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 (#136’s consensus-hallucination file gains its wildest exhibit; #110’s “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 (#017). The pandemic keeps administering the economy’s chaos-engineering suite with no feature flags.
The counterweight the fortnight deserves: Travis Scott held a CONCERT INSIDE FORTNITE — 12M+ concurrent players attending a psychedelic giant striding across the map — and the #149 Marshmello file upgrades from “phenomenon” to “genre”: in a locked-down world this wasn’t a novelty, it was the biggest venue on EARTH, and the production values (physics-defying set changes no physical stage could attempt) made the virtual format the SUPERIOR one for the first time. The metaverse pitch decks (#149) now have slide one AND slide two, and slide two has 12 million receipts.
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 (#062); 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).