Semi-famous Brooklyn-based ice cream brand Ample Hills went from $19 million in total investments and 17 stores (including one in Disney World) — to bankruptcy in just a few years.

It's mostly a story about bad management. But it's also a story about how the allure of an ice cream factory is so strong you forget to keep track of how much stuff costs?

A former employee says...

Ample Hills began a pattern of aggressively opening new shops while the old ones languished [in 2014]. As freezers broke or fuses blew “we would have to throw away massive amounts of ice cream."

"They were all very simple things that could have been fixed or addressed. But they would say, ‘Oh, we just opened Chelsea so we have to put money into that shop.’” According to employees, the shops almost always were over budget and failed to meet ambitious targets. Smith doesn’t dispute that they prioritized expansion. “If something is working but just not working as well as it could, and your focus is on growth, then yeah, you’re going to make some of those mistakes,” he says.

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Full story here.

It's called Same Energy.

You can find stuff by just clicking images you like, and it gives you ones that are similar. Or you can upload an image or search by word.

Here's what came up when i searched bicycle:

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and here's what comes up when you click the pic of the kids in the pail:

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here's what comes up when you search yellow:

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and i guess a bunch memes come up when you search coffee:

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ok one more, here's what comes up when you search for my hummel avatar:

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found via marty who made the very good poolside.fm thanks marty

This recent NYT article about a famous academic who killed himself by jumping off a building is thought-provoking in a million ways.

His most famous academic article, which he co-authored, attempted to prove that money doesn’t buy happiness. It’s well-known to anyone with a passing knowledge of contemporary pop psychology or who has watched a TED talk in the past ten years, as a the NYT piece mentions.

Here’s a summary of the article from the NYT:

The study is straightforward. As the title suggests, the authors surveyed lottery winners and accident victims, plus a control group, hoping to compare their levels of happiness.

But what the authors found violated common intuition. The victims, while less happy than the controls, still rated themselves above average in happiness, even though their accidents had recently rendered them all either paraplegic or quadriplegic. And the lottery winners were no happier than the controls, at least in any statistically meaningful sense. If anything, the warp and weft of their everyday lives was a little more threadbare. Talking to friends, hearing jokes, having breakfast — all of these simple pleasures now left them less satisfied than before.

The lesson of his article (as flawed as its methods were), together with the story of his life and its end, causes one to re-examine both the article and the story of the author.

Shouldn’t he have known better? Quoting again from the article:

Brickman’s work may have had much to say about the futility of pursuing happiness. But that wasn’t Brickman’s problem, ultimately. Those who kill themselves don’t do so because they find happiness elusive, or even if they’re outrageously unhappy. They do it to liberate themselves from unendurable pain. That’s what Brickman was experiencing. Pain without cease. “Suicide,” wrote Jamison, “is the last and best of bad possibilities.”

Anyway the whole article is here and it’s worth a read.

This is so great. A story about coffee told via watercolors made on napkins. From Christoph Neimann.

See also: other posts about Christoph Niemann on this blog.

That’s gotta be the least effective helmet accessory I’ve ever seen. But then again I suppose effectiveness is not the primary objective here.

But, lest you think fashion is the objective, may I direct your attention to the 3-4 shades of red she’s wearing?

No, the objective here is self-presentation via sartorial-based social proximity repellant.