Blog AF

• Here Comes The Downturn
  Jon Evans - Techcrunch
  

  Merry christmas, shit hit the fan.

• How China’s Rulers Control Society: Opportunity, Nationalism, Fear
  Amy Qin and Javier C. Hernández - The New York Times
  

  Another piece in this great series on China by the Times. There’s so much packed in here and in the rest of the series that I don’t even know what to highlight. Just go read it.

• On-Chain versus Off-Chain Computation, Turing Completeness and Zero Knowledge Proofs
  Albert Wenger - Continuations
  

  In this piece, Albert explains an unresolved with smart contracts. He asks, “will a new smart contract cause any existing smart contract to misbehave?” This is a problem I hadn’t thought about until now, and it made me wonder, what are some blockchain projects trying to solve for this?

• Central Planning as Overfitting
  Vitalik Buterin and E. Glen Weyl - RadicalxChange
  

  There are many reasons to dislike central planning. Most people arguing against it usually point to the economic calculation problem and the fact that even if the required data could be collated, which is on its own impossible, we wouldn’t have the compute power to make optimal decisions, so instead we should offload this process to markets. In this piece, Buterin and Weyl make an analogy to a common failure mode in statistically inferred systems (not necessarily machine learned) that is even easier to accept. I had not thought about it before, and found it very insightful. In short, they argue that systems with simpler designs, particularly those with less knobs for bureaucrats to fiddle with, are better. Our experience of highly complex systems don’t generalize well, so we should aim for less parameters to tune. This in turn also has the advantage of making systems less prone to corruption, since it is harder for the person behind the wheel to hide their actions behind the complex interaction effects of the system. Lastly, they discuss the differences between simple and familiar systems, and how a lot of the structures that organize our lives are actually quite complicated, but we’re used to them. You can consider the essay a proposal to apply Occam’s razor to political economy.

• FOSS is free as in toilet
  Geoffroy Couprie - Unhandled Expression
  

  A play on the usual “free as in beer” of open source software, denouncing the tragedy of the commons implied by the organization system as it is today. “Let’s own up to the absurdity of talking about a personal freedom that depends mainly on hidden people working for free.”

• Thinking Ahead To 2019
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  It is interesting to think about how tech IPOs will interact with the bear market of the past few weeks. Here Fred argues that it’s about time for the private and public markets to sync up once again, and that the startup sector is well positioned to make things work. I’m not so sure.

• Messy desks and benign neglect allow ideas to grow
  Tim Harford
  

  “Neglect is undervalued” - a good short piece. This idea applies to family life, to office productivity, and even urban design. If a space is too controlled, there’s no room for emergent behavior.

• Do I Deserve What I Have?
  Russ Roberts
  

  Isn’t redistribution more just/fair than our current system? What kind of perverse incentives does it introduce? How do we avoid free-loading? And how do we make sure that redistributive taxation doesn’t deter innovation and entrepreneurship? As usual, Russ does a good job of asking the big questions and answering them smartly, with simple words. Don’t miss out on Part II, while we wait for the third installment.

• "When You Get That Wealthy, You Start to Buy Your Own Bullshit": The Miseducation of Sheryl Sandberg
  Duff McDonald - Vanity Fair
  

  A strong critique of the cult of the MBA. This is not really about Sandberg, who sadly is just the scapegoat, but about the ethics of business, and the problems that arise from the antinomy of objective profit-seeking and subjective value-judgement. The author blames the great man theory as rehashed by HBS for many of the woes of the industry. I disagree with a lot of what’s said here. In the end nothing gets done without someone making decisions, and I don’t think the case method pretends to have The One Objectively Correct Answer, but it’s good to think about how respected institutions can improve.

• Facebook, Dynamite, Uber, Bombs, and You.
  Lana Brindley
  

  “How could I use this product to do harm? […] Can I use this platform, this API, this plugin, this app, this feature to do something that, as reasonable moral human beings, we feel a little uncomfortable about?” These questions matter. The author’s point is these things shouldn’t exist, but instead that there are trade-offs in building them. We should think more about trade-offs.

• The Architecture Interview
  Susan Fowler
  

  I’ve been interviewing a lot of people, and a few weeks ago I was asked to cover architecture for the first time. I had never built a distributed system until I started working at Apple. Sure, I’d used Heroku with a Redis instance and a Postgres DB, but all of that was totally abstracted away from me. Reading this was an eye-opener as to how much I’ve learned in the past few years, and it made me reflect on some of the interviews I had while switching teams - even two years ago I already felt skilled at systems design, and that experience is rare. Working at a place like Apple can really distort your perception of what’s normal.

• The Anti-Bill Gates
  Adam O’Neal - The Wall Street Journal
  

  I first learned about William Easterly when one of my econ professors handed me his book, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics. I read that a few years ago, and by now have forgotten many of its anecdotes, but its key point resonated with me and shaped a lot of my intuition behind economics. Essentially, Easterly shows that the classic top-down technocratic solutions that make up foreign aid tend to backfire in unexpected ways because they’re full of perverse incentives for businesses, bureaucrats, and individuals alike. The headline, and part of the article, opposes his views to those of Bill Gates which is gimmicky and click-baity, but the content is substantial. For a deeper dive into Easterly’s thought, check out his Econtalk episodes, or obviously check out his actual work EQG is a pretty easy read.

• Decentralized Identity Trilemma
  Maciek Laskus - maciek.blog
  

  Your decentralized system can allow for (1) Self-sovereignty, (2) Privacy-preservation, (3) Sybil-resistance. Pick two.

• “Janesville” and the Costs of American Optimism
  Joshua Rothman - The New Yorker
  

  I read this because Sean posted about it on Twitter. Turns out his family comes from there, which I didn’t know until after I read the article and told him I was adding this to my to-read pile. I have a very hard time understanding company towns. This book will be a good start.

• Anywheres vs Somewheres: the split that made Brexit inevitable
  Andrew Marr - New Statesman
  

  I don’t really know much about Brexit, but this divide between “any-wheres” and “some-wheres” is an interesting one. For a while, I’ve been making a similar argument about the cosmopolitan urban elites vs secluded rural communities elsewhere in the world.

• The Yoda of Silicon Valley
  Siobhan Roberts - The New York Times
  

  I never got into the Knuth cult, I have not read his books, and don’t pretend to know much about his research, but I know he’s a highly influential figure who changed the field of computer scince again and again in the last ~60 years. Reading about him, and how he spends his time these days was fascinating.

• China as No. 1 Economy to Reap Benefits That Once Flowed to U.S.
  Noah Smith - Bloomberg
  

  Here, Noah points out what has been clear to many for a while: China is already the main world power, and the trend says that’s not gonna change. Still wrapping my head around the obvious implications & struggling to understand 2nd/3rd order effects. It made me think of this piece by Brian Brooks, the chief legal officer of Coinbase. If the replacement of the USD as the world reserve currency is a real worry near-term, it would be a good strategy for the US to push for a non-sovereign-backed currency instead of ceding the position to China. It’s like a kid, who knowing he’s lost the game, grabs the ball and takes it home with him early.

• GE Powered the American Century—Then It Burned Out
  Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann - The Wall Street Journal
  

  This ~12k word story of the downfall of GE is crazy. I’m sure someone has studied it well, but don’t conglomerates go totally in the opposite direction of Coasian theory of the firm? Odd that the paper it comes from was written in the golden era of conglomerates. The section on GE Capital overtaking the industrial “real economy” branch of GE has a lot of echoes of Braeburn Capital. Odd to think of the financialization of industrial giants.

• I Used Gmail Auto-Complete, and Now I Know I’m Worthless
  Derek Thompson - The Atlantic
  

  Perhaps I’m too much of a cynic, but I welcome these little time saving technologies. They help me more than they make me doubt my humanity. Thompson says near the end that “to see these technologies in action is to be confronted with the fact that we are not so very special or unique.” Good, someone had to break it to us.

• Bibi Was Right
  Ben Judah - The Atlantic
  

  I used to follow Israeli politics quite closely, and Judah’s reflections here echo a lot of my own opinions. I remember grasping, as a 15 or 16 year old, for the first time grasping that Israel can’t be both democratic and Jewish in the long run, and how that realization changed so much of my world view. The world is going in a strange direction.

• The Itsy-Bitsy, Teenie-Weenie, Very Litigious Kiini Bikini
  Katherine Rosman - The New York Times
  

  At first glance, this did not seem interesting at all. I only read it because several people I respect brought it up on Twitter as a great read, and it was! TL;DR this is a crazy story about a turkish woman who started a fashion company that sold a ton of really high end bikinis, then a bunch of companies like Victorias Secret and Neiman Marcus started copying her, so she sued them over it. In the end, she settled with VS, but it turns out she had copied the design herself from a woman in Brazil who sells bikinis at the beach, and there’s a whole legal shit-show about what copyright is supposed to be surrounding this case. Super interesting.

• What Is Glitter?
  Caity Weaver - The New York Times
  

  This industry seems unnecessarily secretive, but this piece was pretty fun. It’s good science writing, although, I have to say, the self-deprecating tone felt a bit out of place for the NYT. I had never really thought about how glitter is made, and had always assumed it was some kind of shredded/pulverized metal. I guess it makes sense that it’s mainly plastic, since that’s much cheaper, but, again, I’d never thought of it.

• The World through the Eyes of the US
  Russell Goldenberg - The Pudding
  

  A really simple visualization that says a lot. The author combed through 741,576 section front headlines since 1900, looking for which country got the most mentions in any given month. It’s pretty amazing how much attention Britain was given early on, and how much reporting about wars takes up the front page. Germany and then the Axis take over during the world wars, then there’s Russia during the cold war, followed Vietnam and Iraq. The fact that China takes up so much of the last ten years is also telling. This is a great project, I just wish the articles were linked, too.

• Marchel (Podcast)
  Heavyweight
  

  Three seasons in, and I still don’t know how to describe Heavyweight. Jonathan Goldstein somehow manages to create amazing stories where I can initially see none. This time around, he tracks down the single guy who blew it during the filming of Russian Ark, an experimental single-shot full-length movie I had never heard of.

• Negative Mount Pleasant (Podcast)
  Sruthi Pinnamaneni - Reply All
  

  An unusually political and not very internetty episode for this show, but still a very interesting listen about the interactions between local governments and corporations. It pairs nicely with this Planet Money episode about Amazon and NYC.

• Ancient Dreams of Technology, Gods & Robots (Podcast)
  Adrienne Mayor and Hanne Tidnam - a16z
  

  A fun conversation about how humans thought about technology thousands of years ago, and how little some things have changed. I had never heard about Talos and especially liked that part of the podcast.

• Building Crypto, from Vision to Reality (Podcast)
  Brian Armstrong, Chris Dixon, and Sonal Chokshi - a16z
  

  I really like the idea of cryptography enabling the “building blocks” style tech that Web 2.0 companies had promised many years ago. Today, no one wants to build on top of other people’s platforms, because historically, platforms end up screweing developers - just ask developers who built on top of Twitter. Crypto might finally lay out the right kinds of incentives, and lead us to a place where tiny services can actually ride on others’ rails. It’s still early days…

• Building Picks and Shovels (Podcast)
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Hunter Walk - Invest Like the Best
  

  This was one of the most interesting episodes of Patrick’s podcast recently. Origin stories are always cool, but especially so when they’re so eclectic. Learning a bit about the decisions behind 2nd Life’s and YouTube’s early economies was fun, but what I found most insightful (by far!) was “is it a value or is it a tactic?” towards the end of the episode. We need to remember why we do the things we do.

• A Computer of One’s Own - Pioneers of the Computing Age
  Florencia Grattarola, Sebastian Navas, and Alvaro Videla - Medium
  

  This isn’t a link to a single article, but to 24. Through this advent calendar, these three decided to tell the stories of 24 women who, as they explain, “made today’s computing industry as amazing as it is.” The whole set is awesome, but I especially enjoyed reading about Kathleen Booth and Wendy Carlos.

• Poland in the 80 Through the Lens of French/Swiss Photographer Bruno Barbey
  Bruno Barbey - Imgur
  

  This set of photos from Poland in the 80’s is just 👌 Have you seen other similar photo sets that capture a culture at a single point in time? I’d love to see them!

A few weeks ago, Hannah had to go to Hawaii for work, and asked if I wanted to tag along. The tickets were cheap, so I said why not! I had low expectations, beacuse how much better could the beaches be than the ones I grew up going to in Costa Rica? I’d say they are different enough, and cool in orthogonal directions - the cultural and historical context are totally different. More...

• The Land That Failed to Fail
  Philip P. Pan - The New York Times
  

  This is the first epic in a series about China that the NYT is working on. It is a good overview of how the Chinese government has switched from being a closed-in communist anti-market regime to an expansionist communist but market driven regime. The tone is a bit too positive for my taste, as it brushes away the clearly autocratic/totalitarian tendencies of the Chinese system, but the content is well put together, and I’m sure they will touch on these in one of the upcoming pieces. Make sure to see the appendix articles, too.

• Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck
  Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen - The Atlantic
  

  As I read this wonderful piece I kept thinking of Robert Gordon. Unsurprisingly, the authors invoke Gordon’s pessimistic headwind thesis but, unlike him, Nielsen and Collison are optimistic, demanding “large-scale institutional response” to a problem they see as solvable. The thing is, progress is non-linear. Most science isn’t worth the time and effort invested in discovering it. I was a bit bummed out that the domain they are hosting their appendix at (http://scientificreturns.org) is empty. I was excited to click around and learn more about their position, and hoping to find proposals they were bringing to the table. I assume they have more than just this op-ed up their sleeves, so I’m looking forward to hearing more.

• On the constancy of the rate of GDP growth
  José Luis Ricón - Nintil
  

  An in-depth look at why GDP grows the way it does. This post decomposes growth into many components, and ultimately ties it down to how many people can use a bounded pool of knowledge at any given time, and how we can extract more of that knowledge to put it to use.

• Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea
  David Streitfeld - The New York Times
  

  Somehow I’d missed this NYT profile of Lina Khan, and her work on antitrust, from this past September. It’s easy to draw parallels between her questioning the meaning of consumer welfare & Mariana Mazzucato’s questioning the meaning of value. We need to rethink the basics.

• No Straight Lines
  Alvaro Videla - Medium
  

  In this short piece, Alvaro questions the modern eurocentric view that cartesian straight lines are good, while complex illegible curves are not. We have a learned set of ideas of what things should look like, and that knowledge is a lens through which we view other societies. When at first sight a system doesn’t fit nicely with our views, it is easy to dismiss it as wrong - our first reaction is to impose our accepted truth on top of it. Clearly our way of doing things is better. Whether we’re discussing urban planning or software engineering, people are often trigger-happy and ready to raze down effective solutions layered by history, enacting our own abstractions to provide legibility at the cost of actual efficiency. Without knowing it, he was channeling Seeing Like a State.

• The Hottest Trend in American Literature Isn’t From the U.S.
  Liesl Schillinger - The Atlantic
  

  I’ve always hated reading translations. It is really surprising that mainstream USians have pushed back on this for so long.

• Superstar Firms and Cities
  Tim Taylor - Conversable Economist
  

  Power laws are real, and they are everywhere. Of ~6k firms making $1B+ in revenue globally, the top 1% creates 36% of all profits, middle 80% record near-zero profits, Bottom 10% destroys as much value as the top 10% creates. Similarly, out the top 50 cities host 8% of the global population and represent 21% of world GDP, translating into a GDP/capita that’s 45% larger than their peers. The dynamics that lead to this are not studied enough.

• Can Democrats Save Capitalism?
  Noah Smith - Bloomberg View
  

  In this essay, Noah points out two possible paths for the Democrats: social democracy and corporatism. Either we want the state to take up a larger role in people’s welfare, or we want companies to do so. There’s a clear tension between the two. Honestly, I’d like to think of a third path.

• There is a fine line between stupid and clever
  Tim Harford
  

  Recently, with the turmoil in markets in the US and abroad, I’ve been thinking a lot about personal finance, and ways to improve my lot. The question of whether one should invest as soon as cash is available with each paycheck (ie, cost averaging over time) or invest in a lump sum when some event occurs (ie, a simple momentum play, or a market drop) is deeply controversial. I’ve been cost averaging for a while, but the longer I do it the more I think I’m doing it wrong.

• Want a mentor? Stop asking for one.
  Bethany Crystal - Hacker Noon
  

  People want to help, you just need to make it easy for them to do so. I have been lucky over the years to have naturally found mentorship in family members and friends alike, but the kind of specific pointed requests for advice that Bethany recommends here seem like an art that I should spend time perfecting. If I weren’t at Apple, I’d probably make a bigger effort to tell people about what I’m working on, and what I’m struggling with on a day to day basis.

• What Happens When A Founder Is Fully Vested?
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  While I’ve thought a lot about incentives in startups, I had never thought of the kinds of conflicts that arise when a founder fully vests an initial grant. The fact that something like this can trigger a bigger conversation seems especially mis-understood.

• Pivot or Fail?
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  The fact that some “huge successes are the results of pivots” does not mean that all pivots are successful. I agree with Fred that in most cases, hard pivots are a bad idea. There’s probably enough data around to calculate whether P(success | pivot) > P(success).

• Engineers Shouldn’t Write ETL: A Guide to Building a High Functioning Data Science Department
  Jeff Magnusson - Stitch Fix
  

  This is a topic that I’ve been thinking a lot about at work, given the growth of my team and the trajectory that we’re following as a data platform to other teams within the company. I can’t say much, but I’m glad other people have thought about these problems before.

• Back When Sears Made Black Customers a Priority
  Lauretta Charlton - The New York Times
  

  You can trace all sorts of parallels between Sears and Amazon. This is one I hadn’t heard about before, but it is interesting how sometimes unrestricted capitalism and its tunnel vision can lead to unexpected good outcomes. Having access to catalogue shopping meant that you had access to products you otherwise were not able to obtain. The capitalist machine was just catering to the market. Another example, technology meant to reduce friction for everyone can disproportionately ease the experience of shopping for those who are usually targeted as potential thieves.

• Streetscapes Mozart, Marx and a Dictator
  Kai Biermann, Paul Blickle, Astrid Geisler, Flavio Gortana, Lennart Hildebrandt, Andreas Loos, Fabian Mohr, Karsten Polke-Majewski, Alexa Steinbrück, Julian Stahnke and Sascha Venohr. Translation by Charles Hawley and Daryl Lindsey - Zeit Online
  

  Language, geography, history, and identity are deeply tied together. Here’s an awesome visualization from Germany

• The Snapchat Thief
  Reply All (Podcast)
  

  The internet is scary. I have multiple factor auth in most sites, and somewhat understand the intricacies of phone spoofing. My mom does not, and most of my non-techie friends don’t either. This is a problem we have to solve via easy to use products that abstract away all this complexity, or we’ll have to pay for it later on.

• War of the Worlds
  Radiolab (Podcast)
  

  Fake news! The problem is that people are gullible, and that we don’t question what we see and hear, not that we are presented with false information. This episode is a good case study with a couple of extreme historical examples, but for a wider overview on the topic you can also check out Sam Harris interviewing Matt Taibbi for his podcast

• The Seattle Experiment
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  In the US, you need to have money to have a voice in an election. What if we helped people attain that voice? Well, it’s a hard design problem. Seattle tried it, and for the most part flopped. This is an interesting idea worth exploring, and I hope other local experiments expand on it.

• Sharing, Transaction Costs, and Tomorrow 3.0
  Russ Roberts and Michael Munger - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  An interesting conversation on the sharing economy, and the value of platforms, from the ancient souks of the middle east to the present day gig economy. A lot of the dynamics behind these systems can be explained as ways of lowering transaction costs.

• Quant in Private Markets
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Ryan Caldbeck - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  What kind of analyses can we apply to private brands to try and pick out winners? Caldbeck has been doing this for years, and has great insight into what signals are worth looking for.

• Esoteric Credit
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Ali Hamed, Brian Harwitt and Marc Porzecanski (CoVenture) - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  The previous episode with CoVentue’s Ali Hamed was great, so I had very high expectations for this one, too. It did not disappoint, and reminded me of how little I actually know about the mechanics of credit, even though I interened in two different credit-related fintech startups.

• On November 26th, a mole will land on Mars.
  Matthew Inman - The Oatmeal
  

  The usual blend of humor and science that you’d expect from the Oatmeal. Somehow I had missed that InSight was coming.

I guess this is what happens when I don’t share what I’ve been listening to in over two months. Don’t miss out on the counterpart post, which is just links to some of the best articles I’ve read recently.

• How I Got Into College
  This American Life (Podcast)
  

  Michael Lewis tells an amazing about immigration, education, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and how they shape who we are in very unexpected ways. Just listen.

• Let Me Count the Ways
  This American Life (Podcast)
  

  Sharing this one mostly because I’m pissed off about the dumb position that the US is taking on immigration, and the small but effective ways in which the government is curtailing immigration accross the board through its bureaucracy. These changes to the rules are affecting good people, like those who try to follow the rules to enter the US legally, many of whom I know personally, and depending on the luck of the draw might also include me in a few months. 🎉

• Post No Evil
  Radiolab (Podcast)
  

  This episode makes a great point about privilege being geographically bound, which is a recurring topic for me. We can’t agree on values globally, as we don’t all have the same preferences/views. We can’t expect FB (or other companies!) to police that. We can’t make FB, Twitter, or any other company the arbiters of morality globally with a single set of rules. A company can pick what to censor according to one set of beliefs, to be applied equally, or it can respect local belief systems. Since that’s a choice, A company can’t be neutral.

• Building Something People Want to Buy
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Andy Rachleff - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  This another one of those older episodes I decided to go back and revisit. The stories of Benchmark and Wealthfront are interesting on their own, but Rachleff’s experiences running both are also full of great advice for entrepreneurs.

• What You Learn About Business After 12,000 Deals Reviewed, 1,500 Deep Dives, 125 Site Visits, and 7 Portfolio Companies
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Brent Beshore - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  This interview is packed with lots of interesting tidbits about businesses that I am not exposed to, from property management to pet crematoria (yup you read that right). The strategies behind these companies are interesting in and of themselves, but thinking about them in aggregate as part of a fund and ensuring, for example, that there are enough cyclical and counter cyclical businesses in the mix made the conversation for me.

• The Bitcoin Standard
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Saifedean Ammous - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  Ammous is an engaging thinker, and the ideas he pushes are compelling. Hearing economists discuss bitcoin and cryptocurrency from a historical perspective is always more interesting to me than the usual everything is awesome techno-utopic stories pushed by engineers and entrepreneurs. Thinking of crypto from the point of view of monetary policy throughout history is way more interesting than thinking about what role blockchains play right now.

• Crowdsourcing Predictive Models
  Patrick O'Shaughnessy and Richard Craib - Invest Like the Best (Podcast)
  

  I’ve talked about Numerai here in the past, and on my other non-podcast post this week I shared their most recent product. Craib is on to something, and this conversation with Patrick is a great showcase of why what they’re trying to build makes sense in the long run.

• Crypto Security Tokens
  Ted Seides and Stephen McKeon - Capital Allocators (Podcast)
  

  I had never heard of McKeon until this podcast came around, and honestly crypto is only a small part of why this episode is worth listening to. His background in the wine industry gives him a unique perspective about business in general, and his time working on the heavily regulated space of drone startups makes for interesting parallels with the inevitably upcoming round of regulation about to hit the cryptocurrency world. I especially enjoyed his analogies, which make concepts such as thin vs. thick markets especially accessible.

• Seeing the Lux
  Ted Seides, Josh Wolfe - Capital Allocators (Podcast)
  

  Wolfe is one of my favorite Twitter follows. He’s super insightful - seeing the world through the lens of complex sytems can help us understand the networked relationships between people and companies, and this conversation is full of such examples.

• Venezuela's Fugitive Money Traders
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  You probably know, but the political situation in Venezuela is a disaster, and its hyperinflated financial system is an important part of it.

• Big Government Cheese
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  Policymaking is not about good intentions. The government tried to help dairy farmers, and in the process not only did it distort the dairy products market for years, but it also sunk a ton of cash into non-fungible assets - cheese!

• The Central (Bankers') Question
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  The Zero Lower Bound, revisited.

• Moneyland
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  Strange loopholes around taxation and cross-border exploits are getting more and more common. This is not just the case for huge corporations. Rich people are well incentivized hide vast wealth in assets around the world, but setting up shell companies like matryoshka dolls to hide cash is no longer necessary. Buying real estate in top markets, or leaving valuable art in tax-free ports works just as well. This problem is only going to get worse and worse over time, as access to these tax havens becomes more available.

• Modern Monetary Theory
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  Note that this episode was heavily criticized by many people online for its simplified economic explanations, but as an introduction to MMT, it’s probably a good one. In essence, the MMT crowd reminds us that money is just numbers on a spreadsheet, and makes the leap to saying that the government could just spend money by changing its balance sheet - no need to tax to bring in money first. I don’t understand this well enough, so if you have pointers, I’d very much appreciate them.

• New Jersey Wine
  Planet Money (Podcast)
  

  Certain products are all about perception. Luxury items tend to fall in that category, and good wine is right up there, too. The fact that I was half way through watching The Sopranos when I listened to this didn’t help.

• The Crime Machine
  Reply All (Podcast)
  

  This episode of Reply All had me thinking about The Wire the whole time. This is a story about policing, urban development, history, and organizational behavior. How do we incentivize the police to do what it is meant to do (keep us safe!) without also pushing for racist and corrupt behavior? That’s the question that this conversation tries to answer. Don’t miss Part II.

• Rob
  Heavyweight (Podcast)
  

  I’m glad Heavyweight is back. I won’t spoil this, just listen.

• The Mystery of the Kibbutz
  Russ Roberts and Ran Abramitsky - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  The internet is wonderful. I had a question about a topic which I knew about, but mostly anecdotally: the kibbutz. I wanted depth, and asked Russ if he could supply it. He asked me to suggest an expert worth interviewing. I researched a bit and found Abramitsky. Weeks later, my questions were answered, even if there wasn’t much in the episode that I didn’t already know. The success of the kibbutz was related to being small homogeneous units of very motivated people, and its eventual fall came with time, as the motivated people were gone, and other opportunities appeared for their kids and grandkids. The discussion on how the Israeli kibbutz was voluntary (exit was an option!) and comparing it to the coercive Russian kolkhoz was what made this episode most valuable. That’s where my questions had initially come up, and what I learned most about. I had my gap year in Israel when kibbutzim were no longer central, so I didn’t get the kibbutz experience. By now, I don’t think young people can have that experience, but there’s a lot to learn from the experiment. This episode makes the kibbutz ideas accessible to everyone. Thank you for that Ran and Russ!

• The Seven Kinds of Atheism
  Russ Roberts and John Gray - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  Religion is always a weird topic for me. Listening to people who have thought about it much more than me is always interesting.

• Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet Union, and In the First Circle
  Russ Roberts and Kevin McKenna - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  For the past couple of months, Russ had been pushing his listeners to read Solzhenitsyn’s In the First Circle, and offered to host a book club through his podcast. This is the first of a few episodes on the book, discussing the historical context of the novel. These other two older episodes, one on Bukharin and one on Trotsky were super helpful in my quest to understand Solzhenitsyn. I finished the book a couple of weeks ago, and hope to write a full blog post on it soon.

• Worker Compensation, Co-determination, and Market Power
  Russ Roberts and Noah Smith - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  Hearing Noah and Russ discuss all these topics was wonderful. The conversation about co-determination was not as interesting as the discussion around labor, incentives, and metric measurement. The point about temp agencies reminded me of last year’s NYT piece comparing the bleak job prospects of a janitor at Apple today vs. a janitor at Kodak in the 80s, as well as the discussion about company goals/profit maximization in Tim O’Reilly’s WTF. I’d love to be a fly on the wall for a conversation like the one they alluded to, where each of them presents some indicator to make an argument and the other one has a chance to critique it.

• Cruelty
  Russ Roberts and Paul Bloom - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  Having taken Bloom’s class on Coursera earlier this year, I found this conversation a good recap of some of his arguments, which added to a few new ideas made for a great listen. The discussion about Westworld (a show that I’ve never seen) and how people behave with each other versus how they behave with robots or other beings that they believe to be non-human was super interesting.

• The Virtue of Nationalism
  Russ Roberts and Yoram Hazony - Econtalk (Podcast)
  

  A conversation worth listening to given our current political environment around the world. I am fascinated with nation states lately, and Hazony believes they’re not going anywhere. He’s against the idea of more global government, and thinks that we should double down on the nation-state. In a way, his arugments mimic what Taleb says at the beginning of Antifragile about Switzerland and its canton system - you want to have multiple sets of policies running in parallel as a way to let the best outcomes rise out of trial and error across the board. With little research to back it up, I think that’s the correct approach, but that the modern nation-state is too large for such trial and error to be productive. Another book to add to the to-read list.

• The House that Came in the Mail
  99% Invisible
  

  An entertaining story of how the designers at Sears shaped the future of tens of thousands of families with these mail-to-order houses. These are still sprinkled all over the US, and people don’t even know about it. The past was weird, and every once in a while it peeks back at us and laughs.

• The Worst Way to Start a City
  99% Invisible
  

  This episode tells the story of a literal land grab. I am happy that 99PI is doing more of these urban origin stories lately.

• The Case Study of Dollar General and Surviving (Thriving!) Retail
  Cal Turner Jr., Jeff Jordan, and Hanne Tidnam - Andreessen Horowitz (Podcast)
  

  This was one of the most enlightening episodes a16z has put out in a while. In part, due to the fact that I know absolutely nothing about Dollar General and their target market, making the stories fascinating, but also because of how little expectations I had from it. Definitely worth a listen.

• Seeing into the Future — Making Decisions, Telling Stories
  Steven Johnson, Chris Dixon, and Sonal Chokshi - Andreessen Horowitz (Podcast)
  

  And yet another a16z conversation that ends up making me add a book to my to read list. Johnson’s new book discusses decision making, and tries to list techniques that can help us make the best decisions in the long term. Our tools go beyond simple pro/con lists, as they should. It made me think of the first finance class I ever took, where we discussed decision trees (notice, not to be confused with in decision trees in the ML world) as a way to make structured decisions, considering all possible scenarios. I probably should use tools like these more often. Maybe reading the book will push me in the right direction.

• Technological Trends, Financial Capital, and the Dynamics of Disruption
  Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon - Andreessen Horowitz (Podcast)
  

  To be honest, I had extremely high expectations from this conversation, given that Dixon and Wilson are two of the most forward thinking people in the tech space. The conversation makes interesting parallels between in-game economies and crypto, as well as the 90s boom and the token markets today.

I guess this is what happens when I don’t share what I’ve been reading in over two months. Don’t miss out on the counterpart post, which is just links to some of the best podcasts I’ve listened to recently.

• Hayekian Communism
  Branko Milanovic - Global Inequality
  

  This description of China as a country where the individuals are celebrated for starting companies, and building capital, while letting the government steers the wheel and is celebrated for its collectivized growth is a strange combination. From the outside, it seems accurate. What puzzles me the most is how people in China trust that the powers that be are not going to take them away for building the wrong thing. The institutions of trust are simply different, and I don’t understand them well enough, and should change that.

• The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech
  Geoffrey Miller - Quillette
  

  Strangely, the week that I read this article there were several pieces where bringing Isaac Newton to the present was used as a thought experiment to exemplify how things have changed. This essay makes the argument that our current push toward political correctness, safe spaces, and restricted speech in academia are curtailing progress. Moreover, the article makes the case that this dispropportionately affects those people who can be categorized as neurodiverse. That much is probably true. The unaddressed question is whether the gains from these policies lead to a net benefit at the expense of those being silenced. That I do not pretend to have an answer for.

• Access is the Scarcest Commodity in Startupland
  Tomasz Tunguz
  

  Title says it all. Between the JOBS act a few years ago, the rise of ICOs, and the changes announced by the SEC a few months ago, the barriers to entry in VC have never been lower. Nevertheless, having access to deals is still what sets firms apart.

• A history of alienation
  Martin Jay - Aeon
  

  Now that I’ve been reading Marx and friends, I kind of want to re-read this one.

• First Mover Disadvantage
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  Short but sweet. This reminded me of Peter Thiel’s quip about wanting to be the last mover in a market, not the first.

• Peak Valley?
  Fred Wilson - AVC
  

  This is a critique of an article from The Economist which has been making the rounds. San Francisco and the Valley have hundreds of problems, and yet, this is still the best place to start most venture funded businesses.

• Could Index Funds Become Too Popular?
  Ben Carlson - A Wealth of Common Sense
  

  For a while I’ve been wondering about this question myself. If you believe in efficient markets, then there’s always going to be someone there to pick up the $20 from the sidewalk, but at the same time it feels like there must be an effect from the stashes of money flowing to index funds. Could we craft a strategy based on exploiting the added momentum that certain stocks get from being heavily invested in by the Vanguards and Blackrock of the world?

• The Technology Tel
  Joshua Gans - Digitopoly
  

  Over time, I’ve gotten used to thinking of cities and neighborhoods as accidents of path dependence. Here, Gans makes the point that the infrastructure that powers all our modern technology suffers from that same phenomenon. Leapfrogging a step or two in the chain aside, every piece of technology we interact with is directly influenced by the same old ideas, and built atop the same old networks as everything else. People are generally amazed when they hear that the internet runs on huge submarine cables between continents, just like the telegraph used to, but even though our systems are much more advanced these days, they are ultimately just iterations in at least some dimensions.

• A Lockean Theory of Digital Property
  Elaine Ou
  

  An interesting argument against banning/blocking users online. Essentially, Elaine makes an analogy to squatter’s rights, arguing that people’s investment over time in their online presence (say, Alex Jones’ Twitter account) should entitle them to some kind of property rights, and that Twitter, Apple, Cloudflare, or whoever, should not be able to single-mindedly revoke those rights. While in theory this sounds reasonable, it disregards the fact that these companies don’t owe their patrons for the space on the platform, and that the patrons agree to be there under whatever terms of service are presented to them. There is no social contract between the companies and the users, and if the users decide to act in a way that the platform finds harmful to their values (or their bottom line!) they are justified in taking them out.

• Apple Is a Hedge Fund That Makes Phones
  Thomas Gilbert and Christopher Hrdlicka - The Wall Street Journal
  

  This is not really a post about Apple, but about all large companies who invest part of their assets into what the authors deem “risky financial assets, such as corporate bonds, mortgage-backed securities, auction-rate securities and equities.” Gilbert and Hrdlicka argue that this should be a regulated space, and that companies should return this capital to shareholders instead of taking advantage of the tax and accounting treatments that these non-operational assets allow for. I am not familiar enough with this topic to make a strong argument either way, but something smells fishy, and this seems like a space worth regulating.

• Innovative Governance Reading list
  Mark Lutter
  

  I was recently introduced to this project, which looks great. After skimming the reading list and adding a bunch of things to my queue, now I’m wondering: what other projects have similarly structured survey lists? I really appreciate the mix of breadth and depth.

• The Conversations that Cryptocurrency Killed
  Sonya Mann - Jacobite
  

  I’m fascinated by the Hirschmanian notions of exit, voice, and loyalty. Here, Mann explains how the rise of cryptocurrencies allow for more use of exit where traditionally people would have leaned on voice. It is exciting to think about how this new technology might reshape the world.

• Norbert's Gambit
  JP Koning - Moneyness
  

  An example of the strange loops that money takes when someone sees through the modern finance system’s leaky abstractions. Specifically, Koning moves money through the stock market in a series of trades to avoid foreign exchange fees.

• Don't Be Evil
  Fred Turner - Logic Magazine
  

  A long piece on Silicon Valley history and ideology, the formation of its origin stories, its organizational structure culture, and its hero-worshipping fantasies. Worth your time.

• Everything to know about digital celebrities and how they could change the world
  Michael Dempsey - Medium
  

  I first heard about digital celebrities during a conversation with Chris Messina. We were discussing the power of voice interfaces, and he brought up Miquela, which just blew my mind. What happens when my niece or my nephews start thinking of me - their uncle who lives far away and never get to see other than through an iPad’s screen - in the same way they think of these characters? What makes me different from Siri, Alexa, or Miquela? This is only starting.

• Programming Languages are not Languages
  Alvaro Videla - Medium
  

  The ecosystem of built-ins and open source libraries around different programming languages can make solving certain problems trivial or nearly impossible. While we should be able to express the same ideas across any turing complete language, thinking of concurrency in Go or Erlang is much simpler than in C or Python. As Alvaro explains, this is not so much because of the language itself acts as a lens through which we see the world, but because each language (and its community!) packages different groups of ideas into self-contained tools and abstractions. When a Java programmer switches over to Lisp, they bring with them a bunch of ideas about how programming should be done, and while they are constrained by the framework of their new tool they also inject their own set of constructs into their new community by creating libraries that others can use and work on top of. In my opinion, the work you can do with a language depends much more on its ecosystem of bolted on tools than its basic syntax.

• An Unstoppable Predictions Marketplace — Introducing Erasure
  Richard Craib - Medium
  

  The people at Numerai are producing some really interesting blockchain ideas - the kind that wouldn’t work on a Postgres DB. This implementation of P2P prediction feeds is one of them.

• Religions, Nations, and Other Useful Fictions
  Alexander Blum - Quillette
  

  Everyone thinks of the “useful fiction” meme as something stemming from Yuval Harari these days, but really it is older. Benedict Anderson discusses it in depth in his Imagined Communities, and others before him have made similar arguments. Ultimately, all of these fictions step in for the sources of objective truths, and in doing so, they are useful.

• In India, gold prices affect dowries and girls' survival
  Sonia Bhalotra - Quartz
  

  This is very messed up, but not too surprising. “…we find that monthly changes in gold prices lead to an increase in girl relative to boy neonatal mortality and that the surviving girls are shorter.” The analysis of this specific correlation is new, but the study of the dynamic isn’t. For example, here’s Amartya Sen back in 1990.

• Hating the wrong tech people for the right reasons
  Jon Evans - TechCrunch
  

  Clearly I am biased here, but Evans makes good arguments. It is easy to blame big tech for problems. He doubled down with this argument in a different direction [over here]. Tech has caused negative changes, but let’s not pretend that Tech is guilty of everything.

• I’m very sorry, but you’re going to have to learn to love the blockchain
  Jon Evans - TechCrunch
  

  If you’re a blockchain skeptic, this might change that.

• The million-dollar brownstone that no one owned
  Cole Hawes Louison - The Outline
  

  Private property, ownership, and the many rights and regulations that surround them are in fact pretty complex. Who owns the space in which you’re in right now? It might not be that simple.

• The Tyranny of the U.S. Dollar
  Peter Coy - Bloomberg
  

  Having the whole world virtually on a single currency, owned by a single country, and serving that country’s interests is an anomaly, and other states seem to be catching on to the fact that they can do something about it.

• The Crisis Was in the System
  Matt Levine - Bloomberg View
  

  Humans build complex systems, and those systems lead to unintended consequences.

• What Follows the End of History? Identity Politics
  Evan Goldstein, interviewing Francis Fukuyama - The Chronicle of Higher Education
  

  I have never read any Fukuyama, but his end of history hypothesis feels very wrong these days.

• The Bermuda Triangle of Wealth
  Conrad Bastable
  

  A somewhat depressing view of the rat race, but seems like sound analysis. Bastable discusses how we’ve built a system in which people are forced to save for basic needs and services like housing, education, and healthcare, with no real way of ever accumulating enough money to make their expected standard of living achievable. As my friend Stephen mentioned on Twitter, we have to “acknowledge the common factor among the sectors most subject to cost disease: a predominance of government subsidy and regulation.” because “subsidy of demand is captured by suppliers via increased prices.” We need to find ways to tie prices and costs back together.

• How the Elderly Lose Their Rights
  Rachel Aviv - The New Yorker
  

  On one of my article club meetings with my friends a couple of months ago, the article was this ridiculous New Yorker piece about the rights of the elderly. We had a great discussion. There are interesting questions about state power, family dynamics, corruption, and much more. The state puts rules in place meant to protect its citizens, so what happens when people with bad intentions ride on those rules to take away the rights of others? An important question these days.

• It’s Not Technology That’s Disrupting Our Jobs
  Louis Hyman - The New York Times
  

  Our current policies around labor don’t match the new reality we live in, and neither stopping the “the gig economy,” nor shoehorning it in the old paradigm will do. “…technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. […] Uber is a symptom, not a cause.” We can change the status-quo.

• The Bitter Regrets of a Useless Chinese Daughter
  Jianan Qian - The New York Times
  

  As someone who lives far away from his family this was a tough read. As someone whose parents (both of them!) have gotten sick while I’ve been away this was a really tough read. This is an empathy building piece, but also a vignette into China and the life of those immigrants who live in the boundary space between two worlds.

• India Pushes Back Against Tech 'Colonization' by Internet Giants
  Vindu Goel - The New York Times
  

  We’re headed into a world of protectionism. It is scary to think what won’t exist because of it. "…officials admire Beijing’s tight control over citizens’ data and how it has nurtured homegrown internet giants like Alibaba and Baidu by limiting foreign competition." If India goes down this path, and closes itself off to western companies like China has, the market dynamics of working on new products change completely. When your addressable market goes from being the world to excluding the two economies that are forecasted to be the largest in a few years theres way less incentives to build new things. That’s bad.

• Towards The Post-Liberal Synthesis
  Palladium Magazine
  

  The effort by the people behind Palladium is laudable. They are trying to answer the question of what comes after liberalism, and are publishing this magazine to that end. I, too, am convinced that the current world order is not sustainable, and would love to see it be replaced with a less broken version of itself, based on liberal ideas. I’ll keep an eye on their work, and I hope you do, too.

• My Parents Give Me $28,000 a Year
  E. J. Roller
  

  A privileged person suddenly notices their privilege, and tries to understand it. What’s most interesting about this piece is not the argument she tries to make for basic income, nor the commentary on the value of education, but instead its point about taxation. Taxes on gifts and inheritance are way too low, and lead to weird incentives.

• Do the Rich Capture All the Gains from Economic Growth?
  Russ Roberts - Medium
  

  The indicators we pick matter. The ways we measure things matter. Here, Russ makes a strong set of arguments agains the usual arguments about the standard of living in the US, and who wins from economic growth. I think the rich-get-richer dynamics in our modern economic systems are extremely strong, and this piece downplays them a little bit, but the point that Russ makes about the dynamism of the various groups is definitely something that is not talked about enough. Made me think of the random handouts experiment I had produced a while back, which I never turned into a full blog post. The longer you run that simulation, the more obvious it is that people switch from one bucket to another all the time.

• The Lonely Man with a Gun
  Russ Roberts - Medium
  

  The events from the past couple of weeks are tragic, and deeply troubling. It is on days like these that I remember that it doesn’t matter whether I think of myself as part of a group or not. The case that Russ makes here is that the problem at the root of all the gun violence in the US is not the availability of guns, but the fact that the social fabric that mediates our interactions has torn. In his own words, “One of the glorious things about American culture in our day is that people leave you alone. […] And yet, one of the most horrific things about American culture in our day is that people leave you alone.”

• The Ideology of Isolation
  Rebecca Solnit - Harper's Magazine
  

  A couple of weeks ago I heard Rebecca Solnit at an event at City Lights. There, she commented on how privilege isolates you. In her view, more privilege makes you more disconnected, until you live in a world of one person. Just you. I found it insightful. She said it in the context of the current leaders in the US, but it made me think of the scenes about Stalin in In The First Circle. This essay develops that idea further. There is an interesting contradiction in conservatism, which is so tightly bound to religion and its value of religious communities, contra the individualism pushed by the modern right. Who has written on the reconciliation of these two ideas?

• What If Counterfactuals Never Existed?
  The New Republic - Cass R. Sunstein
  

  Sometimes, counterfactuals are just wishful thinking. Other times, they are tools. Sunstein’s review of Richard Evans’ Altered Pasts gives us a great lens through which to look at history. Also, the pun in this piece’s title is awesome.

• Some Notes on Translation and on Madame Bovary
  Lydia Davis - Paris Review
  

  As part of my current Coursera class on Modernism and Postmodernism, I am currently reading Madame Bovary. Given my interest in languages and translation, I ended up doing some research of my own into which translation was worth reading, and it seemed like Lydia Davis’ was the recommended one. During my search, I found this piece by her on the process of translating it.

• Data Pipeline
  Randall Munroe - xkcd
  

  And to end on a good note, this is my daily life.