Interesting Stuff from the Internet
Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers (Full Series) - YouTube
The return of economic idiocy is staggering and terrifying. Many things are debatable, even if I or others may strongly differ. Tax rates are debatable. Transfer programs are debatable. Regulation is debatable (all within reason). But the return of politically driven idiocy that is not debatable, that history and theory have both proven destructive, is terrifying. Almost all economists of the left and right (not the extreme left and extreme right) would agree (though we haven’t heard the former economist Paul Krugman or any of his backup singers, the Krugtones, courageously speak truth to their party about rent control of this latest asininity on price controls).
The current top 3.
1) Rent control — has destroyed whatever it has touched, and for clear obvious reasons. The left wants it everywhere and are finally poised to get it.
2) The “blame corporations” utter nonsense on inflation, and the plan to whip inflation now through price controls, is beyond ridicule. From Diocletian to Nixon, from theory to fact, it’s insane. The left is all in on it.
3) Tariffs and trade wars out of the past destroying a ton of prosperity for both us and our trading partners all to claim to have saved some jobs (generally in the industries we don’t really want, they always say “we don’t need cheap crap from overseas in exchange for American jobs” but we don’t want those jobs making “cheap crap” either — also involving “national security” here is almost always just a lie (almost)). This one is mainly from the right but Biden didn’t repeal Trump’s idiocy here and added his own, so the left has no real high ground and is poised to make it worse just not “as much worse” as Trump if they win.
Foresight in a Complex World:
The report underscores the challenges of foresight in a complex world characterized by interconnectedness and emergent properties. It argues that traditional reductionist approaches, while effective for simpler problems, are insufficient for addressing wicked problems like pandemics, climate change, and demographic shifts. The report advocates for a whole-of-government approach, breaking down silos and fostering collaboration across agencies to develop a more comprehensive understanding of complex challenges.
Scenario Planning: Process Over Prediction:
The report emphasizes the value of scenario planning as a tool for sense-making, challenging assumptions, and fostering strategic conversations, rather than as a method for predicting the future. It highlights the importance of involving diverse perspectives, engaging stakeholders, and focusing on the process itself in driving organizational change. The report acknowledges the limitations of scenario planning, recognizing its resource-intensive nature and the need for careful consideration of objectives and trade-offs.
Looking Ahead: Embracing Curiosity and Adaptability:
The report concludes with a call for embracing curiosity, adaptability, and resilience in navigating the uncertain future. It draws inspiration from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, emphasizing the importance of open-minded exploration, flexibility, clear communication, and self-awareness in a world that is constantly changing. The report encourages future generations to embrace these qualities as they face even more complex and curious challenges in the years to come.
Snippets from the Newsletters/ Newspapers/ Books
“If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong, in that simple statement is the key to science, it doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t make a difference how smart you are (who made the guess),or what his name is, if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong." - Richard Feynman
Economics professor Tyler Cowen on raising the aspirations of others:
"Yesterday I had lunch with a former Ph.D student of mine, who is now highly successful and tenured at a very good school. I was reminded that, over twenty years ago, I was Graduate Director of Admissions. One of my favorite strategies was to take strong candidates who applied for Masters and also offer them Ph.D admissions, suggesting they might to do the latter. My lunch partner was a beneficiary of this de facto policy.
At least two of our very best students went down this route... neither realized that it was common simply to apply straight to a Ph.D program, skipping over the Masters. I believe this is now better known, but the point is this.
At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous. This is in fact one of the most valuable things you can do with your time and with your life."
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”
— T.S. Eliot
The Chatham House Rule is a guideline used to facilitate open discussions and promote the sharing of information in meetings. It was established by the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London.
Purpose: The rule aims to create a confidential environment where participants can freely express their views without concern for personal attribution or repercussions.
Implementation: When a meeting is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are allowed to use the information they receive. However, they cannot disclose who said what, nor can they reveal the identity or affiliation of any speaker or participant.
Benefits:
Encourages more open and honest dialogue.
Participants can speak as individuals, rather than representatives of their organization, allowing for more personal and candid contributions.
Reduces the risk of sensitive information being linked to specific individuals.
Usage: Often applied in meetings involving policy discussions, think tanks, and conferences where sensitive or controversial topics are discussed.
The rule is not legally binding but relies on mutual respect and agreement among participants to maintain confidentiality.
Bloomberg:
The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which account for roughly a third of all US container imports, had their third-strongest month ever in July, just shy of an all-time high reached in May 2021. Back then, a wave of inbound consumer goods caused supply bottlenecks on land and a queue of cargo ships waiting for a berth offshore was getting longer by the day. Demand now is driven by retailers and other importers that are stocking up ahead of US tariffs on Chinese goods and a possible strike by a large group of American dockworkers — adding to the usual frenzy of pre-holiday ordering that occurs this time of year.
SITALWeek:
a) For Whom the Dell Tolls
Dell is reportedly reducing its staff by around 20,000 people to 100,000 (the numbers are unconfirmed by Dell, but reported by BI). According to the BI report: “Dell has been trialing AI tools internally since October 2023 and is now putting the plan into action, applying AI across product development, content management, sales tools, and customer service. The tools will make staff more efficient and free up their time for more important tasks, corporate strategy SVP Vivek Mohindra told BI.” The company is also gearing its sales effort toward selling AI products to customers. I’ve discussed the Catch-22 of AI multiple times in the past: the faster AI displaces jobs, the more negative its potential impact on the economy. Every technological transition comes with displacement followed by innovation that ushers in new waves of job creation. While AI could provide the same net employment benefit long term, the speed of the transition will determine whether we tilt downward in an economic spiral à la Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror or, conversely, tilt upward toward Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek utopian-verse. The magnitude of the purportedly AI-driven downsizing at Dell is alarming. The irony for Dell is particularly acute because much of their business is selling computers and software to workers of the flesh-and-blood variety. Everyone laid off at Dell likely had a laptop and numerous software licenses. Any tech company, from Dell to Microsoft, that sells seat-based tools for information workers faces this paradox. And, even if tech companies are able to value-price AI such that it overcomes the losses in hardware/licensing revenues, their customers will still have to contend with the fact that a large swath of unemployed, middle-class consumers will eventually negatively impact their toplines (not to mention the economy more broadly). Will the marginal savings and productivity gains be worth the topline shrinkage? We have certainly seen situations before in the market where an obsessive focus on short-term EPS growth for the benefit of executive comp payouts has caused companies to sacrifice their futures. As I’ve said before, I am much more interested in the use of AI to drive an accelerated scientific revolution entailing new technologies/solutions for today's seemingly intractable challenges (in healthcare, medicine, food, energy, climate, etc.) as well as a new digital, agent-based economy. I believe the eventual displacement of many information-based jobs today in the workforce is unstoppable, but slowing it down would be prudent (e.g., a major risk for developed economies would be a loss of wage-based input into long-term savings plans like social security). One path forward would be to incentivize worker retention with taxes on automation and promote innovation with R&D grants. Deglobalization incentives would be another way to offset potential AI job losses. In the meantime, there is no shortage of companies claiming to reduce jobs by deploying AI.
b) From Atari to Embodied
Google’s DeepMind engineers have createda ping-pong playing robot that beat all its beginner-level opponents and 55% of the intermediate playersit faced. The bot lost to all advanced players, thus avoiding (for now) the tabletop game’s AlphaGo moment. According to the paper, one weak spot was insufficient reaction time, which might require innovations in the hardware mechanisms, such as “faster communication protocols between the robot’s sensors and actuators”. Indeed, our super-fast human muscle reactions are a marvel.
c) New Ways to Pay
The largest sector in the world will be digital payments once we reach the point that every consumer and business transaction is no longer antiquated and analog. Historically, when a sector goes digital, we see the emergence of a small number of power-law winners. This pattern occurs because natural monopolies are typically the highest non-zero-sum (win-win) outcome (e.g., see last week’s Search Win-Win). Currently, however, the overly complex pyramid of payment companies continues to over earn and resist power lawing (besides the card networks like Visa and Mastercard, which have never been more ripe for disruptionthan they are today). One development I have been watching keenly is the shift to real-time payments (RTP), enabled by governments and industry consortiums like FedNow and The Clearing House, which has become a global phenomenon (Plaidhas a good overview). RTP’s advantage lies in its high speed and low cost. The various RTP vendors cover consumer-to-consumer, consumer-to-business, and business-to-business payments. I have personally seen a large increase in US service providers eschewing credit cards in favor of Zelle or Venmo, which you can think of in part as RTP payment platforms. In an impressive feat, Zelle, which is operated by a consortium of US banks, appears on track to surpass $1T in transactions this year. My current best guess is that RTP is going to keep taking share of consumer and business transactions. And, while this incursion may not directly impact today’s large payment providers, it will at least take the incremental growth away from vendors across the entire stack (from merchant acquirer to rails to credit cards, etc.).
We’ve also seen multiple companies try to disrupt payments at the point of sale, but, again, no one company is running away with that market. If anything, the competition is multiplying. In-store payments have yet to be disrupted despite efforts like Amazon’s Just Walk Out (which debuted in 2016, but more recently has been decommissioned), as well as self-checkout providers that use AI to assess purchases without consumers needing to scan items (side note: self-checkout is still reaching record revenues despite misleading headlines about shoplifting). The next decade will see the birth of a new power-law platform take over in retail payments with a next generation of self-checkout technology powered by multimodal AI. Whether it's using a phone’s camera or more sophisticated wearables (like earbuds with cameras or smart glasses), it seems clear that leading-edge AI models (like Gemini 1.5 and GPT-4o) could easily “see” what you are buying and facilitate a seamless, low cost RTP transaction. While Google Wallet and Apple Pay are currently lost in a sea of competitors trying to gain share in payments, this shift to multimodal payments could enable them (and/or other large language model providers or mobile apps) to power law retail payments. Further, AI operating inside large companies could automate billing and receivables and seamlessly transact B2B payments and consumer billing. We are still within a highly competitive evolutionary fitness function for digital payments; but, reading the tea leaves today, the future appears to involve a combination of RTP and LLMs automating transactions across the economy, likely anointing new payment monopolies.
Washington Post:
Globally, about 18 percent of all new cars sold last year were EVs, according to the International Energy Agency. Electric cars and trucks made up 60 percent of new vehicle sales in China, about a quarter of vehicle sales in Europe and just under 10 percent of sales in the United States.
The automotive consulting firm J.D. Power lowered its expectations for U.S. EV sales this year from 12 percent of new cars to 9 percent. Less than 1 percent of the cars on the road in the United States are electric, according to the firm.
fs.blog
“For a long time, I looked for consensus. I think consensus is really the enemy of scale, and so I used to say, “Whenever we’re making an important decision, there should be winners in the room and losers. We shouldn’t find that negotiated settlement that everyone is happy with. Somebody should be unhappy, three or four people should walk out unhappy, and one should walk out happy, and we’re all going to be good with it.” As you get bigger, the gravity pulls you towards consensus, and I think consensus is the enemy of greatness.” — Brian Halligan
“We cannot change our past... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude. I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it. And so it is with you... we are in charge of our attitudes.” - Charles R. Swindoll
Wohlleben explains how this process works:
“A tree is not a forest. On its own, a tree cannot establish a consistent local climate. It is at the mercy of wind and weather. But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. In this environment, trees can live to be very old. To get to this point, the community must stay intact no matter what. If every tree were looking out for itself, then quite a few would never reach old age. Regular fatalities would result in many gaps in the tree canopy, making it easier for storms to get inside the forest and uproot more trees. The summer heat would reach the forest floor and dry it out. Every tree would suffer.”