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These days! How are you supposed to live these days? What if you retire at age thirty four to live off your stocks and rents and the sales of your courses on how to live off your stocks and rents but then you’re unable to resist buying property in San Francisco with cash (“on a triple-wide lot with a view and… 100% recently remodeled”) only to find yourself struggling to cover your monthly private grade school and candles budget on only $230,000 a year in work-free income with no mortgage? As Siddhartha Gautama famously said:
Desire is the cause of all suffering. Due to my desire to own a nicer home, I sold stocks and bonds. By doing so, I lost about $150,000 a year in passive income for the foreseeable future.
In 2023, my passive income was tracking to generate about $380,000. However, by buying a real forever home this time, my passive income is estimated to decline to about $230,000 in 2024. Sadly, $230,000 is not enough to cover my family's living expenses.
And how are you supposed to get ahead of the other “‘second tier’ private school“ parents these days? How are you supposed to lock down the $120,000 a year college admissions consultant as soon as little Grieghson or Reighleigh start eighth grade? If you can’t pay a 20-something approximately $2,307 an hour to tell your fourteen year old that “what it sounds like you’re maybe starting to talk about a little is this idea of investing in green technologies and trying to use private industry as a way to be more environmentally conscious” then who will ever do it? That’s just what McKinsey for middle schoolers costs these days.
All the hermit crabs live in trash these days but at least they have homes. The Los Angeles Housing Department got evicted and now it has to do ineffective landlord-coddling bureaucracy out on the street. These days you can’t even trust your driver not to charge thirty four million dollars to your AmEx over seven years and buy a Cessna Citation III, several vacation houses, and one hundred fifty ounces of gold bullion, despite making it very clear that charging $300,000 a month for no services will only be tolerated for a little bit longer.
These days! Someone let The Hairpin’s domain name expire and now it’s an AI sludge pit. Maybe we all live in trash these days. But even “AI” isn’t AI these days, just as Kyle Orland suspected: that allegedly AI George Carlin special “was completely written by Chad Kultgen,” one of the cohosts of fake-AI podcast Dudesy. Imagine telling people that something you wrote was AI and having them believe it? He’s probably been punished enough.
According to Leslie Jamison we’re supposed get people divorce gifts these days. Why don’t you stay off Lyz Lenz’s turf, Leslie. Not even Penn Jillette is a libertarian these days, and that story about record political polarization between young men and women? Also nonsense. You can’t even trust a context-free viral graph these days. In The Verge Kevin Nguyen profiled “scene-y newsletter” Perfectly Imperfect’s “scene-y social network” pi.fyi. The recommendations website was described to me as “a lot of people recommending pizza” by someone who will remain anonymous because who am I, of all people, to make fun of an optimistic self-funded web project that’s bleeding money? I wish them massive success so I can make fun of it properly in the future.
Make Way For The King’s Ussie
A Japanese macaque escaped the Highlands Zoo in Scotland in a town called Kingussie, named for the time King George III visited and gave a speech that everyone agreed he put his whole kingussie into. And King Charles III was released from the hospital today after a "corrective procedure" on his own kingussie:
A palace source told ABC News previously that Charles wanted to share the news of his enlarged prostate diagnosis publicly to help raise awareness.
I am suddenly very aware of the King’s prostate, so it worked.
Today In Hammed Borger
Everybody’s Doing Promos!
Garbage Day has a little ad today that’s “part of a promo swap I’m doing with Semafor this week,” and yesterday in Semafor Max Tani reported that Platformer is doing a syndication deal with Casey’s former Verge daddy Josh Topolsky’s Robinhood subsidiary Sherwood Media, which I guess still exists.
“I love what they’re building at Sherwood. It’s really exciting to have a chance to work with Josh again, and we can’t wait to share Platformer with the huge Snacks audience,” Newton said in a statement.
“I am doing this of my own free will,” Newton went on, smiling but blinking strangely. “No one is holding a gun to my head here or anything. This is a statement I wrote, and believe in.” The blinking seemed patterned, somehow. Are those tears? “The huge Snacks audience,” he repeated woodenly, glancing to the side just before the statement ended abruptly.
Oh no, I wrote so much nonsense that I ran out of space for the important news. I guess we’ll get to it tomorrow, if there’s room. There wasn’t anything good, we’re probably better off skipping it anyway.
But Finally: Mandy Brown, “A unified theory of fucks.”
Today’s Song: Handsome Boy Modeling School “Metaphysical”
Music Intern Sam is the kingussie of the Today’s Song spot. As Siddhartha Gautama famously said:
I don’t have to do uncomfortable syndication deals anymore thanks to paying subscribers. If you appreciate this, you might consider becoming one yourself. Just $35 for the first year. No worries if not!