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
