The new Star Wars premieres tomorrow and this fortnight has been a single global pre-order countdown. Ticket sites melted on presale day (thundering herds: still undefeated, drink), the tracking says biggest opening ever, and our floor has block-booked a Friday evening show — the enterprise version of a CEO buying out a theater is forty engineers and one Excel signup sheet. Corporate perks are fake except the ones you organize yourself.
In actual economics: the Fed raised interest rates today for the first time since 2006. I was in high school the last time money wasn’t free. The finance-brained engineers at lunch say cheap money is why every app is subsidized and every startup is hiring; if rates keep rising someday, the game changes. I nodded along and wrote it down. Future me: did the game change?
SpaceX is also days away from another landing attempt, its first flight since the June failure, now trying to land back on solid ground at Cape Canaveral instead of the barge. After the January explosion and the April explosion, third time’s the… we’ll see. I have a browser tab pre-opened.
TIL: presale queueing systems, virtual waiting rooms, token buckets, why “you are number 24,571 in line” is a feature not a failure. Honesty scales better than heroics.