Ken Ashley

The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure. The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe. The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table. The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties. The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in. The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior. The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right. The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house. The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse. The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it. Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help. You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time. The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody. The next one is being drafted now.

IYKYK… 😆😆😆

Spirit Halloween is the only tenant in America that: Signs in 48 hours.
Takes a dead Joann's as-is.
Doesn't ask for TI.
Doesn't ask for exclusives.
Doesn't ask what the NNNs are.
Doesn't even ask to see the site plan. Moves in with a 9-foot screaming clown and a fog machine. Pays rent on time. AND disappears November 1st without a forwarding address. Best Halloween costume! Or at least if yore in retail 😂

Buc-ee’s is quietly hoping first-time visitors never learn how the store actually works. Most people pull in for gas and a bathroom. They see the beaver logo, use the cleanest restroom they’ve ever seen at a gas station, buy a bag of Beaver Nuggets, fill the tank, and leave. They never realize they just drove past: a 74,000-square-foot travel center the size of a Walmart. Brisket smoked fresh in-house that rivals dedicated BBQ restaurants. A car wash longer than a football field. 120+ gas pumps with some of the cheapest fuel prices on the highway because the business model isn’t about gas. A wall of homemade fudge cut to order. Kolaches baked fresh every morning. Jerky in 15+ flavors cut and seasoned in-store. A credit card with 5 cents off per gallon. Coffee stations with unlimited free customizations that turn a $1.50 cup into a $6 coffeehouse drink. A merchandise section larger than most clothing stores with items you can’t buy online, ever. And a deliberate store design with no seating, no trucks, no overnight parking, and no phone ordering all by choice, all for a reason. A Texan who’s visited 30+ Buc-ee’s locations told me: “Out-of-staters stop for the bathroom. Texans stop for the brisket. But nobody not even most Texans understands the business model. Buc-ee’s isn’t a gas station. It’s a destination retail store that happens to sell gas. The gas gets you in the parking lot. The 74,000 square feet inside is where the money is made.” Here are 11 things about Buc-ee’s most visitors never discover 🧵

The hottest investment market in the US right now is office. Prices have been reset coming out of the Covid vacancy apocalypse. Work from home is largely dead. Owners have capitulated on price and the recognition that higher interest rates are here to stay. This will happen eventually with Multifamily. Get ready because this is when money is made.

Momentum continues to build in the U.S. office market, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s third-quarter U.S. Office MarketBeat. See the full article. cushwk.co/4jZmL75?blaid=9090…

ty for 4 years of bangers