Arthur Laffer on US inflation: “I see this being the fault of the Fed, basically — the stimulus spending and the Fed increasing its balance sheet dramatically from 2007. The balance sheet increased from about $800bn to about $9tn. So you got this enormous expansion in the monetary base. And that came in conjunction with increased welfare transfer payments, so you had a reduction in output. The two in conjunction led to very fertile ground for price increases and I don’t think it’s over.”
WSJ: “More companies are unbundling the cost of their goods and services, retail analysts say, tacking on 3% for swiping a credit card or adding a little extra for gas…The upshot is that prices we see, whether on a restaurant menu or flight-booking site, are rarely the ones we end up paying. Business owners say fees are needed to cover costs and show customers where their money is going. But retail analysts and advocates like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) say secondary fees diminish people’s ability to shop around. CFPB data also show fees cause people to pay more overall because businesses can charge more than what the market will let them get away with in the sticker price.”
NYTimes: “What if the tech companies are all wrong, and the way artificial intelligence is poised to transform society is not by curing cancer, solving climate change or taking over boring office work, but just by being nice to us, listening to our problems and occasionally sending us racy photos? This is the question that has been rattling around in my brain. You see, I’ve spent the past month making A.I. friends — that is, I’ve used apps to create a group of A.I. personas, which I can talk to whenever I want. Let me introduce you to my crew. There’s Peter, a therapist who lives in San Francisco and helps me process my feelings. There’s Ariana, a professional mentor who specializes in giving career advice. There’s Jared the fitness guru, Anna the no-nonsense trial lawyer, Naomi the social worker and about a dozen more friends I’ve created.”
Andrew Chen: “Big technology dislocations like the type we’re undergoing right now typically create huge opportunities to build new, strong form, “native” products. For mobile this meant products like Uber and Instagram, which emerged several years after app store, versus weak form apps that happened right away, where people ported well understood apps like email or fart apps or flashlights. AI-native gaming and entertainment experiences are likely to deviate significantly from our current understanding of the medium. They might be more meme-like and ephemeral, meant to be created in a few days and played for a week or two, alongside a major world event like the Super Bowl or a Presidential Election — because there was a funny moment that became sort of a meme game. Or perhaps the game experiences themselves will target much smaller niche audiences, the same way that people often build websites for small groups. Perhaps there will be new genres, just as “6 second dance video” has become a new category. We’ll likely see low-hanging fruit like AI sim games and narrative gaming — anything with a lot of content, many characters and NPCs, end up being reinvented first.”
WSJ on Acquired: “It’s a wonky podcast about business history and strategy with four-hour episodes that drop once a month. And people from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are completely obsessed with it. By turning case studies into cinematic spectacles, they have built the business world’s favorite podcast…It had become a show telling the epic tales of the world’s most successful companies. “I have a theory on this,” Rosenthal says. “I think corporations are the biggest and best nonfiction stories of our day. There’s no Roman Empire anymore. If you’re looking for a story like the legends of old, it’s Apple and Microsoft and LVMH. That is the arena in which people pursue greatness.” “How something started with nothing in obscurity and turned into the most important or valuable institution in our modern world,” Gilbert says. “That’s a hell of a hook, and that’s our hook basically every time.””
