Tom Tunguz: “Data sales invert the business model of the Internet. Instead of Reddit building product experiences that create good advertising data to earn more on ads, Reddit will launch product experiences that produce more valuable data to feed to LLMs. The LLM vendors should pay more for better data. User data remains the currency of the realm, but it’s packaged & sold in a very different way. Cookies, the moribund technology that created the ad world, will be replaced by data-purchasing contracts. One day, we may visit websites that have fewer ads or none at all. The revenue model of the Internet will have changed. Publishers’ sell the data directly to the search companies. Should we evolve this way, there are any number of questions around user privacy, data controls, regulation, not to mention how product experiences themselves may change. The days of the ad network may be numbered & with it, an era of a new business model for the Internet.”
FT reviews How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History: “Tracing 4,000 years of predominantly European history, [Josephine] Quinn unpicks this paradigm to emphasise the west’s permeability. Her purpose is to dethrone the “privileged connection” between ancient Greeks and Romans and the modern west, and focus instead on the millennia of interaction with other cultures. So-called western values — freedom, rationality, justice and tolerance — are not only or originally western, she suggests, but “the West itself is in large part a product of long-standing links with a much larger network of societies.”
Jonathan Haidt: “Let me be clear: there is no way to make social media safe for children by just making the content less toxic. It’s the phone-based childhood that is harming them, regardless of what they watch. Kids need to be freed from the grip of smartphones and social media, especially through early puberty. This is why two of the four norms I propose for solving our collective action problems are about delaying children’s complete immersion in the virtual world. Here are those four norms: 1) No Smartphone Before High School (give only flip phones in middle school), 2) No Social Media Before 16, 3) Phone Free Schools (all phones go into phone lockers or Yondr pouches), 4) More independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world, at an earlier age.” [via Arnold Kling]
WSJ: “Kanbrick evaluates about 150 to 200 companies a year, focusing on consumer businesses and those in industrial or business services with about $5 million to $50 million in earnings before interest and taxes. It rules out companies in financial services, healthcare, real estate and many other industries where the firm doesn’t feel it has expertise. “We’re looking for businesses we can understand that have a moat or competitive advantage—something that we can get our arms around,” [Tracy Britt Cool] said…Many families and founders are fatigued: exhausted from managing their companies through the pandemic, labor challenges, inflation and change. For those who don’t want to sell to private equity, she is positioning Kanbrick as another option.”
NYTimes: “The U.S. economic recovery from the pandemic has been stronger and more durable than many experts had expected, and a rebound in immigration is a big reason. A resumption in visa processing in 2021 and 2022 jump-started employment, allowing foreign-born workers to fill some holes in the labor force that persisted across industries and locations after the pandemic shutdowns. Immigrants also address a longer-term need: replenishing the work force, a key to meeting labor demands as birthrates decline and older people retire. Net migration in the year that ended July 1, 2023, reached the highest level since 2017. The foreign-born now make up 18.6 percent of the labor force, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that over the next 10 years, immigration will keep the number of working Americans from sinking. Balancing job seekers and opportunities is also critical to moderating wage inflation and keeping prices in check.”
