Category: Thinks

Thinks 98

Morgan Housel on Investing: “Investing is a broader field than it looks, and there is so much to learn about it outside of the narrow lens of finance…There’s a graveyard of companies and investors who tried to grow too fast, attempting to reap a decade’s worth of rewards in a year or less, learning the hard way that capitalism doesn’t like it when you try to use a cheat code.”

Alex Nowrasteh: “Humans, as economist Julian Simon long argued, are the ultimate resource. It is human creativity that turns nature into natural resources and raw materials into valuable capital and new technologies. Unfortunately, much of humanity, by accident of birth, lives in countries where human creativity is constrained. Though not the only reason for low productivity, lousy governance is often what prevents humans from making the most of their creativity and potential.” [Via CafeHayek.]

Atanu Dey: “A country deserves the government it gets. A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves. That’s so in some cases. In other cases, a nation of immoral citizens begets a government of the most vicious thieves and crooks. It’s a kakistocracy...Indians of today are as tolerant of the oppression they suffer as their forebears were of the oppression of the British they suffered in turn. It is British Raj 2.0. The skin color of the rulers have changed but not the basic nature of the master-slave relationship.“

Thinks 97

Forget Customer Experience. Forget Employee Experience. Enter Total Experience: “Total experience is a strategy that connects multiexperience with customer, employee and user experience disciplines, as Brian Burke, research vice president at Gartner, explained.”

150+ ways to use AMP for Email: by Jordie van Rijn. “AMP for Email allows you to use email in ways that were never possible before. Bringing  rich engaging experiences with modern app functionality into your marketing email. How cool is it to fetch real-time content, interact with forms, configure products, interact with the sender.”

Reading: Every Last Fear by Alex Finlay.

Thinks 96

Moore’s Law for everything: by Sam Altman. “A great future isn’t complicated: we need technology to create more wealth, and policy to fairly distribute it. Everything necessary will be cheap, and everyone will have enough money to be able to afford it. As this system will be enormously popular, policymakers who embrace it early will be rewarded: they will themselves become enormously popular.”

How Being More Productive Starts With Doing Nothing: from WSJ. “It’s gotten harder to create mental breaks as work and home have blurred…Even brief timeouts help the brain reinforce long-term learning and productivity.”

Richard Epstein: “Even the failure and disintegration of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union has not led to a clear response to the next question: if government ownership of the means of production is so bad, why is government regulation of the private means of production so good?”

Thinks 95

India’s State institutions are failing citizens because they were built to control, not govern: by Vibhav Mariwala. “While centralising elements are necessary at times, the problem is that India’s institutions have not evolved along with the country’s growth.”

Why is India poor in the modern world of widespread economic prosperity?: Atanu Dey’s 3-part essay: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. “My answer is one word: Freedom.”

The Emergent Task Planner: “A paper-based daily planning sheet designed to keep you focused in the face of chaos. Start the day by declaring what you want to get done, and the ETP helps you stick to the plan by with task, time, and scheduling support.”

Thinks 94

Looking beyond Silicon Valley: by Tim O’Reilly. “The nexus of machine learning and medicine, biology, and materials science will be to the coming decades what Silicon Valley has been to the late 20th and early 21st century.”

Via CafeHayek: “As Adam Smith noted more than two centuries ago, a nation can gain from trade whenever a good can be acquired from foreigners more cheaply than it can be produced domestically. When foreign governments subsidize their exports to us, they are subsidizing American consumers. Of course, the subsidies are costly to the taxpayers funding them. With time, they are likely to tire from the burden and bring the subsidies to a halt. If foreigners are subsidizing their producers, some argue we should do the same. This makes no sense. Merely because foreigners are wasting their resources propping up inefficient suppliers is no reason for us to engage in the same folly. As with other trade restrictions, export subsidies will channel more of our resources toward production of things we do poorly and away from things we do well. A smaller output and lower level of income will result. Put simply, neither individuals nor nations can expect to get ahead by spending more time producing things they do poorly.”

Reading: Win by Harlan Coben

Thinks 93

We’re better off with mRNA vaccines: An interview with Harvard Chan School immunologist Sarah Fortune. “When we vaccinate people, basically we take a little chunk of the pathogen, in this case SARS-CoV-2, and we give people (in a safe form) – we give people that little chunk of pathogen. Vaccination started with actually the pathogen itself in some crippled form. And then we’ve moved to safer and safer iterations of that by whittling down the parts of the pathogen that we give to people. And so the traditional way of giving parts of pathogens is to give the whole protein. So, many vaccines that people would have received in childhood are protein vaccines. And this is sort of the next frontier of vaccine technology in which instead of giving the protein, you’re giving the sort of message, the map for how the body makes that protein, which is called mRNA, and you’re making the body make that protein.”

Why Email Remains One of the Most Important Marketing Tools: “The number of global email users will rise to more than 4 billion in 2021. This means that around half of the world’s population uses email. Clearly, marketers should be focused on this vast amount of communication.”

F.A. “Baldy” Harper’s: “An essential feature of a liberal government is the protection of minorities, and of the rights of minorities against plunder by the majority. The ultimate of minorities is one person. And so the ultimate of liberalism … is the protection of each person against the plunder of one or more other persons.” [Via CafeHayek.]

Thinks 92

Disruption Decade: “The decade ahead is ushering in a period of economic transformation unprecedented in speed, scale and scope—yet not everyone views this moment in the same way.”

We’re Never Going Back: “The future of work is remote, and companies don’t really have a choice.”

Arnold Kling on Martin Gurri: “20th-century elites and institutions relied on having a much less chaotic and engulfing information environment. Politicians, journalists, and academics now are overwhelmed by: (a) what they don’t know that others do know. Think of citizens using cell phones to cover events sooner and more completely than paid journalists; and (b) by the amount that others know about them that they used to able to keep secret…The elites cannot accept the new reality that there is so much information that they cannot control. They see new competitors as illegitimate (“fake news”) and they blame others for elites’ loss of status and respect.”

Thinks 91

Clean Water to Indian homes: “Modi’s next election play is ensuring clean water in all 192 mn rural homes. [The] programme aims to supply at least 55 litres of potable water to each person per day by building new pipelines.”

Credit Suisse Report on India’s 100 Unicorns. More.

How To Fix The Indian Financial System’s Five Big Challenges: by Rajiv Lall. Credit growth, decline of trust, extreme risk aversion, access to finance, gaps in long-term finance.

Thinks 90

Capitalism Is What Will Defeat Covid: from WSJ. “The vaccine revolution didn’t happen on its own. It’s a product of decades of planning and investment…J&J’s road to the vaccine—from failure to life-saving success, from investment write-off to breakthrough—is a little-known story about science, business risk and innovation. There are also lessons for those who think capitalism is merely about rapacious profit.”

About Roblox: “What makes Roblox different from anything else in the games industry — including a storefront like Steam — is that all the games are made by its users. On Roblox, the fun doesn’t just come from playing games, it also comes from making games. These games are not formally developed by Roblox Corporation, but by users of the platform. Currently, the official website boasts that its users have published over 20 million games on the platform.”

Reading: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017. Beautiful writing.

Thinks 89

The Most Important Chart of the Decade: by Michael Batnick. (US context). “During a recession, the economy contracts, and people lose their job. And when they lose their job, they lose the ability to save money. But this was no ordinary recession. Yes, people lost their job, but they didn’t lose their income, thanks to a fiscal bazooka like we’ve never seen before. And when the economy closed, their spending declined to a fraction of what it otherwise would have been.  Add this all up, and you get this amazing result where the personal savings rate explodes. Mathew Klein at Barron’s shows that Americans have saved $1.8 trillion more than they would have had we not experienced a pandemic. Wow. Just wow.”

Akira Kurosawa: The note taker: “From this point on, my approach to literature changed. I made a deliberate effort to change it. I began to read carefully, asking myself what the author was trying to say and how he was trying to express it. I thought while I read, and at the same time I kept notes on the passages that struck some emotional chord in me. When I reread in this new way things I had read in the past, I realised how superficial my initial reading had been.”

Reading: The Beirut Protocol by Joel Rosenberg