NYTimes: “A rule of life is an overarching plan governing your daily practices, habits and routines. It is not a resolution, but rather a comprehensive way to take stock of how you spend your time so that you be the person you want to be.” John Mark Comer: “A rule of life is ancient Christian language for a schedule and a set of practices and relational rhythms that organize your life around what you most deeply value…Step one is to clarify in your mind and heart a vision of the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live — what you most deeply value — and then work backward and very slowly. Don’t try to go hard core. The next step is a kind of habit audit. You can read a book like “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg. Then begin to see if you can connect the dots between all of these habits and relationships and who they are forming you into. And then the third step is to start with a fresh scrap of paper and begin to design a life habit architecture that is more congruent with your vision and values…A couple of pieces of advice would just be start really, really, really small. Don’t start with massive steps…Second is, start with joyful things that you love and want to do.”
NYTimes: “In Continental Drift, a spherical version of the 15 Puzzle, it’s the hexagonal tiles that are scrambled. (The pentagons are recessed and remain stationary.) “One of the hexagons, this one in the South Pacific, comes out,” Dr. Segerman explains. “We can then activate the San Andreas fault and slide California south into the ocean. And we can keep going, mixing up all of the continents.” Holonomy happens when a tile travels a full loop along the curved surface of the puzzle: Slide the tile featuring, say, Greenland all the way around the perimeter of a single pentagonal tile — perhaps the tile featuring the North Atlantic. After a complete loop, the Greenlanders return to their starting position rotated by 60 degrees. If the loop encompasses two adjacent pentagons, then the tile returns to the starting point rotated 120 degrees.”
Shankkar Aiyar: “The fundamental question that successive [Indian] governments have struggled to answer is whether to be the umpire/regulator or one of the players. It is true that in a developing economy, such as India, the government plays a major role in investment and growth. The question is should the government own everything that it owns and must the government manage everything which it manages? To start with, the government should transfer the holdings of companies listed for privatisation into a sovereign trust accountable to Parliament. Second, divest political management and reduce all government holdings via ETFs to 51 or 26 per cent as strategy dictates. The holdings can be leveraged to fund development. Disinvestment can happen as the opportunity arises.”
Economist: “It is one of the wonders of the world—or, more accurately, off the world. The Starlink constellation currently consists of 3,335 active satellites; roughly half of all working satellites are Starlinks. In the past six months new satellites have been added at a rate of more than 20 a week, on average. SpaceX, the company which created Starlink, is offering it as a way of providing off-grid high-bandwidth internet access to consumers in 45 countries. A million or so have become subscribers. And a huge part of the traffic flowing through the system currently comes from Ukraine. Starlink has become an integral part of the country’s military and civil response to Russia’s invasion. Envisaged as a celestial side-hustle that might help pay for the Mars missions dear to the founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, it is not just allowing Ukraine to fight back; it is shaping how it does so, revealing the military potential of near-ubiquitous communications. “It’s a really new and interesting change,” says John Plumb, America’s assistant secretary of defence for space policy.”
Blossom Street Ventures: “We looked at how long it took 224 publicly traded tech companies to exit. B2B SaaS takes a long time. On median SaaS companies took 10 years to IPO/exit since founding and 11 years on average. If we isolate only those companies that exited in 2019 or 2020, those companies took 11 years to exit on median. Consumer focsed companies exits faster (generally B2C focused). This category includes Social Media, Marketplaces, Ad Based businesses, Hardware, Ride Sharing, and other B2C tech. On median the exit took 7 years and on average 8 years. The 90’s were awesome. Netscape IPO’d in 1994, the same year it was founded. Netflix IPO’d 4 years after its 1997 founding. Google took 5 years after being founded in 1998, TakeTwo took 6 years (founded in 1993), Amazon took 2 years, and Overstock took 3 years. Companies with a pre-2000 founding vintage got to exit very fast even though they were far smaller than companies that IPO today. The 90’s were an incredible time.”
