On Monday the 20th, the price of a barrel of West Texas crude oil settled at negative $37.63. Sellers paid buyers to take oil, because the futures contracts expiring that day require physical delivery, storage at Cushing was functionally full, and a “price” is not a fact about a substance, it’s a fact about a contract mechanism meeting a capacity constraint (the consensus-hallucination file gains its wildest exhibit; “everything is capacity planning” achieves final form: the global oil market ran out of disk). Retail traders in oil ETFs learned about contango the way juniors learn about rm -rf. The pandemic keeps administering the economy’s chaos-engineering suite with no feature flags.
The counterweight the fortnight deserves: Travis Scott plays inside Fortnite tonight, US time — a psychedelic giant striding across the map, five showings across the weekend to catch every timezone. The Marshmello file is about to upgrade from “phenomenon” to “genre”: in a locked-down world this isn’t a novelty, it’s the biggest venue on Earth, and the production values (physics-defying set changes no physical stage could attempt) may make the virtual format the superior one for the first time. Attendance numbers in fifteen days; the metaverse pitch decks are already re-cutting slide one.
Work dispatch: my “async-first communication” RFC shipped, meetings demoted to last resort, decisions in documents with comment deadlines, recorded everything. Adoption is uneven; the surprise champion is our most meeting-loving PM, converted by timezone arithmetic (we hired remote across nine hours now, the pandemic made our hiring pool planetary, quietly the biggest structural change of all). Every constraint is a subsidy for some behavior; lockdown subsidizes writing, and I intend to spend the subsidy.
TIL: contango and storage economics. Futures curves price warehousing, not just wanting. Every market has a physical substrate that abstractions forget until it’s full (us-east-1, ICU beds, Cushing Oklahoma, the year’s recurring theme in three data centers).