We do not need any money from your wallet

There's always a Burgundy gif.

As proprietors of a small business, we get a lot of emails. Some of them are fun like hey we’d like to work with you on a project. Most are rote and dull, logistics and what not. But, with increasing frequency, people are emailing Three Point Four Media to ask us if we need a loan. Here’s a typical one that I just received:

I’m checking in because we recently approved a similar operation with a $1.35M working capital line at roughly 1% monthly, enabling them to move forward on a large project. We structure this without personal guarantees and explore terms without affecting credit scores.

Does this sound like what you’re seeking for Three Point Four Media?

Family offices want to give us money. PE companies want to give us money. Banks want to give us money. We don’t want any money.

There’s no larger point here. We probably ended up on some list and now we get three or four emails a week from various places with cash to burn. The I’m launching my political campaign and bought your phone number from the DNC of small business experiences.

I have started sending the above gif back in response. So far, no one has followed up.

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An article

Paul Tenorio tells the wild tale of how former Everton star and Major League Soccer coach Adrian Heath was kidnapped in Morocco where he went to see about a managerial job. Some truly unbelievable details in the story:

In the pitch-dark room, Heath remembers hearing the call to prayer in the morning. What came next surprised him. The wife and toddler son of the man in his 30s came into the room. Neither looked at him. The little boy — Heath guessed he was about four — watched a cartoon on the TV. At one point, the wife went grocery shopping. Later, she put a backpack on the kid and took him to school. Heath remembers the young boy turning back and looking at him. They made eye contact.

The takeaway: Turn on Find My Friends.

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Another article

Kerry Howley is an immediate click for me. Her latest from Minneapolis… damn.

I don’t know. I’m not an activist, a protester, an organizer of anything. I move about the world pretty freely. It was news to me that a federal agent could, without consequence, execute a woman in her car in response to a traffic violation. The world is not what it was yesterday. We reconsider our limits. We recalibrate our relationship to power.

It is the misfortune of Minnesota’s ICE contingent to have invaded the state with the second-highest levels of social trust, trailing only Utah. Many activist networks were formed in 2020; we are seeing, Petrus says, Minnesotans call upon the “muscle memory” of the George Floyd protests. In mid-January, a neighborhood organization for a part of town called Whittier put out a call for a meeting to organize a “Neighborhood ICE response”; more than 800 people showed up at the local elementary school and formed a tidy line extending well beyond the door. (“Why a line?” I ask someone later. “Because we are in Minnesota,” he says.) In the cafeteria, in their big coats, adults struggled to get their legs through benches attached to long lunch tables. Because there were too many Minnesotans to fit in a single room, officials and parents and teachers went room to room giving the same speeches about how to help neighbors in hiding. They then gridded out the rooms, dividing the neighborhood into smaller subdivisions. Close neighbors met one another (“Oh, you live on the other side of the museum”) and formed hyperlocal Signal groups. At the first sighting of an agent, someone could ping the group and draw them outside. Their favored tactic was noise. They would make it impossible for ICE to conduct raids in secret.

If the whistle is the sound of resistance, the sensation is the never-ending vibration of a half-dozen chats on the phone in your pocket and all the anxiety that suggests.

This is an aside but describing The Free Press as “our leading chronicle of the knowing sigh” is perfect perfect perfect.

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A third article

At first glance, this looks more like spaghetti.

A lot of good writing this week. This Francesco Pacifico piece is part travel guide, part writing advice, part philosophical diatribe. A lot to consider. Is everyone, everywhere terrible? If so, what is to be done?

So I’m resisting describing the bar and the neighborhood. Every description will put the described people in the AI eye of Palantir while bringing more international investors to this part of town.

Just imagine a paragraph here where I tell you what the trio has missed by only asking the yes or no question about cold brew and by not paying attention to anything else. Imagine the interesting descriptions of the owners of the coffee shop. The outrageous life the older owner has lived. The sketchy past. The sketchy present, for crying out loud. Imagine me romanticizing the owner’s life and then waxing poetic about the younger owner, a real legend in local night life. Just imagine the Zolaesque description of the bar’s regulars, the various cliques, the debauched sex life, the romantic drug-addled breakdowns. A whole Mubi watchlist of city types. Imagine me writing copy for this corner of the city so it’s there for real estate to come and get it.

To write fiction or narrative nonfiction these days is to fuel real estate speculation. Think about it. Can we still write in good faith after the Gomorrah and My Brilliant Friend multimedia franchises jump-started Naples’s belated gentrification?

Everything is tourism and everything is real estate.

I do think the existence of takeaway coffees is a better example than cold brew, but that’s a minor quibble.

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A project

We played a small role in helping Flourish Ventures announce their latest investment. We learned a lot about Brazilian healthcare: “Large hospitals employ 50–100 people solely to manage revenue cycle operations, which consume 4–6% of operating budgets. This is a structural inefficiency that the system can no longer afford.”

At Three Point Four Media, we’re proud to have a less time-consuming billing cycle.

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A game

Some genius ported Super Monkey Ball 1 and 2 into a web browser. Whoever did it for president.

That’s all for this week. Next week, coming in hot with another Q&A. Until then, let’s talk about being lonely and isolated. Happy Saturday.