#130: Stop, Drop, and Barrel Roll
The COVID-19 pandemic has some weird side effects. For example, for a few minutes on April 20th, the price for a barrel of oil went negative, meaning you would actually be paid if you wanted to buy some. As weird as this sounds, it actually does make some sense: There’s not much of a market for oil right now, what with planes not flying and everyone staying at home. But oil wells continue to produce oil, which has to be stored somewhere. And once you have nowhere left to put the oil, paying someone to take it off your hands makes (some) kind of sense
.But this raises another question: Why don’t oil producers just stop producing oil? And the answer, as so often, is because it’s not that easy. Ars Technica on why it took so long to dial back oil production, despite the glut.
Get Rich Quick
It used to be, if you wanted to sell a product, you had to find someone to manufacture it, then you had to store the products somewhere, and then you had to ship them to customers or retailers. Globalization and the internet have turned this on its head. It’s now possible to design, manufacture, and sell something using nothing but your laptop, without you having ever seen or touched the actual product. Welcome to the world of dropshipping, which promises vast fortunes. ‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping.
Unimaginable Wealth
Scale is always a problem for us humans to get a mental grip on. If the numbers get too big, our brains just don’t deal with it too well. You’ve experienced this in recent weeks with the COVID-19 crisis, but there’s another subject where the scales are so off your brain just doesn’t deal with it: Wealth, shown to scale.
Double the Yolk, Double the Goodness
You’ve only heard the rumors from other people. Maybe, just maybe, it has even happened to you: An egg with two yolks in it. Why Do Some Eggs Have Double Yolks?
📖 Weekly Longread 📚
It’s often said that once something’s on the internet, it’s there forever. But this is not really true, especially for media, which costs much more to host. But there are nerds who hoard this kind of stuff: “Our terabytes are put to use for the betterment of mankind”