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.

Source: https://growthlab.com/shane-parrish-make-it-a-little-less-about-luck-every-day/

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.

Source: https://www.1843magazine.com/features/morning-glories

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

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.

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.

https://longreads.com/2018/09/17/people-sorting-an-interview-with-personality-brokers-author-merve-emre/

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/

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

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/

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.

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

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

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.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-16/inside-europe-s-struggle-to-build-a-truly-global-tech-giant

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

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

Some things I read recently

On writing a book:

Writing is an art form, books are art, but they exist in a system that relies on readers to exchange money for goods. That money pays a publisher’s rent and electric bill, and the salaries of the often hundreds if not thousands of people they employ to make the books readers buy. And if a book doesn’t make money, it’s very hard to pay those salaries. Publishers take a financial risk on a book, because no one knows how a book is going to sell until it’s on shelves, and very successful authors (your JK Rowlings and James Pattersons) help pay the bills for the less successful books. Publishers certainly publish books they know are not going to make a lot (or any) money, and they do this for the sake of art or history or prestige, or a dozen other reasons. But they can’t do it that often. So, you may have an amazing story, but if there isn’t sufficient evidence that readers will flock to it, you’re not likely to be published. No one deserves to be published just because they completed a book. It’s not “if you write it, they will come.”

https://theoutline.com/post/5541/unconventional-wisdom-you-should-not-write-a-book?zd=2&zi=3bqqqx2d

On a man who turned into a woman - and of course on AI:

“The only reason he talks about this stuff is because it prevents financial analysts from asking tough questions on quarterly calls.” What we really need to worry about is AI-related labour market disruption, not just for factory workers, but for brain workers too. “I think the global professional middle class is about to be blindsided. She cites a recent competition at Columbia University between human lawyers and their artificial counterparts, in which both read a series of non-disclosure agreements with loopholes in them. “The AI found 95 per cent of them, and the humans 88 per cent,” she says. “But the human took 90 minutes to read them. The AI took 22 seconds.” Game, set and match to the robots.

https://www.ft.com/content/3aac2330-8f38-11e8-b639-7680cedcc421

On supply chains: 

Leonardo Bonanni is the founder and CEO of a company called Sourcemap, which aims to help companies map their own supply chains. Bonanni suspects that companies’ inability to visualize their own supply chain is partly a function of SAP’s architecture itself. “It’s funny, because the DNA of software really speaks through,” said Bonanni. “If you look at SAP, the database is still actually written in German. The relations in it are all one-link. They never intended for supply chains to involve so many people, and to be interesting to so many parts of the company.”

This software, however imperfect, is crucial because supply chains are phenomenally complex, even for low-tech goods. A company may have a handle on the factories that manufacture finished products, but what about their suppliers? What about the suppliers’ suppliers? And what about the raw materials?

Supply chains are highly modular by design. Think of the shipping container. It wasn’t revolutionary because it was a box; it was revolutionary because it was a standardized, interchangeable box that could be locked in and transported. It makes globalization possible—it makes global scale possible—because of what it obscures. One doesn’t need to know what’s in the box, just where it needs to go.

https://logicmag.io/04-see-no-evil/

Masa son: 

Son capitalized on the rise of personal computing in the 1980s and bet so heavily on the dot-com boom of the 1990s that he is said to have at one point owned 25% of the Internet. He lost billions in the dot-com bust, but sinking $20 million into Alibaba in 2000 helped revive his fortune. Son is now worth about $15 billion -- and, remarkably, maintains his tremendous appetite for risk and long-term thinking. At a time when most CEOs look no further ahead than the next quarter, Son forges ahead with a 300-year plan for his company.

At the heart of his plan lies the Vision Fund, a $93 billion pool of money that Son intends to use to shape the future for centuries to come.

https://money.cnn.com/interactive/technology/masayoshi-son-profile/index.html

An interview with Peter Thiel: 

The big question is: Will the future of the computer age be decentralized or centralized? Back in the 60s, you had this Star Trek idea of an IBM computer running a planet for thousands of years, where people were happy but unfree. Today, again we are thinking that it is going to be centralized: Big companies, big governments, surveillance states like China. When we started Paypal in 1999, it was exactly the opposite: This vision of a libertarian, anarchistic internet. History tells me that the pendulum has swung back and forth. So, today I would bet on decentralization and on more privacy. I don’t think we are at the end of history and it’s just going to end in the world surveillance state.

You have always been very critical of herd-like behavior. Back in 1995, you wrote a book about the “diversity myth” at universities: People are selected in order to look different, but educated to think in the same way.

Yes, diversity should be more than a group of people that look different and think alike. Intellectual diversity is the kind of diversity we should really value, not just this superficial diversity with some extras such as seen in the Space Canteen in Star Wars.

The advanced technological civilization of the early 21st century is a complicated world where it is not possible for anybody to think through everything for themselves. You cannot be a polymath in quite the way people were in the 18th century enlightenments. You cannot be like Goethe. So there is some need to listen to experts, to defer to other people. And then, there is always the danger of that going too far and people not thinking critically. This happens in spades in Silicon Valley. There is certainly something about it that made it very prone to the dotcom bubble in the nineties or to the cleantech bubble in the last decade.

You were on Donald Trump’s transition team. In which respect is he different than everybody else you’ve met before?
I think it is his extraordinary ability to understand people. If he interviewed you for a job, he would right go to the essence. In the Western world, we are behind layers and layers and layers of political correctness, where we cannot say things, we cannot make judgements about people, we cannot evaluate people, we can’t say this person is better than this person because this or this reason. If you can just cut through this political correctness, that is tremendously valuable and it is hard to understate how much it distorts things.

https://www.weltwoche.ch/ausgaben/2018-29/artikel/en-hypnotische-massenphanomene-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-29-2018.html

The story of poison in food: 
The story of cassava and konzo should not alarm global connoisseurs of tapioca pudding, bamboo shoots, and sweet almonds. It demonstrates that well-nourished, well-educated, and wealthy people generally have very little to fear from eating potentially cyanide-containing food plants. Only a sustained period of consumption of large amounts of inadequately prepared bitter cassava—which only occurs in conjunction with a collection of other disagreeable social and environmental circumstances—causes the disease. In short: only poor people suffer the curse of konzo.
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-curse-of-konzo/

Inspiring optimism from a 24 year old investment advisor who has cancer: 
CML altered my world. The past five months have been the hardest time in my life by far. Each day, one foot at a time, I’m rebuilding my life. Each day I’m getting better at living with cancer. Despite the circumstances I still feel blessed to be where I am today. I feel lucky because it could be so much worse. But I also feel so incredibly bummed out sometimes. I’ve been FEELING a lot for the last few months. Talking about our feelings is a touchy, almost taboo subject. It’s extremely difficult to speak up about how we’re feeling.

Telling people “you’ll be alright” simply isn’t enough. You have to make them believe it. What patients and clients ask of their doctor or advisor will change over time. The relationship is fluid. It’s important for the doctor/advisor to realize this and be able to change with the client. Sometimes the client/patient will want a 30,000 foot view of the situation just to reassure them they’ll be alright. Sometimes the client/patient will want to break down the minutiae.
https://mullooly.net/tims-top-links-8-9-18/13264

Sobering convocation words: 

So: What do I regret? Being poor from time to time? Not really. Working terrible jobs, like “knuckle-puller in a slaughterhouse?” (And don’t even ASK what that entails.) No. I don’t regret that. Skinny-dipping in a river in Sumatra, a little buzzed, and looking up and seeing like 300 monkeys sitting on a pipeline, pooping down into the river, the river in which I was swimming, with my mouth open, naked? And getting deathly ill afterwards, and staying sick for the next seven months? Not so much. Do I regret the occasional humiliation? Like once, playing hockey in front of a big crowd, including this girl I really liked, I somehow managed, while falling and emitting this weird whooping noise, to score on my own goalie, while also sending my stick flying into the crowd, nearly hitting that girl? No. I don’t even regret that.
What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded ... sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.
Or, to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth?
Those who were kindest to you, I bet.http://thecollege.syr.edu/news/2013/george_saunders_convocation.html

On Theranos:

Indeed. Before reading Carreyrou’s book, I had the vague idea that Theranos had some high-tech ideas that didn’t work out, and that they’d covered up their failures in a fraudulent way. The “fraudulent” part seems about right, but it seems that they didn’t have any high-tech ideas at all!

http://andrewgelman.com/2018/08/09/bad-blood-secrets-lies-silicon-valley-startup/

Some things I read recently

On using social media to choose your news/noise platform:

This profusion of informational choice lets me to customize the news and information I consume. There are many ways to do that but the most common way is through social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Facebook and Twitter entertain us, let us keep in touch with friends, learn things we couldn’t have imagined and by friending and following the right people, they let us discover an unending stream of content, a stream we curate for ourselves.

I don’t listen to one news channel. Or even three. Or one newspaper. Or a few magazines. With Twitter and Facebook, I create my own newspaper, my own news channel. I can get the highlights of every network. Every newspaper. Every pundit. Every talking head. Any reporter who does interesting work. This information revolution is an extraordinary achievement.

https://medium.com/@russroberts/i-cant-hear-you-e7a218831f07

What is a bureaucracy?...and it's uses:
A bureaucracy is an automated system of people created to accomplish a goal. It’s a mech suit composed of people. The owner of a bureaucracy, if an owner exists, is the person who can effectively shape the bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are people who are part of a bureaucracy (excluding the owner).

Not all organizations are bureaucracies. Most organizations are mixed — they have both bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic elements.
The Purpose of Bureaucracies

The purpose of a bureaucracy is to save the time of a competent person. Put another way: to save time, some competent people will create a system that is meant to do exactly what they want — nothing more and nothing less. In particular, it’s necessary to create a bureaucracy when you are both (a) trying to do something that you do not have the capacity to do on your own, and (b) unable to find a competent, aligned person to handle the project for you. Bureaucracies ameliorate the problem of talent and alignment scarcity.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/brQwWwZSQbWBFRNvh/how-to-use-bureaucracies

When do TV shows peak:
There are some slight genre-dependent differences: Comedies and dramedies tend to peak 45 percent of the way through their runs, while dramas peak 25 percent of the way through their runs. The average comedy remains within .02 points of its peak for 30 percent of its run, while dramas and dramedies stay in that sweet spot for 20 percent and 10 percent of their runs, respectively. In general, dramas are the most resistant to steep declines, maybe because the sheer need to know what happens next keeps audiences placated even if the plotting and writing aren’t quite as adept as they once were.

https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/7/31/17628494/when-do-tv-shows-peak

Some interesting memories about summer jobs: 
For a city kid with no use for a driver’s license and no experience farming, spending a summer on a tractor harvesting apples was a surprising delight. Who knew I appreciated nature? Not me. Waking up before dawn to drink coffee with the crew, the sweet smell of fruit and dew in the cool morning air which would soon be scorching, gorging on apples, mastering the stick shift, perfecting my reverse, the feeling of camaraderie among workers, it was magical.


In fact, I was tempted to become an agriculture major in college or skip school altogether and just spend forever in the orchards. That didn’t happen—my parents were pretty insistent that farming wasn’t my forte—but the experience taught me that I didn’t yet know myself. I wasn’t just bookish and could be interested in anything, it turns out.

https://qz.com/work/1347123/the-life-changing-skills-you-learn-at-a-summer-job/

On the financial twitter battle ground:
Financial Twitter — like much of Twitter in general — is rife with anonymous voices spewing foul, even hateful language. It can be a dangerous place for many people — and not just women, though #metoo moments regularly happen there.

At a time when even the president of the United States’ tweets contain vicious and false statements, it should not be surprising that the same is true for Financial Twitter — also known as FinTwit — which has its share of blowhards, bullies, and bots.

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b19b6swblfjyvh/Inside-the-Always-Nasty-Frequently-Sexist-and-Often-Litigious-World-of-Financial-Twitter

On next gen batteries:
Carbon-based energy storage has another major advantage over existing technologies. It can actually be used as part of the external structure of the phone. Instead of designing batteries to fit into current phone designs, Voller is preparing for a future of flexible screens and foldable devices, where all our data is pulled from the cloud over 5G, and battery life becomes even more important.

Voller waves his smartphone in the air, bemoaning the shortcomings of lithium-ion that have driven him, and hundreds of others, to join the high-stakes race to reinvent the brilliant but flawed battery. “We’ve all had to evolve strategies to deal with it, whether it’s clip on batteries, or carrying two phones,” he says. “It’s crazy. It shouldn’t be like that.”

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/smartphone-battery-life-lithium-ion-future

On being a mailman:

Delivering the mail gives you a granular insight into America’s growing cultural, political, and wealth divide. North of town, there’s a senior-living mobile home community sitting in the shadow of newly-built eco-friendly condos that sell for half a million dollars. Residents at the condos subscribe to The Atlantic and New Yorker residents in the trailer park a few hundred feet away get People and National Enquirer

Clerks, whose duties include working the front desk helping customers and sorting mail and packages (sometimes overnight), were brutally overworked, often clocking 60- to 70-hour weeks. Many of my coworkers felt trapped: Sure, the job sucked sometimes, but where else can you find a secure job that pays as well?

https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/07/man-of-letters/565979/

Some things I read recently

Aaron Sittig: Then pretty much unheralded and not talked about much, Facebook launched in February of 2004.

Dustin Moskovitz (Zuckerberg's original right-hand man): Back then there was a really common problem that now seems trivial. It was basically impossible to think of a person by name and go and look up their picture. All of the dorms at Harvard had individual directories called face books—some were printed, some were online, and most were only available to the students of that particular dorm. So we decided to create a unified version online and we dubbed it “The Facebook” to differentiate it from the individual ones.

There was something a little rough about MySpace.

Mark Zuckerberg: So MySpace had almost a third of their staff monitoring the pictures that got uploaded for pornography. We hardly ever have any pornography uploaded. The reason is that people use their real names on Facebook.

Adam D’Angelo (Zuckerberg's high school hacking buddy): Real names are really important.

Aaron Sittig: We got this clear early on because of something that was established as a community principle at the Well: You own your own words. And we took it farther than the Well. We always had everything be traceable back to a specific real person.

https://www.wired.com/story/sex-beer-and-coding-inside-facebooks-wild-early-days

Ding Yan Zhong — known to industry insiders as “Mr. Ding” — has managed the flow of fireworks for a decade through the two companies he founded, Shanghai Huayang and Firstrans International.

He has broadened his empire by consolidating power in China, expanding his reach into California and becoming the most important player in fireworks logistics on both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Now, Ding’s control of the fireworks delivery chain is nearly complete, according to two dozen shipping and fireworks executives, more than 40,000 fireworks shipping records, numerous court documents and other sources.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/the-largest-supplier-of-american-fireworks-is-from-china/?utm_term=.9e9cf57676b6

The most important component of good management, good leadership, and good stewardship is making sure that you have diversity of mind. When you recruit young people from different universities—and we generally hire around 400 to 450 young people [a year]—they all can’t come from an Ivy League school. You have to start from the foundation that people come from different experiences, and they have different opportunities. If you don’t interview a diverse group of people from different universities, different state schools, and different parts in the world, you are not going to get diversity of mind. If you hire all business majors, all engineers, or all people who have one field of expertise, you’re going to fall down.

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/talent-management-at-blackrock-a-conversation-with-larry-fink

There are limits to this archenemy motif. Alibaba and Tencent attack the market differently, in ways that have often allowed them to grow without butting heads. Alibaba’s is largely a strategy of buying controlling stakes in businesses that are a fit with its commerce platform; Tencent takes hundreds of minority stakes in an array of businesses to win over partners and gain access to their technology. What’s more, the competition is hardly a zerosum game, thanks to the rapidly expanding Chinese middle class.
Still, the companies can and do play hardball. In an economy in which e-commerce is dominant in ways unthinkable in the U.S., each company stymies the other’s payment service on their main platforms. And when Tencent and Alibaba sign on investment bankers, they reportedly make it a condition that the bankers work exclusively for them. (Many companies impose such restrictions, but they have greater consequences coming from Tencent and Alibaba given that the two also are major venture capital investors and the prohibitions could impinge on work with the companies in which they invest.) Even if the world is big enough for both of them, Tencent and Alibaba increasingly are in conflict. “Until recently, everyone played in their own sandbox,” says Deborah Weinswig, New York–based CEO of the China-focused retail consultancy Coresight Research. “Now the sand is starting to spill over.”

http://fortune.com/longform/alibaba-tencent-china-internet/

HAS THE INTERNET failed? Sitting in his office at Christ Church College,
Oxford, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has his
answer ready: “I wouldn’t say the internet has failed with a capital F, but
it has failed to deliver the positive, constructive society many of us had
hoped for.”
Two decades ago he would have scoffed at the idea that the internet
and the web would do anythingbutmake thisplaneta betterplace. In his
autobiography written in the late 1990s, “Weaving the Web”, he concluded: “The experience of seeing the web take off by the grassroots effort of
thousands gives me tremendous hope that…we can collectively make
our world what we want.”

At the heart of their disenchantment, this special report will argue,

is that the internet has become much more “centralised” (in the tech

crowd’sterminology) than itwaseven ten yearsago. Both in the Westand

in China, the activities this global network of networks makes possible

are dominated by a few giants, from Facebook to Tencent. In his latest

book, “The Square and the Tower”, Niall Ferguson, a historian, explains

that this pattern—a disruptive new networkbeing infiltrated by a new hierarchy—has many historical precedents. Examples range from the invention ofthe printing press to the Industrial Revolution.

Source: Economist June 2018

Some things I read recently - 09/07/2018

Access to management is obviously not easy at FANG. But one of the top value investing firms has invested in Amazon/Tenecent ... is value investing finally changing? 

Source: Sequoia transcript 06/2018

Some interesting things I read recently

The episode hits on exactly what Hoffman, Hilbe, and Nowak describe in their paper. “Donations are never fully anonymous,” they write. “These donations are often revealed to the recipient, the inner circle of friends or fellow do-gooders,” and these “few privy observers, in turn, do not only learn that the donor is generous” but are “also likely to infer that the generosity was not motivated by immediate fame or the desire for recognition from the masses…”—exactly what everyone seemed to figure was true of David, to his chagrin.

What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty, is that it’s “hard to reconcile with standard evolutionary accounts of pro-social behavior,” the researchers write. Donations fall under a form of cooperation called “indirect reciprocity.”

http://nautil.us/blog/larry-david-and-the-game-theory-of-anonymous-donations

On the Model 3 body line on a Tuesday afternoon in early June, everything is still. Tesla Inc. is just coming off a week of downtime during which workers added a new production line, improved ventilation after a fire in the paint shop, and overhauled machines across the factory. But even after the changes, there are kinks to work out.

Suddenly, dozens of robots snap into frenzied action, picking up door panels, welding window pillars, taking measurements, and on and on. This robotic dance is a visceral representation of what Tesla chief executive Elon Musk has dubbed “Alien Dreadnought,” a code name for the factory that evokes an early 20th century warship, but with extraterrestrials.

Tesla says there isn’t any single problem slowing production down now. Instead, the heavy reliance on automation and new production methods have created a galaxy of smaller problems that must each be addressed individually. Musk’s claim is that once the process is tuned, the company will set a new standard for speed, precision, and scalability in manufacturing.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-08/tesla-model-3-photos-of-elon-musk-s-factory-in-fremont

Croatia is about half as rich as Denmark (per capita GDP around $25,000 PPP-adjusted). But Croatia, or at least one very small part of it, used to be much richer: what is now Dubrovnik, and what was then (usually) called Ragusa, was once a little Mediterranean Singapore. In contrast to Denmark, Ragusa was a small trading port and a city-state, and its elite was a trading elite. What kind of elite would one want in a trading port? In an age where long-distance trade was dangerous and uncertain, anyone who controlled a vital route could extract rents.

What this suggests to me is that the value of institutions over endowments has been somewhat overplayed in the recent economic literature. To be sure, ‘institutions’ (in this instance, the characteristics of political elite) can be more or less appropriate to a particular endowment of the factors of production (broadly conceived), and to the historical circumstances. If Britain had not specialised in manufactures in the nineteenth century—and hence begun to import butter from Denmark—then the demand for a butter export industry may not have been sufficient for Denmark’s excellent institutions to matter all that much
http://decompressinghistory.com/post/croatia-vs-denmark/


“The first word out of everybody’s mouths in meetings is, ‘How do we deal with Netflix?’ ” says one longtime TV-industry executive. “‘How do we compete with Netflix? What are they doing?’ ” Disney’s pending purchase of much of 20th Century Fox’s film and TV assets — which has prompted a counterbid by Comcast, parent company of NBCUniversal — is in no small part a reaction to the rise of Netflix.
Mysterious though it may seem, Netflix operates by a simple logic, long understood by such tech behemoths as Facebook and Amazon: Growth begets more growth begets more growth. When Netflix adds more content, it lures new subscribers and gets existing ones to watch more hours of Netflix. As they spend more time watching, the company can collect more data on their viewing habits, allowing it to refine its bets about future programming. “More shows, more watching; more watching, more subs; more subs, more revenue; more revenue, more content,” explains Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer.
Netflix doesn’t necessarily care if you binge-watch an entire season of a show within a couple days of it launching. “We’re not trying to encourage that,” Sarandos says. “The completion of a single episode is a more important trigger. We wouldn’t be looking at, ‘Are people plowing through it in the first weekend?,’ because the number of people who do that is pretty slim.” But one metric I heard repeatedly during my visits to Netflix was 28-day viewership — basically how many people completed a full season of a show within the first four weeks it’s on the service. Sarandos also tells me the company looks at which shows new subscribers watch first: It lets them know if a show is driving people to sign up for Netflix.
“When we are not growing the subscriber base or hours of engagement per subscriber,” he says. “When you start seeing them plateau, then you say there’s a point of diminishing returns on the continued expansion of the library. But we are not seeing any evidence in either metric yet.” Sarandos also points out that while Netflix users are spending more time watching the service than ever, it’s still “a very small portion” of the overall amount of time we spend on our TVs and cell phones. “There’s tons of growth in user screen time on Netflix,” he says. “If you think about the addressable market for Netflix as being paid TV households, it’s relatively small. Everyone with a phone has a screen and access to the internet. That is our addressable market. The world’s taste, and the world’s time, is what we’re after.”

http://www.vulture.com/2018/06/how-netflix-swallowed-tv-industry.html

Linkfest

Best tweet so far: 

decentralize

— KANYE WEST (@kanyewest) April 25, 2018

Starbucks: America’s culture wars come to the café https://t.co/P3Lowm3v4C
RT @borismsilver: @morganhousel @NTmoney At what point can one participate? How much of the value creation occurs in public vs. in private? In private goes to accredited+ only
"Because the returns have moved"
https://t.co/daYozhDogp
"What’s behind the falling number of public companies?"
https://t.co/vzZwKtssWIRT @morganhousel: @borismsilver @NTmoney That's all a separate topic from what began. Blockchain and venture capital are not interchangeable terms. The ability for the masses to partake in the wealth creation of innovation has been around since the 1600s. Should add that I'm not a crypto bear.
RT @Act_tw0: @morganhousel @NTmoney A lot of publicly traded companies are pretty damn innovative & can create wealth for anyone w/ an E*TRADE account if they know where to look 👀 📈
Bloomberg Presents The David Rubenstein Show, Peer to Peer Conversation... https://t.co/5kDAOyVpHT via @YouTube
History with David M. Rubenstein: A Conversation with Drew Gilpin Faust https://t.co/RIqJVqxxkB via @YouTube
Sara Blakely, Founder and CEO, Spanx https://t.co/bunEa9GcUW via @YouTube
RT @HaydenCapital: A Rare Interview with Capital Today's founder, Xu Xin:
https://t.co/SG8PLedwCc(can use Google to translate)
She's an early investor in $JD, $NTES, Wahaha, Three Squirrels, $VIPS, and others. I took some notes, & thought others may find it useful. Notes are attached. https://t.co/UB4PjrAjAX
RT @pierpont_morgan: Coup attempt in Saudi Arabia?
Palantir Knows Everything About You https://t.co/RJmZHDqqIC
Germany and Immigration: The Changing Face of the Country - SPIEGEL ONLINE - International https://t.co/x7QmiW7JUe
Don’t Think like A Millionaire, Act Like A Billionaire - The Big Picture https://t.co/PXQPMxmAOQ
Hugh Hendry’s Life After Hedge Funds | Institutional Investor https://t.co/AOuXS6p2hr
OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world — then it all went wrong - The Verge https://t.co/gf9IpXC2rj
Humans, Gods and Technology - VPRO documentary - 2017 https://t.co/EtpKuWPDtq via @YouTube
10 Tips from the Master of Impro! | Actors & Performers https://t.co/SvXbCNgawZ
Open, Closed, and Privacy https://t.co/75Gof9SaXv via @stratechery
The Ridiculous Saga Of Lance Armstrong, The Cheater Who Became An Enemy Of The State https://t.co/ztglZSgUK4

The Crypto Landscape with Arianna Simpson [Invest Like the Best Ep. 84] - @millennial_inv https://t.co/94gGfd9bU6

Some fascinating things I read last week

"I’m torn on how to approach the idea of luck. I’m the first to admit that I am one of the luckiest people on the planet. To be born into a prosperous American family in 1960 with smart parents is to start life on third base. The odds against my very existence are astronomical."

Source: https://twitter.com/jposhaughnessy/status/974461199097171968

Recently asked, “What are the ten biggest ideas that changed your life?” Great/hard question. Here's where I landed... "1) Imago Dei: Every person is inherently valuable independent of behavior and beliefs. Everyone matters. Treat people accordingly, without exception."
contd...

Source: https://twitter.com/BrentBeshore/status/970661400786870272

"Since October, a mysterious flying object has been seen moving through the skies over the South Island of New Zealand. It looks like a cross between a small plane and a drone, with a series of small rotor blades along each wing that allow it to take off like a helicopter and then fly like a plane. To those on the ground, it has always been unclear whether there was a pilot aboard."

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/business/dealbook/flying-taxis-larry-page.html

Startup investors have extraordinary incentives for correcting obsolete beliefs. If they can realize before other investors that some apparently unpromising startup isn't, they can make a huge amount of money. But the incentives are more than just financial. Investors' opinions are explicitly tested: startups come to them and they have to say yes or no, and then, fairly quickly, they learn whether they guessed right. The investors who say no to a Google (and there were several) will remember it for the rest of their lives.

Anyone who must in some sense bet on ideas rather than merely commenting on them has similar incentives. Which means anyone who wants such incentives can have them, by turning their comments into bets: if you write about a topic in some fairly durable and public form, you'll find you worry much more about getting things right than most people would in a casual conversation.

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/ecw.html

Many of the park’s managers, primarily Sri Lankans brought in to impart the efficiencies achieved in their country’s sweatshops, would view this comment as epitomizing one of their main complaints: Ethiopia’s history hasn’t equipped its citizens for the rigors of industry. “Ethiopia has never been colonized,” says David Müller, who moved from Sri Lanka (his name comes from his German father) to be the human resources manager for Hela-Indochine, a joint Chinese-Sri Lankan apparel venture in one of the park’s sheds. “There’s a sense of pride about that, and a little pushback comes with it.”

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-02/china-is-turning-ethiopia-into-a-giant-fast-fashion-factory