WSJ: “The way humans reproduce recorded sound could change more in the next decade than it has in the past century. What’s coming are solid-state speakers, etched from wafers of ultrapure silicon—like microchips. That means they operate like nothing available today—and also that they have capabilities that no existing sound-reproduction system can match. This technology also embodies a broader trend—the conversion of all electronic components to solid-state silicon—that is easy to take for granted, but has had profound consequences for how we interact with the world. The technology that has made this transition possible, called MEMS—short for micro-electromechanical systems—is the reason an entire 1990s RadioShack’s worth of gear can be crammed into the slim slabs of touch-sensitive glass that now fit in our pockets.”
NYTimes: “if you’re new to meditating, it can be hard to know where to start. So start small — with five minutes of breathing exercises to calm and focus the mind every morning. Not only will it “set the tone for the day,” said Dr. Eva Tsuda, a meditation instructor at the UMass Memorial Health Center for Mindfulness, but meditating earlier may make the practice easier to stick to. In a recent study of almost 900,000 meditation app users, those who meditated in the morning were more likely to maintain the habit.”
Scott Galloway: “The business strategy that marked 2023 is not leveraging AI or adopting hybrid work, but focusing on bloat. Specifically how to reduce it. Whether you’re a critic or a stan, Elon’s 80% reduction in the bird’s workforce is the most impactful business decision of the year. The Zuck may have coined the phrase “the year of efficiency,” but it was Elon who inspired the movement…A new generation of business leaders discovered that a firm with a 20% operating margin can see as big an increase in value by cutting costs $1 billion as it can by increasing revenue by $5 billion…Elon didn’t fire 6,000 employees at Twitter, he (effectively) terminated over 300,000 workers across tech. Because every other tech CEO felt they could have the great taste of reduced expenses while avoiding the calories of collapsing revenue.”
Michael Munger: “There are two fundamental truths of macroeconomics, and while we can sometimes work around them, they are surprisingly resilient and robust. First, inflation, at least in the sense of a sustained increase in the overall price level over long time periods, is caused by artificial and unwise increases in the money supply. Second, increases in the overall price level are often misread by entrepreneurs and business people as increases in the actual demand for their specific products. That’s not surprising when you think about it. The price for the widgets you make is going up fast, and you want to expand your factory and hire more workers. But you have trouble doing that, because the blodget makers, and the whatsit makers are all trying to do the same thing. Austrian economists call this the problem of “correlate errors,” where market participants are fooled by inflation into thinking that there is a “real” increase in the demand for their specific product…unless inflation is controlled on a long-term basis, it is workers who will suffer most, as the consequences of the artificial stimulus hurt real economic growth.”
