One of my all-time favorite type of videos is pre-fame bands playing their extremely famous songs to a tiny room of people, because they're not yet known.
A thread of some examples:
Bastille playing Pompeii in what looks like someone's living room:
MGMT playing 'Kids' to a crowd of maybe 25 people on a college quad:
Tones and I playing Dance Monkey in a parking lot before the song came out
Older books are selling, newer ones aren’t. Old music is all the rage, newer artists can barely get played. Older video games and old movie franchises suck up all the attention.
In almost every field, old art is strangling new art. 🧵
Let's start with music.
In 2010, current music was 57% of sales with 'catalog' (older songs) taking 43%.
In 2024, catalog made up a whopping **73%** of music sales. New music is increasingly irrelevant to the music industry.
You can see this in places other than sales data. What's the hottest industry trend? Buying up the rights of retired or dead artists.
I usually try not to post too hysterically because it's not strategically useful, but you really do need to admit that the completely hysterical anti-Trumpers were right about everything.
People are always attempting to sanewash Trump's latest idiocy, and it always fails.
He doesn't have complicated geopolitical theories about war and peace. He just likes Russia and likes Putin. That's it. Every idea more complicated than that fails.
He doesn't have 5D chess strategies for how tariffs can reorder the international economy. He thinks tariffs are big and tough and manly and will 'beat' the other side. He's just a dumb fucking guy who doesn't understand economics.
Recently Richard Hanania wrote an article about how - despite his belief that the GOP is a party of lazy, conspiratorial, bigoted, anti-democracy morons - he's going to vote for them anyways.
His reasoning? Economic growth.
This is very dumb, and deserves a thorough rebuttal.
First: It's kind of insane to *only* care about economic growth. But let's concede the point. Say that literally all you care about is growth - what next?
Even in that case, it's a terrible idea to support Trump. He has terrible ideas and would be a disaster for the economy.
Let's start with tariffs. Trump wants a 10% global tariff on everything. Maybe the single worst idea in a generation - it would make the US poorer instantly.
Economists are pretty much universally in agreement this is a bad, bad, bad idea.