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The Costco theory of the internet
At FedMart, the discount chain Sol Price built in 1950s San Diego, you could buy a can of WD-40 in one size, the big one, and that was the end of the conversation. Anyone who wanted the small can went without. Price called it the intelligent loss of sales: carry
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Why I can't stand the word "driven"
A man named Harry Readford once stole close to 1,000 head of cattle from Bowen Downs station in central Queensland and drove them south, down through the Channel Country
Nobody is destined for greatness.
Demosthenes lost his first appearance before the Athenian assembly. His voice came out thin and failed him mid-sentence, and the crowd laughed him off the platform. Plutarch tells us he
How to be inspired without copying
In 1713, Johann Sebastian Bach sat down at his desk in Weimar and began copying out concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. He transcribed them note for note, in his own hand,
Position or Perish: The Narrative Blueprint
Avis was losing $3.2 million a year; and they'd been unprofitable for thirteen straight. In 1962, they sat at number two in American car rental, well behind
Fear is information.
The motivational industry has built any number of small empires on the notion that fear is a problem to be either managed, suppressed or out-manoeuvred. Fight the fear, etc. The
The war between fast and legitimate is here
The European Union took four years to draft the AI Act - with OpenAI shipping GPT-4 to a hundred million users in two months. By the time Brussels finalised its
Emotional regulation is a dying art.
There was a time when adults could feel something without screaming at you about it. We could disagree - hard - in a meeting and walk out with our faces
Outrage is letting someone else set the frame
William Randolph Hearst bought the New York Morning Journal in 1895 - and immediately started running stories designed to make his readers furious before they’d finished their breakfast. The
On wintering.
The winterer is out of the loop; they're not maintaining a position because they don't have a position to maintain. They can do work that takes longer than a quarter, longer than a year, longer than 5 years, because nobody is auditing the line item.
The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen again
We keep replaying the same human mistakes -bubbles, strongmen, scapegoats, and panics -because the operating system in our skulls hasn’t updated in ten thousand years.
Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay
Prediction markets are the clearest single sign our civilisation has entered a late and decadent stage. The reason isn't that they're new or sinister. It's that the case for them is defensible, the technology works, the outputs are useful, but the long-term effect is corrosive anyway.