30 Oct 23 Monday Briefing

We've made it through October… nearly

We close October in a state of growing apprehension over intensifying conflict, and there is little a single individual can do but to wait and observe (if lucky, from a distance). Interesting rumblings in the atmosphere include the UAW ending a strike with Stellantis but not GM, SBF going on the stand (and the tragedy of millennial speak), Hong Kong’s appellate Court of Appeal standing up to its own government’s Department of Justice when it comes to upholding LGBT public housing benefits, and a ship without a rudder finally installs one.

Chalk It Up

I attended primary school in an analogue era of blackboards, chalk sticks, and dusters that we would clap together to pretend it was snowing. Wiping the blackboard clean was also a task we all gladly volunteered for, as it gave us the opportunity to clamber up on chairs and expend energy. Those further up the academic food chain appear to possess the same predilection, albeit in a more sedate manner, and with “Rolls-Royce” chalk that costs more than most families’ weekly grocery bills. Chalk is not just chalk, it would seem.

Nostalgia made me procure a roll of stick-on blackboard material suitable for rental walls, and box of non-Rolls-Royce chalk sticks I have yet to use. Chalk that up to procrastination.

Naked Truths

Will our naked bodies, bags of meat and bones, start to become less the objects of prurience and more that of disgust at loose, sagging, greying everything? Cultural mores are hard to shake, as Jeannette Cooperman drives home in her nudist essay, but easier to shed than one might think. After all, being naked in same-sex communal baths is mandatory is many cultures. Mixed-sex is quite another matter, as always.

Netted by Politics

Roads & Kingdoms, my favourite longform magazine, is intermittently back.

No one wins in a bilateral struggle, least of all the little guys who are just trying their best to eke out a subsistence living an in increasingly hostile climate. Maritime Southeast Asia is truly stuck between a shoal and a fishing boat, with diplomacy proving little relief. Historic rights, claims of sovereignty and all that are fertile ground for the next watery dispute and conflict.

No Free Lunch

Founding and exiting a startup at 100x would appear to be my generation’s accursed idea of get-rich-quick (but painfully, and probably at the cost of your relationships and sanity). Getting rich slowly, however, is no longer what it used to be. tl;dr I guess we’re all fucked.