Comforts, May 2020

A digital terarrium
Orb Farm!

Right now I’m listening to Surface Image by Tristan Perich and Vicky Chow.

Earlier today I had stuck in my head Philip Glass’ ‘Dance VI’ from In the Upper Room, and for a brief moment I just needed to hear Betty Buckley sing the final song from The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Vibin

I made a little orb farm via this online simulator, and is incredibly satisfying.

Theories

Modern monetary theory: A different theoretical framework for considering economics is just so tasty right now. I don’t have my own way of explaining it right so I’d recommend listening to this interview from a person who wrote a book and then reading a short summary Cory Doctorow’s blog

ZIRP: zero-interest-rate policy: the fuel for business models like WeWork/Uber/Seamless. As written about in these posts from the newsletter Margins.

You have insanely large pools of capital creating an incredibly inefficient money-losing business model. It’s used to subsidize an untenable customer expectation. You leverage a broken workforce to minimize your genuine labor expenses. The companies unload their capital cannons on customer acquisition, while this week’s Uber-Grubhub news reminds us, the only viable endgame is a promise of monopoly concentration and increased prices. But is that even viable? From this amazing story of scamming. when a nation’s central bank pushes nominal interest rates to 0% using monetary policy.

ugh i love watching videos

KILLING EVE, this show is just so so so so fantastic. And this essay that you should read if you’ve finished Season 2 makes me love it EVEN MORE.

in the department of things i miss about seeing live performance: jolty choreography.