WSJ: “Marketers of all kinds attempt to balance “bottom-of-the-funnel” activities—like promotions or retargeted ads to get consumers to make a relatively immediate purchase—with so-called “upper-funnel” campaigns to build brands and generate consumer goodwill at a higher level. Pressure to show the return on every advertising dollar often leads marketing departments to embrace the lower funnel with tools like cost-per-click keyword search ads. But many also eventually realize they neglected their brands in the process.”
Deirdre McCloskey: “What, then, should be the primary-liberal rule in the footrace of life? It should be – for natural justice to the individual and for the consequent flourishing of the individual’s family and fellows and trading partners and society through loving care and peaceful exchange and liberal conversation – an equality of permission, or allowance, or approval for a general right to do, to venture. Let no obstacles of human design be placed in your path. It is to be permitted to enter the race as an adult, and to accord to others the same permission. It is [Adam] Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.”” [via CafeHayek]
FT: “Cryptocurrency companies are preparing for the threat that powerful quantum computers could soon be able to hack the security at the heart of the global industry, including breaking the critical code that underpins bitcoin. The risk to crypto posed by fast-developing quantum technology — which exploits the way the physics of matter works differently at atomic and subatomic levels — was once considered a distant possibility, with bitcoin widely seen as unhackable. But digital assets firms are speeding up their preparations for a “post-quantum” age, as tech companies slash the timelines for developing practical quantum computers to as soon as 2030.”
Amarda Shehu: “The question I want to leave with the reader is not what the university should do. It is what the country loses if the public research university does not do it. The well-resourced private institutions will protect themselves longer. Their endowments and their prestige will absorb the dissonance for a while. They will not be fine. They will be insulated, and the insulation will run down, and when it does they will face the same question with less time to answer it, because they will have spent the runway extending the hedge rather than redesigning around it. The public access institutions do not have that runway. The reckoning arrives at the public university now. The students who arrived in good faith for a credential the institution sold them are owed an answer, and the answer cannot be that the institution is studying the question. The institution has to choose, in public, what it is for. The hedging is over. Said more plainly, the jig is up. What comes next is a redesign or a slow surrender, and the slow surrender will be paid for by the students who can least afford it.”
