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The secrets to Coco’s success, and the dozens of girls that have come before and will surely come after her, have much less to do with Coco the person (or the body) than with the social context of an unstable market. There is very little intrinsic value in Coco’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly-built teens—when dealing with symbolic goods like “beauty” and “fashionability,” we would be hard pressed to identify objective measures of worth inherent in the good itself. Rather, social processes are at work in the fashion modeling market to bequeath cultural value onto Coco. The social world of fashion markets reveals how market actors think collectively to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. And this social side of markets, it turns out, is key to understanding how investors could trade securities backed with “toxic” subprime mortgage assets leading us into the 2009 financial crisis. - from “how supermodels are like toxic assets.” (3quarksdaily)

This is Your Night - Amber

“Facebook Brand Spam” - from the Meaning Full Spam series

“Facebook Brand Spam” - from the Meaning Full Spam series

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

nostrich:

RJD2 - “The Takeoff”

RJD2 + Jean Michael Jarre = oh, I guess the morning isn’t so bad after all.

dannng. this is HARD.

hahahahahahha

alanis morissette - hand in my pocket. 

this vid is pretty amazing.

I’m moving to Evanston in September for grad school, and I need someone (female, preferably) to live with to keep the cost down! I don’t have an apartment yet, and I’d like… - facebook marketplace is a joke.

The Internet Is Tubes.

Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way. At Viaweb one of our rules of thumb was run upstairs. Suppose you are a little, nimble guy being chased by a big, fat, bully. You open a door and find yourself in a staircase. Do you go up or down? I say up. The bully can probably run downstairs as fast as you can. Going upstairs his bulk will be more of a disadvantage. Running upstairs is hard for you but even harder for him.

What this meant in practice was that we deliberately sought hard problems. If there were two features we could add to our software, both equally valuable in proportion to their difficulty, we’d always take the harder one. Not just because it was more valuable, but because it was harder. We delighted in forcing bigger, slower competitors to follow us over difficult ground. Like guerillas, startups prefer the difficult terrain of the mountains, where the troops of the central government can’t follow. I can remember times when we were just exhausted after wrestling all day with some horrible technical problem. And I’d be delighted, because something that was hard for us would be impossible for our competitors.

This is not just a good way to run a startup. It’s what a startup is. Venture capitalists know about this and have a phrase for it: barriers to entry. If you go to a VC with a new idea and ask him to invest in it, one of the first things he’ll ask is, how hard would this be for someone else to develop? That is, how much difficult ground have you put between yourself and potential pursuers? [7] And you had better have a convincing explanation of why your technology would be hard to duplicate. Otherwise as soon as some big company becomes aware of it, they’ll make their own, and with their brand name, capital, and distribution clout, they’ll take away your market overnight. You’d be like guerillas caught in the open field by regular army forces.

- Paul Graham in his essay on Wealth also in his book “Hackers and Painters.”

“Mouseless” from MIT Media Lab

(via hackernews)

Kathering McPhee - Employee of the Day @ Vevo. 

Well cut, well cut.

newyorker:

This week in the magazine, Anthony Lane visits the Eurovision Song Contest, “the World Cup of pop music.” (read more; subscription required)

Here, Lane teaches you how to speak in the special language he dubs “Eurovision English”

Wow! And the see-through dual keyboard instrument at 1:21 looks a-MAYZE-ing.

Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalize; words depersonalize; words make the uncommon common. - Nietzsche, Will to Power (810 — Spring-Fall 1887)