Hello, re:mart
brief intro
The best part about all of this is you don’t have to understand how any of this works if the price is competitive. I’m not sure why I feel compelled to explain how any of it will work, but I do. And I know when I talk about things people say things back, and that’s my hope.
This is perhaps my 20th attempt at writing this, as I can never get it right, so I’m posting it grammatical errors and all. re:mart is an emotional response to my deepest frustration that fits on economic rails as to cleanly work as a business. It isn’t complicated, but the details are essential. And on top of that, I really freaking care and so you’re not going to get me to explain that without getting worked up. I’ve decided to include that emotion in this all, and even to lead with it like I’m doing now, because I need help with this, and if I’m anything other than who I am, I’m not going to attract the right kind. This is a callout for anyone who is familiar with any of the topics mentioned here, as I need all the advice, pushback, and pointers I can get.
The project has the working title of “lattice”, as in a repeating shape that forms a structure. re:mart is the first crystal, the seed, that I’m hoping the others will form around. And if not, I’ve got a series of others all lined up as other good starting points. The structure is the systems that I feel society not only could benefit from, but sustain, through business practices at a competitive rate. Each enabling the next, each formed by mitosis, as one business splits to fulfil two separate needs, but in a complimentary way. In its planning, no detail thus far has been left untouched, each inventoried against the intention and spirit of the project. I’ve never been convinced of anything like this, but at the same time, I’ve never had something so difficult to explain, so please bear with me.
Businesses were never meant to be moral because they never operated or were measured on a scale of morality. Sure, businesses do moral and immoral things, but only because they’re built for creating and maintaining steady flows of money, not making lives better. It is my hypothesis that re:mart will succeed, and in the process, demonstrate that there are alternatives to the defaults that not only happen to fall on the more moral end of the spectrum, but are good for business. And if they can’t be good for business, we’ll demonstrate that they can at least be done, sparking expectation that it is worth it despite the costs.
But for now, in the context that matters: re:mart is a business. It can’t succeed until it has succeeded, and there isn’t much to show for it yet. I have a prototype that will be launched in my area in the coming weeks, which I’ll explain in my next post. But still you must know that it, from it’s beginnings, is a thinly veiled statement and belief that we can do better, and not just because it’s good for business, but for employees, customers, and the environment. And yeah, I’m taking on all three, all at once. So I need that input you’ve got.
The whole point is that we’re fucked. I’m sorry, but it’s the only word that gets the point across, and I’m going to lead with that. We’re fucked, Susan. The air we breathe and that explosion at the center of our solar system that used to keep us alive are both now slowly baking us and no one is coming to save us. The ones that could end world hunger are in a rocket measuring contest, paying off politicians, and exploiting workers with unsafe conditions and slave wages. Yeah, we’re fucked. Okay? Okay. Now that we’ve established the precariousness of the situation, I think I’ve got an idea. And it came from a place of grief, and loss, and this is my response. That’s why I bleed so hard for this idea. I’m not afraid to hurt publicly, or mess up publicly, because I’ve hurt too much silently to care at this point. So, let’s do this. I mean, there is nothing to lose. We’re fucked either way, Susan, so let’s go full hail-mary.
The overarching concept is if you want insulin for $50, someone has to sell it, at volume, for $50.01 to force everyone to go below that price. If you want minimum wage to be $25, you need enough people to pay $24.99. The lattice is a set of businesses that force its competitors and other in its shared space to be better. It tugs on the pinky of “the invisible hand” of the market. Its success isn’t measured in dollars, it’s measured in force excerted on the worst parts of society to the point of forcing them to change. The recent strikes and push for unionization show that the system is tearing at the seams, and that it’s ripe for change, but that we as individuals cannot create that lasting change in our lifetimes, or quite frankly in time for the human race to survive itself, unless we have a vehicle for change. I, very inadequately, put forth lattice as a proposal, and I need everyone to give me all the feedback they’ve got, because it’s my best shot at making a difference, I believe. And yes. I hear the audacity of that statement and I cringe.
But speaking of the invisible hand, it never was by benevolence that we came by our beer and bread from the baker and brewer, but somewhere between cottage shops and Amazon.com there was room for an unforgivable, unfathomable amount of greed that has accumulated trillions of dollars for the richest among us, while employees are peeing in bottles so the AI that fires slackers won’t notice them. Don’t tell me wages can’t change or that billionaires were somehow essential to the process, because clearly there is wiggle room.
There have been experiments with CEO pay, and Ben and Jerry’s as an example, that demonstrate that it is sensitive, and that it takes a very special person to run an empire and they charge top dollar. So just, don’t build the empire. Build a community, and let them take care of themselves.
If you create one company that does one thing and one thing only, and then that company integrates with a company that does a different, single thing, you can outsource the work to each others company, as I’ll explain. Neither is all that complicated because of their singular focus, so you build a system of singular nodes that form an organism that functions as an all inclusive society. Legally, they’re the same entity, and so from the outside it looks like a conglomerate of brands similar to Nestlé or Amazon, but it’s actually a continent of villages, each with their own craft and subculture and a unique relationship exists between all of them. But this also gives them the benefit of micro-companies, but the bulk discount of massive companies when it comes to negotiating for insurance, retirement, and the like.
And yes that’s all quite the claim, but one step at a time. First, re:mart.
If you don’t know what a Tensegrity Table is (Google it, I’ll wait, but here is a cool example of one on Etsy, act fast there are only 3 left) it’s a table that is held up by chains held in tension (tensional + integrity = tensegrity). If I told you that a table leg could be made of loose, unwelded, chain, you’d call me, very reasonably, an idiot. But that’s exactly what a Tensegrity Table is. It’s only when you zoom out that you realize that the chains in the center hold the weight, and the chains on the outsides aren’t weight bearing, but provide stability. Altogether, they make a stable table. If you cut one chain, you risk not having a table anymore. But when put together correctly, you’ve got a table that, although it works just like a table, is entirely different in significant ways.
re:mart is a tightly coupled set of interdependent pillars that, if any were to be removed, you’d be left with either something that is unstable, or just a worse version of something that already exists. When normally such a vulnerability like that is a risk, it’s the secret sauce that makes this all work. A company that can’t survive unless it sticks to clear, core, and very publicly visible tenants, which happen to be moral and wholesome as heck, that company can only ever be “good”, or it dies. I’ll give my time, effort, and money to something like that.
The biggest difficulty is that this table can only be explained chain by chain, and at every chain, the gut response might be “but you could just use a piece of wood instead of a chain”. Feel that, and then ask why everyone else used wooden legs for their businesses. I’ve done that at every turn and it’s gotten me this far, and I need as many people to ask themselves that because I’m not the smartest person I know.
K, now that we got this clear, let’s get to some business details.
hello for reals this time, re:mart
re:mart is an app where customers enter one-off and recurring shopping orders for home essentials like groceries, baked goods, home repair, electronics - anything that you would buy running errands around town. Either on schedule or at a scheduled time, re:mart will have those items for you at a single location, usually one of the stores your stuff was purchased from. You can shop for everything from yoghurt, yard care, bulk, or single-size, and then pick it up at one location, even though your stuff came from 7 different locations around town. The kicker is I think that, if you’re spending around $200, I think I can actually save the customer more money than I charge them, making my services essentially free, if not mildly “profitable”. Yeah, that sounds insane, but I’ll get to it.
Choice is important, and we should be specific with our purchases, if only because we can choose at all. But I’m not in the “let’s choose” mood when I’m shopping for my home essentials that are routine or staple purchases. I will always get 1% Milk, so why do I need to pick it from a list? re:mart does have a search method where I can par-use when I am wanting to shop around or be surprised, but dumping inventory on users is not the default.
We charge a flat fee of $15, and try to save you that much or more. Using re:mart, you can shop specifically or just window shop, having that same exact experience you have in the store, but without the noise of marketers, or the one helping you shop making money off of your individual decisions. re:mart is structured so that it doesn’t make any more or any less money based off of how you choose to spend yours. No need to tinker with the search algorithm or wonder if we’re up to any games, because there is no game. I couldn’t care less if you spent $3 or $300, I’m just here to make sure you get what you want, and that you’re happy with it so you’ll pay me to do it again. When has a shopping experience been based off of true customer satisfaction, and not some form of customer satisfaction that is only a proxy for how much money you can get from them? So shop with someone who could not care less.
While it’s tempting to call that “Grocery Delivery”, and it is a “drop-in replacement” for grocery delivery and most general online shopping, it is an entirely different model under the hood and those differences make it difficult to compare it to other “drop-in replacements”. Sure, many things function as a hammer, but this is truly a hammer, and we’ve been using a wrench this whole time called “consumer retail”, but only because no one actually wanted to sell us hammers because they made less money that way
Deliveries take at least 24 hours, and I’m expecting that the average time will be between 24 and 48 hours. It’s strange that in this day and age, when starting a new business you have to convince people that 24-48 hours is a duration people are willing to wait for something that is within 10 miles of their current location, but it’s part of the business model. The idea is that duration gives us the time to find, purchase, and move your goods to that single location without having to suck the life out of humans with a feverish pace, but also it gives us the time to price compare, to compensate for when stores are sold out, or wholesalers are delayed. We can pick up your non-perishables immediately and your perishibles the morning of. That 24-72 hours gives us a lot of time to work. Yes, there are impulse buys, and re:mart isn’t here to solve that. That’s for Doordash, Instacart, or you getting up and doing it yourself. But with extremely little effort, we as humans are able to plan out at least 95% of our shopping at least 1 day, heaven forbid 3, into the future, especially if we get our groceries delivered for free because we waited 24 hours. Yeah, you heard me right, I explain how that works in a sec, stay with me.
okay, the business plan
We all have buying patterns that are unique to us, but they can be summed up as routine, general, and surprise purchases. I will always get 1% Milk because that’s what my kids drink, I don’t always buy Pop-tarts, but when I do it’s strawberry flavored, and I’m one of those guys who tries every seasonal, specialty flavor of soda with ever deepening dissapointment. Those are examples of routine, general, and surprise purchases. Ask my partner Kate, I lean towards the general and the surprise, and she makes sure I get the routine purchases.
Businesses operate in a similar way - they have a set of recurring purchases and staples, but also some one-off purchases. A manufacturing plant, whether it’s for beef jerkey or minivans, has a team that sources the most cost-effective materials, and then oversees the purchase, delivery, and assembly of said materials. This chain of suppliers and manufacturers is called “a supply chain”, and it’s the backbone of the economy. I don’t need to tell this to the planet that just went through a cargo ship shortage, but it’s a big deal.
But suffice it to say, the CEO of Toyota isn’t going to Costco to buy tires for the next shipment of Corollas. They have a team that does that. You? You’re shopping for your tires at Costco. You’re marching through warehouses, trying to avoid being snared into impulse purchases, which is why the milk you need to feed your children is at the back of the store and right next to the snack food, in hopes of tempting you with a treat. And if you want to order your milk online, let me first show you a list of all the permutations of milk I have available, things that people who bought milk also bought, and did you mean almond milk, because I’ve got a ton of non-dairy milk solutions, when all you wanted was a Gallon of 1% Milk, now you want Oreos.
Not only that, but when you get to checkout, there’s this strange game of royalty rewards points, memberships, coupons, discounts, case-lot sales, and “are you going to round up your total to the nearest dollar to end child cancer because our focus groups indicated they favored our brand when we asked you that”. It’s a mockery of your time, and it only happens because a few people make more money that way, but they’re the ones who make these sorts of decisons. I’m all for charity, and have been at the receiving end of charity, but they’re parading children with cancer in front of us so we’ll like them more. I know there are people who genuinely care and want to use their business as an opportunity to good, but corporate charity is marketing unless they’ve done it without telling anyone. And they make sure to tell us every day.
When I buy groceries, I try not to but it happens every time, but I divide my total by the minumum wage and think of the single mother that earns that, who’s dollar is not the same as mine. It’s a prayer of sorts, I guess. A rememberance of what I’ve been given, but also a reminder of how difficult life is for others in ways I’ll never understand, but that I also had my times when I worked for minimum wage. I’m fortunate to be at a place where I can afford groceries, and I’m going to use that opportunity up making sure others can, too. So much of what I see is “if I had to suffer, then they should have to, too” as if the lesson to learn from suffering was that others should have to endure it, as well. I’ve believed that! There were times where I legitimately felt that, but I suffered for long enough to realize that that is an appropriate first response, as it’s one instinctively reach for, but it shouldn’t be our actual, or last response.
To so many of us, we may look at this problem of shopping and sales and groceries and say “it’s just a few cents here and there”, “or I really like finding a good deal”, you’re not finding a good deal, you’re paying for it at its actual price, and then paying way higher the rest of the time. It’s a lie, Susan. Wake up. If you’re not bothered by this, you’re fortunate to not have to have been bothered by this. One of the features I’m going to add to my app first is Calories Per Dollar and Nutrient X per Dollar because that’s the people I’m here to save. Too many people don’t know the person next to them is doing the math. I would love to sell to you, and please use my service, but I’m starting with EBT, WIC, E-readers, and the elderly and pensoners. I’m going to be printing papers and running them down to senior centers, hospitals, homeless shelters, abuse clinics, and churches. As we enter the phase of people who will never retire, we need their dollars to go as far as possible and I’m not going to let some asshole make a few cents more off of them. I’m going to make sure they get the best deal possible and that no one is playing games with the money they have left. But the cool thing is that this can be for everyone, and needs to be for everyone, as volume is the speed that keeps this bike stable.
See, I’m bleeding again. This is all so dear to me. It’s the summation of everything I am, and ever was taught to be. You can’t be a bleeding heart and hold yourself together when you talk about trying to save the world.
But back to the current shopping experience: it sucks. It’s insulting. It’s exploiting a reward system that is the core of our being and the spark of life that has protected and led us and our ancestors throughout our entire history and they’re wiggling laser pointers at it so it spends $2 instead of $1. We love music, we love it so much that it is such part of cultural identity and is a gift that people regularly give to their God, and they turned it to jingles. We accumulate into units of parents and children, and Olive Garden takes that word and insists they’re part of it. I know that no one took them literally, but they still did it. Maybe one of the company activities for re:mart is to show up at Olive Gardens across the country, asking them for “a place to crash since I missed rent, and when I’m here, I want to see if I actually am family” until they stop using that stupid slogan. I will stop ranting, but seriously, if you look around and see just how embedded this stupid game is in our lives, it will push you to start a company, too, or something dramatic at least.
But the way you end this stupid game is by doing it differently and in the process doing it better. Either they have to follow suite, or they die. If I sell insulin (which I won’t be because I can’t yet) for $50, and you sell it for $100, you won’t sell any insulin. The way you lower the price for insulin is to lower it as low as sustainably possible, and I know the market rate isn’t that. I’m doing that, just with groceries.
the app
There is a single search bar in the center of the page, and a collapsable cart to your right. No ads, no promotions, no pictures on the landing page - just a search bar. It loads under the most limited internet bandwidths, and that is the tone of the entire site. Minimal data usage. You search for the products you want as specifically as you want. For example, I can say I want “one gallon of 2% Milk” and that’s as specific as I care to get because all 2% milk tastes the same to me, so get the cheapest that doesn’t expire for two weeks. I will get the cheapest 2% Milk in town and find out where it’s from later. But I can say “4 Count Strawberry Pop-tarts”, and you’ll know that I mean that I want exactly 4 sachets of Strawberry poptarts. But, if you’re willing to wiggle on your specificity and limit your item to just “4 Count Pop-Tarts” because price matters more than flavor, then I’ll get you the cheapest 4 Count Pop-Tarts in town, they happen to be Cinnamon Sugar at Lee’s Marketplace, for example. Let’s say I want Pop-tarts, but I’m not sure which flavor I want, I can search the flavors in my area, and then pick the size I want from the sizes available. The best part is that I don’t care from where it’s coming from or who has what, because Pop-tarts and milk from my local Harmon’s tastes the same as Pop-Tarts and milk from Walmart, and I didn’t end up going to the one that was sold out or cost more because I didn’t have to go anywhere, but I still got what I wanted.
You still get to experience the rush of sales and discounts, it’s just after the fact when we show you that we got you all of them. And if strawberries are half off their normal cost, we’re not going to hide that fact from you, but you won’t be inundated with a wall of potentially useful information.
Some purchases are location specific, as my friend really can’t get over the from scratch Bread from Costco, and so he can get so specific as to say the exact location he wants it from if they’ve got it. Since for most other things, we’re not sure the final price of my order since we’re not sure where it’ll be picked up from, you’re shown the average price in your area, and you make a $15 down payment when you submit you order.
During that whole process, none of your behavior was tracked, none of your information was sold, you weren’t presented hundreds of options, you were guided on how to enter your shopping list that you always buy, and then were able to fill in the gaps with search that is only focused on your satisfaction. The algorithm had no bias, no one was served priority sorting, and since the site only charges a flat $15 for delivery, we were never incentivized to make you buy more, or make you buy one product over the other.
Oh, and at checkout, you’re shown exactly how much the people who will be processing your order make per hour on average. They make a flat, hourly rate with a productivity incentive that is meant to be encouraging, but that the hourly rate is a living wage. I think I can get it to $25/hour if the numbers are right. I know anyone can say that, but this is one of those chains in the Tensability table or whatever. Tensegrity. Just keep this number in mind and know it will fit in eventually. Chain leg on a table, makes no sense, until it does. But on top of how much everyone is paid, you’ll also be told two numbers: how much it would have cost you in time and gas and depreciation to your vehicle, as well as how much you would make if you had spent that time as a re:mart employee. “Hey Susan, thanks for shopping. Sally is your driver, Billy is your shopper, and Davis is in dispatch and the three of them are going to be processing your order. They’re on track to make $26/hour this week, and of the $15 you’re giving us, getting $2.37 is going to corporate to cover expenses, but the rest goes to them. If you were to do all the shopping yourself, you wouldn’t get back until 7:17PM and it would have cost you $32 in gas and time, using our average wage as a measure of the worth of your time.”
I hope that isn’t insulting, maybe I need to tone it down a bit, but I want to demonstrate this is possible and force everyone to acknowledge that $10 an hour is poverty exploitation, not job creation. This wage publishing is one of those mechanisms to keep the company in check, that tension integrity. If ever we stop advertising wages, or wages go down, then that is a public indicator that we’re not doing well, and we need to do better, whatever that is. There is no way to discontinue the practice of advertising wage like that once it’s put in place without causing an insanely damaging blow, so don’t.
Now, the specifics of the algorithm that determine who needs what products are a bit more complicated, and quite honestly guarded at this point. I strive to be as open as possible, but this is the one secret recipe I have to keep for now. There are two conditions where I legit just release the source code, and that is when we’re no longer vulnerable to takeover by bad actors, or we fail and I give it to the next person to try. I don’t own this idea, but I owe it to the people I might help with it, so I have to protect it. If you want to sign an NDA, I’ll tell you the director’s cut, but I hope you find out the real secret during the better of those two scenarios.
This “algorithm” (I hate calling it that because it sounds crypto-hype-y, it’s just a fancy way to sort things) can do the price calculation and comparison for the entire state of Utah in under $5 a month if I’ve got 50k customers. That is not a joke, and it is probably going to be the best idea I’ll ever have in my career, and I’ll get to tell you one day. I’ve actually told a ton of people who are super close to me, but thankfully, I was so crazed with excitement that none of them got it, I was just rambling about a table made of chains and they loved me anyways, and I will name them each with their permission as a memorial for their hours of sacrifice.
Suffice it to say, it finds the best deals, adds them to the dispatch of an in-store shopper to pick up, and I’m about to start on the “driver deliverers the goods to their final location” but I’m hoping someone smarter shows up by then — but all of this is 7 blog posts worth of oversimplification bless your heart if you are still reading, you are my people, please let me know so I can find you.
the kick, this is where it all comes together.
K, this is great and all. Price comparison, shopping, pick up, $15, great. No, better than that. 15 is 8% of 200, what I think is a reasonable “weekly staple shopping trip” for a family of four to six. If we can save you 8% by price comparing, you stop saving money and begin making money. That’s when we’ve left the territory of it makes sense and entered the realm of “if you don’t do this you’re an idiot”.
And it gets better.
While this is churning away, autocatically forced to because of the tension integrity and the fact that it costs anywhere from less resources it would take you to do it to you actually getting paid to use the service, other businesses are forced to respond. Wages have to go up. Parasitic space tourists have no place using our milk money to fly their jet to the world cup on a whim. The whole system will have to adjust because we won’t fall for the lie that it can’t change. re:mart is not meant to be an island, but a rising tide. The leadership of re:mart will have to forego a lot of luxuries, but we can set a standard and hire from underneath the others. What we’re seeing isn’t the Great Resignation, it’s The Great Renegotiation. When you see it like that, you know that it’s not a problem, it’s the solution. Let’s run a tight ship, let’s not buy a skyscraper, or frills, but instead put every employee in a home while delivering people’s groceries for free.
and that’s how the cookie assembles
re:mart is just a logistics company. It does no buying and selling, has no inventory, nothing. That’s where re:supply comes in. re:mart will perform mitosis, maintaining a relationship with the now “other” company, but it will split each will be their own organization, unafilliated in every way other than legally and by cause, but to the outside world it will just look like the same company. re:supply will work with wholesalers as a retailer to compete with local stores as a vendor to re:mart. I debated whether or not to include that in the public plan, as I will be relying on grocery stores and other local retailers to make this happen, and I don’t want them thinking this is all going to end with me stabbing them in the back, because I want to make it clear that I need them.
If you are a grocery store, and I, re:mart and re:supply, had to choose between a gallon of milk on a farm 200 miles away or a gallon of milk on your shelf, despite the difference in price, I will choose the gallon of milk on your shelf every time. It’s here because you did the hard work of getting it here, and I will happily outsource that work to you and yours. I would rather have re:supply out in farmers’ markets, and with mushroom growers, not Sysco and shipping companies.
But what we see with re:supply is the lattice growing. It didn’t have to start from square one, it started from where re:mart left off. It will be the best positioned local distributor because it will have analytical data on every pricing pattern and strategy of everyone in the area. But instead of using that to exploit their neighbors, it will just use it to fill in the gaps as tightly as possible. It will work on getting access to more foreign foods locally so cultural dishes don’t require trips to major cities or online purchases. It will build store fronts for cottage industries, and buying garlic from your neighbor and from a factory farm is as simple as just buying garlic.
re:supply would have to operate on a margin basis, rather than a flat fee, as there is no flat fee model that scales when it comes to the sale of goods. But it would still have to compete with stores. It’s not a shoe-in, cheat code supplier, and because of that, it will be forced to find new venues like that local garlic farmer, because that’s the one place they have an advantage over Sysco and other wholesalers that grocery stores are working with.
Companies merge and aqcuire each other because it’s good for business, and sometimes good for employees. Bigger companies are able to provide better benefits packages to their employees because they get bulk discounts. When my employer got aqcuired, my insurance got way better because we were now bigger. But what in nature makes us think that mergers and aqcuisitions is at all normal. We talk about “Social Darwinism” and how it’s survival of the fittest, if we’re going to try to fit everything into that analogy, then accumulation for the sake of accumulation is more a homo sapien instinct rather than an organic pattern. Things in nature divide as well as accumulate. The cells in the human body are each different shapes and sizes, but they’re the sizes they are because if they got any bigger, life would be unsustainable. Why don’t companies follow the same logic?
Psychologists say that the optimal community size is 150, so let’s keep it to that. Let’s create a network of small, cellular companies, each working freely with each other in tightly coupled relationships, and occasionally dividing to create new cells of commerce. Each cell has one task and excels at it, and nothing else.
But there are natural niches that form when you spread out hexagonally like this, pockets in the Catan Board that could be filled or roads that could be built begin to appear as you spread out. re:mart must remain unbiased at all times, that means no suggestions or prioritizations that are related to anything unobjective. But we have all of this marketing data, all of this pricing, promotional, and restocking dates and times. So we form re:market, which is an independent advertising agency that makes money by subscription. For $1 a month, you can have someone who doesn’t work for Pepsi, doesn’t talk to Pepsi, and couldn’t care less whether or not you purchased a Pepsi product show you the latest Pepsi products. The ad agencies only goal is customer satisfaction to the point of continued subscription, which changes their entire dynamic.
For another mitosis example, let’s say that re:supply is really taking off and has done a solid job of networking farmers. It is now trying to manage the logistics of getting their goods directly to customers, as well as organizing a marketplace for farmers, then it performs mitosis and pinches off into re:stalk, which is a coop of sorts that specializes in facilitating farmer relationships, I don’t know, that’s just an idea.
You see, this could continue, perpetually, and we can retake the entirety of society. We don’t need to wait for governments to enact 20 year plans to slow the climate change that will be irreversable in 7. We can start solar panel companies, hostels for the homeless, we could build up manufacturing and distrubution companies, creating an entire economy that is human centric, and that human centricity is the key to it’s sustainability and success. We don’t have to wait for whoever is in power to do the right thing, and quite frankly we don’t have the time. So let them catch up.
This is not a eutopia. This is not some dream scenario where the bread never burns, it’s a machine that operates in a way that just happens to be moral, to perpetuate the human experiment by enabling meaningful work and straightforward costs.
So here’s to this. Here’s to a better world for my kids. Here is to housing strangers, and employing friends. Like, I think we might just be able to pull this off if we try enough times.
If you read this far, please toast this, so I know. It would mean a lot to know that someone took that journey with me as it was a vulnerable one to make in public. And I’m sorry to my family for swearing, but I think I’m swearing about the right things.
If this resonated with you, or you think it’s stupid, or there’s nothing you can do to help, but you care - please, let me know as well.
Best, Mike