cherrytruthbombs

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“so what are your plans for after you graduate?”

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My Favorite Finance Story of Last Year

While finance coverage is mired with tabloid-esque drama and excess-level escapades, there are some really interesting pieces out there about how money makes imprints in our world. Some of that coverage is from Pulitzer level investigations, while others are a bit…weirder. My favorite story was one by the Washington Post that took the reader through a journey of how the economy of Iceland ebbed and flowed all through the narrative focus of an unrotting McDonalds sandwich:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/11/02/tale-icelands-last-mcdonalds-burger-that-simply-wont-rot-even-years-after-company-pulled-out-country/

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Valley Boys

Finance bros, tech bros, are all the same. They have no idea what’s happening with the outside world, truly, maybe because their brains and addled with cocaine and deep-rooted confidence issues.

( https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/01/09/silicon-valley-some-men-say-cosmetic-procedures-are-essential-career/ )

When I was an intern at a largely circulated digital publication, a 30 year old finance reporter had confessed that he was shocked to see yakult (the yogurt) stocks suddenly uptick. Of course, his niece had explained to him that the Netflix release of ‘To all the boys I’ve loved before’ was the culprit. (https://www.insider.com/to-all-the-boys-ive-loved-before-yogurt-drink-yakult-2018-9)

I would say in my experience, people associated with finance or tech oddly seem to be out of touch with modern culture. In fact, they seem to make up their own little insular world where ideas that seem ludacris to the everyday consumer gains millions in funding. I call this collective, affectionately, Valley Boys. Implying in sorts that they resemble the unawares blondes that formerly decried the nickname of valley girls. When I covered finance, CEOs who ran science based companies could not actually tell me how the science of their product worked, which explains why cases like Theranos, run by a pretty woman, were able to deceive so many fancy financiers. In the years of watching activity in the finance world, I’ve definitely picked up on a few sagas that I think are too entertaining and too exemplifying of the Valley Boy culture.

First off is the famous ‘young blood’ conspiracy. Now bear in mind there are aging studies that look into specific compounds in blood of young animals that restores functions in old ones. But simply infusing a liter of the blood of the young for a pretty price of $8,000 seems like rich vampire supervillainy to me. (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-25/the-bloody-tale-of-ambrosia-the-startup-that-wants-to-slow-aging)

I don’t even want to get into the mess that is freezing your brain and using it to reanimate a dead body down the line (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-cryonics/brain-freeze-russian-firm-offers-path-to-immortality-for-a-fee-idUSKBN1ZD1FN)

More interesting is the cryptocurrency saga that has rocked the finance world. Now I’m not ashamed to say that to this day I still don’t really understand what cryptocurrency and bitcoins are. In theory I’m aware of how they conceptually function, but like many CEOs who started CRISPR companies when they’re really like ‘CRISPR? I barely even know her!’ I’m the same with blockchain. Yet the culture around cryptocurrency is so absurd that it’s like a car crash I can’t look away from. Follow along with me on this wild tale. A 30 year old founder of a cryptocurrency trading company died. When he died there was about over $180 million in crytocurrency in the account, and he was the one who had all the passwords. So what is the reasonable thing to do when you have money tied up now in an inaccessible account? You band together and asked for the body of this exec to be exhumed so you can make sure that he is actually dead and didn’t make off with your imaginary currency, duh. Truly, you simply can’t make up this kind of story folks.

(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/17/business/gerald-cotten-death-cryptocurrency.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share)

Stay tuned, my next edition might feature a fun quiz that asks you to identify that quote! Who said it? CEO or supervillain. (Funny because finance bros are actually more likely to have Machiavellian traits!) That’s all for now!

(https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/mar/12/improbable-research-machiavellian-stockbrokers-car-sales)

All in all, I think Atlantic writer Amanda Mull encapsulated the miasma around tech and finance culture the best. “Tech companies, like many for-profit enterprises, aren’t necessarily incentivized to ensure that what they sell is used correctly, or that correct use provides any particular material benefit. They simply need to make a compelling argument to people who can pay, which means identifying and capitalizing on the anxieties of the affluent.” Be it may that her articles were talking about weight, and these are talking about fear of death (or undeadness), the sentiment remains the same. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/01/why-do-people-still-love-consumer-tech/604909/

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Of Media and Memes

2019 was the first year I was fully a part of the media world. That’s right, I’m talking journalism, magazines, fake news and all. And let me tell you, being on the inside of has been even more so surreal than watching it from afar. It felt like I was etching closer and closer to the embers that ignited a trend rather than see it blow up, unclear how it happened. Well, actually, seeing it start didn’t really provide any more sound logic.

As anyone who hasn’t lived under a rock since the 2000s know. Memes have become such a big thing that once, a 60-year-old family friend asked me to explain to her what exactly they are, which reminds me of how I feel when I ask anyone to explain what a bitcoin is to me. Nonetheless, memes capture the zeitgeist of the inexplicable trends that have placated the digital age. It also tends to reflect your personal feelings onto a more collective theme (think: #same #me).

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/12/11/20991671/memes-decade-doge-baby-yoda

But media memes seem to be in an even niche-r subcategory of memes. These are memes that originated from a corner of the internet, and was picked up by several media organizations who wrote MANY in depth articles about them. The elevation of a meme to a cultural phenomenon fascinates me. And let me tell you there are so many memes, but few that I take the time to go down the rabbithole to explore. Pardon my broken sense of humor, but here are just a few of the best that got me (and even though no one asked for it, I’ll continue to reblog off this when I find new candidates) :

- Hot Duck (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/nyregion/hot-duck-mandarin-central-park.html)

A more New York-centric meme in which everyone is obsessed with this really beautiful duck that randomly showed up in Central Park one day. Some may say that this duck was a beacon of light in the darkness, a wholesome spectacle that has by some act of magic united people near and far. I mean, you should see the crowd that turned out for him!

- Another avian, but cartoon, Untitled Goose Game (https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-joy-of-untitled-goose-game-in-a-time-of-moral-crisis)

The premise really is simple. You play a game as a goose who wrecks havoc on a town and its townspeople. The New Yorker purports that in creating game world chaos within real-life chaos, we appear to find a little peace.

- Fish tube (https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-nihilistic-euphoria-of-the-fish-tube //  https://www.wired.com/story/fish-tube-meme/)

As a New York Magazine hed and dek reads: Put me in the fish tube, shoot me over the dam of this life. We all want to go in the fish tube, which is actually a REALLY long contraption that sucks up a salmon and by some hydraulic force transports it up difficult-to-cross man made dams. But mostly, what people took away from this was that the salmon basically was given an easy pass through what is supposedly the hardest journey of their lives. I mean, they usually migrate up stream, lay eggs, then most likely die. Don’t we all want to skip past the hard parts?

- Call me a bedbug to my face (https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/08/bedbug-tweet-bret-stephens-new-york-times-boss-gw-professor.html)

Ok, this last one is a little insider baseball. But this meme was due to the timely coincidence of a bedbug infestation at the New York Times headquarters last year. At which point, a professor on twitter quipped a wry joke implying that the bedbugs were a metaphor for a controversial opinion columnist at the Times. One thing led to another, and it devolved into an email involving presidents of universities and a playground insult of sorts, where the columnist invited the professor to “come have dinner with my wife and kids, then call me a bed bug to my face.” I now use this expression when I catch bitches talking shit about me behind my back also.

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My worst fear is being stuck. Being stuck in a place that isn’t comfortable, or that bores me, being stuck with people that I don’t care for, being stuck doing a job I can’t stand.

swellvisions, my worst fear is that I will let my life get away from me and forget to really live it (via wnq-writers)

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Honestly what a mood

and that’s what we were taught in drama school… (x) 

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All I want for Christmas is:

A government that cares about climate change

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woman: i miss you like the deserts miss the rain

man: oh that's so sweet, i--

woman: i've adapted to existence without you, buried everything we made together, and prolonged exposure to you would be disastrous.

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Comrades, Henry Scott Tuke 1924.

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