“When GM began selling leaded gasoline, public health experts questioned its decision. One called lead a serious menace to public health, and another called concentrated tetraethyl lead a ‘malicious and creeping’ poison. General Motors and Standard Oil waved the warnings aside until disaster struck in October 1924.”
“The afterlife of a dead mall is interesting. Schools are moving into malls; some students are completing high school in a converted Macy’s in Vermont. A Dillard’s in Texas is now a radio station. Malls are becoming home to community colleges and libraries and offices.”
“[A] central theme of this story is that expectations move slower than reality on the ground. That was true when people clung to 1950s expectations as the economy changed over the next 35 years. And even if a middle-class boom began today, expectations that the odds are stacked against everyone but those at the top may stick around.”
(This is interesting and insightful, but I link to it with a very large caveat: It erases minorities from the story.)
“Veil’s website hadn’t been saved, and Pictures for Sad Children was hard to track down in its entirety. The last, tangible vestige of the comic came from those who had ordered a copy of the book. … They resolved to share the collection, mailing copies to whoever hadn’t cracked its spine yet.”
“Tether’s Chinese investments and crypto-backed loans are potentially significant. … [I]f those loans fail, even a small percentage of them, one Tether would become worth less than $1. Any investors holding Tethers would then have an incentive to redeem them; if others did it first, the money could dry up. The bank run would be on.”
“Because the drought had worsened since the quotas were set, conservancy members had voluntarily left most of them unfilled. While wildlife surveys earlier in the year had suggested that 75 oryx could be killed without harming the population, for example, only three had been shot so far.”
“To most consumers, Prime looks like a lovely convenience offering free shipping, and it’s hard to find better prices elsewhere. But the reason you can’t find better prices isn’t because Amazon sells stuff cheap, but because it forces everyone else to sell stuff at higher prices.”
“Strategy and product visions only go so far. And success in those areas has limited impact on real company culture. What makes working at a company fulfilling is actually quite simple. You have to align the goals of your organization with the health and stability of the employees.”
“We should ask ourselves, our communities, and our government: if a business can’t pay a living wage, should it be a business? If it’s too expensive for businesses to provide healthcare for their workers, maybe we need to decouple it from employment?”
“Substack takes a small percentage of my subscription money, and that money goes to fund the writers they view to be better investments. I give them my money, and they use that money to pay men who have, in several instances, stalked or harassed either me or people I care about.”
“Yes, it would be good if Harvard et al. let in a lot more poor kids. But if we really want to boost opportunity for the mass of working-class Americans, we should be worrying more about expanding access to places like UC Riverside, SUNY Stony Brook, Cal State Fresno, and so on.”
“Little reportage has been devoted to unpacking Korean players’ personal histories and the context in which they compete. Esports, like everything else, is inextricably tied to questions of race, class, and structures of power.”
“People work at Gumroad as little as they need to sustain the other parts of their lives they prefer to spend their time and energy on: a creative side-hustle, their family, or anything else.”
“The thing about a $590 T-shirt is that, upon acquiring one, you immediately become the human assistant to a $590 T-shirt. Your compensation for this role is capped at the amount of joy you personally are able to derive from the act of wearing it.”
“Roosevelt and his advisers never had a master plan. Rather, in the administration’s first 100 days, they implemented a flurry of laws and regulations. If those programs worked, they remained. If they didn’t, they were dropped, to be replaced by others.”