Just read a great Reddit thread: "What is a life hack that seems fake, but is a true lifesaver?"
Some gold ones 🧵
1/ "If your ring gets stuck on your finger, windex will slide it right off...you can also reduce the the size of your finger but chilling it in cold water."
2/ "You can do the Heimlich maneuver on yourself. Use a chair or countertop, press yourself against it (right under your rib cage), and press down hard. Should force air up and dislodge blockage."
3/ "Rubbing alcohol removes chewing gum and gets paint off of clothes"
4/ What to do if you're ever attacked by a dog...(also works for cats)
5/ "Put your onion in the freezer for 10 minutes before chopping it. It freezes the juices just enough to slow down the process of it turning into gas...gives you a few minutes to chop without tears."
6/ "Use shaving cream as anti-fog. I use it on the inside of my motorcycle visor. Smear it on, let it dry and then rinse it off. You can also use it on a bathroom mirror or car window."
(SIDE USE: A nursing home employee says shaving cream removes the smell of urine)
7/ "Vinegar in a plastic bag with rubber band ties around any faucet will make the faucet like-new. I'm talking decade old rust and stuff gone...and water flows like the first day."
(Also works on shower heads, just unscrew it)
8/ "Rubbing vegetable oil (or any cooking oil) on your hands after you cut up jalapenos or other hot peppers.
It gets rid of the awfulness that would normally be left on your hands from the peppers. I can remove my eye contacts after doing this!"
9/ "The cheapest, most effective and safest insecticide against roaches is a spray bottle of mostly water with just a little liquid dish soap in it.
Shake it a little bit to get a little foamy. The soap film suffocates them faster than any chemical."
11/ “If a man is in an accident (car, ladder fall), and he gets an erection, don’t move him. He has a spinal injury. It’s called a priapism and is associated with a mid-to-low back injury.”
[No image needed]
12/ "During pollen season, rinse your hair before bed. Otherwise you're just depositing pollen on your pillowcase every night and then rolling your face in it all night."
13 / "Crayons are flammable and will provide about an hour of light as a candle if you light the top."
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If you are the person that did the un-aligned letters for the previous eBay logo, please contact the research app team. We are huge fans of how un-aligned the “e” is with the “y”.Bearly.AI
This article offers up reasons for popularity of simple font logos (mostly Sans Serif):
— Easier to standardize ads across mediums
— Improves readability (especially on mobile)
— The “brand” matters more than the logo velvetshark.com/why-do-brands-…
Berkshire Hathaway board member Chris Davis once asked Charlie Munger why Costco didn’t drop the membership card.
Let anyone shop and raise prices by 2% (still great value), thus making up for lost membership fees (and more).
Munger said the card is important filter:
▫️“Think about who you’re keeping out [with a membership card]. Think about the cohort that won’t give you their license and their ID and get their picture taken.
Or they aren’t organized enough to do it, or they can’t do the math to realize [the value]…that cohort will have a 100% of your shoplifters and a 100% of your thieves. Now, it’ll also have most of your small tickets.
And that cohort relative to the US population will probably be shrinking as a % of GDP relative to the people that can do the math [on Costco’s value].”▫️
I have a membership but have been guffing on the math for a few years tbh. They keep telling me to upgrade from Gold to Business but I’m too lazy (even if the 2-3% Cash Back on Business pays back after a few trips).
This is a long way of saying Costco’s membership price hike effective today — its first in 7 years — is annoying but when I decide to do the math in a few months, it’ll be worth it.
Anyway, here is something I wrote about Costco’s $9B+ clothing business my affinity for Kirkland-branded socks and Puma gym shirts. readtrung.com/p/costcos-9b-c…
Two notes:
▫️Meant “Executive” (not “Business”) membership
▫️Chris Davis was doing a pure thought experiment. Costco membership obvi high margin (on~$5B a year) and accounts for majority of Costco profits. Retail margin is tiny on ~$230B of annual sales (Costco would need like another $150B+ from letting anyone shop to make up membership profits)
One of the Team USA rowers who won a Gold Medal is an investment banker and actually did the “B2B SaaS Sales” joke on Linkedin. Legend.
Here’s the rest of the post (perfectly formatted to show up in the feed as a shitpost): linkedin.com/feed/update/ur…
Justin if you’re reading this and are available for consulting, the research app team would love to engage your B2B SaaS knowledge for our Q4 sales roadmapBearly.AI
The amount of work Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli team put into a film is mind-boggling.
Each typically has 60k-70k frames, all hand-drawn and painted with water color.
This 4-second clip (“The Wind Rises”) took one animator 15 months to do. Insane.
The docu “10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki” shows him talking to the animator (Eiji Yamamori) after its done.
It’s so good:
Miyazaki: “Good job.”
Yamamori: “It’s so short, though”
Miyazaki: “But it was worth it.”
The animator gets a second of joy (he’s pumped) but on to the next.
Miyazaki doesn’t use digital FX or computer graphics. He believes “that the tool of an animator is the pencil.”
On a related note, here’s something I wrote about another Japanese legend dedicated to the craft (Ichiro Suzuki) and the art of mastery: readtrung.com/p/jerry-seinfe…
New York City paid Mckinsey $4m to conduct a feasibility study on whether trash bins are better than leaving garbage on the street.
The deck is 95-slides long and titled “The Future of Trash”.
Some highlights:
▫️The official term is “containerization”, which is the “storage of waste in sealed, rodent-proof receptacles rather than in plastic bags placed directly on the curb.”
▫️Two main types of containerization: 1) individual bins for low density locales; 2) shared containers for high-density.
▫️NYC needs to clean up 24,000,000lbs of garbage a day
▫️Containerization has only become the norm worldwide in major cities in the past 15 years.
▫️New York City first considered containerization in the 1970s but never conducted a feasibility study until now (Mckinsey’s sales team has been dropping the ball)
▫️Key considerations for container viability:
• POPULATION DENSITY: NYC has 30k residents per square mile (more dense than comparable big cities)
• BUILT ENVIRONMENT: Few places to “hide” containers due to history of infrastructure development.
• WEATHER: Snow creates challenges for “mechanized collection” in the winter.
• CURB SPACE: Mostly taken up by bus stops, bike lanes, outdoor dining and fire hydrants.
• COLLECTION FREQUENCY: NYC needs to double frequency of pick-up for estimated speed of trash that bins would accumulate.
• FLEET: A new garbage truck will needs to be designed to collect rolling bins at scale.
▫️ The proposed solution (literally garbage bins and shared containers) covers 89% of NYC streets and 77% of residential tonnage.
▫️The three case studies — because you gotta have solid case studies — are Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona.
▫️There is a slide called “Why containerization matters” and three reasons are “rats”, “pedestrian obstruction” and “dirty streets” (the 21-year intern that did this slide billed at prob $10k an hour is my hero).
The study is actually pretty interesting.
I have no idea if $4m is a rip-off to learn that “yeah, we should put garbage in bins so rats don’t eat it” but I would have happily done it for 10-20% of that budget (and come to a similar conclusion).
It is actually an interesting deck. Just the thought of a 20-year old newly grad getting billed at an obscene rate to say”rats get to garbage” is kinda funny
Four more solid slides:
— By the numbers (daily garbage = 140 Statue of Liberty a day!!)
— City comparison
— Container comparison (looks like they did select the “scalable” trash bin)
— Curb side analysis
Think Mckinsey telling NY to “put garbage in bins so rats don’t eat it and people can walk” will work out better than when it told AT&T in 1981 that cellphones would be “niche.”