Let’s say you make TV sets. You sell a TV set to a customer. When is the next time he’ll be your customer? Probably not for many years. By selling him a TV set, you’ve lost him as a potential buyer. Every sale is a loss. Every success is a failure.

This is the problem with selling tangible goods. There are all sorts of limitations on how many you can sell to one person. Space is limited, for one.

Of course, there are all sorts of tricks to bring back the customer. Planned obsolescence is one. But still, tangibles are complicated and needy. You have to ship, store, and employ people to handle the very physical thing you are trying to sell. What a bore.

Many purchases in consumerist societies aren’t about the actual objects but the emotions they evoke. A woman who pays $600 for a handbag isn’t paying for the bag as much as she’s paying for the feeling, for the image of herself as a woman with this kind of a bag.

What if we can exclude the bag from the equation completely? Have the customer pay directly for the emotion?

You can sell an experience endlessly. Emotions can be consumed again and again. They are evanescent, and the need is never saturated. Space is never a limitation. Nothing is. As long as the experience feeds the ego, the customer will only need more and more.

Yesterday, a reader of this blog posted a link to a company that sells the feeling that one is a good parent and is developing her baby’s intellect. This is the experience economy. The parent pays to feel like a good parent. The need in that feeling cannot be exhausted. The customer gives money for whatever combination of images and words on a screen can make her feel a certain way.

This is the neoliberal dream of a business model. Minimal costs, minimal space taken, and most importantly, a minimal number of people employed. Everything is intangible and endlessly renewable.

I was at the graduation ceremony, and it’s so fun to observe how some graduates are comfortable in their skin while others are still not. It’s normal, they are young. It comes at different times, adulthood.

Many more black students are comfortable being themselves than whites. And both much more than Asians. Men more frequently than women. How comfortable they are in their bodies has nothing whatsoever to do with weight or conventional attractiveness.

The graduates of the school of engineering are all white men with a couple of Nigerian women. One future male engineer walked across the stage with a newborn baby, giving everybody a massive cuteness attack.

There was one female name among summa cum laude graduates in computer science but when this student stepped off the stage, it became clear that he’s female like Brianna Wu.

The last name of the Dean of Business is Hayek, and he’s so cheerfully neoliberal that it’s really cute. He grades with AI and tries to get us all to do it, always provoking great sarcasm in Humanities profs.

I came to the graduation ceremony where I’m marshalling.

“You are on the far right,” an assistant explained.

“Yes, I am!” I answered gladly.

Something I wish an older mom would've told me is that: The baby doesn't need constant stimulation.

Okay? The baby is okay to just hang out. They don't need a full schedule of daily activities and events.

Being alive and new does it.

It's okay to just chillax.

— Back-Up Tambourine Player (@UpTambourine) May 9, 2025

I want to add that the best, most wonderful moment is when the kid says, “I’m booooored. There’s nothing to do, I’m so booooored.” If the parents breathe through the guilt and anxiety this causes them and simply do nothing, the kid’s natural curiosity and ingenuity will kick in. That’s when things start getting invented and the imagination gets unleashed.

“I’m bored” is good. It’s the door to everything wonderful that a kid’s mind can produce.

I thought bitching about family obligations was passé but apparently some people still can’t let go of it. Everybody lives in the exact arrangement they want to live in. But some people like to pretend that somebody arranged their family lives for them.

This kind of thing is why I don’t have a great time in mommy circles. We are all supposed to put on these fake shows about how we are exasperated with our hopeless husbands. And I’d sit there thinking that at that exact moment I could be reading or painting, and instead I’m participating in an embarrassing activity.

Seriously, you can’t figure out a system of who buys presents? With your partner in life, the person who’s closest to you, you just absolutely can’t make it work? That’s ineptitude of extreme proportions.

Of course, they are not inept. They simply like the fake victim status.

Whoever asked about sources on the Spanish cash withdrawal story, you could have googled it, you know?

Here’s one.

Here’s another.

Here’s the original one in Spanish.

Another one in Spanish.

Please remember that I work in a managerial capacity and deal with people acting helpless all day long. It stopped being cute years ago.

🚨BREAKING: Pakistan has launched a missile strike on India, targeting multiple locations, including air bases and a missile storage facility, after India struck three Pakistani airbases earlier tonight.

This is one step away from all-out war
pic.twitter.com/eM9D8n32Nj

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) May 10, 2025

As I explained previously, the reason why the US had troops in Afghanistan for twenty years was to prevent exactly this.

Americans couldn’t appreciate their own greatness, convinced themselves that they needed to be very small and expiate non-existent sins, and now we have two conflicts involving three nuclear powers happening at the same time.

They can be left, right, it doesn’t matter. They went to school where they were told that their history is sinful and they should stop participating. Here’s the result.

Spain, it’s getting harder and harder to love you.

The Spanish bureaucracy is already too unwieldy, slow, and confused. This measure makes it possible to dispossess anybody whether they even try to access their own money.

I just noticed that I had a 300% growth in views yesterday and it’s continuing today. All from the US. What exactly did I say that excited people so much?

Speaking of software glitches, Duolingo seems to think that the reality of “you’ll have nothing and you’ll be happy” has already arrived: