three masks

materialist scumbag -

The Town That Diamonds Couldn't Build

You've heard about the place — the town in the South Australian desert where people live in caves like hobbits to get out of the heat, opal capital of the world, forty-something nationalities scratching in the dirt for pretty rocks. In 1916, and then in a bigger wave after 1918, men started coming back to the field who'd spent the previous few years on the Western Front and at Gallipoli. They knew one thing about the ground cold: a hole in it keeps you alive. A dugout holds 23, 24 degrees year round, free, while the heat outside runs past 40°C in January with the flies getting in your mouth — so the arithmetic did itself. You just had to already know how to dig a trench and not die, and a whole generation had just been taught.

So the signature feature of the place, the thing on the postcard, is a technology transfer out of the war. The mine and the house are the same excavation done twice — you dig for opal, you don't find opal, fine, now you live in the disappointment. Some of the dugouts are literally worked-out mines with a bed in them.

Okay so — set the roof aside. The strange part is the men. Why are there individual blokes with picks out there at all in the year of our lord 2026? That's a weird thing for a mineral to produce, and it comes down to the rock.

The rock got found in 1915. A fourteen-year-old named Willie Hutchison, out with a gold-prospecting party that was having no luck with gold, wandered off and came back with opal, February the first, and the story's probably been cleaned up since but the date's solid. The Aboriginal name that stuck, kupa piti — anglicized to Coober Pedy — gets glossed as "white man in a hole," or "white man's burrow," which, you know. They watched what we did there and named it accurately.

Now, opal itself, which is the engine of everything here. You cannot grade it. There's no scale. A diamond gets sorted on the four Cs, and every one of those is a number or close to it — carat is literally a weight, color and clarity run on defined lettered ladders, and the cut is geometry, so a diamond can be assessed by a guy in Antwerp against a rubric and priced before it's ever set, which means it can be traded as a commodity, which means it can be stockpiled, rationed, and cornered. And it was. De Beers spent most of the twentieth century holding the world's diamond supply in a drawer and letting it out a teaspoon at a time. A diamond is boring. That's the compliment. It's boring enough to be money.

Opal is not boring and that ruins it as a business. Every stone is a one-off — the play of color, the pattern, the direction the fire moves when you tilt it, whether it's got that one flaw in the wrong spot — and two experienced dealers will look at the same stone and give you numbers that are 40% apart and both mean it. There's no futures market for opal. There's no central price. There's no opal cartel and there never was one. Plenty of people were greedy enough. But you cannot corner a thing you cannot grade — how do you stockpile a supply when you can't even agree what any given unit of it is worth? The whole apparatus that turns a shiny rock into a financial instrument just won't bolt onto opal. The bolt-holes are the wrong shape.

That commercial failure — opal's refusal to become boring — is where the town comes from.

Because if you can't cartelize it, you can't consolidate the mining of it either. Diamonds get dug by Rio Tinto and De Beers, capital-intensive, open-pit, guys in hi-vis and a company town owned by the company. There's no margin story that justifies a mining major sinking a hundred million into opal ground, because the major can't control the price on the other end, can't smooth the boom and bust, can't do the one thing that makes big mining capital worth deploying, which is guarantee the sell side. So they don't come. And the field stays exactly what it was in 1920 — a poor man's rush, pick and shovel and a bit of explosive, one bloke or two blokes and a claim you can peg for the price of a license. To this day you basically cannot get a corporate lease over that field; it's carved into small individual claims, deliberately, and the noodlers — the people who sift the mullock heaps, the tailings the miners threw out, looking for the color the miner missed — the noodlers work for free on other people's garbage and sometimes it pays.

Ungradeable, so un-cartelizable, so nobody with real money bothers to consolidate it, so it stays 1920 out there with better drills.

Take the forty-five nationalities, the thing the tourism board loves — the Orthodox dugout church, the guys who came from everywhere. Charming multiculturalism, the desert melting pot. Run it materially and it's a labor-supply story with a very specific source. After 1945 Australia had a displaced-persons intake, the "populate or perish" panic, and it brought in a huge wave off the wreckage of Europe — Balkan, Greek, Italian, Baltic, the whole churned-up middle of the continent — and a lot of those men landed into an economy that had a specific vacancy: unglamorous, unsalaried, no-boss, no-English-required work where the only capital you needed was your own back and a license anyone could afford. Which is precisely and only the kind of work a decartelized mineral leaves lying around. A corporate diamond mine wants papers and English and a payroll number. An opal claim wants a man who'll dig. So the field filled up with exactly the people the rest of the settled economy had the least use for, and it filled up that way because nobody had managed to make opal respectable enough to require respectable labor.

(There's a whole separate thing here about how the underground housing let those men skip the mortgage and the building society entirely — you don't need a loan officer to sign off on a hole you dig yourself on a weekend — so the town also quietly routed around the entire postwar consumer-credit apparatus that was busy defining the normal Australian life everywhere else, the Hills Hoist and the brick veneer and the thirty-year note, and I could go four paragraphs on the fact that the most anti-suburban settlement in the country got built by the least-wanted men using a skill they learned killing each other, but I'll leave it.)

The water tells you the same story from another angle. There's no river. For decades water came from a bore and got sold by the gallon, and then off a pipeline, and now off a reverse-osmosis desal plant chewing through brackish groundwater. In a normal town water is a public utility, a thing the state lays on because a town is a thing the state decided should exist. Coober Pedy the state never decided should exist. It's a place people went to dig, and it stayed inhabited past the logic of the digging, so the water stayed a commodity you bought — priced by the physical cost of hauling or pumping or squeezing it out of a bad aquifer. That's what a metered gallon means out here: the wider economy would rather the town weren't there at all.

And the electricity — diesel gensets forever, then a hybrid solar-and-wind-and-diesel setup lately, because trucking diesel in got insane. You pay the real cost of the plumbing out here because nobody's subsidizing your existence. Everywhere else the cul-de-sac gets its power and water because a developer and a council and a bank all agreed in advance that a town belonged there. Out here nobody ever signed that. The place happened; it wasn't planned.

The movies figured this out before the sociologists did. Mad Max, Pitch Black, Priscilla — they keep shooting post-apocalypse and end-of-the-world stuff at Coober Pedy, and everyone says it's the Mars landscape, the mullock heaps like a moonscape, and sure. But what the camera finds is a working human settlement that runs on none of the invisible machinery a settlement is supposed to run on — no municipal water logic, no grid logic, no housing-finance logic, no employer — so it photographs as "after the collapse." To the eye it really is people living well past the point where the normal supports got pulled, a working model of a place the world's institutions never bothered to hold up. The crews think they're shooting the future. They've just found somewhere the props were never installed.

And this pattern isn't a one-off freak of the Australian desert. Every place where a resource can't be cornered stays a poor man's field with a wild social life on top. The California gold rush before the hydraulic companies moved in and consolidated it — individual pans, forty-niners, every nationality on earth in the diggings, exactly this. Klondike, same, until the big dredges came and turned it corporate and the crowd went home. The thing that ends the poor-man's-rush and the melting pot is always the same event: somebody figures out how to grade the product and control the sell side, capital consolidates the field, and the diverse desperate crowd of individual diggers gets replaced by a payroll. Opal just never had its consolidation event. The dredge never came because there's no dredge you can build for a rock you can't price. So Coober Pedy is a gold rush that never got told to go home. It's 1849 with satellite internet, still running, because the one thing that historically shuts these places down — the corner, the cartel, the buyout — bounced off the merchandise.

The monument of the place is a room that doesn't exist. Somewhere in Antwerp there's a room where diamonds got turned into money, sorted and stockpiled and released on a schedule by men in good suits, and every one of those men is the reason a diamond field is a company town with a payroll and a security fence. For opal there's no such room. Nobody ever built one, and nobody could, and forty-five nationalities of men who came off the boat with nothing spent a century in holes in the dirt because the rock they were chasing was too pretty, too particular, too much itself, to ever be turned into something as sensible and boring and grindingly consolidated as money.

Wartime trenches were not deep enough into the ground to provide meaningful temperature regulation or insulation; heatwaves were brutal on the western front in WW1. This was not knowledge that troops brought back.

If it is hot outside, and you dig a big hole in relatively soft ground to mine out something, you would notice just fine, by yourself, that it is cooler in the big hole than outside. That is what happened. The earliest dugouts were exactly co-occurring with the earliest mining, and they were deeper and more structural than trenches were.

Coober Pedy's dugouts are not a 'technology transfer out of war'. It is a normal response to having a hot climate, relatively diggable ground, and pre-existing reason to dig.

They also didn't let people 'skip' traditional housing costs any more or less than standard mining shanty-town construction did. That's not unique to Coober Pedy dugouts in the slightest.

Same thing with water in the town; a total nothingburger. Any mining/tourist town especially one with extensive fringes, manages water carefully, and it might cost more to get it from a centralised grid.

There's nothing 'wild' about the place, either. All the guff about apocalypse conditions and unplanned settlement and a wild social life, etc: shit, complete shit. Sometimes settlements and extensions are planned. Sometimes they are not.

Also, opal grading: it isn't really true that there is no standardised 'grading' for opals (there is, sort of). More egregiously, though, the 'you cannot control what you cannot grade' line is nonsense.

People know what opals are and value them fairly consistently. Large companies control the sale and distribution of the majority. They are valued, and sale of supply is controlled, just like any other gem. There are many rooms where men in good suits make these decisions.

Mining is more fragmented, sure. This is due to it being annoying, as rocks go. Opal is a pain in the ass to mine at scale (spotty deposits, fragile) and small landholders are essentially ablative risk-absorbers for the opal industry at large. Plus there are economic incentives for local governments to sell out small mining leases rather than massive ones.

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materialist-scumbag

Right on the dugout, and I'll take the hit clean, because the mechanism does me in. If the hole's cool because it's a hole in soft ground under a desert, then the guy who dug the first one didn't need to have been at Gallipoli to notice the bottom of his own shaft was twenty degrees nicer than the top. The O'Neill brothers cut the first dugout and they came off a claim at Tarcoola, they were miners, and the earliest dwellings sit right on top of the earliest mining because they ARE the earliest mining with a bed dragged in. So the returned-soldier story is a thing the tourism board likes and the sources repeat, and I repeated it because it's a good story, and "technology transfer out of the war" was me dressing an overdetermined convergence up as a lineage. The trench angle is at best decoration on a fact that digs itself. Struck.

It's possible the Coober Pedy Tourism Board is also robots though. Someone should check that out.

Water and power, same, and this one I should've caught myself because it's the softest thing in the piece, all that "the wider economy would rather the town weren't there" is me narrating mood, not mechanism. A council manages the supply, the pipes are old and leak, so it's the priciest water in South Australia. That's every fringe mining town with a bad aquifer and a long haul. Nothing about it says the state withheld a blessing. I wrote a metaphysics where there was a utility bill. Gone.

But the grading thing. Here's where I think you've handed me a better version of my own argument and then told me my argument is confabulation, and I want to keep the good half you gave me.

Because look at what you actually conceded on the way past it. Mining IS fragmented. You cannot get a corporate lease over that field, it's carved into fifty-by-fifty claims by design, the majors don't come. We agree the town exists because the digging stayed atomized. The whole disagreement is upstream of that, on WHY it stayed atomized, and your why is better than mine. Spotty deposits, fragile stone, a rock that's a real pain to mine at scale, small landholders working as ablative risk-absorbers for the industry proper, local government with every incentive to sell a hundred little leases instead of one big one. That's cleaner than my story. It's more materialist than my story. It's a geology-and-lease-structure account and I'll trade up to it without blinking, because it does the actual work, it carries the weight, it explains the fifty-by-fifty claim and the noodler on the mullock heap, which grading never quite did.

Where I dig in: there is still no room. You say there are many rooms where men in good suits control the sale and distribution of the majority, and I don't think that's true in the sense that matters, and the tell is that you can name the room for diamonds and you can't name it for opal. De Beers is a proper noun. The CSO in London was a proper noun, the sight-holders were a list of proper nouns, the stockpile was a real drawer with a real quantity in it that a real person released on a schedule. Point me at the opal equivalent. There isn't one, there never was one, and greed wasn't the missing ingredient. The sell side just never consolidated the way the mining never consolidated, for related reasons. Opal moves through a scatter of dealers and cutters and Hong Kong buyers and the stone-by-stone haggle, and yes it's a large global consistently valuable trade, I'll grant every word of that, a big diffuse market is still a market. But diffuse is the whole point. "Valued fairly consistently" and "cornered from a single room" are different claims, and De Beers is the difference, and opal is on the wrong side of it.

(Or was the difference. This was the case back in 1990. Since then even DeBeers stranglehold has fallen some.)

The worldview of redditors is really Bronze Age or perhaps Iron Age in a truly interesting way. Deeply transactional, concerned with honor and commanding honor, with everything founded on property relations. The comments of any AITA post will evince this. It is "patriarchal" not in the sense of being misogynistic (which it sometimes is and sometimes isn't), but in the sense that it is structurally like the morality of the archetypal Patriarch of the isolated family unit, very Indo-European. The Man who rules his own little kingdom, his family, and who deals with other such Men through a certain kind of economically-inspired honor code. Most redditors are liberal enough that they deal with their spouses as other Men though, and indeed with their children once they reach a certain age. But I think even this has some historical precedent.

It's all about who has the Right to do what, you see, it's about who can and who can't and who must. Very Norse, very Bronze Age, very Indo-European. The redditor sees themself (actually or aspirationally) as on top and as agentic. They speak positively of learning hard lessons and of teaching hard lessons. Their world is a world of contracts, not abstract and mathematical but specific and personal.

This is notably not the ideology of 4chan, which anyone who's been on that site much should know. 4chan's ideology is much less confident in itself. The 4channer sees themself as beneath, not on top, either with acceptance or with resentment. Frantz Fanon might have something to say about it. The 4channer is the subaltern.

And here? I was going to say that tumblrianas are somewhat domesticated, but I don't think this is exactly right. It's more like the world-sense of eunuchs in a harem, desperate for stimulation. Scholastic (though not scholarly) and estranged from the world—from normalcy—for reasons they can't escape. And they know this, and have mostly elected not to try. "Eh", say they, "I will read about life in one of my books," or perhaps just as commonly "I will simulate an outside-life in here with the other eunuchs, and it will be better than what they can make on the outside anyway". Maybe that's true; it probably depends on you and your eunuch crew.

I don't think I'm any of these types of guy. I've spent more of my life as a lurker than a poster. Lurkers are a whole other type of deal.

First thing first, yes, I'm aware that the author is Jewish. That doesn't really change my judgement much. I also know the author has a tumblr account, so there's a nonzero chance he will see this post. In shch a case, I hope he can understand that I'm merely frustrated with being told this was a Jewish story and finding it less so than I expected, and that this doesn't really reflect the quality of his writing. From that angle, I think Unsong is rather good. I'm not sure it's for me, though.

What lit me up here forst was the electricity-on-Shabbat part. Admittedly, in Jewish circles it is common to think of it as fire. However, the Halachic discussion over it in Orthodox circles is less certain - there were claims that it's construction, or completion, or just something too weekday like to do on the rest day. However, in this story, the main purpose of the Shabbat commandment is regarding electricity. Which is rather weird. Also, not sure I like the way the commandments are treated - but that also stems from replacing G-d with Uriel, so what can I say at this point.

Now, the above point isn't commenting that much about the Judaism of the story. After all, it is actually very much a Jewish thing to consider electricity prohibited on Shabbat and connecting it to fire. No, my problems come in other areas.

First, the worldbuilding. Specifically, the war in heaven. The whole thing about a third of the heavenly host siding with Lucifer and fighting against the larger part of the angels? That is a very Christian thing, actually. If it was ever in Jewish lore, it was taken out of the canon long ago. Fallen angels are something of a different matter, and are a bit complex. Kudos for including the "angels can't speak Aramaic" thing, but honestly, this feels more like a nice fun fact added in more than anything. The explanation is kind of original, though.

Then there's the Midrash Shem on Kissinger. Which says that we learn kissinger would be the name of a bad person because Judas Iscraiot kissed Jesus in the act of betraying him. Relatedly, Kissinger happened to be a Jewish man and comparing Jews to Judas was one somewhat common antisemitic trope.

Now, to be fair, I don't really know much about Watergate, Nixon or Kissinger - funnily enough, the most I know comes from the Unsong version, which is different from the actual event in a number of ways, I'm sure. So I can only assume that Americans have a very good reason to dislike Kissinger - he was also likely a token for Nixon, who was himself somewhat antisemitic. So I'm not going to get on anyone's case for disliking him. Also, despite what I said, I don't think mr Alexander intended in any way to be antisemitic towards Kissinger. Not just because he's Jewish - that doesn't exclude people from being antisemitic, especially considering Kissinger himself may have harbored some bigotry towards his own people - but because I don't see any sense in it. However, what he did do was use a very Christian story as part of that. Oh, and there's also the Messianic figure born from a virgin.

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

This is what I'm saying!! People keep being like "we can't possibly solve things through voting! That would involve massive organizing, getting everyone on the same page, making compromises and settling for less than perfection, and it would be subject to the influence of mega-wealthy donors and an opposition-controlled media environment! We just have to have a revolution so we don't have to deal with any of those things!"

on Grey Gardens (1975), evergreen

So the thing everyone pictures when you say Grey Gardens is the raccoons in the attic and the hundred cats and Little Edie in her headscarf, two crazy Bouvier women who lost their minds in a mansion, and you file it under eccentricity and mental illness and faded-glamour camp, and what nobody quite stops on is that the actual engine of the story is a maintenance backlog. This was a 28-room house in East Hampton, built in 1897 for an attorney named Joseph Greenleaf Thorp, bought by Phelan Beale in 1923 for his wife Edith Bouvier Beale (Big Edie, whose real name nobody uses because the documentary turned the diminutives into the brand) and her daughter Little Edie, and then Phelan left in 1931, divorced by mail from Mexico, never came back, and the rest of it is just what happens to two women in a house built for a level of staff and upkeep the family trust could no longer come close to sustaining across forty years of withdrawals outrunning returns.

This is the part that nobody quite says out loud about Grey Gardens, although the Maysles brothers I think understood it perfectly well: alongside the eccentricity and the mental illness and the strange particular madness of these two specific women, the documentary is also, more deeply, about deferred maintenance.

Specifically: it's about what happens to American gentry housing stock when the family money goes from "comfortable upper-middle-class" to "comfortable upper-middle-class minus a divorce, minus the Depression, minus the gradual erosion of trust fund principal across forty years of withdrawals at slightly higher rates than the trust's returns can sustain." The Beales were not poor in any meaningful sense, they had a trust, they had the house, they had relatives (notably the Bouvier connection through Big Edie's brother, who was Jackie Kennedy's father), and Jackie and Lee Radziwill eventually paid for the cleanup that allowed them to keep the house when the Suffolk County Department of Health condemned it in 1971. They were poor only relative to what the house required, and what the house required was a level of staff and upkeep that essentially no upper-middle-class family in postwar America was maintaining anymore, because the labor cost of running a 28-room Hamptons house had become prohibitive and the social system that produced live-in domestic staff for upper-middle-class families had collapsed.

The raccoons in the attic. The cats, dozens of cats, some accounts say a hundred. The corn meal on the floor for the raccoons because Little Edie felt sorry for them. The collapsed walls, the holes in the ceiling, the unusable rooms. None of this is purely psychiatric. All of this is also a maintenance backlog on a structure built for a different economic regime, occupied by people who could not afford to staff it the way it had been designed to be staffed and could not bring themselves to leave it for a smaller place because the house was the family.

The American great-house problem in miniature. The English worked through this problem at a national scale starting roughly in 1894 (death duties, Sir William Harcourt, the beginning of the National Trust as a pressure-relief valve for landed families who could no longer afford the country pile), and by 1950 the entire English country-house stock had been triaged into what would become museums or hotels or tax write-offs and what would be allowed to fall down. The Americans never had the death duties at quite that level and never developed the National Trust equivalent for non-architectural-landmark domestic property, so the American gentry-house problem was solved at the family level, ad hoc, with each generation of each family deciding whether to keep grandma's house or sell it to a developer who'd put up six McMansions on the lot.

The Beales made the wrong choice. They kept the house. They kept it past the point where they could afford to keep it. They kept it past the point where they could afford to clean it. They kept it because Big Edie was a Bouvier and the house was the proof, and because Little Edie had moved back in 1952 to take care of her mother and then never left, and the never leaving is the part of the story that the documentary is actually about, the way that a daughter's care for an aging parent in a house that is becoming uninhabitable becomes the daughter's whole life, and at a certain point the question of whether to leave becomes unanswerable because she would not know who she was if she left.

The Maysles got there in 1973 essentially because Lee Radziwill had wanted them to make a film about the Bouvier family, then pulled out, and the brothers stayed because they had become interested in the actual subjects of what was now no longer the original commission. They shot for six weeks. Verité, no narration, no music other than what Big and Little Edie produced (both of them sang, both of them had been semi-professional performers in their youth, and the singing in the film is genuinely moving in a way that the camp-icon reception of the documentary tends to obscure, these were women who could really sing, who had wanted to be performers, and who were performing for a camera at the end of their performable lives).

The cult of the film is the part that's interesting now, because Grey Gardens became one of those documentaries, like Salesman, like Gimme Shelter, like the Maysles work generally, that founded the modern documentary aesthetic of "the camera is just here, watching, and the subjects' actual lives are the entire content," and then Grey Gardens specifically founded a parallel tradition of camp appropriation where Little Edie's Revolutionary Costume for the Day became a drag-queen reference and the dialogue became a Brooklyn-and-Provincetown shorthand for a particular kind of arch faded-glamour theatrical mode that has now been the analytic frame in American gay culture for forty years. There's an HBO biopic with Drew Barrymore as Little Edie. There's a Broadway musical. There's the cottage industry of Little Edie style emulation, the headscarves, the inverted skirts, the constant invention of garments out of whatever was at hand because she had stopped buying clothes in approximately 1948.

The house, after both Edies died (Big Edie in 1977, Little Edie in 2002), got bought by Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn in 1979 for $220,000, which they put another seven figures into restoring, and which is now a roughly $20 million property in the East Hampton market because the East Hampton market did what it did. The maintenance backlog that defined the Beale women's lives has been resolved by capital infusion at a level that the original Beale fortune could never have produced, the house was always too big, the question was just whether the people in it were rich enough to keep it or whether the people who eventually got it would be richer.

Sally Quinn was richer.

materialist scumbag --

Winchester Mystery House unveils new "unfinished rooms" walkthrough for the season -- San Jose, June 2026

The story you already have: Sarah Winchester, gun widow, gets told by a medium in Boston that the spirits of everyone a Winchester rifle ever killed are coming to collect, and the only thing holding them off is the hammering -- build without a plan, build without stopping, stairs that climb into a ceiling and doors that open onto a two-story drop, keep the carpenters going day and night forever or the ghosts get you. Build for 36 years. Die mid-swing with the nails still warm.

Good story. The medium is undocumented, by the way -- she doesn't show up in print until after Sarah's dead and the place already has a ticket booth -- but good story, sells the tour. What's not on the brochure is the dividend.

Sarah owned something like 48% of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. That stake paid out at a clip people at the time put around a thousand dollars a day. 1886 dollars. A day. Whether she got out of bed or not, whether she did a single thing or not, every morning another thousand dollars landed on a woman who could not spend a thousand dollars a day if she tried, and who, more to the point, had no way to put it back to work.

Because a rich man in 1886 with a thousand a day rolling in has somewhere to put it. He buys into a railroad, he buys into a bank, he buys the company next door, he does the thing money does, which is find more money. Sarah can't. She's a woman, in the 1880s, in the arms trade -- she does not run Winchester, other men run Winchester, and the idea of her walking into New Haven to direct capital allocation at a rifle works is not a thing that occurs to anyone including her. So the income is real and the reinvestment channel is welded shut. The plumbing that carries a fortune back into more fortune -- for her it just isn't connected to anything.

So where does a thousand a day go when it can't compound?

It goes into lumber.

Run it as a balance sheet for a second, because that's really what the house is -- it's a balance sheet you can walk through. You've got a revenue line that won't quit and a capital account with no outlet, and the only asset class a widow in Santa Clara Valley can pour unlimited money into without a board, without a partner, without a single man's signature, is her own real property. Construction is the one sink big enough and slow enough to absorb the flow. And construction with no architect, no blueprint, no buyer at the end and no permit regime worth the name -- because this is unincorporated county land in the 1890s, nobody's inspecting anything -- construction like that doesn't produce a house. It produces accretion. It produces exactly the thing you'd get if you deleted every constraint that normally makes a building stop: the client who runs out of money, the plan that says "done," the resale buyer who'd want it to make sense, the code official who won't sign off on a staircase into a joist. Pull all of those out and the stairs-to-nowhere are what building looks like with the brakes cut.

The famous weird stuff is basically unplanned capital deployment leaving a physical trace. You graft a wing, then you graft onto the graft, and the door that used to go outside now opens into the new room's wall, and you don't tear it out because why would you -- there's another thousand dollars coming tomorrow and the spending was the activity, not the door. A stair that climbs seven steps and stops is a canceled line item nobody bothered to erase, because erasing costs the same as building and building's more fun.

Anyway.

The carpenters. This is the piece that actually gets to me, and it's not the spooky piece, it's the boring piece. The Santa Clara Valley in the 1890s is prunes and apricots -- it's farm labor, and farm labor is seasonal, which means half the year a lot of skilled men aren't working. And here's this widow who will employ you, year-round, at good wages, indoors, forever, doing careful joinery on a house that will never be finished because being finished is not the goal. She ran a private off-season for two decades. Kept table saws fed through winters that would've had those men idle. And you will not find that on one single placard in the gift shop, because "eccentric heiress runs a full-employment program for valley carpenters" does not move flashlight-tour tickets and "she was building a maze to trick the vengeful dead" does. The carpentry was just the raw material the ghost got made out of.

Okay. I get worked up about the guys with the hammers. Moving on.

Because you should follow the money one more hop back, the thousand a day, where's it actually from -- and it's from the rifle, obviously, but be specific about the rifle. The "gun that won the West," the Cody poster -- that's the sales pitch sitting on top of the sales pitch. The Winchester repeater's real breakout customer, the order that turns Oliver Winchester from a shirt manufacturer -- he was a shirt guy, the whole thing is capitalized on menswear, that's a separate tangent I'm not taking tonight -- into an arms dynasty, a big chunk of that early volume is foreign. The Ottomans buy these things by the tens of thousands. And in 1877 at Plevna the Turks sit in trenches with Winchester repeaters and shred wave after wave of Russian infantry advancing in the old style, and every army attache in Europe files a report, and the repeating rifle stops being a curiosity and becomes a line item in every war ministry on earth.

So the thousand dollars that shows up on Sarah's breakfast tray in San Jose in 1893 is, follow it back, the compounding dividend on a lot of dead Russian conscripts outside a Bulgarian town nobody in California could find on a map. That's the seed stock the 24,000 square feet grew out of. The stairs to nowhere are the harvest that came up, twenty years later and six thousand miles away, from a very good afternoon of killing at Plevna. It really is beautiful, in the cold way these things are -- the reach of it. A trench in the Balkans ripens into a tower in the Santa Clara Valley and nobody standing in either place can see the other end.

Now -- the ghost story. Where does it come from, if not from Sarah. It comes from where these stories always come from. She dies September 1922, and the house -- which is worthless as a house, it's a 160-room unsellable accretion with no plan, you cannot move a family into it -- the house gets leased in 1923 by a couple, the Browns, who look at this unsellable liability and correctly see that the one thing it can be sold as is admission. And an admission product needs a story. Nobody buys a ticket to see a widow with no reinvestment channel. They buy a ticket for the curse -- blood-guilt of the rifle, spirits, a woman building to appease the dead. That's the one Houdini himself comes to poke at in 1924, seance rooms and the number thirteen worked into everything. The curse is the retail packaging, applied to the house after the fact by people who needed to charge at the door. Same as it ever was -- the sacred meaning always gets bolted on downstream by whoever inherited the asset and had to make the note.

And I'll bet you this, flat: strip the ghost narrative off that place -- just present it honestly, "widow with an unspendable dividend and no other outlet, here's what that builds" -- and the gate receipts fall by half inside five years. People drive to San Jose for the haunting. The building they walk through to get to it was incidental -- incidental to them, and incidental to Sarah, who mostly wanted something to do with the money and, after 1906 when the quake pinned her in a bedroom for a while and knocked the tower down, seems to have half given up: sealed off the front thirty rooms and let the rest sprawl. She'd lost her teeth by the end, saw almost nobody -- a detail the ghost version has no use for and mine turns on.

The tell is that the money kept coming the whole time and she kept spending it the same way right up to the last night, and the morning after she died the men put down their tools mid-task and a nail is supposedly still half-driven in a wall somewhere. The spell didn't break. The dividend had finally found the one person it couldn't reach, and with her gone there was nobody left whose job it was to convert a thousand dollars a day into lumber, so the machine that had been running for 36 years just -- stopped having anywhere to put the next thousand.

materialist-scumbag

F1's Las Vegas Grand Prix loses money for Liberty Media, third straight year — November 2025

So the thing nobody says out loud about the Vegas race is that Liberty Media doesn't run it the way they run every other race on the calendar. Everywhere else — Monza, Spa, Suzuka, wherever — there's a local promoter. Some entity, often part-government, sometimes a rich guy, who buys the rights to host the event, pays the sanctioning fee to Formula One Management, eats the risk on ticket sales and infrastructure, and prays the tourism multiplier makes it worth it. Liberty just collects the fee and shows up. Clean. They're a media company; they sell the broadcast, they don't want to be in the business of pouring concrete and selling beers.

Except in Vegas they are the promoter.

They bought the land — like forty acres off the Strip, $240 million for a paddock building they put up themselves — and they're running the whole circus on their own books. Which is a weird thing for a media company to do, and it tells you something.

It tells you they thought Vegas wasn't a race. They thought it was a real estate and hospitality play that happened to have cars in it.

And honestly you can see the logic, because the thing they're actually selling in Vegas isn't motorsport, it's proximity. The grandstand seats were whatever, the money was always in the suites and the "experiences" — the $50,000-and-up packages where you get a paddock pass and a chef and a view of the Bellagio fountains while a Ferrari does 200 down the Strip, and the whole pitch is that you, personally, are the kind of person who's at this. That's not a ticket. That's a status good. And Vegas, the city, exists to convert money into the feeling of being the kind of person who has it, so on paper this is the most natural marriage in the history of capital.

So why's it bleeding money three years running?

Well. Couple things, and they stack.

First year, 2023, they tore up the Strip for months to lay the track, and the locals — the people who actually work in the casinos, the dealers and the valets and the line cooks whose commute got strangled — got nothing. Worse than nothing, because Caesars and the rest comped out their high rollers and the normal weekend tourist who'd have come anyway stayed home to avoid the chaos, so a bunch of service workers ate a slow November on tips. The Strip basically displaced its own baseline revenue to make room for the event and then acted surprised when the math didn't obviously close.

And the practice session got cancelled because a loose water valve cover launched into Carlos Sainz's car and tore the floor off a Ferrari, which, fine, freak thing — except they cancelled it at like 2am and then wouldn't let the fans who'd paid back in, and a class action got filed, and that's the kind of detail I love because it's the seam showing. The event is a media product wearing the costume of a live event, and when the live-event part broke they defaulted instantly to the media-product instinct, which is that the people in the stands are not the customer. The broadcast is the customer. The bodies are set dressing.

Which they kind of are. That's not even a knock.

The real revenue logic of modern F1 — and this is the Liberty thesis since they bought the sport off Bernie Ecclestone in 2017 for eight billion — is that the race is a content factory. Drive to Survive on Netflix turned a sport that Americans found impenetrable and frankly a little gay into a prestige narrative drama, the grid into a cast of characters, and suddenly you've got a US audience that didn't exist, three US races where there used to be one, and a sponsor base that valorizes "engagement" over actual fannies in actual seats. Bernie ran it like a guy renting out a luxury good to oil states. Liberty runs it like a streaming IP with a physical-event attach.

And Vegas was supposed to be the cathedral of the new model. Their race, their land, the Strip itself as the set, peak attach. The flagship.

Here's where the rhyme is interesting though.

Because this isn't the first time someone tried to wedge Formula One into the American casino-tourism complex and watched it not take. There was a US Grand Prix in Las Vegas in 1981 and '82 — in the parking lot of Caesars Palace, literally, a flat ugly circuit laid out on asphalt where they'd otherwise park cars, and it was a disaster, drivers hated it, the heat was murderous, nobody came, gone in two years. Then Phoenix in '89 through '91, downtown street circuit, and the famous thing is the 1991 race drew fewer people than an ostrich race held in the same city the same weekend. Genuinely. The ostriches outdrew Ayrton Senna.

So America has been the graveyard of F1 promoters for forty years, and the reason is always the same and it's the reason that should worry Liberty.

The American sports consumer does not, structurally, want to pay a premium to stand in a hot parking lot and watch a thing he could watch better on television. That's the whole national disposition. The US built its entire spectator-sports economy on the broadcast and the cheap seat and the beer, on volume, on the median fan — and the European motorsport tradition is built on the opposite, on the paddock, on access as a scarce good, on the race as something you attend to signal that you could.

And the genius and the trap of the Liberty model is that they figured out how to sell the European status logic to Americans through the screen, through Netflix, without ever having to make the physical event actually work, because the physical event was never the product.

But Vegas they made physical. They put themselves on the hook for the one thing the model is structurally bad at.

So now they're discounting tickets — which in a status-good economy is poison, because the entire value of the $50k suite was that it cost $50k, and the moment you can see the prices sliding the magic that converts money into the-feeling-of-having-money evaporates, and the high roller who'd have paid full freight reads the discount as a signal that this isn't actually exclusive, it's just expensive, which are very different things, and the second one is just a bill.

The 2024 race did better than '23. Smoother, fewer manhole incidents, locals less furious. And it still lost money, which is the part that should tell you it's not an execution problem they can fix by getting good at logistics.

It's that they built a content machine and then tried to make one node of it carry physical-event economics, in the one country whose entire sporting culture is hostile to physical-event economics, in a city that is itself a machine for extracting money and is not going to share the spread with some Colorado media company that flew in to use its skyline as a backdrop.

Caesars and MGM, the casinos — they do fine. They always do fine. They sell rooms either way, and the race fills rooms, so for the house the F1 weekend is just another high-margin November weekend with a louder soundtrack. The house doesn't care if Liberty's promoter arm loses money any more than the house cares if you lose money; that's sort of the arrangement you walk into. Liberty came to Vegas to be the promoter and Vegas treated them exactly like it treats everyone who comes to Vegas thinking they've found the angle.

Over the years, in numerous books and countless fanfics, we've all seen some variation or another of the infamous "I'd burn the world down for you." And fans always swoon over this line because it's framed as this noble or romantic gesture where the character puts their love over everything else.

The Franciscans and the long fight over whether you're allowed to own anything — flares up again every few centuries, currently dormant (October 2025)

So Francis of Assisi was a rich kid. Son of a cloth merchant, Pietro di Bernardone, who was doing extremely well off the wool trade in a town sitting on the road between the wool of the Apennine hinterland and the markets of central Italy — and that matters more than the birds-and-wolves stuff, because the whole drama starts with a wealthy man's son theatrically stripping naked in the town square and handing his clothes back to his father to disown the inheritance.

That's the founding gesture. A repudiation of property by a man who had a lot of it.

And here's the thing people miss when they do the gentle-saint-of-the-animals routine: the radical content of early Franciscanism wasn't kindness. It was the claim that you could live with zero ownership. Not "share generously," not "give alms" — own nothing, individually OR collectively, hold no money, no buildings, no stores, eat what you begged that day and worry about tomorrow tomorrow.

Which is a lovely ideal and an institutional time bomb.

Because the movement explodes. By the time Francis dies in 1226 there are thousands of these guys, and thousands of men who own nothing and beg daily are, materially speaking, a logistics problem of the first order — they need to sleep somewhere, they accumulate books, they get given churches, they have to be fed in numbers that overwhelm any town's casual charity. An order that big cannot actually function on the literal terms of its founder. The terms were built for a wandering band of a dozen, not an international institution embedded in every city in Europe.

So you get the fix. And it is a beautiful fix, the kind of thing that makes you love how these people thought.

Pope Gregory IX in 1230, and then more elaborately Innocent IV and finally Nicholas III in 1279 in the bull Exiit qui seminat, basically invents a legal fiction: the Franciscans don't own anything, the Pope owns it. The buildings, the land, the food — all of it is the property of the Holy See, and the friars merely have the use of it (usus facti, "use in fact") while the dominium, the ownership-right, sits with the papacy. So the friar eating bread in a Franciscan friary doesn't own the bread, doesn't own the friary, owns not even the use as a right — he just, you know, is using it, the way you'd use a stranger's well on a hot day without thereby holding title to water.

Brilliant. They get to be propertyless and also have stuff. Vow intact, friary built.

Except it papers over the actual question, which is the one that won't die, which is: is poverty just a nice discipline for monks, or is it a claim about the right ordering of the world — i.e. did Christ and the apostles own things, and if they didn't, is everyone who does kind of doing it wrong?

That's the live wire. Because the second question has teeth that point straight at the entire wealth-holding apparatus of the medieval Church.

And the order itself splits along exactly this fault. You get the Conventuals, who are fine with the usus facti fix, who live in big convents and basically run a functional institution on the papacy-owns-it dodge. And you get the Spirituals — later the Fraticelli, the Observants, various flavors over the centuries — who think the fix is a betrayal, that "absolute poverty" has to mean what it says, that the order has gone soft and the whole point was to NOT do this. Usus pauper, "poor use," they call it: it's not enough to lack the right of ownership, you have to actually use little, wear rags, eat scraps, the austerity has to be real and visible and it has to sting.

These are not minor liturgical squabbles. People get burned for this.

Four Spiritual Franciscans burned at Marseille in 1318 for refusing to back down on the poverty question. For an argument about whether you're allowed to have a nice robe.

But the real escalation comes with John XXII, the Avignon pope, the one Dante hated, and this is where it gets genuinely great as a piece of intellectual machinery — because John, who was a canon lawyer by training and very good at money, just looks at the whole usus facti edifice and goes: this is nonsense, and I'm done holding the bag.

Two moves, both surgical. First, in 1322–23, he says the fiction is incoherent on consumables — you cannot have "use without ownership" of a loaf of bread, because using the bread is destroying it, the use and the consumption are the same act, so when the friar eats the bread he is exercising exactly the dominion he claims not to have, there's no daylight between "using up" and "owning," and the whole legal architecture is therefore a lie they've been telling for ninety years. Second — and this is the kill shot — in the bull Cum inter nonnullos (1323) he declares it heretical to assert that Christ and the apostles owned nothing. Flatly heretical. The thing the rigorist Franciscans had built their entire spiritual identity on, the doctrine of apostolic poverty as cosmic truth, is now a burnable offense.

He just nuked the foundation. From the chair of Peter.

And you have to see what he's actually doing, because it's not a man losing a theological debate, it's a man defending an institution's right to exist as a property-holding thing. If apostolic poverty is the gospel ideal — if Christ owned nothing and therefore the perfect Christian owns nothing — then the Church, which by 1323 owns a third of the arable land in some regions, is in a permanent state of structural sin, and every begging friar in his rags is a standing rebuke to every bishop in his palace. John XXII isn't being greedy. He's recognizing that "absolute poverty is the Christian ideal" is, taken seriously, a doctrine that delegitimizes the material basis of the entire Church, and he's killing it before it metastasizes.

Same fight as the rich kid in the square, just from the other side of the table now.

And the response is the part I love most. Because the head of the order at this point, Michael of Cesena, plus a Franciscan theologian who happens to be one of the sharpest logicians of the whole Middle Ages — William of Ockham, the razor guy — they don't fold. They go to John's enemy, the excommunicated Holy Roman Emperor Louis of Bavaria, and they declare the Pope the heretic. Ockham spends the rest of his life writing tracts arguing that John XXII has fallen into heresy and forfeited his authority, that a pope who errs in faith is no pope. The man who gave us the principle that you shouldn't multiply entities beyond necessity ends up multiplying, at length, the reasons a sitting pope is illegitimate, because the poverty question dragged him there.

Which, follow this out — the argument about whether friars can own bread becomes, by direct chain, an argument about whether the pope can be wrong, which is one of the load-bearing questions of the next two centuries, the one that Hus and eventually Luther come back around to. The conciliarist idea that authority might sit somewhere other than in the papal person gets a real workout in the mouths of Franciscans who just wanted to not own their sandals.

It's all downstream of the loaf of bread.

And the pattern doesn't resolve, it just keeps recurring, which is the whole point. The Observant reform in the 15th century is the same impulse coming back — a wing of the order saying we've gone soft, the convents are too comfortable, back to the rule — and it gets so big it formally splits the order in 1517 (the same year, note, that a different propertyless-vs-property argument is getting nailed to a door in Wittenberg, and no I don't think those are unrelated in mood). And then the Capuchins split off in 1525 because the Observants have themselves gone soft, beards and hermitages and back to the real austerity this time. Every reform becomes the new establishment that the next reform defines itself against. The austere splinter hardens into the comfortable mainstream and grows its own austere splinter.

Same as it ever was. The radical wing is the future moderate wing, on a loop, century after century.

And what I find genuinely beautiful about the whole thousand-year run of it is that they were never wrong, none of them, that's what makes it inexhaustible — Francis was right that you could try to own nothing, and the Conventuals were right that an institution of that size literally cannot, and John XXII was right that the fiction was a fiction, and Ockham was right that the man who said so was defending a Church drowning in property by declaring the gospel of poverty a heresy, and the Observants were right that comfort always wins eventually and you have to keep restarting the engine by hand. Every one of them sees a real thing. The thing they're all circling and none of them can dissolve is just the gap — the permanent, structural, unclosable gap between a religion founded by a man with no place to lay his head and an institution that has to feed and house tens of thousands of men in stone buildings across a continent and therefore has to have, and the having and the not-having can't both be holy but the order needs both, so it carries the contradiction around inside itself forever and the contradiction periodically catches fire and burns a few people and then settles down to smolder.

There's a Franciscan order today, by the way. Several. Still split — the Order of Friars Minor, the Conventuals, the Capuchins, the three big branches, plus a few rigorist splinters that think even the Capuchins have gone soft. Still arguing, at low heat, about exactly how poor poor has to be.