Strange Loops

Combine a low burn rate with no debt and a pile of cash, and you have the recipe for a long sustained push at a new product or service.

Just spot on. I try and tell this to wannabe entrepreneurs and get scoffed at 99/100 times.

Rapper Murs on staying true to who you are:

I would love to reach millions, but the type of music I make right now is more like vegan food, so I can only expect vegan people to want to eat in my restaurant. A lot of people make fast food music, I don’t. Until people decide they do not want to be on a fast food diet, then my music is not for them. There is nothing I can do about that because I am not about to create something that is unnatural for me. I have been fortunate enough to make a career out of what I want to do.

I am not a pop star yet, but when I get there I want to be a real person. I’m a vegan, but I may eat chicken one day. I am really peaceful, but want to fight somebody sometimes. I am not perfect. To define something means leaving it in a box and anything outside of that box is unacceptable. My whole career I have tried to break out of boxes. I do want to sell millions of records, but I do not want to be commodified or turn myself into a one-dimensional something. To continue to tell young black kids that they can only be one way does not encourage them to mature or to try new things.

Clayton Christensen on how the pursuit of profiles is killing innovation. Shame no one cares.

The McRib’s unique aspects and impermanence, many of us believe, make it seem a likely candidate for being a sort of arbitrage strategy on McDonald’s part. Calling a fast food sandwich an arbitrage strategy is perhaps a bit of a reach—but consider how massive the chain’s market influence is, and it becomes a bit more reasonable.

Charles P. Pierce on the NBA Lockout and what it really was about:

They are not natural phenomena. They are never truly unavoidable. They don’t “just happen,” and they certainly do not occur because “both sides” are at fault. Lockouts occur when management believes that unions are too strong, and they occur when management believes that unions are too weak, and they occur when management doesn’t want a union to exist at all. Lockouts are not devices of economic correction. That’s just a byproduct. Lockouts are attempts by management to exercise control over their workers. Period.

Really good piece.

Rands in Reposes t-shirt promotion turns into a perfectly distilled argument about why most people are misinformed and likely to stay that way:

History is full of lies and ignorance propagated by people who’ve put their trust in the ideals of allegedly qualified others. Now, as we live in a world divided by opinions acquired via Twitter, it’s never been easier grab onto a clever 140-character quip and assume it’s the truth. The fires of ignorance burn wildly on these acts of intellectual laziness.

Having an opinion takes work. It means stopping in your tracks and staring conventional wisdom in the face and asking it to explain itself. It means drilling deeper than the conventionally polarizing opinions that a topic is simply awesome, it totally sucks, or it’s completely irrelevant to you. Chances are, it’s a little bit of all three, but that type of ambiguity is mentally exhausting, right? Can’t we just love or hate? It’s so much easier to yell when it’s right versus wrong or us versus them.

Incredibly spot-on analysis of the hottest term of the century thus far.

The system should introduce as few new ‘moving parts’ as possible—a large part of how we’ve been able to scale Instagram with very few engineers is by choosing simple, easy-to-understand solutions that we trust.

Yup

A man buys a basketball team as insurance on a real estate project, flips the franchise to a Russian billionaire when he wins the deal, and then — as both parties happily count their winnings — what lesson are we asked to draw? The players are greedy.

Something that I’ve discussed again and again here.