Category
Hackers reportedly just stole $6.3 billion in cryptocurrency, allegedly with North Korea behind the operation. Six-point-three billion dollars. Gone in an attack that reportedly took minutes to execute.
And once again, we’re being reminded that the future of money is apparently a financial system where you need the cybersecurity expertise of an NSA contractor just to keep your savings from disappearing.
There’s a special breed of asshole on Instagram who wants you to know that you’re poor because you haven’t discovered the secret to making $30,000 a month from your laptop.
You know the guy.
He’s 24. He’s wearing sunglasses indoors. He’s leaning against a rented Lamborghini in Miami, and he’s about to tell you that working a regular job is for losers.
There’s a funny little problem with an economy where the rich keep getting richer and everyone else keeps getting poorer.
Eventually, you run out of people who can afford to buy anything.
It’s a minor inconvenience, really. You’ve spent decades squeezing every last dollar out of the working class, buying up their homes, raising their rents, suppressing their wages, and turning basic necessities into subscription services. You’ve accumulated more money than your grandchildren’s grandchildren could spend in a thousand lifetimes.
Congratulations. You’ve won capitalism.
Now what?
There is a beautiful, almost forgotten art in this world, and it’s called shutting the fuck up.
Not every situation requires your input. Not every disagreement needs your perspective. Sometimes the most intelligent thing you can do is look at something, think, “Well, that’s fucking weird,” and continue eating your sandwich.
But we’ve apparently lost this ability.
There are few pleasures in life more satisfying than watching an entire industry of self-important assholes discover that nobody actually needs them.
And right now, sneaker resellers are getting a long-overdue introduction to that reality.
For years, these guys operated under the belief that buying a $180 pair of Jordans and immediately listing them for $600 constituted entrepreneurship. They weren’t selling shoes. They were “building businesses.” They weren’t hoarding inventory in their childhood bedrooms. They were “managing assets.”
Every dipshit with a sneaker bot and a Shopify account suddenly thought he was Warren Buffett with a ring light.
And the worst part? For a while, it actually worked.
There’s a special kind of asshole who books a one-way ticket to Thailand, spends three weeks drinking buckets of vodka on the beach, and then decides the local population should finance the rest of his spiritual awakening.
Meet the begpacker.
If you’ve spent any time traveling through Southeast Asia, you’ve probably encountered one of these people. Usually white, usually Western, usually wearing some combination of elephant pants, dreadlocks, and the vacant expression of someone who just discovered Buddhism through a YouTube video.
There are few things more satisfying than watching an industry that spent generations selling scarcity suddenly discover what happens when scarcity disappears.
Natural diamond prices have fallen roughly 60 percent in five years.
In March 2022, a one-carat natural diamond hit an all-time high of around $10,000. Since then, prices have cratered.
And the primary reason is beautifully simple:
We figured out how to make diamonds.
Not fake diamonds. Not cubic zirconia. Actual diamonds.
Las Vegas used to have an honest arrangement with its visitors.
You came to behave badly. The city gave you a cheap room, a reasonably priced steak, a few free drinks, and the intoxicating possibility that you might go home richer than you arrived. Vegas understood that the best way to separate you from your money was to make the separation feel like fun.
That arrangement is dead.
For decades, movies have taught men that getting a woman is mostly a matter of refusing to accept her first answer.
If she says she isn’t interested, keep trying. If she has a boyfriend, prove that you understand her better than he does. If she wants space, appear outside her house with music, flowers, cue cards or some enormous public declaration that makes rejecting you socially uncomfortable. Eventually, she will realize that you were the right guy all along.
There was a time when sharing good news required effort. You called someone. You met them for dinner. You trapped a coworker near the copier and made them look at four poorly developed photographs from your trip to Cancun.
Now you can inform 900 people, including your high school lab partner, a former landlord, and three women you vaguely remember from a wedding—that your toddler successfully used the toilet.
This is called progress.
