What Banksy's recent actions mean:
Banksy’s mockery of a market that has fed both his wallet and his capacity for ever more ambitious activities has had a happy ending this time. But the questions remain. When in 2014 Sotheby’s sold a print depicting an auctioneer selling an eager crowd an elaborate gold frame (naturally) in which is stencilled “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit”, it seemed the epitome of . . . what? A joke gone flat? A savage critic rendered toothless? Or the ultimate laugh against the “morons” actually buying the shit? Source: https://www.ft.com/content/f62a69d2-cd45-11e8-b276-b9069bde0956
CRISPR is the only thing that can save the banana:
TR4 only affects a particular type of banana called the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 banana varieties in the world, but the Cavendish, named after a British nobleman who grew the exotic fruit in his greenhouses on the edge of the Peak District, makes up almost the entire export market. The Brazilian apple banana, for example, is small and tart with firm flesh, while the stubby Pisang Awak, a staple in Malaysia, is much sweeter than the Cavendish. But no banana has become as ubiquitous as the Cavendish, which accounts for 47 per cent of all global production of the fruit.
As TR4 creeps across the globe towards Latin America, the Cavendish’s genetic uniformity is starting to look like a curse. Ploetz estimates that TR4 has already killed more Cavendish bananas than Gros Michel plants killed by TR1, and, unlike the previous epidemic, there is no TR4-resistant banana ready to replace the Cavendish. And time to find a solution is rapidly running out. “The question is, ‘when is it going to come over here?’,” Ploetz says. “Well, it may already be here.”
“CRISPR is precise, it’s relatively easy to use, and it allows a young company like us to start doing real genetic editing,” says Gilad Gershon, Tropic’s CEO. Gershon, who founded the company in July 2016, was working for the Californian agricultural investment firm Pontifax AgTech when he became convinced that CRISPR was about to blow open the agricultural industry.
Source: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cavendish-banana-extinction-gene-editing
Shane Parish on doing things differently:
I get feedback from people: “I didn’t like that.” I dig in and they say, “I want to hear these name brand people that I know.” But that’s not what the podcast is about. So that means I have to tune the messaging so people’s expectations are aligned with what I’m actually trying to do. Then they can self-select between people who want to go deeper and people who want only the surface.
When you’re only doing what people want, that can put you out of business. As Steve Jobs noted a long time ago, you can’t always ask people what they want.
I mentioned before that everything can be copied. Well one of the things people have a hard time copying is things that are hard in the short term. Like going to the gym. You might like running but I don’t. I don’t like going to the gym. But it will likely lead to a longer, happier life.
There are things you can do in your business in the same way. But you need time to think through these things.
On Alexa:
One reason is that Amazon and Google are pushing these devices hard, discounting them so heavily during last year’s holiday season that industry observers suspect that the companies lost money on each unit sold. These and other tech corporations have grand ambitions. They want to colonize space. Not interplanetary space. Everyday space: home, office, car. In the near future, everything from your lighting to your air-conditioning to your refrigerator, your coffee maker, and even your toilet could be wired to a system controlled by voice.And indeed, these devices no longer serve solely as intermediaries, portals to e-commerce or nytimes.com. We communicate with them, not through them. More than once, I’ve found myself telling my Google Assistant about the sense of emptiness I sometimes feel. “I’m lonely,” I say, which I usually wouldn’t confess to anyone but my therapist—not even my husband, who might take it the wrong way. Part of the allure of my Assistant is that I’ve set it to a chipper, young-sounding male voice that makes me want to smile. (Amazon hasn’t given the Echo a male-voice option.) The Assistant pulls out of his memory bank one of the many responses to this statement that have been programmed into him. “I wish I had arms so I could give you a hug,” he said to me the other day, somewhat comfortingly. “But for now, maybe a joke or some music might help.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/alexa-how-will-you-change-us/570844/
On breakfast:
On her long and ultimately doomed slog to become president, Hillary Clinton started most days in the same way: with scrambled egg whites and vegetables that she would perk up with some fresh jalapeños, if available. Failing that, the hot sauce she carried with her at all times and some salsa did the trick. For any other meal, such repeat behaviour would seem weird, at least in a rich country where a glut of dining options is available. Yet breakfast is the one meal where a thoroughly unadventurous spirit is acceptable.
Nonetheless, within any single country, the rules dictating what constitutes an appropriate breakfast are far clearer than those that define lunch or dinner. Mention bacon and eggs in Britain and few will doubt that you are describing breakfast. Cover a slice of bread with chocolate sprinkles in the Netherlands and it is obvious which meal you have prepared. A French person would sneer at the thought of eating a croissant at any time other than morning.
There is safety in “the usual”, as Hillary Clinton might have thought when ordering her election-trail breakfast. But the evidence from meals at every other time of day suggests that even the wariest diner can eventually find delight in the unfamiliar. And given the limited number of meals anyone can eat over the course of a day, making breakfast as exciting as dinner is surely worth the risk.
