Marvin’s Best Weekly Reads Jan 30th, 2022
“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings”--Lao Tzu
"Starbucks crushed many mom-and-pop coffee shops. Walmart did the same to small department and grocery stores alike. Local hardware stores have been largely replaced by Lowe’s and Home Depot. The response to the pandemic destroyed countless small businesses, much to the advantage of giants like Amazon. One wonders why so much attention is being selectively paid to the plight of the small rancher.
The senator most responsible for pushing this issue is Max Baucus of Montana, Biden’s longtime Democratic colleague and ally in the Senate. It wouldn’t surprise us if Baucus sold Biden’s team on the usefulness of this issue as a political deflection point for the inflation challenges facing the administration.
Naturally, Baucus’ family runs the famous Sieben Ranch in Helena, Montana. Plus c'est la même chose."
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/political-hamburglars
2. This is a damn good show. Can't believe I just discovered it now. I need to get out of my bubble.
3. "Yes, the Fed is likely to hike. Yes, the Fed is likely to try and start tightening the balance sheet again. Yes, other G10 central banks ought to try and be hawkish… What happens when you tighten into a massive slowdown in the rate of change of credit, is that you flatten the curve materially... And I am even tempted to say that you should both buy the USD and duration (in most currencies) with an arm and a leg already now.. And equities overall.."
https://themacrocompass.substack.com/p/vikings
4. I expect there are alot more tech biz people living in nice rural areas than we think. Good for you Wesley.
"I never want to bag on San Francisco; it’s been very generous to me over the last 20 years. But it’s also a place where, when things go crazy, it’s not a fun or comfortable place to be. I was in San Francisco when the shutdown occurred and I was watching these crazy long lines around supermarkets. So I got in my car and visited like 10 national parks.
When I got to Wyoming, where Grand Teton National Park is and Yellowstone, I fell in love with it. It was the most beautiful place on the planet. I’ve always dreamt of owning a mountain home. Everyone was on remote Zooms; I predicted this thing would last two-plus years. So I just bought a house. I said, “Why not?” and I’ve been here ever since."
5. Great concept: Longitudinal Hiring.
"the increasing usage of Longitudinal hiring. What this means is that companies are not looking at the location of the employee anymore but rather at the timezone he/she is present in.
So for example, a company that is headquartered in New York shares the same timezone as Venezuela, Bahamas, Toronto, etc and even Argentina is just 1 hour ahead. The amount of talent that companies would have access to if they start hiring based on timezones is monumental. So long companies have restricted themselves to a small subset of people who would be willing to relocate, but with longitudinal arbitrage, they have unlocked a whole lot more talent."
https://vadithya.com/what-is-longitudinal-arbitrage
6. This mess is also because of the EU's badly thought out anti-Nuclear Energy policy. "Policy by Platitude".
"The project in question is Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion Russian-owned pipeline that has Washington in a difficult position with some of its European allies, divided other European countries among themselves, and weakened Ukraine.
And Russia, in case you haven’t figured out, wants all of those things — a geopolitical tool to get leverage over Europe, a vulnerable Ukraine, and a payout from the pipeline."
https://www.vox.com/22881709/nord-stream-2-russia-ukraine-germany-united-states-cruz
7. The future of war. It's coming, like it or not.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/one-person-fly-drone-swarm
8. I'll definitely be picking up this book. "Davos Man"
https://time.com/charter/6139479/davos-man-peter-goodman
9. This is a pretty damn good rubric.
https://davidcummings.org/2022/01/15/friedbergs-rubric-for-business-value-creation
10. Sounds about right.
"In short, while at larger companies positioning is indeed suffering, at seed-stage companies, positioning is the quick search for simple clarity."
https://kellblog.com/2022/01/07/seed-stage-positioning-lock-and-load
11. Older book but one I'll have to check out. India seems to be becoming the new center of the world balancing out China and the USA.
https://branko2f7.substack.com/p/capital-the-explosion-of-delhi
12. "Somewhere in the years leading up to the layoffs, I had been exposed to the idea that a business and a company are not one and the same. We tend, in startup-land, to use the terms interchangeably. But they are not the same.
A business is comprised of a product or service sold to customers in exchange for money, attention, or some other form of payment.
A company is a collection of humans brought together around a shared effort or mission.
We speak a lot in startups about how to build a business: how to learn from customers, how to build a great product, how to test various acquisition strategies, how to raise capital, etc. But we speak very little about how to build a company."
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/build-company-just-business-matt-munson
13. "Cartels are effective precisely because they do not look like evil monopolies at all. The coastal homeowner campaigning against new development looks like your mother, and very well might actually be your mother. Doctors and schoolteachers are the healers and educators of society, not the enemy. None of them believe that they are advocating for policies that take from the poor and give to the rich; they are certain that the true problem with housing must lie with developers and investors, or that the true problem with health care must lie with administrators and CEOs.
This is what makes cartels more dangerous. The tech sector is actually quite small compared to housing and health care; none of the major tech companies have revenue much greater than $200 billion globally, while housing and health care reach into the multiple trillions of dollars per year in the U.S. alone."
https://philo.substack.com/p/cartels
14. This seems ominous.
"The metaverse represents the most recent battle between human freedom and the constraints of reality. It could also become a battle to define reality itself."
https://www.city-journal.org/enter-the-metaverse
15. "As people wake up to inflation being 7%+, it means that they losenearly a month of their entire working year. Keeping it simple, even if you think that inflation is only 8.33% it means that you lost one full month of production, so *your after tax* income needed to rise by more than 8.33% to live the exact same life in 2022 as you did last year. Insanity."
https://bowtiedbull.substack.com/p/understanding-the-dangers-of-centralization
16. "The good news about Web3 is that it cannot give rise to the type of tyrannies we saw in Web 2.0. People often say "OpenSea will be the Facebook of Web3" or "Coinbase will be the Amazon of Web3". But they're missing an important point: In a world where users can pick up their things and leave, tyrants will behave completely differently. And tyrannies like the ones we've seen in the past could simply not survive.
The bad news about Web3 is that new types of tyrannies can emerge. In this case, the role of the US is played by the largest blockchains, particularly Ethereum. Ethereum currently enables users to move freely between apps and platforms and move money and assets across digital and physical borders. That's wonderful and it enhances individual freedom and keeps all participants in check."
https://www.drorpoleg.com/stalin-in-the-metaverse
17. Some good news in America.
"So densifying America is going to be a brutal, long, uphill slog, no matter what. But it’s a task to which smart young activists, thinkers, and organizers have increasingly set their minds. Our history shows that rarely do such campaigns fail without changing the country in some tangible way. YIMBYism addresses a real and pressing economic problem, but it also touches a deep need in the human spirit — the need to live close to other human beings. The pandemic isolated us all from each other, and urbanism is one way of reaching to reclaim the physical contact we’ve lost."
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-yimbys-are-starting-to-win-a
18. This is a bad way to start off the year. This is bad for everyone.
https://drpippa.substack.com/p/warwords-part-one
19. This is a big deal. 69B big. MSFT buys Blizzard. Gaming is happening.
https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/microsoft-to-buy-activision-for-69b-5694026
20. "“Fighting insurgencies,” we haven’t been so good at, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, where U.S. efforts were undermined by their tethers to corrupt, inefficient regimes and officials. Supporting insurgencies, we’ve been better at.
That’s a message Washington wants Moscow to hear in the Kabuki shadow war over Ukraine. And it’s understood that some in Washington are indeed serious about setting fires in Kazakhstan and elsewhere—not just Ukraine—should Russian troops and tanks cross the Dnieper in the coming days."
https://www.spytalk.co/p/us-signaling-putin-that-ukraine-will
21. This is a cool dude. Daniel Dae Kim.
22. "What is interesting about the relation between state conflict and technology is that just as new technologies slowly raised the destructive potential of direct conflict, a new avenue was opened: states can now fight each other not by winning in a direct battle but by setting the rules under which other states must operate. Call it a form of indirect government: perhaps your opponent will even assume the rules are natural or given, but in reality you have moved one level up in the great game.
Your opponent is playing a video game. You are coding it. I would reserve the term superpower for those states engaged in a battle to shape the rules. Everyone else is competing under the rules."
https://brunomacaes.substack.com/p/technology-wars-the-singularity-is
23. Always worth listening to Balaji. Rise of Indian & Chinese state capacity. Decline of US state capacity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M85Vctnj90
24. This is a lot of $$ and VC investor super power. As with these specific situations & hyped companies, this will be either a crazy massive hit or massive dud, MUCH more so than usual in VC. Many times these turn into the Silicon Valley version of Matrix 2 the movie due to the hype.
25. This is going to be good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM_4-XFeRyA
26. Audience first is the rule. So many business opportunities come from this.
"Ultimately, the successful Boy Brands are the ones that come from musicians who are as savvy at communicating with their fans about things and taste as they are about making resonant music. “These businesses are not for everyone,” says Beckman, “and that’s why the community—the tribe—that these artists bring along with them is really critical.” If an artist can cultivate a fandom in that way—which is increasingly the way traditional luxury brands are trying to operate—“then it could become a sustainable, real business.”
https://www.gq.com/story/boy-brands-frank-ocean-tyler-the-creator-harry-styles
27. This is just one of the best scenes in any movie. The Heat cafe scene with Pacino and Deniro. Masterclass based on a true life occurrence.
https://www.zavvi.com/blog/features/heat-at-25-how-that-incredible-diner-scene-came-to-be
28. Big fan of Lithuania. Down with the CCP. The new geopolitical bullies.
"It is too soon to tell whether Lithuania is the lone nut and Slovenia the first follower that triggers a foot-stomping dance party on the CCP’s credibility, but the coming days and weeks will be telling."