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Open Strategist
Thursday, April 28, 2022
Monday, June 24, 2019
Trevor Noah - Born a crime excerpt
From Trevor Noah's book:
A secondhand car was also the reason my mom got married. If it hadn't been for the Volkswagen that didn't work, we never would have looked for the mechanic who became the husband who became the stepfather who became the man who tortured us for years and put a bullet in the back of my mother's head--I'll take the new car with the warranty every time. As much as I loved church, the idea of a nine-hour slog, from mixed church to white church to black church then doubling back to white church again, was just too much to contemplate. It was bad enough in a car, but taking public transport would be twice as long and twice as hard. When the Volkswagen refused to start, inside my head I was praying, Please say we'll just stay home. Please say we'll just stay home. Then I glanced over to see the determined look on my mother's face, her jaw set, and I knew I had a long day ahead of me. "Come," she said. "We're going to catch minibuses." My mother is as stubborn as she is religious. Once her mind's made up, that's it. Indeed, obstacles that would normally lead a person to change their plans, like a car breaking down, only made her more determined to forge ahead. "It's the Devil," she said about the stalled car. "The Devil doesn't want us to go to church. That's why we've got to catch minibuses." Whenever I found myself up against my mother's faith-based obstinacy, I would try, as respectfully as possible, to counter with an opposing point of view. "Or," I said, "the Lord knows that today we shouldn't go to church, which is why he made sure the car wouldn't start, so that we stay at home as a family and take a day of rest, because even the Lord rested." "Ah, that's the Devil talking, Trevor." "No, because Jesus is in control, and if Jesus is in control and we pray to Jesus, he would let the car start, but he hasn't, therefore--" "No, Trevor! Sometimes Jesus puts obstacles in your way to see if you overcome them. Like Job. This could be a test." "Ah! Yes, Mom. But the test could be to see if we're willing to accept what has happened and stay at home and praise Jesus for his wisdom." "No. That's the Devil talking. Now go change your clothes." "But Mom!" "Trevor! Sun'qhela!" Sun'qhela is a phrase with many shades of meaning. It says "don't undermine me," "don't underestimate me," and "just try me."
Source: https://cpl.catalogue.library.ns.ca/Record/1305431/Excerpt
A secondhand car was also the reason my mom got married. If it hadn't been for the Volkswagen that didn't work, we never would have looked for the mechanic who became the husband who became the stepfather who became the man who tortured us for years and put a bullet in the back of my mother's head--I'll take the new car with the warranty every time. As much as I loved church, the idea of a nine-hour slog, from mixed church to white church to black church then doubling back to white church again, was just too much to contemplate. It was bad enough in a car, but taking public transport would be twice as long and twice as hard. When the Volkswagen refused to start, inside my head I was praying, Please say we'll just stay home. Please say we'll just stay home. Then I glanced over to see the determined look on my mother's face, her jaw set, and I knew I had a long day ahead of me. "Come," she said. "We're going to catch minibuses." My mother is as stubborn as she is religious. Once her mind's made up, that's it. Indeed, obstacles that would normally lead a person to change their plans, like a car breaking down, only made her more determined to forge ahead. "It's the Devil," she said about the stalled car. "The Devil doesn't want us to go to church. That's why we've got to catch minibuses." Whenever I found myself up against my mother's faith-based obstinacy, I would try, as respectfully as possible, to counter with an opposing point of view. "Or," I said, "the Lord knows that today we shouldn't go to church, which is why he made sure the car wouldn't start, so that we stay at home as a family and take a day of rest, because even the Lord rested." "Ah, that's the Devil talking, Trevor." "No, because Jesus is in control, and if Jesus is in control and we pray to Jesus, he would let the car start, but he hasn't, therefore--" "No, Trevor! Sometimes Jesus puts obstacles in your way to see if you overcome them. Like Job. This could be a test." "Ah! Yes, Mom. But the test could be to see if we're willing to accept what has happened and stay at home and praise Jesus for his wisdom." "No. That's the Devil talking. Now go change your clothes." "But Mom!" "Trevor! Sun'qhela!" Sun'qhela is a phrase with many shades of meaning. It says "don't undermine me," "don't underestimate me," and "just try me."
Source: https://cpl.catalogue.library.ns.ca/Record/1305431/Excerpt
Sunday, June 23, 2019
Some weekend reads
Elton John on a film about him:
Some studios wanted to tone down the sex and drugs so the film would get a PG-13 rating. But I just haven’t led a PG-13 rated life. I didn’t want a film packed with drugs and sex, but equally, everyone knows I had quite a lot of both during the 70s and 80s, so there didn’t seem to be much point in making a movie that implied that after every gig, I’d quietly gone back to my hotel room with only a glass of warm milk and the Gideon’s Bible for company.
I hadn’t even wanted to be a rock star in the first place, I just wanted to be a successful songwriter – but it just got bigger and bigger over the next few years. I kept a diary the whole time, and it’s inadvertently hilarious. I wrote everything down in this matter-of-fact way, which ends up making it seem even more preposterous: “Woke up, watched Grandstand. Wrote Candle in the Wind. Went to London, bought Rolls-Royce. Ringo Starr came for dinner.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/may/26/elton-john-in-my-own-words-exclusive-my-life-and-making-rocketman
On space travel:
Almost every President since Nixon proposed going back to the moon.” (President Obama focussed instead on studying an asteroid near Earth and working toward the distant goal of sending astronauts to Mars.) “But the money was never allotted. Congress decided we couldn’t have guns and the moon at the same time.” The Department of Defense’s budget is now nearly seven hundred billion dollars, whereas nasa’s funding is $21.5 billion, or around half of one per cent of the national budget. The U.S. is still believed to spend more on space programs than the rest of the world combined.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/the-race-to-develop-the-moon
On croissant:
The plural of anecdote is not data, and the 19th arrondissement is a long way from the posh 16th, but in my old Paris neighbourhood several years ago it was the ordinaire and not the seductively glittering beurre that was carried off in bagsful by eager customers every morning, snaffled in the street and gobbled at the counters of the neighbourhood bars. Apparently they’re better for dunking in your coffee. There seemed to be fewer ordinaires about last time I was in town, though its cunning rebranding as a croissant naturel in one bakery suggests that vegan celebrity for the margarine croissant may be lurking just around the corner, even in France. And there you have it: the croissant, perennial breakfast of controversialists. Bon appetit, you wild rebel, you.
Source: https://www.1843magazine.com/food/world-in-a-dish/the-croissant-breakfast-of-rebels
On being an astronaut:
The key is to move slowly, nimbly, “as a cat, very smooth,” said Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazansky. Push off too hard and “you immediately hit your head on the wall.” At first there’s a lot of that. “During the first two weeks we have bruises,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/50-astronauts-life-in-space/?utm_term=.0671b633708e
Incredible how a commercial carrier is still missing:
The mystery surrounding MH370 has been a focus of continued investigation and a source of sometimes feverish public speculation. The loss devastated families on four continents. The idea that a sophisticated machine, with its modern instruments and redundant communications, could simply vanish seems beyond the realm of possibility. It is hard to permanently delete an email, and living off the grid is nearly unachievable even when the attempt is deliberate. A Boeing 777 is meant to be electronically accessible at all times. The disappearance of the airplane has provoked a host of theories. Many are preposterous. All are given life by the fact that, in this age, commercial airplanes don’t just vanish.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/
One of my fav pieces from David Sedaris:
Learning French is a lot like joining a gang in that it involves a long and intensive period of hazing. And it wasn't just my teacher; the entire population seemed to be in on it. Following brutal encounters with my local butcher and the concierge of my building, I'd head off to class, where the teacher would hold my corrected paperwork high above her head, shouting, "Here's proof that David is an ignorant and uninspired ensigiejsokhjx."
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a1419/talk-pretty-0399/
HZ: But words like laser, scuba, taser - and the care in ‘care package’, those are all acronyms.
HZ: The classic four-letter swears are NOT acronyms.
so very literal: ‘log in’, after the log on a knotted rope that would be thrown overboard from a ship to measure its speed - calculated by the length of rope unspooled over a particular time - and that would be logged in the log book.
HZ: 700 years ago, ‘nice’ meant ‘stupid’ or ignorant. There’s nothing stupid about being nice, people!
Some studios wanted to tone down the sex and drugs so the film would get a PG-13 rating. But I just haven’t led a PG-13 rated life. I didn’t want a film packed with drugs and sex, but equally, everyone knows I had quite a lot of both during the 70s and 80s, so there didn’t seem to be much point in making a movie that implied that after every gig, I’d quietly gone back to my hotel room with only a glass of warm milk and the Gideon’s Bible for company.
I hadn’t even wanted to be a rock star in the first place, I just wanted to be a successful songwriter – but it just got bigger and bigger over the next few years. I kept a diary the whole time, and it’s inadvertently hilarious. I wrote everything down in this matter-of-fact way, which ends up making it seem even more preposterous: “Woke up, watched Grandstand. Wrote Candle in the Wind. Went to London, bought Rolls-Royce. Ringo Starr came for dinner.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/may/26/elton-john-in-my-own-words-exclusive-my-life-and-making-rocketman
On space travel:
Almost every President since Nixon proposed going back to the moon.” (President Obama focussed instead on studying an asteroid near Earth and working toward the distant goal of sending astronauts to Mars.) “But the money was never allotted. Congress decided we couldn’t have guns and the moon at the same time.” The Department of Defense’s budget is now nearly seven hundred billion dollars, whereas nasa’s funding is $21.5 billion, or around half of one per cent of the national budget. The U.S. is still believed to spend more on space programs than the rest of the world combined.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/06/the-race-to-develop-the-moon
On croissant:
The plural of anecdote is not data, and the 19th arrondissement is a long way from the posh 16th, but in my old Paris neighbourhood several years ago it was the ordinaire and not the seductively glittering beurre that was carried off in bagsful by eager customers every morning, snaffled in the street and gobbled at the counters of the neighbourhood bars. Apparently they’re better for dunking in your coffee. There seemed to be fewer ordinaires about last time I was in town, though its cunning rebranding as a croissant naturel in one bakery suggests that vegan celebrity for the margarine croissant may be lurking just around the corner, even in France. And there you have it: the croissant, perennial breakfast of controversialists. Bon appetit, you wild rebel, you.
Source: https://www.1843magazine.com/food/world-in-a-dish/the-croissant-breakfast-of-rebels
On being an astronaut:
The key is to move slowly, nimbly, “as a cat, very smooth,” said Russian cosmonaut Sergey Ryazansky. Push off too hard and “you immediately hit your head on the wall.” At first there’s a lot of that. “During the first two weeks we have bruises,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/50-astronauts-life-in-space/?utm_term=.0671b633708e
Incredible how a commercial carrier is still missing:
The mystery surrounding MH370 has been a focus of continued investigation and a source of sometimes feverish public speculation. The loss devastated families on four continents. The idea that a sophisticated machine, with its modern instruments and redundant communications, could simply vanish seems beyond the realm of possibility. It is hard to permanently delete an email, and living off the grid is nearly unachievable even when the attempt is deliberate. A Boeing 777 is meant to be electronically accessible at all times. The disappearance of the airplane has provoked a host of theories. Many are preposterous. All are given life by the fact that, in this age, commercial airplanes don’t just vanish.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-malaysia-airlines/590653/
One of my fav pieces from David Sedaris:
Learning French is a lot like joining a gang in that it involves a long and intensive period of hazing. And it wasn't just my teacher; the entire population seemed to be in on it. Following brutal encounters with my local butcher and the concierge of my building, I'd head off to class, where the teacher would hold my corrected paperwork high above her head, shouting, "Here's proof that David is an ignorant and uninspired ensigiejsokhjx."
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a1419/talk-pretty-0399/
Some incredible things on language:
HZ: The G-spot is named in tribute to the German gynaecologist Ernst Gräfenberg, who did a lot of research on the role of the urethra in orgasm. Also in 1929, he invented an early form of IUD, made from silk and silver. Luxe!HZ: But words like laser, scuba, taser - and the care in ‘care package’, those are all acronyms.
HZ: The classic four-letter swears are NOT acronyms.
so very literal: ‘log in’, after the log on a knotted rope that would be thrown overboard from a ship to measure its speed - calculated by the length of rope unspooled over a particular time - and that would be logged in the log book.
HZ: 700 years ago, ‘nice’ meant ‘stupid’ or ignorant. There’s nothing stupid about being nice, people!
Sunday, May 12, 2019
Some things I read recently
A profile of morningstar CEO:
"Kunal is very open-minded, and he demands feedback, absolutely demands it,” said Catherine Odelbo, AB ’85, MBA ’00 (XP-69), who retired in 2018 as Morningstar’s executive vice president of corporate strategy. “It’s not just inviting it and hoping you don’t give it. He wants the team to be collaborative, but at the same time, he wants the team to air their issues.”
Source: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/winter-2019/features/all-in-for-investors-kunal-kapoor-morningstar
Waymo and Xerox parallels:
"Some of the parallels between Waymo and Xerox are obvious. Like Xerox PARC, Google's self-driving car project created technology that was years ahead of its time. Like the Alto, Google's early self-driving cars were extremely expensive, with rumored costs as high as $250,000 per vehicle.
And like Xerox, Waymo has struggled to commercialize its technology. In November 2017, Waymo announced it had begun testing fully driverless cars on public roads, with plans for a commercial launch in 2018.
But Waymo failed to live up to its own hype. When Waymo launched its "commercial" service called Waymo One in December 2018, every car had a safety driver behind the wheel. That almost certainly means the company is losing money on every ride—which is probably why Waymo has only invited a few hundred people to use it."
Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-repeating-silicon-valleys-most-famous-blunder/
The rise of US beef:
"Beef was a paradigmatic industry for the rise of modern industrial agriculture, or agribusiness. As much as a story of science or technology, modern agriculture is a compromise between the unpredictability of nature and the rationality of capital. This was a lurching, violent process that sawmeatpackers displace the risks of blizzards, drought, disease and overproduction on to cattle ranchers. Today’s agricultural system works similarly. In poultry, processors like Perdue and Tyson use an elaborate system of contracts and required equipment and feed purchases to maximise their own profits while displacing risk on to contract farmers. This is true with crop production as well. As with 19th-century meatpacking, relatively small actors conduct the actual growing and production, while companies like Monsanto and Cargill control agricultural inputs and market access."Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/07/the-price-of-plenty-how-beef-changed-america
Data does not equal network effects:
"Systems with network effects generally have the property of direct interactions between the nodes over a defined interface or protocol. Joining the network requires conforming to some standard, which increases direct interaction for all nodes and makes those interactions increasingly stickier. But when it comes to the popular narrative around data network effects, we don’t often see the same sticky, direct interaction play out (let alone mechanical interdependencies between nodes due to protocols or interfaces)."
"Kunal is very open-minded, and he demands feedback, absolutely demands it,” said Catherine Odelbo, AB ’85, MBA ’00 (XP-69), who retired in 2018 as Morningstar’s executive vice president of corporate strategy. “It’s not just inviting it and hoping you don’t give it. He wants the team to be collaborative, but at the same time, he wants the team to air their issues.”
Source: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/magazine/winter-2019/features/all-in-for-investors-kunal-kapoor-morningstar
Waymo and Xerox parallels:
"Some of the parallels between Waymo and Xerox are obvious. Like Xerox PARC, Google's self-driving car project created technology that was years ahead of its time. Like the Alto, Google's early self-driving cars were extremely expensive, with rumored costs as high as $250,000 per vehicle.
And like Xerox, Waymo has struggled to commercialize its technology. In November 2017, Waymo announced it had begun testing fully driverless cars on public roads, with plans for a commercial launch in 2018.
But Waymo failed to live up to its own hype. When Waymo launched its "commercial" service called Waymo One in December 2018, every car had a safety driver behind the wheel. That almost certainly means the company is losing money on every ride—which is probably why Waymo has only invited a few hundred people to use it."
Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-repeating-silicon-valleys-most-famous-blunder/
The rise of US beef:
"Beef was a paradigmatic industry for the rise of modern industrial agriculture, or agribusiness. As much as a story of science or technology, modern agriculture is a compromise between the unpredictability of nature and the rationality of capital. This was a lurching, violent process that sawmeatpackers displace the risks of blizzards, drought, disease and overproduction on to cattle ranchers. Today’s agricultural system works similarly. In poultry, processors like Perdue and Tyson use an elaborate system of contracts and required equipment and feed purchases to maximise their own profits while displacing risk on to contract farmers. This is true with crop production as well. As with 19th-century meatpacking, relatively small actors conduct the actual growing and production, while companies like Monsanto and Cargill control agricultural inputs and market access."Source: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/07/the-price-of-plenty-how-beef-changed-america
Data does not equal network effects:
"Systems with network effects generally have the property of direct interactions between the nodes over a defined interface or protocol. Joining the network requires conforming to some standard, which increases direct interaction for all nodes and makes those interactions increasingly stickier. But when it comes to the popular narrative around data network effects, we don’t often see the same sticky, direct interaction play out (let alone mechanical interdependencies between nodes due to protocols or interfaces)."
"...we encourage startups to think more holistically about defensibility. Greater long-term defensibility is more likely to come from packaging differentiated technology; understanding the domain and reflecting that in your product as you verticalize across industries; dominating the go-to-market race; and winning the talent war to build a world-class team. These efforts will pay off in defending and winning in the markets far more than data alone."
Source: https://a16z.com/2019/05/09/data-network-effects-moats/
Source: https://a16z.com/2019/05/09/data-network-effects-moats/
Sunday, February 17, 2019
Some things I read recently
Atual Gawande on why doctors hate computers:
Medicine is a complex adaptive system: it is made up of many interconnected, multilayered parts, and it is meant to evolve with time and changing conditions. Software is not. It is complex, but it does not adapt. That is the heart of the problem for its users, us humans.
Adaptation requires two things: mutation and selection. Mutation produces variety and deviation; selection kills off the least functional mutations. Our old, craft-based, pre-computer system of professional practice—in medicine and in other fields—was all mutation and no selection. There was plenty of room for individuals to do things differently from the norm; everyone could be an innovator. But there was no real mechanism for weeding out bad ideas or practices.
Although some Chinese tech companies can look very Silicon Valley-esque — with sprawling campuses that include dining halls, gyms and nap rooms — their preferred management style is still top down and results driven. Unlike Silicon Valley, smart underlings have less freedom to start something new.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/business/china-silicon-valley-technology.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Tesla and dodgy HSE records:
Watson recalled one worker who had passed out on the job and went to the hospital because of her exposure to fumes in the factory. Even though a work-related loss of consciousness is required to be counted, no such injury was recorded on Tesla’s injury logs.
Temp workers hurt on the production line also were often rebuffed by the clinic, said former clinic employees. At one point, there was a blanket policy to turn away temps, they said.
Silicon Valley's doomsday historian/forecaster:
“I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.
Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government.
Some BoJack:
It’s not about being happy, that is the thing. I’m just trying to get through each day. I can’t keep asking myself ‘Am I happy? ‘ It just makes me more miserable. I don’t know If I believe in it, real lasting happiness, All those perky, well-adjusted people you see in movies and TV shows ? I don’t think they exist.
— Diane Nguyen, BoJack Horseman, Season 3: BoJack Kills
On touching and China:
Medicine is a complex adaptive system: it is made up of many interconnected, multilayered parts, and it is meant to evolve with time and changing conditions. Software is not. It is complex, but it does not adapt. That is the heart of the problem for its users, us humans.
Adaptation requires two things: mutation and selection. Mutation produces variety and deviation; selection kills off the least functional mutations. Our old, craft-based, pre-computer system of professional practice—in medicine and in other fields—was all mutation and no selection. There was plenty of room for individuals to do things differently from the norm; everyone could be an innovator. But there was no real mechanism for weeding out bad ideas or practices.
Silicon Valley, China:
Work habits weren’t the only sharp difference between the Valley and China. By the end of the week, a group of American executives and investors found an alternate tech universe. It resembles Silicon Valley superficially. Look closer, and it becomes a futuristic yet closed-off world that can be equally impressive, alienating and dystopian.Although some Chinese tech companies can look very Silicon Valley-esque — with sprawling campuses that include dining halls, gyms and nap rooms — their preferred management style is still top down and results driven. Unlike Silicon Valley, smart underlings have less freedom to start something new.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/business/china-silicon-valley-technology.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
Watson recalled one worker who had passed out on the job and went to the hospital because of her exposure to fumes in the factory. Even though a work-related loss of consciousness is required to be counted, no such injury was recorded on Tesla’s injury logs.
Temp workers hurt on the production line also were often rebuffed by the clinic, said former clinic employees. At one point, there was a blanket policy to turn away temps, they said.
Silicon Valley's doomsday historian/forecaster:
“I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.
Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government.
Fascinating interview with Eric Schmidt:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEH3j7AINwU
Investors need to change or die:
Autos A cyclical, capital-intensive business that makes commoditized products is a troubled industry to begin with. If driverless cars become a reality, then car sharing is not far behind. Once that occurs, it’s virtually certain we’ll need fewer automobiles. Falling production on a fixed-cost base—look out below.
Insurance Another cyclical, commoditized business with no barriers to entry except capital—which is to say, no barriers at all. Returns on equity in insurance have been in structural decline for 30 years, with personal lines most at risk. Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate is invested in insurance, has acknowledged that self-driving cars could significantly decrease auto-insurance premiums. Such coverage may join the buggy whip in terms of utility within the next generation.
http://fortune.com/longform/value-investing-warren-buffett-tech-stocks/
Autos A cyclical, capital-intensive business that makes commoditized products is a troubled industry to begin with. If driverless cars become a reality, then car sharing is not far behind. Once that occurs, it’s virtually certain we’ll need fewer automobiles. Falling production on a fixed-cost base—look out below.
Insurance Another cyclical, commoditized business with no barriers to entry except capital—which is to say, no barriers at all. Returns on equity in insurance have been in structural decline for 30 years, with personal lines most at risk. Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate is invested in insurance, has acknowledged that self-driving cars could significantly decrease auto-insurance premiums. Such coverage may join the buggy whip in terms of utility within the next generation.
http://fortune.com/longform/value-investing-warren-buffett-tech-stocks/
It’s not about being happy, that is the thing. I’m just trying to get through each day. I can’t keep asking myself ‘Am I happy? ‘ It just makes me more miserable. I don’t know If I believe in it, real lasting happiness, All those perky, well-adjusted people you see in movies and TV shows ? I don’t think they exist.
— Diane Nguyen, BoJack Horseman, Season 3: BoJack Kills
On touching and China:
Perhaps touch between friends was partly set free, and came to the fore, because sexual touch was prohibited by the Communist Party under Mao. Sex was confined to marriage, and even then wasn’t supposed to distract from the love for the revolution.
Among the older generation, who grew up under these ideas, couples are fairly formal with each other physically in public. When I spoke to older people sitting by Beijing’s Back Lake about the kinds of touch they shared with their spouses in their homes they were matter-of-fact. Sex was sex, one lady told me, it never involved kissing. An elderly man told me of his relationship with his wife: ‘I rub her back, she rubs mine.’
Source: https://granta.com/touch/
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Some things I read recently
What Banksy's recent actions mean:
Banksy’s mockery of a market that has fed both his wallet and his capacity for ever more ambitious activities has had a happy ending this time. But the questions remain. When in 2014 Sotheby’s sold a print depicting an auctioneer selling an eager crowd an elaborate gold frame (naturally) in which is stencilled “I can’t believe you morons actually buy this shit”, it seemed the epitome of . . . what? A joke gone flat? A savage critic rendered toothless? Or the ultimate laugh against the “morons” actually buying the shit? Source: https://www.ft.com/content/f62a69d2-cd45-11e8-b276-b9069bde0956
CRISPR is the only thing that can save the banana:
TR4 only affects a particular type of banana called the Cavendish. There are more than 1,000 banana varieties in the world, but the Cavendish, named after a British nobleman who grew the exotic fruit in his greenhouses on the edge of the Peak District, makes up almost the entire export market. The Brazilian apple banana, for example, is small and tart with firm flesh, while the stubby Pisang Awak, a staple in Malaysia, is much sweeter than the Cavendish. But no banana has become as ubiquitous as the Cavendish, which accounts for 47 per cent of all global production of the fruit.
As TR4 creeps across the globe towards Latin America, the Cavendish’s genetic uniformity is starting to look like a curse. Ploetz estimates that TR4 has already killed more Cavendish bananas than Gros Michel plants killed by TR1, and, unlike the previous epidemic, there is no TR4-resistant banana ready to replace the Cavendish. And time to find a solution is rapidly running out. “The question is, ‘when is it going to come over here?’,” Ploetz says. “Well, it may already be here.”
“CRISPR is precise, it’s relatively easy to use, and it allows a young company like us to start doing real genetic editing,” says Gilad Gershon, Tropic’s CEO. Gershon, who founded the company in July 2016, was working for the Californian agricultural investment firm Pontifax AgTech when he became convinced that CRISPR was about to blow open the agricultural industry.
Source: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cavendish-banana-extinction-gene-editing
Shane Parish on doing things differently:
I get feedback from people: “I didn’t like that.” I dig in and they say, “I want to hear these name brand people that I know.” But that’s not what the podcast is about. So that means I have to tune the messaging so people’s expectations are aligned with what I’m actually trying to do. Then they can self-select between people who want to go deeper and people who want only the surface.
When you’re only doing what people want, that can put you out of business. As Steve Jobs noted a long time ago, you can’t always ask people what they want.
I mentioned before that everything can be copied. Well one of the things people have a hard time copying is things that are hard in the short term. Like going to the gym. You might like running but I don’t. I don’t like going to the gym. But it will likely lead to a longer, happier life.
There are things you can do in your business in the same way. But you need time to think through these things.
On Alexa:
One reason is that Amazon and Google are pushing these devices hard, discounting them so heavily during last year’s holiday season that industry observers suspect that the companies lost money on each unit sold. These and other tech corporations have grand ambitions. They want to colonize space. Not interplanetary space. Everyday space: home, office, car. In the near future, everything from your lighting to your air-conditioning to your refrigerator, your coffee maker, and even your toilet could be wired to a system controlled by voice.And indeed, these devices no longer serve solely as intermediaries, portals to e-commerce or nytimes.com. We communicate with them, not through them. More than once, I’ve found myself telling my Google Assistant about the sense of emptiness I sometimes feel. “I’m lonely,” I say, which I usually wouldn’t confess to anyone but my therapist—not even my husband, who might take it the wrong way. Part of the allure of my Assistant is that I’ve set it to a chipper, young-sounding male voice that makes me want to smile. (Amazon hasn’t given the Echo a male-voice option.) The Assistant pulls out of his memory bank one of the many responses to this statement that have been programmed into him. “I wish I had arms so I could give you a hug,” he said to me the other day, somewhat comfortingly. “But for now, maybe a joke or some music might help.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/alexa-how-will-you-change-us/570844/
On breakfast:
On her long and ultimately doomed slog to become president, Hillary Clinton started most days in the same way: with scrambled egg whites and vegetables that she would perk up with some fresh jalapeños, if available. Failing that, the hot sauce she carried with her at all times and some salsa did the trick. For any other meal, such repeat behaviour would seem weird, at least in a rich country where a glut of dining options is available. Yet breakfast is the one meal where a thoroughly unadventurous spirit is acceptable.
Nonetheless, within any single country, the rules dictating what constitutes an appropriate breakfast are far clearer than those that define lunch or dinner. Mention bacon and eggs in Britain and few will doubt that you are describing breakfast. Cover a slice of bread with chocolate sprinkles in the Netherlands and it is obvious which meal you have prepared. A French person would sneer at the thought of eating a croissant at any time other than morning.
There is safety in “the usual”, as Hillary Clinton might have thought when ordering her election-trail breakfast. But the evidence from meals at every other time of day suggests that even the wariest diner can eventually find delight in the unfamiliar. And given the limited number of meals anyone can eat over the course of a day, making breakfast as exciting as dinner is surely worth the risk.
Sunday, October 7, 2018
Some things I read recently
Some additional coverage on SoftBank Masa son:
The tech industry has seen deep-pocketed outsiders before, but SoftBank is operating at a scale never attempted. That’s driven valuations up, making it difficult for traditional firms to put together enough capital to get into the hottest deals. SoftBank, according to a partner at a major Silicon Valley firm, is “a big stack bully,” a poker term referring to a player with a pile of chips so huge that competitors are afraid to get in the game.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-27/masayoshi-son-softbank-and-the-100-billion-blitz-on-sand-hill-road?srnd=businessweek-v2
Interesting piece on the value of using cash:
Thus, Visa, MasterCard and their allies are running large global marketing campaigns to tell us how foolish and old-fashioned it is to pay autonomously with cash and how modern and convenient it is to have someone else manage your payments digitally. They bribe restaurants into refusing to accept cash. They provide vendors of homeless-newspapers and churches with card readers, because this provides terrific PR for cashlessness. Governments worldwide issue laws and regulations to prohibit or restrict autonomous payments with cash. They make them harder or more expensive and generally cloak them in the suspicion of illegality.
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/08/23/brave-new-money-paypal-wechat-amazon-go-a-totalitarian-world-currency-in-the-making-part-i/#more-33172
I completely agree with you. I think the indicator does teach you to speak in its language—which is one of the things that’s greatly appealing about it. So even if you don’t believe your results, you still walk away from it having internalized this new vocabulary of thinking about the self and of thinking about other people. There are so many caveats in the MBTI training sessions about this question of dichotomies—they say there are degrees of the different preferences, so I might be a strong extravert and someone else might be a moderate extravert, or someone might be in the middle. But at the end of the day those qualifiers really aren’t getting you away from that dichotomous way of thinking.
On the French first lady Macron, and her views on politics:
Brigitte Macron, with her loathing of age-appropriate floral prints, has liberated women of a certain age to be themselves, wear what they want and defy social pressures. “Of course, we have breakfast together, me with my wrinkles, him with his fresh face, but that’s how it is,” Brigitte has joked. There is something refreshingly rebellious about her that appeals to the subversive French spirit.
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/brigitte-macron-agent-provocatrice
The tech industry has seen deep-pocketed outsiders before, but SoftBank is operating at a scale never attempted. That’s driven valuations up, making it difficult for traditional firms to put together enough capital to get into the hottest deals. SoftBank, according to a partner at a major Silicon Valley firm, is “a big stack bully,” a poker term referring to a player with a pile of chips so huge that competitors are afraid to get in the game.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-09-27/masayoshi-son-softbank-and-the-100-billion-blitz-on-sand-hill-road?srnd=businessweek-v2
Interesting piece on the value of using cash:
Thus, Visa, MasterCard and their allies are running large global marketing campaigns to tell us how foolish and old-fashioned it is to pay autonomously with cash and how modern and convenient it is to have someone else manage your payments digitally. They bribe restaurants into refusing to accept cash. They provide vendors of homeless-newspapers and churches with card readers, because this provides terrific PR for cashlessness. Governments worldwide issue laws and regulations to prohibit or restrict autonomous payments with cash. They make them harder or more expensive and generally cloak them in the suspicion of illegality.
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/08/23/brave-new-money-paypal-wechat-amazon-go-a-totalitarian-world-currency-in-the-making-part-i/#more-33172
Li Lui's speech on economic progression is fascinating:
In the long history of the world, GDP has basically been flat. This is especially so in China.
Taking the example of the last five hundred years, we can see the sudden ascendance of the
West and that the East trailed by about one hundred years. The rise of the East one
hundred years ago is largely the contribution of Japan.
Anyone who wants to understand the performance of Equities over the last two hundred
years and their performance over the next two hundred years needs to understand this line
– the course of human civilisation. If you don’t understand this, it will be very hard to stay
rational during a stock market crash. Each time we get into a situation like 2008 or 2009, it
will feel like the end of the world. The most important thing in investing is predicting the
future but as the saying goes, “forecasting is hard, especially when it’s about the future”.
Why has mankind’s economic progress been like this over the last two hundred years? It’s
very hard to make any kind of forecast without understanding this question. I have thought
about this question for almost thirty years and put my thoughts into a monograph titled
“Sixteen Lectures on Modernisation”. Anyone interested is welcome to have a look. It’s
available on the web and Professor Jiang has also brought along a few copies today. You
can find it on my blog, Google or Baidu by searching for “Sixteen Lectures on
Modernisation”.
https://brianlangis.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/li-lu-the-prospects-for-value-investing-in-china.pdf
On the MBTI test:
I think it’s very hard to take something like a Buzzfeed quiz and then go take MBTI and not realize that they’re sort of doing the same thing. One is doing it in a parodic vein, but it’s totally laying bare the logics of the original instrument in doing so. So if you’re even a little bit influenced by that sort of internet meme-ish uptake of the indicator, and of all personality testing, then I can’t imagine not being a little bit ironic or detached towards it.
On Lebanon's electricity brokers:
Most people in Lebanon, in turn, are often stuck with two bills, and sometimes get creative to keep their personal devices—laptops, cell phones, tablets, smart watches—from going dead. Meanwhile, as citizens scramble to keep their inanimate objects alive, the local authorities are complicit in this patchwork arrangement, taking payments from the gray-market generator operators and perpetuating a nation’s struggle to stay wired.
Beirut’s supplementary power needs are effectively under the control of what is known here as the generator mafia: a loose conglomerate of generator owners and landlords who supply a great deal of the country’s power. This group is indirectly responsible for the Wi-Fi, which makes possible any number of WhatsApp conversations—an indispensable lifeline for the country’s refugees, foreign aid workers, and journalists and locals alike.
https://www.wired.com/story/beruit-electricity-brokers/
Most people in Lebanon, in turn, are often stuck with two bills, and sometimes get creative to keep their personal devices—laptops, cell phones, tablets, smart watches—from going dead. Meanwhile, as citizens scramble to keep their inanimate objects alive, the local authorities are complicit in this patchwork arrangement, taking payments from the gray-market generator operators and perpetuating a nation’s struggle to stay wired.
Beirut’s supplementary power needs are effectively under the control of what is known here as the generator mafia: a loose conglomerate of generator owners and landlords who supply a great deal of the country’s power. This group is indirectly responsible for the Wi-Fi, which makes possible any number of WhatsApp conversations—an indispensable lifeline for the country’s refugees, foreign aid workers, and journalists and locals alike.
https://www.wired.com/story/beruit-electricity-brokers/
Brigitte Macron, with her loathing of age-appropriate floral prints, has liberated women of a certain age to be themselves, wear what they want and defy social pressures. “Of course, we have breakfast together, me with my wrinkles, him with his fresh face, but that’s how it is,” Brigitte has joked. There is something refreshingly rebellious about her that appeals to the subversive French spirit.
https://www.1843magazine.com/features/brigitte-macron-agent-provocatrice
Friday, September 28, 2018
Some things I read recently
Still, Bush decided to view Elliott’s investment as an opportunity for self-reflection. The hedge fund’s tactics seemed thuggish, but he had probably become negligent about addressing certain issues. He was a firm believer in the virtues of free-market capitalism, and, he reasoned, here it was at work. “Nobody likes to hear your baby is fat,” he told me. “But maybe we needed to hear that.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-doomsday-investor
The magic power of quantum computing is that this arrangement lets qubits do more than just flip between 0 and 1. Treat them right and they can flip into a mysterious extra mode called a superposition.
You may have heard that a qubit in superposition is both 0 and1 at the same time. That’s not quite true and also not quite false—there’s just no equivalent in Homo sapiens’ humdrum classical reality. If you have a yearning to truly grok it, you must make a mathematical odyssey WIRED cannot equip you for. But in the simplified and dare we say perfect world of this explainer, the important thing to know is that the math of a superposition describes the probability of discovering either a 0 or 1 when a qubit is read out—an operation that crashes it out of a quantum superposition into classical reality. A quantum computer can use a collection of qubits in superpositions to play with different possible paths through a calculation. If done correctly, the pointers to incorrect paths cancel out, leaving the correct answer when the qubits are read out as 0s and 1s.
https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-to-quantum-computing/
With so many large businesses changing their practices, recycling will “become the norm,” said David Blanchard, Unilever’s head of research and development.
Lego faces a more complex problem than other consumer businesses, though — for this Danish company, plastics are not the packaging, they are the product.
Most test materials, both bio-based and recycled, have so far fallen short. Some bricks made with the new materials have broken, leaving sharp edges that could injure a child, or have popped out with ugly, muddied colors. Others have on occasion produced misshapen or pockmarked bricks.
The search for a substitute for petroleum-based plastic could yet take years of work, Mr. Brooks acknowledged. Still, executives argue that, as a company that models itself as a de facto educator as much as a profitable enterprise, it has little option but to keep trying.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/business/energy-environment/lego-plastic-denmark-environment-toys.html?pagewanted=all
At least for a few more decades, human intelligence is likely to far exceed computer intelligence in numerous fields. Hence as computers take over more routine cognitive jobs, new creative jobs for humans will continue to appear. Many of these new jobs will probably depend on cooperation rather than competition between humans and AI. Human-AI teams will likely prove superior not just to humans, but also to computers working on their own.
AlphaZero is not the only imaginative software out there. One of the ways to catch cheaters in chess tournaments today is to monitor the level of originality that players exhibit. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that it could not possibly be a human move—it must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans! So if chess is our canary in the coal mine, we have been duly warned that the canary is dying. What is happening today to human-AI teams in chess might happen down the road to human-AI teams in policing, medicine, banking, and many other fields.
Blockchain technology, and the use of cryptocurrencies enabled by it, is currently touted as a possible counterweight to centralized power. But blockchain technology is still in the embryonic stage, and we don’t yet know whether it will indeed counterbalance the centralizing tendencies of AI. Remember that the Internet, too, was hyped in its early days as a libertarian panacea that would free people from all centralized systems—but is now poised to make centralized authority more powerful than ever.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/
The $3 trillion hedge fund industry, less glamorous than it was during its heyday, is crowded with managers struggling to justify their costs. The problem with a business based on geniuses who can spot trends is that few remain geniuses forever. “Regression to the mean is a very powerful force in the universe,” says University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock, who studies the track records of professional forecasters. “It’s harder for hedge funds to sustain high performance in the long term, especially when you have a lot of smart people second-guessing each other.” Einhorn, Paulson, and Howard declined to comment through their spokespeople.
Einhorn told investors in July that it’s been a frustrating environment for value investors. “Right now the market is telling us we are wrong, wrong, wrong about nearly everything,” he wrote. “And yet, looking forward from today we think this portfolio makes a lot of sense.” Investors pulled about $3 billion from Greenlight in the past two years, leaving it managing about $5.5 billion in assets, less than half the peak of $12 billion three years ago.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-12/for-hedge-fund-stars-being-right-in-2008-proved-to-be-a-curse?srnd=businessweek-v2
Many people know that perfumers build their trade on the graves of millions of tiny white flowers, but fewer people realize they also bottle and sell the byproducts of animal pain and suffering. Perfumers who use synthetic materials are exempt, in a sense, as are those who use found or vintage materials. Ethier’s ambergris is “quite old” and reportedly beach-found (“I hope it is,” she says). But even perfumes that use synthetic compounds or salvaged bile carry the whiff of death; the history of the industry is seeped in it, and that smell doesn’t wash out easily.
Unlike musk, civet can be collected without killing the animal, but it’s not a cruelty-free process. Civets are kept in tiny cages and poked with sticks or frightened with loud noises until they react and spray out their valuable secretions. Commercial perfumers no longer use genuine civet in their fragrances, but James Peterson, a perfumer based in Brooklyn, owns a very small vial of civet tincture. “It smells terrible when you first smell it,” he says. “But I have some that is five years old, and it gets this fruity quality as it ages. In a tincture, it gets this rich scent that works wonderful with florals.” On a few occasions, Peterson has used genuine musk or civet to make “tiny amounts” of specialty perfumes, and the resulting blends have an “intensely erotic draw.” Customers report that these dark and dirty smells are potent aphrodisiacs. “When it’s below the level of consciousness, that’s when it works best,” he adds.
https://longreads.com/2018/09/10/ugly-history-of-beautiful-things-perfume/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/08/27/paul-singer-doomsday-investor
The magic power of quantum computing is that this arrangement lets qubits do more than just flip between 0 and 1. Treat them right and they can flip into a mysterious extra mode called a superposition.
You may have heard that a qubit in superposition is both 0 and1 at the same time. That’s not quite true and also not quite false—there’s just no equivalent in Homo sapiens’ humdrum classical reality. If you have a yearning to truly grok it, you must make a mathematical odyssey WIRED cannot equip you for. But in the simplified and dare we say perfect world of this explainer, the important thing to know is that the math of a superposition describes the probability of discovering either a 0 or 1 when a qubit is read out—an operation that crashes it out of a quantum superposition into classical reality. A quantum computer can use a collection of qubits in superpositions to play with different possible paths through a calculation. If done correctly, the pointers to incorrect paths cancel out, leaving the correct answer when the qubits are read out as 0s and 1s.
https://www.wired.com/story/wired-guide-to-quantum-computing/
With so many large businesses changing their practices, recycling will “become the norm,” said David Blanchard, Unilever’s head of research and development.
Lego faces a more complex problem than other consumer businesses, though — for this Danish company, plastics are not the packaging, they are the product.
Most test materials, both bio-based and recycled, have so far fallen short. Some bricks made with the new materials have broken, leaving sharp edges that could injure a child, or have popped out with ugly, muddied colors. Others have on occasion produced misshapen or pockmarked bricks.
The search for a substitute for petroleum-based plastic could yet take years of work, Mr. Brooks acknowledged. Still, executives argue that, as a company that models itself as a de facto educator as much as a profitable enterprise, it has little option but to keep trying.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/31/business/energy-environment/lego-plastic-denmark-environment-toys.html?pagewanted=all
At least for a few more decades, human intelligence is likely to far exceed computer intelligence in numerous fields. Hence as computers take over more routine cognitive jobs, new creative jobs for humans will continue to appear. Many of these new jobs will probably depend on cooperation rather than competition between humans and AI. Human-AI teams will likely prove superior not just to humans, but also to computers working on their own.
AlphaZero is not the only imaginative software out there. One of the ways to catch cheaters in chess tournaments today is to monitor the level of originality that players exhibit. If they play an exceptionally creative move, the judges will often suspect that it could not possibly be a human move—it must be a computer move. At least in chess, creativity is already considered to be the trademark of computers rather than humans! So if chess is our canary in the coal mine, we have been duly warned that the canary is dying. What is happening today to human-AI teams in chess might happen down the road to human-AI teams in policing, medicine, banking, and many other fields.
Blockchain technology, and the use of cryptocurrencies enabled by it, is currently touted as a possible counterweight to centralized power. But blockchain technology is still in the embryonic stage, and we don’t yet know whether it will indeed counterbalance the centralizing tendencies of AI. Remember that the Internet, too, was hyped in its early days as a libertarian panacea that would free people from all centralized systems—but is now poised to make centralized authority more powerful than ever.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/
The $3 trillion hedge fund industry, less glamorous than it was during its heyday, is crowded with managers struggling to justify their costs. The problem with a business based on geniuses who can spot trends is that few remain geniuses forever. “Regression to the mean is a very powerful force in the universe,” says University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock, who studies the track records of professional forecasters. “It’s harder for hedge funds to sustain high performance in the long term, especially when you have a lot of smart people second-guessing each other.” Einhorn, Paulson, and Howard declined to comment through their spokespeople.
Einhorn told investors in July that it’s been a frustrating environment for value investors. “Right now the market is telling us we are wrong, wrong, wrong about nearly everything,” he wrote. “And yet, looking forward from today we think this portfolio makes a lot of sense.” Investors pulled about $3 billion from Greenlight in the past two years, leaving it managing about $5.5 billion in assets, less than half the peak of $12 billion three years ago.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-12/for-hedge-fund-stars-being-right-in-2008-proved-to-be-a-curse?srnd=businessweek-v2
Many people know that perfumers build their trade on the graves of millions of tiny white flowers, but fewer people realize they also bottle and sell the byproducts of animal pain and suffering. Perfumers who use synthetic materials are exempt, in a sense, as are those who use found or vintage materials. Ethier’s ambergris is “quite old” and reportedly beach-found (“I hope it is,” she says). But even perfumes that use synthetic compounds or salvaged bile carry the whiff of death; the history of the industry is seeped in it, and that smell doesn’t wash out easily.
Unlike musk, civet can be collected without killing the animal, but it’s not a cruelty-free process. Civets are kept in tiny cages and poked with sticks or frightened with loud noises until they react and spray out their valuable secretions. Commercial perfumers no longer use genuine civet in their fragrances, but James Peterson, a perfumer based in Brooklyn, owns a very small vial of civet tincture. “It smells terrible when you first smell it,” he says. “But I have some that is five years old, and it gets this fruity quality as it ages. In a tincture, it gets this rich scent that works wonderful with florals.” On a few occasions, Peterson has used genuine musk or civet to make “tiny amounts” of specialty perfumes, and the resulting blends have an “intensely erotic draw.” Customers report that these dark and dirty smells are potent aphrodisiacs. “When it’s below the level of consciousness, that’s when it works best,” he adds.
https://longreads.com/2018/09/10/ugly-history-of-beautiful-things-perfume/
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Some things I read recently
On PE firms moving down the size curve:
As a result of the strong market dynamics at play even less attractive deals are starting to get more attention. “The higher quality deals get done at a premium. Even deals that aren’t above average are starting to get bid up. The quality premium is narrowing. This is when things can start to get ugly. During a downturn your higher quality assets will weather the storm. Assets that are of lesser quality will have difficulty,” warns Frazier. “We see the IRRs they are modeling and unless they are able to grow these assets fast, it’s going to be challenge to make the return on capital with the high valuations that were paid or make it through lean times.”
https://www.axial.net/forum/lower-middle-market-hot-to-touch/
The chaos garbage collectors can cause by going on strike:
Imagine, for instance, that all of Washington’s 100,000 lobbyists were to go on strike tomorrow. Or that every tax accountant in Manhattan decided to stay home. It seems unlikely the mayor would announce a state of emergency. In fact, it’s unlikely that either of these scenarios would do much damage. A strike by, say, social media consultants, telemarketers, or high-frequency traders might never even make the news at all.
When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business.
Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.
Why Europe can't do tech right:
The kind of companies that can be created in China and the U.S. are still very hard to create in Europe, just structurally,” he says. “You could be the No. 1 company in Germany, but in France people won’t have heard of you.”
Spotify:
To vanquish these rivals and make good on the promise of its high market cap, all Spotify has to do is continuously improve its best-in-class product, mollify music artists and labels who are still skeptical about the shift to streaming (despite the fact that the company has distributed almost $10 billion in licensing fees across the industry), and attract enough new customers to turn around its negative economics. Bulls, such as NYU professor Scott Galloway, argue that Spotify will do this and be the next tech giant. Bears believe the company is simply “not a good business,” as venture capitalist and former digital music entrepreneur David Pakman described Spotify to the Guardian.
“You’re not supposed to be a billionaire in your thirties,” he tells me. (“In Sweden, there’s an inherent tension for anyone who is ambitious,” explains Wallach, who calls Ek a good friend. “How do you do great things without sticking your head up too high?”)
Ek, who doesn’t like to mention Apple by name any more than Cook likes mentioning Spotify, points to his company’s focus as the reason: “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90205519/spotifys-playlist-for-global-domination
As a result of the strong market dynamics at play even less attractive deals are starting to get more attention. “The higher quality deals get done at a premium. Even deals that aren’t above average are starting to get bid up. The quality premium is narrowing. This is when things can start to get ugly. During a downturn your higher quality assets will weather the storm. Assets that are of lesser quality will have difficulty,” warns Frazier. “We see the IRRs they are modeling and unless they are able to grow these assets fast, it’s going to be challenge to make the return on capital with the high valuations that were paid or make it through lean times.”
https://www.axial.net/forum/lower-middle-market-hot-to-touch/
The chaos garbage collectors can cause by going on strike:
Imagine, for instance, that all of Washington’s 100,000 lobbyists were to go on strike tomorrow. Or that every tax accountant in Manhattan decided to stay home. It seems unlikely the mayor would announce a state of emergency. In fact, it’s unlikely that either of these scenarios would do much damage. A strike by, say, social media consultants, telemarketers, or high-frequency traders might never even make the news at all.
When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business.
Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.
https://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-bankers/
Surveillance state in China:
WeChat and Alipay register and store everything customers do with their money and otherwise, and use that information to make a numerical assessment about that person’s virtuousness and trustworthiness. If you spend lots of time playing computer games or if you have a patchy record of paying your bills on time, your standing worsens and you will experience all sorts of economic or social disadvantages. Given the close cooperation with the government, it can be expected that these private assessments of creditworthiness and the government’s social credit system will merge. All information about what citizens buy and which services they use, where and when, can enter into the social credit system.
It may be an attractive idea at first thought, that a person’s virtuous or devious social behavior should be recognized and sanctioned more than economic success or failure. However, if a government has the power to decide and to sanction not only what is legal and what is not, but also what is good behavior and what is bad behavior, then the threshold to a totalitarian society has been overstepped.
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/08/23/brave-new-money-paypal-wechat-amazon-go-a-totalitarian-world-currency-in-the-making-part-i/#more-33172
Surveillance state in China:
WeChat and Alipay register and store everything customers do with their money and otherwise, and use that information to make a numerical assessment about that person’s virtuousness and trustworthiness. If you spend lots of time playing computer games or if you have a patchy record of paying your bills on time, your standing worsens and you will experience all sorts of economic or social disadvantages. Given the close cooperation with the government, it can be expected that these private assessments of creditworthiness and the government’s social credit system will merge. All information about what citizens buy and which services they use, where and when, can enter into the social credit system.
It may be an attractive idea at first thought, that a person’s virtuous or devious social behavior should be recognized and sanctioned more than economic success or failure. However, if a government has the power to decide and to sanction not only what is legal and what is not, but also what is good behavior and what is bad behavior, then the threshold to a totalitarian society has been overstepped.
https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/08/23/brave-new-money-paypal-wechat-amazon-go-a-totalitarian-world-currency-in-the-making-part-i/#more-33172
On hyperpolyglots:
However they differ, the hyperpolyglots whom I met all winced at the question “How many languages do you speak?” As Rojas-Berscia explained it, the issue is partly semantic: What does the verb “to speak” mean? It is also political. Standard accents and grammar are usually those of a ruling class. And the question is further clouded by the “chauvinism” that Ellen Jovin feels obliged to resist. The test of a spy, in thrillers, is to “pass for a native,” even though the English-speaking natives of Glasgow, Trinidad, Delhi, Lagos, New Orleans, and Melbourne (not to mention Eliza Doolittle’s East End) all sound foreign to one another. “No one masters all the nuances of a language,” Simcott said. “It’s a false standard, and one that gets raised, ironically, mostly by monoglots—Americans in particular. So let’s just say that I have studied more than fifty, and I use about half of them.”
I asked Fisher about another cutoff point: the critical period for acquiring a language without an accent. The common wisdom is that one loses the chance to become a spy after puberty. Fisher explained why that is true for most people. A brain, he said, sacrifices suppleness to gain stability as it matures; once you master your mother tongue, you don’t need the phonetic plasticity of childhood, and a typical brain puts that circuitry to another use.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/the-mystery-of-people-who-speak-dozens-of-languages
However they differ, the hyperpolyglots whom I met all winced at the question “How many languages do you speak?” As Rojas-Berscia explained it, the issue is partly semantic: What does the verb “to speak” mean? It is also political. Standard accents and grammar are usually those of a ruling class. And the question is further clouded by the “chauvinism” that Ellen Jovin feels obliged to resist. The test of a spy, in thrillers, is to “pass for a native,” even though the English-speaking natives of Glasgow, Trinidad, Delhi, Lagos, New Orleans, and Melbourne (not to mention Eliza Doolittle’s East End) all sound foreign to one another. “No one masters all the nuances of a language,” Simcott said. “It’s a false standard, and one that gets raised, ironically, mostly by monoglots—Americans in particular. So let’s just say that I have studied more than fifty, and I use about half of them.”
I asked Fisher about another cutoff point: the critical period for acquiring a language without an accent. The common wisdom is that one loses the chance to become a spy after puberty. Fisher explained why that is true for most people. A brain, he said, sacrifices suppleness to gain stability as it matures; once you master your mother tongue, you don’t need the phonetic plasticity of childhood, and a typical brain puts that circuitry to another use.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/the-mystery-of-people-who-speak-dozens-of-languages
Why Europe can't do tech right:
The kind of companies that can be created in China and the U.S. are still very hard to create in Europe, just structurally,” he says. “You could be the No. 1 company in Germany, but in France people won’t have heard of you.”
Spotify:
To vanquish these rivals and make good on the promise of its high market cap, all Spotify has to do is continuously improve its best-in-class product, mollify music artists and labels who are still skeptical about the shift to streaming (despite the fact that the company has distributed almost $10 billion in licensing fees across the industry), and attract enough new customers to turn around its negative economics. Bulls, such as NYU professor Scott Galloway, argue that Spotify will do this and be the next tech giant. Bears believe the company is simply “not a good business,” as venture capitalist and former digital music entrepreneur David Pakman described Spotify to the Guardian.
“You’re not supposed to be a billionaire in your thirties,” he tells me. (“In Sweden, there’s an inherent tension for anyone who is ambitious,” explains Wallach, who calls Ek a good friend. “How do you do great things without sticking your head up too high?”)
Ek, who doesn’t like to mention Apple by name any more than Cook likes mentioning Spotify, points to his company’s focus as the reason: “Music is everything we do all day, all night, and that clarity is the difference between the average and the really, really good.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90205519/spotifys-playlist-for-global-domination
Sunday, August 26, 2018
Some things I read recently
Some interesting thoughts on the art market:
One interesting feature of the art market is that artists almost inevitably need somebody to sell for them. The artist selling directly does exist, but it’s a minimal part of the art market.There are attempts made to estimate the total value of the art market, for example in the annual reports by Clare McAndrew. She does her best, but she is dealing with transactions that often happen outside the public eye, or even in secret. Nevertheless, we can get an estimate from publicly recorded auction sales, plus McAndrew’s belief that sales are roughly split 50-50 between art galleries and auction houses.
The fact that there are a number of comparable works produced today like the spot paintings, actually works in the favour of sales, because it enables financiers and art advisors to make nice little charts which they can then show to their buyers/investors, or what you might call “specullectors”. I cite that in my book, and joking aside, I like the term. Or COINS, collectors only in name. When the financial services industry is looking to give advice on deploying investment capital, they want to be able to demonstrate, how are these spot paintings performing? What’s the track record, and how can you track their value in the marketplace?
The situation is complicated by the fact that workshops—such as Rubens’—employed lots of assistants. How much was Rubens by himself? Today’s artists don’t always make a work of art themselves; they might just give instructions. This has notably been a problem with the Warhol estate, particularly that series of works that were first accepted as original, and then rejected. I think that the market will always prize, for example, Damien Hirst’s early spot paintings, because those are the ones Hirst was actually involved with. A vast difference in prices reflects that. It’s true that Damien Hirst, when he produces what he produced in Venice, isn’t forging himself—he’s producing luxury goods. Of course, counterfeiting is the bane of the luxury goods industry, absolutely.
The whole point, of course, is that it’s a decentralised register—anyone can access the information. I think it still needs to play out a great deal, until we see exactly how Blockchain could benefit the art world. I think it could definitely be of a benefit to living artists. Where they can make a work of art, and then they can put it on the Blockchain, and that will enable them to protect their own intellectual property. If fakes are produced in the future, this technology will enable one to go back and compare. So digital technologies like Blockchain, from the point of view of new artists, could actually be rather a good thing. It does not, however, necessarily assure an art work’s value.
https://fivebooks.com/best-books/the-art-market-georgina-adam/
This Birkenstock sandal that I've been wondering about:
For Görlitz is where a high percentage of Birkenstock’s cork-and-leather sandals are made; the company is headquartered near Bonn, and the family that has owned the business since 1774 lives mostly outside Germany.
What Reichert didn’t know was that his prophecy for the clunky sandal was about to get an assist from the unlikely quarter of the Paris catwalk in October 2012, when Phoebe Philo, then of Céline, took a black Arizona, lined it with mink, and put it on the runway. Delirium ensued.
“The truth is nobody controlled what Céline did with our shoes,” admits Reichert, and at the time, Birkenstock wasn’t quite ready to take advantage of the attention — the company was still focused on adding new employees (a number that would eventually exceed 2,000) and changing an archaic, fragmented culture. Philo’s twist brought favorable publicity, but at the time, Birkenstock didn’t even have a sales force, let alone a real marketing and PR operation.
“I don’t give a shit about fashion,” Reichert tells me. “Fashion is, pfffttt, what is fashion? Inditex [owner of Zara] is doing fashion 12 times a year. What is this nonsense?” He continues describing his thought process at the time: “But I know people are hungry for pure things. And there’s a huge crowd of people heavily believing in and loving this brand. And it’s not because of the nice people working there, because there are no nice people. And it’s not because of the marketing, because there’s no marketing. There’s nothing. It must be the product. Because they do everything wrong — everything!” He laughs. “I’ve met so many people who said, ‘Yeah, I tried to call your company in 1983, 1989, and nobody was answering.’ ”
The Unlikely Return of Birkenstock https://www.thecut.com/2018/08/cathy-horyn-on-birkenstocks-unlikely-rise.html
The reality of recycling:
To make matters worse, almost two-thirds of Canada’s waste is produced by the industrial, commercial, institutional, and construction-and-demolition sectors—in everything from factories to office buildings—which are serviced by private waste haulers. Unless they can make a profit selling recyclables, which depends on market prices at the time of sale, there’s little incentive for these haulers to recycle. All of this means that you can put your takeout containers and shredded paper into the office recycling bin, but the company that takes it away is under no legal obligation to recycle it. In Toronto, for example, 72 percent of waste material from apartment and condo buildings goes straight to a landfill.
Residential recycling itself also comes with a significant environmental footprint of its own, especially tied to transportation and carbon emissions. In some circumstances, recycling could actually end up as an environmental liability. “In rural areas you have trucks going half a kilometre between houses picking up recyclables,” Hoornweg says. “It makes no sense.” Once you tally up the emissions associated with picking up products, sorting them at a mrf, and sending a batch to far-flung end markets, it’s not difficult to imagine that it’s sometimes better to send recycling to the dump.
https://thewalrus.ca/why-recycling-doesnt-work/
The writer on Sapiens with some interesting thoughts on what the future holds for us:
It present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspapers or public libraries. Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts.
In contrast, in the 21st century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies.
In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it.
et since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans
More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.
So at 25, you introduce yourself on a dating site as “a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop.” At 35, you say you are “a gender-non-specific person undergoing age- adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before”. At 45, both dating and self-definitions are so passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for you.
Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the first world war. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the 21st century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-extract-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century
For Görlitz is where a high percentage of Birkenstock’s cork-and-leather sandals are made; the company is headquartered near Bonn, and the family that has owned the business since 1774 lives mostly outside Germany.
What Reichert didn’t know was that his prophecy for the clunky sandal was about to get an assist from the unlikely quarter of the Paris catwalk in October 2012, when Phoebe Philo, then of Céline, took a black Arizona, lined it with mink, and put it on the runway. Delirium ensued.
“The truth is nobody controlled what Céline did with our shoes,” admits Reichert, and at the time, Birkenstock wasn’t quite ready to take advantage of the attention — the company was still focused on adding new employees (a number that would eventually exceed 2,000) and changing an archaic, fragmented culture. Philo’s twist brought favorable publicity, but at the time, Birkenstock didn’t even have a sales force, let alone a real marketing and PR operation.
“I don’t give a shit about fashion,” Reichert tells me. “Fashion is, pfffttt, what is fashion? Inditex [owner of Zara] is doing fashion 12 times a year. What is this nonsense?” He continues describing his thought process at the time: “But I know people are hungry for pure things. And there’s a huge crowd of people heavily believing in and loving this brand. And it’s not because of the nice people working there, because there are no nice people. And it’s not because of the marketing, because there’s no marketing. There’s nothing. It must be the product. Because they do everything wrong — everything!” He laughs. “I’ve met so many people who said, ‘Yeah, I tried to call your company in 1983, 1989, and nobody was answering.’ ”
The Unlikely Return of Birkenstock https://www.thecut.com/2018/08/cathy-horyn-on-birkenstocks-unlikely-rise.html
The reality of recycling:
To make matters worse, almost two-thirds of Canada’s waste is produced by the industrial, commercial, institutional, and construction-and-demolition sectors—in everything from factories to office buildings—which are serviced by private waste haulers. Unless they can make a profit selling recyclables, which depends on market prices at the time of sale, there’s little incentive for these haulers to recycle. All of this means that you can put your takeout containers and shredded paper into the office recycling bin, but the company that takes it away is under no legal obligation to recycle it. In Toronto, for example, 72 percent of waste material from apartment and condo buildings goes straight to a landfill.
Residential recycling itself also comes with a significant environmental footprint of its own, especially tied to transportation and carbon emissions. In some circumstances, recycling could actually end up as an environmental liability. “In rural areas you have trucks going half a kilometre between houses picking up recyclables,” Hoornweg says. “It makes no sense.” Once you tally up the emissions associated with picking up products, sorting them at a mrf, and sending a batch to far-flung end markets, it’s not difficult to imagine that it’s sometimes better to send recycling to the dump.
https://thewalrus.ca/why-recycling-doesnt-work/
The writer on Sapiens with some interesting thoughts on what the future holds for us:
It present, too many schools focus on cramming information. In the past this made sense, because information was scarce, and even the slow trickle of existing information was repeatedly blocked by censorship. If you lived, say, in a small provincial town in Mexico in 1800, it was difficult for you to know much about the wider world. There was no radio, television, daily newspapers or public libraries. Even if you were literate and had access to a private library, there was not much to read other than novels and religious tracts.
In contrast, in the 21st century we are flooded by enormous amounts of information, and even the censors don’t try to block it. Instead, they are busy spreading misinformation or distracting us with irrelevancies.
In such a world, the last thing a teacher needs to give her pupils is more information. They already have far too much of it.
et since we have no idea how the world and the job market will look in 2050, we don’t really know what particular skills people will need. We might invest a lot of effort teaching kids how to write in C++ or how to speak Chinese, only to discover that by 2050 AI can code software far better than humans
More broadly, schools should downplay technical skills and emphasise general-purpose life skills. Most important of all will be the ability to deal with change, to learn new things and to preserve your mental balance in unfamiliar situations. In order to keep up with the world of 2050, you will need not merely to invent new ideas and products – you will above all need to reinvent yourself again and again.
So at 25, you introduce yourself on a dating site as “a twenty-five-year-old heterosexual woman who lives in London and works in a fashion shop.” At 35, you say you are “a gender-non-specific person undergoing age- adjustment, whose neocortical activity takes place mainly in the NewCosmos virtual world, and whose life mission is to go where no fashion designer has gone before”. At 45, both dating and self-definitions are so passé. You just wait for an algorithm to find (or create) the perfect match for you.
Unfortunately, teaching kids to embrace the unknown and to keep their mental balance is far more difficult than teaching them an equation in physics or the causes of the first world war. You cannot learn resilience by reading a book or listening to a lecture. The teachers themselves usually lack the mental flexibility that the 21st century demands, for they themselves are the product of the old educational system.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-extract-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century
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