This is some witch craft level of art.

I've followed the artist on Instagram.

This is one of the most insane sporting achievements on 2024. Beating Peter Norman's record which stood for 56 years. At 16 years old. Kid is a freak.

He's better than Usain Bolt at the same age for context.

Hopefully he stays grounded and makes incremental improvements year on year from this point on.

I'm thinking over the summer of doing some exploration into Apache Kafka.

This is a pretty key technology in generally being a backend engineer so I should be across more of it.

This type of learning is also what ChatGPT is brilliant for. My prompt was

what would be a great test project to learn about apache kafka in typescript

and the response it gave was fantastic.

The particulars of this murder are strange and remarkable: it occurred in public; the suspected shooter went to Starbucks beforehand; he got away from the scene via bicycle; he has not yet been found. But the public reaction has been even wilder, even more lawless. The jokes came streaming in on every social-media platform, in the comments underneath every news article. “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers,” someone commented on TikTok, a response that got more than fifteen thousand likes. “Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage,” another person wrote, under an Instagram post from CNN. On X, someone posted, with the caption “My official response to the UHC CEO’s murder,” an infographic comparing wealth distribution in late eighteenth-century France to wealth distribution in present-day America. The whiff of populist anarchy in the air is salty, unprecedented, and notably across the aisle. New York Post comment sections are full of critiques of capitalism as well as self-enriching executives and politicians (like “Biden and his crime family”). On LinkedIn, where users post with their real names and employment histories, UnitedHealth Group had to turn off comments on its post about Thompson’s death—thousands of people were liking and hearting it, with a few even giving it the “clapping” reaction. The company also turned off comments on Facebook, where, as of midday Thursday, a post about Thompson had received more than thirty-six thousand “laugh” reactions.

This has to go down as one of the most bizarre stories of the year.

The tree is up!

This is some business writing that keeps things simple and I love it.

To be an airline is to be in an almost uniquely terrible market position. For starters, there are only two makers of aeroplanes (Airbus and Boeing). For reasons of training and staff efficiency, you have to commit to one or the other, which gives the aeroplane makers very strong pricing power.

And buyers of airline tickets are incredibly fickle and have no loyalty. They will switch from one "carrier" to another over even small differences in price. Annoyingly, there are loads of other airlines and they're all running the same routes as you!

Worse yet, starting a new airline is surprisingly easy. Aircraft hold their value so banks will happily lend against them. There are loads of staff available that new entrants can hire. So randos will continually enter your market, often selling tickets below cost for quite a while before they go bust. And to top it off, there are plenty of substitutes for air travel - from government-subsidised high speed trains to Zoom calls.

Airlines that get more efficient, work harder or come up with innovations aren't going to be able to "capture" the value of what they've done. If you make more than the bare minimum to survive Airbus will notice that you're being undercharged and you'll find that the next renewal on your service contract eats up the difference.

Being the Coca-Cola company is pretty great though.

Coke is just water, colourant, flavouring, caffeine and sweetener. Those are all widely available and really cheap. And as I said, you don't even have to combine them yourselves - bottling companies will do that for you for almost nothing.

Handily, consumers are really picky about what goes in their mouth. The unofficial motto of your main competitor is "Is Pepsi ok?". This is despite the fact that they are identical in both taste and colour. And a significant minority of people actually say no!

And it isn't easy for new competitors to enter the market. They can't call their new drink "coke" due to trademarks. They have to call it something else. And consumers will generally refuse it because drinking an alternative is considered some kind of weird statement.