WSJ: “A team of bureaucrats rolled out a revamped online system to make getting a passport as simple as buying a plane ticket and booking your hotel. Now you can submit the application on your computer, upload a photo from your phone and pay with your credit card. No paper is necessary. To get a vital document that will accompany you around the world, you don’t even have to leave your kitchen table. The system has been open to the public for less than a year, but it’s already handling nearly half of all U.S. passport renewals, according to the State Department. And the really wild thing is that people are raving about it.” Can we do this in India also?
Norbert Michel: “Industrial policy advocates view the market as a policy device that government officials can manipulate, but in fact, the market is a group of people cooperating to get what they need while offering each other something in exchange. And in the United States, the market is a very large group of people. Even to “redirect” this market would require persuading – or forcing – hundreds of millions of people to so something they would otherwise not do. It’s a core reason that so many experiments with government-directed economies have failed.” [via CafeHayek]
NYTimes offers ideas on what to do when sleep won’t come in the middle of the night: “Tense your toes, flex them for five seconds, then release. Watch a TV show you’ve seen many times before. Count backward from 100. Inhale for four seconds, hold for four, and exhale slowly for eight. Stop looking at your phone — for real this time.”
WSJ: “About 750 million coupons were redeemed last year, the company estimates, down from 3.3 billion in 2010. The huge majority of coupons that get distributed today, about 87%, are still on paper, but nearly two-thirds of coupons actually redeemed are digital.”
Tom McMurray (ex-Sequoia): “Every wave starts messy. But history says two truths persist: Jobs evolve faster than they evaporate. Cisco killed some circuit-switch jobs yet birthed the entire network-engineer class. Bias follows data, not silicon. Fix the training data, and you fix 80 percent of the problem. That’s human homework, not machine destiny. The “force for good” part kicks in when entrepreneurs bake guardrails into the business model, not just the codebase….I’d look for that “Sequoia Moment”—where after all the questions about team, market, and technology, we identify the single critical factor that determines success. For Nvidia, it was “how many millimeters wide is the chip?” Sometimes, it’s these seemingly simple technical questions that reveal whether a company can execute on its vision.”
