cheese vaults, phone boxes, and bad incentives

Sunday, August 9, 2026

I cut off my hamstrings and flew away from the king who took them.

1. Adam Mastroianni: incentives are for losers. One of the better contrarian arguments this year
2. Italian bank stores 400,000 Parmigiano wheels as loan collateral — and rotates them
3. The geogrid that let Port of Long Beach pave over ocean sludge
4. 1,700-mile round trip to make 52 calls — saving a Scottish island phone box
5. How Ukraine went from Trump liability to ‘model ally’
6. Did word processors solve journalism? On the ‘coding is solved’ meme