“Promise me not to hide yourself when you’re in pain, it’s unfair that we laughed together but you cried alone”

— Unknown

“The river was running strong for midsummer; heavy rains to the west of us had kept it full. I crossed the bridge and went upstream along the wooded shore to a pleasant dressing-room I knew among the dogwood bushes, all overgrown with wild grapevines. I began to undress for a swim.”

-My Ántonia, Book 2, ch. 14

Oh, to live in a time and place where there are just pleasant and conveniently located riverside dressing rooms among the dogwoods.

When talking to toddlers, you have to be extremely, explicitly clear about what you say, cover every possibility you can think of in which they might misunderstand it, and with trial and error and experience, you'll learn to also cover the possibilities that wouldn't have crossed your mind. If you tell a toddler, "whatever you do, do not touch that electric wire. Not even with your pinky finger, because if you do, you will die" and once you're finally sure they understood that, you'll turn your eyes away for two seconds

and they're right at the wire, trying to see what happens if they'll touch it with their pinky toe instead.

You don't usually have to do this with adults. An adult who is allergic to pineapples can hear someone say, "eating pineapple is good for you", evaluate this piece of information, conclude that this is probably true for people who aren't allergic to pineapple, shrug it off and carry on with their day.

Unless you're on tumblr. Tumblr posts must be worded like toddler talk, cover every possibility in which someone might misunderstand it, remember to mention people who do not have this problem you are talking about, cannot employ this solution, or who otherwise have nothing to do with this conversation.

You can't just say "eating pineapple is good for you", you'll have to make sure to specify "eating pineapple is good, unless you are allergic to pineapple, in which case do not eat pineapple". And then get promptly informed that you you forgot to mention people who suffer from some extremely rare cliantro-soap-gene that makes pineapple taste like ass, and consequently offended someone who still ships Harry Potter Characters.

I love tumblr.

[INSERT BODY COPY HERE]

This is a cool ad.

I keep seeing people being shocked and bewildered about airbnb being so crappy to use now

and it’s giving me the impression not everyone knows that is by design- all of those “disrupter” startups operate exactly the same way. So let me lay it out:

First the company starts with an enormous amount of seed money, and they enter an established industry offering the same product but dirt cheap and with the feel of luxury. They operate at a loss for years. They offer their product at such a reduced rate that they literally cannot profit off of it. They rely on their seed money and investment from other wealthy friends to get by. They do this until the other established companies in the industry are on their knees and begging to be bought out. Once all of the competitors have either collapsed or been bought out, the new disrupter company is safe to jack up its prices and reduce services/perks to get to a level that is profitable. It might end up being much more expansive than the industry was to start with, because now that competitors are gone the disrupter business has more room to squeeze customers dry without fear they’ll go to another company instead. The “we’re shaking this industry up to bring high quality products direct to the consumer” pitch has nothing to do with consumers and is entirely about eliminating competitors, particularly long standing well established ones.

This is how uber works, airbnb, all of those. It’s the same game the laundry mat chain in my neighborhood who offers free drying is playing- driving out competition so they have more freedom to price things higher.

Individual consumers often don’t have the luxury to be so choosy about what companies they buy from, but just be aware going in and don’t get taken by surprise later on.

By the way, Amazon is absolutely playing by this handbook, and so did Wal-Mart before it. It's very, very, very predictable.

Blitzscaling to nothingness. The Slippery Slope of Scale is what my boss likes to call it.