cjmb

Respectfully, there’s a 1,000 word section in the middle about the fundamentally zero-sum nature of media and the competition for consumer eyeballs that I wrote to explain why the stunning success and growth of the mobile internet and walled garden apps is in fact a source of existential competition for Google and their open web.

Google’s share of consumer eyeballs, both direct on their own web properties & indirect via ads displayed on Web 2.0 sites, is smaller now than it was in 2012.

Of course, Google DID innovate. They spawned the modern AI industry. They just totally missed the boat on commercializing it, like many other ossifying monopolies before them.

That is exactly the thesis and the point of that whole section! I’m sorry you got downvoted for saying it, perhaps your tone was too blunt.

It’s not that Google was created as a monopoly with no competition — there’s a neat little graph about what happened to Yahoo in there! It’s that the experience of using Google and the Google suite was at its peak in their clear & unchallenged market leader phase.

Source: am author

Yeap, just +1'ing this too.

One other axis of engagement is "topical relevance" -- and I think that does have some overlap with the axis of "effort put in". Meaning: putting a TON of effort into a long-form piece tends to relate to some original thought or framing you have. But a lot of people are explicitly looking for something, even if that something is an entertaining throwaway meme comment.

If you go too heavily down the "flesh out topic of deep personal interest", you can end up too far away from the "topic everyone wants to talk about on the internet today" stuff.

Sadly (or not!), I take great enjoyment fleshing out topics of deep personal interest, even when they have limited relevance to the topic du jour. If it were different, perhaps we'd be journalists or more mainstream authors.

$35 billion?

I regret to inform you the number has gone up substantially since you last checked it

OP didn't include any context here, but I frequently link this resource to friends! So allow me to pitch it to folks who come here first: reading a transcript is a bit odd at first, but there are so many unfiltered gems in here analyzing how to not just how to compete and win, but also how to improve and coordinate across teams and different work styles.

To the extent that your team is operating in a competitive environment & you like seeing how other domains beyond just Tech & basic self-help business books really build & maintain advantages, you'll get a lot out of reading this.

I've also found it applies wonderfully to competitive videogames, but I'm not sure that's as relevant to this forum.

If winning is not your primary objective, this may not be as interesting to you.

I can confirm this thing is amazing

the pro one, not the one you linked (headphone inserts seem like needless ear pressure): https://mantasleep.com/products/manta-sleep-mask-pro

i toss and turn all night and this thing stays on most of the time, is incredibly comfortable, and i am so grateful i received it as a gift (would never have bought for self)

Agreed. Don't forget the massive implosion of the real estate market 30 years ago that turned a whole generation off of buying property and bankrupted vast swathes of the population.

Said "breathless articles" usually just grab some "rate of price increase" chart benchmarked to the most severe recession in recent decades and start celebrating just because Tokyo also has good housing policy. But in trying to advocate for good policy elsewhere, they just end up championing national recession, international stagnation, depressed wage growth, and more.

see charts & data etc here: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/japans-housing-crisis-...

did you read that link or just the subtitle?

quoting the penultimate paragraph (why are the relevant bits always buried?)

Analyzing a 2008 survey conducted by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, he noted that one-third of respondents described a jump from 750 to 770 on the math portion of the SAT as having a significant effect on a student’s chances of admissions, and this was true among counselors at more and less selective schools alike. Even a minor score improvement for a high-achieving student, then—and one that falls within the standard measurement error for the test—can make a real difference.

Your link literally says: - test prep improves scores - most conservative possible study suggests ~25 point bump in score - college admission stats show this matters for many applicants

???

the fact that the piece ALSO says, later on:

students who have a mean score on the math portion of the SAT around 450. According to the same admissions counselor survey, a 20-point improvement to a score in this range would have no practical meaning for students who are trying to get into more selective schools

and no kidding. 450 on either section is clearly not suitable for a college experience at a "selective school." You're expected to do multivariable calc during MIT's freshman year, regardless of major. 450 on math SAT means you can't do algebra.

Of course! It was hugely influential on my thinking/approach to problem solving under uncertainty/adversity.

And yeah the other commenter provided a link but there is no actual recording of this exact transcript -- the ones that I found on YouTube just frankly are not quite as good as this one (which is why this one has been preserved, I assume)

Sometimes the transcriber missed a question or you need to fill in the blank yourself a bit (which I think actually meshes perfectly with the content of the talk!), but it's worth it!

I highly recommend reading Boyd's transcript of a talk he gave in 1989 instead of the wiki on this stuff: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5497331ae4b0148a6141b...

It will resonate with any builders in the HN audience and give a ton of context behind the thinking here.

You know, some people like to be regarded as being an analyst. They think that’s a term of endearment. I treat it as a personal insult if somebody calls me an analyst. A personal insult. If you’ve read the last paragraph, I’ve showed there are two things you have to be able to do: analyze and synthesize. Analysis and synthesis. And if you can do that in many different areas, tactics, strategies, goals, unifying theme, you can run businesses, you can do any goddamn thing you want.

I find his discussion of Clausewitz's "friction" and the idea of speed as always being relative to one's adversary incredibly useful, even for my day to day work in Tech.

and what would then happen if a bank were -- somehow -- induced to make more of those loans, which, as you describe "duplicate" or "create" money a number of times up to the number of loans made?

and how would the world look if that same bank then decided to stop making so many loans?

would there be a difference in the total money "created"/"duplicated" between those two worlds?

you can quibble with language ("Many people get ensnared in a series of linguistic traps when they talk about bank accounts." - quoting the article) but I think you'll find the OP and other commenters here have a sufficiently reasonable model of what is happening under the hood in the modern banking system. I suspect if you view the OP charitably and accept that he does understand what's going on and is describing the relative difference between these two hypothetical scenarios I gave above as "more or less money creation"...the essay becomes less "bad".

In the OP -

[4.81% interest on your money after 6 months from the date of purchase]

This is a single concept. The quantity of money earned (4.81%) and the time period over which it is earned (6 months from the date of purchase) are both specified.

In your message -

it earns an annual rate of 5%, for 6 months

You change the rate to annual here..

You're earning 5%,

Here you leave the time period over which the 5% is earned implicit (1 year)

If you were earning 2.5%, for 6 months, you'd only get $125.

And once again here you drop the "per year"

Conventionally, finance uses rates of return on an annual basis -- but it's not unreasonable to use another basis so long as that's specified clearly (as in the OP). This helps because the OP is trying to help people understand the dollar-magnitude of returns they are locking in (X% per year, but for half the time -- aka half the sticker price return) and what is variable in the future.

Apple has made their own music app horrific to use -- every month it bricks when I open it and become unresponsive until it loads a fullscreen ad for their streaming service.

Even when I'm in low or no-data modes (like on a plane).

Every time that screen pops up I lose a little more sanity.

as severe as anything the SEC can bring to bear, imo

I agree.

Correcting the many incentive problems in modern American science would need a hypothetical body with significant funding leverage over journals & scientists to exert executive action. Sadly there is no such centralized funding body, so the problem must be unsolvable.

"in a way" -- the region in question is northern New Hampshire.

on balance, the housing price appreciation, and therefore tax burden, on "these people" is functionally entirely due to external macroeconomic factors, which you can clearly see on the Zillow Housing price index by typing in "New Hampshire" or any relevant zip code: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/

The average NH home increased $7k-$10k in value per year linearly for the last 10 years!

Then it increased $25k Jan '20 -> Jan '21.

Then it increased *$53k* Jan '21 -> Jan '22.

10 years worth of price appreciation, and therefore tax appreciation, occurred in a 2 year window.

I understand many people have a pet housing policy issue they care about, but trying to attribute this step-function change in tax burden to "New Hampshire zoning laws" and "these people" as opposed to the massive increase in demand caused by Covid urban flight/WFH & relaxed monetary policy is completely unreasonable.

I hate to plug my own writing here, but if you'd like a much deeper exploration of the topic, you'll probably enjoy reading The Full Stack of Society: Can You Make A Whole Society Wealthier?

https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/the-full-stack-of-soci...

A lot of folks on HN have liked and shared it before so I feel like it's okay to share again.

My core thesis is that there's a stack of wealth-building strategies:

- Feudalism, aka "take & tax other people's productivity" (this is zero-sum)

- Mercantilism, aka "sell someone else's productive outputs into someone else's consumption"

- Industrialism, aka "Mercantilism but with production brought in-house"

- Globalism, aka "export Industrialism to make your customers richer so they can buy more of your products"

- Financialism, aka "centralize and allocate flows of capital across time to accelerate any of the other layers in the stack"

In reality, most successful countries combine a couple of these, but one tends to be dominant at a time. Most large countries today have passed through this stack and are currently in one of the final 3 layers.

A handful of small, well-positioned countries are able to run unique strategies based around supporting neighbours. I chose not to focus on these because they tend to be very specific (e.g. Singapore can only be Singapore because it's located in Singapore, Ireland needs to be in the EU for its tax arbitrage to work, etc.).

I would also +1 to epistasis's suggestion in the top comment -- How Asia Works is a great book. If you read it, also read Miti and the Japanese Miracle. My chapter on Industrialism links to those and other related sources.

This is actually a picture of national failure, tantamount to celebrating a blowout losing scoreboard. It is not a model for others to copy.

Productivity and inflation are very related to each other. Per your chart, "Japan enters the chat" in the mid 1980s. If you're curious what has happened to Japan since the mid 1980s you can read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades (this wikipage was pluralized from "Decade" to "Decades" in the last couple of years, due to the continued struggles of the Japanese economy).

To the extent that you hold central banks responsible for the national-economic state of things, Japan's central bank ought to be considered a massive failure.

If you lean towards the Krugman side of things, you can find his explanation of that failure here: https://web.archive.org/web/20161203180303/https://krugman.b...

If you prefer the Scott Sumner side, you can find his explanation of that failure here: https://www.themoneyillusion.com/why-japans-qe-didnt-work/ https://www.themoneyillusion.com/the-other-money-illusion/ https://www.themoneyillusion.com/rooseveltian-resolve/

Personally, I tend to sympathize with central banks and take a more muted view of their powers at the national-economic level. In my model, Japan's central bank was/is powerless given the magnitude of non-financial headwinds the country face(d) after the opening of China and beneath 2 decades of aggressive anti-Japanese trade policy from their largest trading partner (USA). This is a (slightly) heterodox take, and you can read my articulation of this view here: https://www.conradbastable.com/essays/unequal-growth-the-zer...

But whatever your take, Japan's economic struggles should not be mistaken for signals of success.

"...requires many safety features for new cars:"

"Making them mandatory saves lives."

Alternatively: making them mandatory raises the price of new cars and pushes more consumers to buy used older cars, which are generally less safe for a variety of reasons & often worse for the environment.

Economics is always about tradeoffs. Not saying this one isn't worth it, but you're not getting a free lunch here.

source: have not bought a new car despite being in the market for one since 2020 because prices make it a bad decision. Have added an additional 20k miles to existing car.

To be fair, the majority of professional sports contracts include items that keep the athlete on payroll while injured or otherwise unable to play, and teams will often invest significant resources waiting for a player to return to health (or even actively assisting the athlete in their recovery journey).

I'm not saying these contracts are "for life", but there are plenty of athletes who either a) get injured and are unable to play or b) take a significant period of time to deliver on their initial promise. Nature might be cruel, but sports teams are often quite fair & accommodating...

The book cover thing is really insane, too. It's gotten a little better over the last decade, but the early 2000s period was crazy (source: moved from UK to USA at that time).

It's interesting that your pet theory is New York City parochialism. Mine is gerontocracy: the (mostly New York based) publishers of SF & Fantasy have been run by the same aristocracy for ~70 years. And those folks cut their teeth on serialized pulp fiction, comic books, and magazines, which culminated in a certain art style that (imo) peaked in the 1980s.

If you browse wikipedia, you will see that many, many, many roads lead back to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ace_Books

Outside of the US market, newer publishing shops were started & run by younger folks with more modern artistic visions.

You can use the old definitions too and see the same effect: https://gonzoecon.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/chart-line-...

The change increased M1 by moving common components of M2 downstream into M1. It's why M2 is all anyone should track. And a "definition change" is not in fact the primary reason for a large increase in the money supply in 2020.

Smart source: https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/01/whats-behind-the-rec... Gonzo source: https://gonzoecon.com/2021/04/m1-and-m2-have-changed/

I rarely see this sentiment since the entire Tech class has moved to Spotify subscription streaming as their music platform of choice (slight hyperbole, only slight). But as one of the 12 remaining iTunes app users out there, I am shocked at how terrible the software has become.

The 2005 version of iTunes that ran on my PowerPC macbook was strictly better than the app that I have installed today on my Windows 10 gaming PC. The 2008 iPhone iTunes app was better than the "Music" app on my iPhone today -- when I open my phone in airplane mode on a flight to listen to music, it bricks itself for 10 seconds trying to get wifi connection and prompt me to pay them for their crappy music streaming service. There is no way to disable that self-bricking advertisement.

I suspect that the average Apple employee uses Spotify to listen to music and doesn't have a large personal collection of songs not available for streaming on common platforms. The lack of dogfooding shows through.

Don't let it bother you man. It's just an example of cross-cultural confusion crossed with some blunt HN mannerisms (to put it politely).

The tell is the callout that this is an "American thing" -- which, well, it is. America has a culture, and especially SF has a culture, that's pretty distinct from elsewhere. Talking up the raw intellect of one's coworkers is a very SF thing, and a very-non-European thing (not to say the person you're responding to is from the EU, I'm sure there's other similar places).

How it reads to an American: "this commenter is psyched to go to work with their colleagues, whose contributions and company they enjoy"

How it (could conceivably) read to someone from a culture very different from SF's: "this commenter is bragging about the IQ of their coworkers relative to everyone else's, which is either uncouth or sycophantic."

Commenting on it is of course ridiculous. Happy your team is good :)

I don’t have to have any opinion at all about the origin of COVID-19 … but I did, and I didn’t share it only because of the likelihood that I’d be called an idiot on social media.

This is a great justification for anon accounts -- both "primary anon-only" users and also fully- or semi- anon alts for people who have thoughts like this (which, in my opinion, ought to be every smart intellectual who doesn't make the Culture War their primary stomping ground).

Blaming a lack of courage is all well and good after the tides have turned, but courage is slim comfort when the eye of sauron turns on you. You will not feel much better for martyring yourself in service of the beliefs you hold with about-as-much-confidence as Scott expresses here -- and you'd be wise not to do so.

If you must put something down in writing that you know has the potential to cause political heat to fall on your shoulders, and it's not something core to your life's work, it's perfectly fine to either a) use a semi-anon alt or b) write in a circumspect manner. Preferably both.

Anonymity is a thin shield to hide behind, so I say "semi-anon" in support of the idea that, though the anonymity may be imperfect and the identity may be tied to your own, it can clearly be shown as a vehicle to express thoughts you are less sure of, or that you wish to distance yourself from somewhat.

I say all this will the empathy & sympathy of a fellow online writer, though with only a tiny fraction of Scott's reach...

(author here, hi)

Thanks, glad you got something from the piece!

My view is that most people cannot know what they want before they have an experience of it.

I feel this very strongly. As I said on my "About" page, anytime I find something I enjoy, I see what it's like to actively create it too -- developing a little more of the San Franciscan School "feel" for the object/experience in the process, and almost always deepening my appreciation for the object/experience.

My writing is itself an example of this. I only started writing these essays because I enjoy reading things like them so much!

I think the visual aura part can be different for many people. I also thought I was having a stroke -- in my case the entire center of my vision in both eyes disappears.

But the brain is used to that behaviour (center-dead-spot from optic nerve) and has a prebaked solution: average/blend the inputs from around the dead-spot.

However my migraine-visual-aura center-dead spot is about the size of a 12" laptop screen, which results in horrifically nauseating visual "blending" happening nonstop. I tried to look at a book once and the only words I could read were the first & last words on each line. I tried to read a car license plate and could only read the last letter.

When the rate at which I got them increased from 1/6mo to 1/6week, I got a prescription & haven't had one since.

But see it's more complicated than that

:) exactly!

:) Thanks! And yes, I did read that part, and it is true, but I think it was getting at something slightly different.

"What are you not saying because you're scared I'll blame you if it fails" implies that the advice-giver has a certain mental model that didn't quite resonate with me.

Mostly I try to avoid hurting people who ask me for advice. A) because I care about them, and B) because very often the "right" answer could reduce their will-to-action in a completely counter-productive way.

(As a hypothetical relevant to HN -- 9 times out of 10, the "correct" advice to give your friend on their startup/product is to deliver a completely filter-free structured rant about all the ways their startup/product is complete and utter dogshit. "Correct" in the sense that their startup/product will be bad and need iteration, but also in the sense that founders/creators almost always have a Parent-Child-esque emotional connection to their creation, and without some external emotive-"knock" they will often rationalize away the need to make changes.

But of course that is incredibly poor form as a friend, which is your foremost relationship with this person, and not as a product-reviewer! And so you'll tend to give some nice comments and then some highly-couched "constructive" critique that signals you know they want some negative feedback, but don't trust them to handle it -- and as a result they won't really know where their product stands, and nothing improves.

As a prospective advice-seeker, you really can't over-signal your commitment to getting the other person's raw & emotional thoughts. "Swear" words tend to be one good way to signal this sort of thing in the English-speaking professional environment, but ultimately humans evolved to be master-tier readers of their friends' inner emotional state and if you feel a tightening in your gut when you get harsh advice, the advice-giver knows you feel it)

One additional thought on advice that I didn't read in Alexey's piece:

- the best advice, in most domains, is never given freely or publicly, so if you are seeking advice, seek it in private

- the best advice tends to have pain associated with it for the recipient (Alexey notes this in section 4)

- the best advice-givers are aware of the effect that giving their advice would have on a typical recipient

- the best advice-givers will tell white-lies privately, even to people they love and respect, if the advice-seekers don't send ultra-clear ultra-proactive signals that they will not be hurt by the advice they seek

- the best advice tends to give you a new "lens" or "perspective" through which to view the world, unlocking second- and third-order insights of your own

- sometimes you really have made a mess of things, and no amount of "advice" can save you from the necessary task of working through all that mess

This is all the same thought, just expressed 6 different ways.