Blog AF

For 4th of July weekend Hannah and I took a last minute backpacking trip to Hood Mountain, right on the border of Napa and Sonoma Counties. We had been looking for campsite permits in a bunch of different parks during the weeks leading up to the long weekend, but nothing seemed to open up. Luckily, Sonoma regional parks had had their reservation system closed due to COVID, and they opened it the morning of the 2nd. After a stressful morning trying to book something, we found this site.

This was our first time leaving SF since the shelter-in-place order started, and it was great to disconnect almost completely. Except for a couple of let’s check Alltrails moments, and a short call to my dad to wish him happy birthday, my phone was on airplane mode the whole time. More...

• While Statues Sleep
  Thomas Laqueur - London Review of Books
  

  This essay, reviewing a book comparing the histories of racism and reparations between Germany and the US was worth the 7200 words. “Coming​ to terms with the past in the United States is a different temporal matter. At issue is the entire national past.”

• Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism (2006)
  Jaron Lanier - Edge.org
  

  An oddly prescient text from Lanier. It predicted the rise of an entity that’d fill the hole of Facebook as the ultimate bottleneck for our attention online, the devolution of the media industry into either more extreme or more average versions of its old self, and the fact that Wikipedia would become a central asset in the battle to train artificial intelligence models.

• Making Sense of Neoliberalism
  Quinn Slobodian - Harvard University Press
  

  An essay that tries to explain a complex perspective of neoliberal globalism, arguing that the narrative of “free trade” is in fact false, as there is an extremely opaque set of laws that regulate international markets. Further, the author argues that the global institutions that set the rules are self-perpetuating, and not really the bearers of deregulation that they pretend to be. Now I want to read Slobodian’s book Globalists.

• You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument
  Caroline Randall Williams - The New York Times
  

  A tough read, and a reminder that the horrors of slavery are recent - a few generations away.

• What comes after Zoom?
  Benedict Evans
  

  An interesting analogy based on the idea that Zoom “feels 1.0.” It’s not new technology, it’s the one people use though. That makes it similar to Skype or Dropbox. Once video is ubiquitous, who will ask new interesting questions and build products around them? Probably not Zoom.

• How the Virus Won
  Derek Watkins, Josh Holder, James Glanz, Weiyi Cai, Benedict Carey and Jeremy White - The New York Times
  

  A sadly cool visualization of the spread of COVID across the US, using graph analysis and genetic data to trace back the contagion.

• The shadow org chart
  Henry Ward - Medium
  

  Organizational behavior usually assumes the perspective that the reader is at the top of the org chart, but that is not the case. I’ve been looking for content that studies bottom up institutional/corporate change, and found this one in the process. If you have any recommendations on this, I’d love to hear them.

• What’s Gotten Into the Price of Cheese?
  Matt Phillips - The New York Times
  

  I don’t understand commodities markets at all, so even superficial reads like this one, on the effect of the current crisis on cheese prices, seem interesting.

• Why the original laissez-faire economists loved slavery
  Blake Smith - Aeon
  

  I always knew of the link between capitalism and slavery, but a recent sad realization is that the origin of “free trade” is contradictorily about the free trade in human slaves. This article came up while looking for more sources after reading about this idea in Jill Lepore’s These Truths. The fact that the phrase is rooted in something I see as morally wrong doesn’t really mean that I disagree with its conclusions - I still think free trade on average achieves more efficient solutions than top down approaches.

• Banks are slow to increase rates on savings accounts, but quick to reduce them
  J.P. Koning - Moneyness
  

  On how banks interests rates are “downwards-flexible and upwards-sticky,” and how that means we’re getting screwed. The title says it all.

• What does 👁👄👁 mean? Well...
  Josh Constine
  

  The internet went crazy in the past few days over what people were speculating to be a new gen-Z focused social network app. It hit #1 on Product Hunt using a wacky website with just a web-form. Turns out that it was not a tech thing at all, but instead a guerilla marketing campaign to push people to donate to civil rights! It was what it was.

• On the effect of reducing H1B visas on new student enrollment into US schools.
  Bill Kerr - Twitter
  

  I’m obviously biased on this topic, as a former F1 and H1B holder, but the fact is that even if you believe in the zero-sum immigration story, large parts of the US economy depends on immigrants. Education is one of the most contingent markets.

• Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
  Anfractuosity
  

  Random cool thing of the day.

• NYT Is Threatening My Safety By Revealing My Real Name, So I Am Deleting The Blog
  Scott Alexander - Slate Star Codex
  

  There is real value to pseudonimity, and Slate Star Codex is one of those treasured corners of the internet that wouldn’t exist without it. There are times when the value created for society by exposing personal information can eclipse personal losses. Not knowing the details behind how the NYT makes decisions about anonimity, nor what this story was actually supposed to be about in the first place, this doesn’t seem to be one of those times. The essay above clearly lays out a good set of reasons why Alexander should remain pseudonymous. Unsurprisingly, the author makes a good case for himself. I’m not more than an occasional SSC reader, but there’s been a lot of noise about this incident in my circles online recently, and it’s hard to see how the NYT could justify this. Now the onus is on the NYT to decide whether whatever story they were planning to write is actually worth publishing, outweighing the logic presented by Alexander and backed by a wide array of very-online-people.

• Living in own ideology
  Branko Milanovic - globalinequality
  

  Sometimes it’s hard to realize how much we’re shaped by our own environment, and how we seldom question why we think the way we do - what the hell is water, etc, etc. Using examples from his youth in Yugoslavia, his time at the World Bank, and the moment in history we’re living now, Milanovic tries to explain that ideology is invisble. We assume it to be obvious, and call it “common sense,” brushing it away.

• The most remarkable product engineering over time in history.
  Steven Sinofsky - Twitter
  

  In which Sinofsky, a long time Microsoft executive, explains what in his eyes is special about Apple in the context of the recent WWDC announcements.

• Wiener Schnitzel vs Cotoletta alla Milanese
  The Heart Thrills
  

  Food history, particularly as it pertains to the dishes that are usually associated with a specific group of people, or a country, is a fascinating field of study. After tweeting about making my mom’s milanesas, and how the recipe was originally an import into Latin America that came with my German grandma, my friend Raffaele Colella pointed me to this piece on the origins of the dish.

• The Death of Engagement
  Orville Schell - The Wire China
  

  Great weekend long read, on “…two countries that are no longer divided just by trade issues, but by a far wider set of discontinuities and contradictions that are made more irreconcilable by our two opposing political systems and value sets.” Set aside an hour if you want to read this, because every couple of sentences can send you through a different Wikipedia rabbit hole.

• Yuppie Fishtanks: YIMBYism explained without "supply and demand"
  Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  

  This piece came up a few months ago while talking to one of my coworkers about San Francisco housing. For some reason San Francisco progressives (aka, conservatives) are allergic to the basic notion of supply and demand. Here, Noah explains a few reasons why the YIMBY solution should go beyond just “build more market rate housing.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite stop himself short of using supply and demand in his explanation.

• Antifragility
  Alex Danco
  

  I wish this article used something other than COVID to explain such an interesting concept, and I also wish it didn’t end on such an unfounded navel-gazing note, but Danco does a great job of explaining antifragility, so here we are. I first read Taleb’s book on this topic back in 2013, and I think it’s due for a re-read.

• Say goodbye to the information age: it’s all about reputation now
  Gloria Origgi - Aeon
  

  An essay on similar ideas to Ben Thompson’s recent pieces on zero trust information but perhaps more grounded in theory. Towards the end, the author quotes Hayek, saying that “civilisation rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess.” Today, having the capacity to figure out which knowledge comes from a trustworthy source and which doesn’t is more important than ever.

• Why Indian companies should take on different projects than competing Valley companies - an application of Cobb-Douglas
  Chris Stucchio
  

  I probably learned about the Cobb-Douglas model a couple of lectures into my economics degree. In one short essay, Stucchio explained more about why it matters than any of my micro professors did.

• The End of OS X
  Ben Thompson - Stratechery
  

  A bit of history. Now that we’re finally on macOS 11.0, let’s look at the operating system’s roots and heritage, to predict where it could be going.

It’s been a while since the last one of these, so here I am, dropping ~200 links on you, hoping that at least one or two seem interesting. It’s a very non-exhaustive list of interesting stuff I’ve read/listened to since early 2019, but I tried to focus on evergreen content. Continue reading...