An ex and I used to jokingly sing “avocados from Mexico” because that was an advertising jingle, and she definitely ate avocado toast all the time. We broke up in 2013, so it had to be kinda popular before then.

STARK: “wow, your intellect is stunning. I look forward to seeing what you’ll be able to accomplish in the next few years”

CAMERA PANS

GRETA THUNBERG SMILES

The number of times I shout “your car is supposed to be smarter than that!” As a Tesla does something like, without signaling, whips around me and into oncoming traffic to pass a stopped city bus is staggering.

A coworker of mine was recently bragging about their new electric mustang and its zero to sixty time. “Have you ever gone zero to sixty?” was my only response. Of all the facts and figures, 0-60 has you to be one of the least important when buying a car.

Am I insane? I’ve been seeing avocado toast on menus for years. Granted, I was living in California at the time, but still. I feel like Dunkin donuts introduced avocado toast to their menu like three years ago.

I’m not really a “brunch” guy, but I feel like every breakfast spot I’ve been to since 2015 has done avocado toast.

Competition is the answer, though. The problem is companies ended up competing the wrong way. If I could watch “The Office” on any streaming platform, suddenly they’re all in competition to create a better platform (quicker loads, different pricing models, integration with different devices, etc). By limiting shows to only certain platforms, sure, you’re creating an easy way to differentiate between platforms, but you’re letting the competition stagnate as you just create cable TV with extra steps: minimal choice, minimal ease of use, minimal cost upside.

I was having this same conversation the other day. Have you ever seen that picture where different people involved in the creation of the video game Kirby draw the title character? Two look really good, and the rest are awkward blobs that only look like Kirby because of the power of suggestion.

Anyway, I genuinely think a team of Tesla employees (independent of Musk) were talking about building a truck, and all took turns drawing something while pulling together numbers before the pitch to Musk. As a joke, the design team mocked up the worst sketch in 3D, and Musk accidentally saw the design in the Slack chat history and demanded it.

Either that, or some sort of “have your kid draw the next Tesla” employee contest, and the design teams modeled the funniest ones as actual cars for the company newsletter. Like those companies that’ll turn your kid’s drawings into real life stuffed toys.

For a service like Twitter, where user numbers define value, using it is 100% supporting it. Again, the metaphor falls apart because suggesting they can’t use other options suggests they might die, which is painfully untrue for the vast majority of Twitter users (literally no user in a developed country relies on Twitter for life/death information in a way other sources can’t provide).

Oh, shit, well as long as they got to the restaurant before the Nazi bought it, I guess there’s no harm in continuing to support it. Especially if they don’t have the technical knowledge to… Stop using a website?

This metaphor falls down when you realize the table is in a restaurant owned by a Nazi, and the table by the window makes the restaurant look really popular.

Refusing to concede the table is literally adding value to the Nazi owned table, and giving others cover to say “no we also hate Nazis; we’re just here because that table looks cool” which furthers the problem.

I wonder who makes the mainframes used at NSA domestic spying server farms, or who run the computing for predator drone targeting systems. “Not profitable to be vocal in support of antisemitism” hardly means “currently on the moral high ground”…

Clearly the solution is 3D print drawer slides and a little handle so they can effortlessly slide out of the cabinet. Maybe even a pivot so they can angle down and lock in place for easy perusal and selection.

Can you rotate them 90° and get a ton of functional space back in your cabinets? Seems like pretty inefficient use of space currently. Very tidy, regardless.

Love the idea of Twitter advertisers becoming $username, !username for public figures, and +username for Twitter blue subscribers. It also means it would be super easy for people to write scripts to filter out certain users.

I think OPs point was the exact opposite. They give three examples where “matters of taste” are narratives guided by boardroom profit in the last twenty years rather than actual consumer preference.

People didn’t want bigger cars. Corporations made bigger cars to circumvent American fuel efficiency regulations (because it’s cheaper to circumvent a law than it is to make a more efficient engine), and convinced consumers bigger is better. Size difference between the #1 selling truck in 1950 and 1990 is nothing compared to the difference between pre-CAFE and present day.

People don’t want huge, fattening meals when they go out. It’s cheaper for companies to give “more”, “saltier”, and “fattier” meals than it is to create “tastier” ones, and for the most part we’ve been hoodwinked again. I’m talking about the “buy one for here get one free to take home” promotions at Applebee’s.

People have been convinced owning a home is “the American dream”. Construction companies have found they can put a 2800sqft house on a .25 acre plot just as easily as they can a 1400sqft house, so that’s all they build. “Starter homes” aren’t as profitable as they used to be, so the companies are banking on the narrative they’ve created to force people out of apartments and into gigantic houses because it’s the “American dream”.

I can fathom no world where you’d want to trade away a multi billion dollar brand for a new brand you literally can’t SEO. What, you think your brand is gonna be more impressive that the generic variable, and a part of the alphabet?

“Follow me on Twitter” becomes “follow me on X”? “You should tweet that” becomes “you should X that”? The little blue bird on every shop window, website, and business card becomes a stylized letter that, hopefully, doesn’t look so threatening on the next iteration?

It’s a textbook case of brand destruction. I almost regret never making a Twitter in the first place, just so I could quit today, or at any of the hundred days in the past year where it got inexplicably worse without reason.