Mid December Links

• The local Dollar General store, built on a rural highway and surrounded by farmland, sells no fresh meat, greens or fruit. Yet the 7,400-square-foot steel-sided store has most of what Eddie Watson needs. [WSJ]
• Let's call this "boss email." It’s defined by nearly immediate — but short and terse — replies. The classic two-word email. For underlings, it can be inscrutable. Is that an angry "thanks" or a grateful "thanks"? Does "please update me" imply impatience with you? Boss email can be the workplace equivalent of getting a "k" text reply from a Tinder date. [BF]
• One of the joys of Mustachianism is that it makes you immune to the business cycle. You immediately stop living beyond your means, so you have stepped back from the cliff. Then you start to build a resilient mesh of skills, health, money, friendships, and peaceful personal badassity which further protect you from trouble. [MMM]
• So over the past 18 years he spent time obsessively posting and stalking (perhaps as high as 50,000-100,000 words, the equivalent of 2 novels) full of the usual stuff, with strawman arguments and conflations of statistical concepts. The volume led to much misinterpretation of my work by people who thought he was competent in probability, statistics, mathematical finance and reflected some expert opinion or "peer review" on the subject (the poor fellow is unqualified and hopelessly clueless). The man is not just abhorent, but there may be something deeply wrong with him. I was privately warned about him and the potential of his behavior based on an incident and took appropriate action. I feel sorry about the fellow and wish him a stable career but this link is here to save time (for me and coauthors in the PP paper) from answering mail and correcting stawman arguments. [Taleb]
• They are racing to take advantage of ethereum's exploding price by adding more processing power to their mines. Some of them are even resorting to leasing Boeing 747s to fly the increasingly scarce graphics processors from AMD and Nvidia directly to their ethereum mines so they can be plugged in to the network as quickly as possible. [link]
• From the road, the unmarked gray van eerily looks like it's moving without a driver. The entire front seat looks empty. But when Tuss looked inside, he saw a man wearing a beige and black costume that covered his entire torso. His arms poked out of the bottom of the costume to steer. His face was completely covered, like that of a sports mascot who can see out, but no one can see in. "I looked out and I said, 'Oh my God, there's a guy in a seat costume," Tuss said. "How's that possible? Your brain can't get around it for a second." [link]
• The economic engine has started, and it's about to accelerate. Not only that, the tank is full of gasoline, and the car has been stripped of all the extra weight. What do I mean by that? Well, the past five years of extreme monetary stimulus has weakened the Yen to a level that makes it the cheapest of the major currencies. [link]
• Of course, these estrogen fueled rages tend to indicate the death of a business or industry. The fact is, conventional mass media is an old person habit. The actuarial tables say that most of what we have come to describe as mass media is headed for the dustbin of history. Young people don’t watch any of this stuff. Even not-so-young people have unplugged from television. The smart money is leaving old media and heading for the new platforms. That means the girls are free to feed on the carcass of legacy media. [Z]
• You should invest in companies you hate, because if they do poorly, your losses will be offset by your glee at their difficulties; if they do well, your distress at their success will be mitigated by your wealth. [Reddit]
• According to Mexican police, the bazooka was stashed inside a cargo van along with around 1,800 pounds of weed and 2,000 rounds of ammunition. Authorities believe that the bazooka was supposed to fire through the van's sunroof and shoot packages across the border into Douglas, Arizona. The find might explain the strange security footage authorities in Douglas noticed last August, catching a 100-pound bushel of weed flying over the border. [link]
• From a random start, ethnocentric strategies dominate other possible strategies (selfish, traitorous, and humanitarian) based on cooperation or non-cooperation with in-group and out-group agents. Here we show that ethnocentrism eventually overcomes its closest competitor, humanitarianism, by exploiting humanitarian cooperation across group boundaries as world population saturates. Selfish and traitorous strategies are self-limiting because such agents do not cooperate with agents sharing the same genes. [link]
• It's the what-might-have-been scenario for my father, the formerly nouveau riche exploratory driller whose fortunes crashed in 1983 along with that wave of the oil economy. He's now on Social Security and a small VA disability, mostly blind, although stubbornly semi-independent. A decade ago, I persuaded him to move closer to me, found him a one-bedroom condo he could afford, and have helped him when I'm able and when he’s needed it. I drive him to doctor’s appointments and weekly grocery store visits. When I'm at home, I spend an hour or so with him a day, watching TV, playing backgammon, listening in the rare instances when he wants to talk. A good deal of my mental energy is expended on making sure I see him off this mortal coil with love, and on hoping nothing happens to me before he's gone. [LARB]
• Page 1 of the low-cost airline PR handbook reads as follows: "A good way to get free press is to talk about charging for something nobody in their right mind would, like the bathrooms, or putting something absurd on your planes, like standing seats. Michael O'Leary of Ryanair has done this very well." [SSC]
• U.S. dollars are not backed by anything other than the faith of the fools who accept it as payment and of other fools who agree in turn to accept it as payment from them. The main difference is that, for the moment at least, the illusion, in the case of dollars, is more widely and more fiercely believed. [Medium]
• The application for a stay presented to Justice Kennedy and by him referred to the Court is granted, and the District Court's October 20, 2017 order granting a preliminary injunction is stayed pending disposition of the Government's appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of the Government's petition for a writ of certiorari, if such writ is sought. If a writ of certiorari is sought and the Court denies the petition, this order shall terminate automatically. If the Court grants the petition for a writ of certiorari, this order shall terminate when the Court enters its judgment. In light of its decision to consider the case on an expedited basis, we expect that the Court of Appeals will render its decision with appropriate dispatch. Justice Ginsburg and Justice Sotomayor would deny the application. [SCOTUS]
• Firstly, and most importantly, *now* is the time for all Macintosh enthusiasts to back-up their floppy collections to hard disk. Seriously, finish this article and then go and back up everything you have! In fact, now is probably at least several years past that crucial point, with many Macintosh floppy disks now being between two and three decades old, far beyond the expected lifespan of this mass-produced media. But it is what it is, and if we're lucky then most of our floppies are still readable. Certainly, I've just backed up a couple of hundred disks and maybe less than 5% were totally dead. [link]
• Her shoe closet with a table by Jonathan Zawada from Matter and mohair-velvet curtains from Schumacher. [NYT]
• RNC lawyers huddled to explore an obscure legal mechanism by which they might force Trump off the ticket. Meanwhile, a small group of billionaires was trying to put together money for a "buyout"—even going so far as to ask a Trump associate how much money the candidate would require to walk away from the race. According to someone with knowledge of the talks, they were given an answer of $800 million. (It's unclear whether Trump was aware of this discussion or whether the offer was actually made.) [Atlantic]
• A lot of very intelligent people don't know how to apply that intelligence to making money, or anything practical. A classic example is Wall Street quants. Wall Street guys would often bring in Ph.D's in math or physics and see how they took to the financial stuff. If you can handle upper-level math, then applying that math to financial concepts should be trivial. But about half the rocket scientists took to finance easily, while the rest lived in a realm of pure theory and struggled to apply their math to anything in the real world. Sometimes high IQ can bias you towards preferring to think about situations where all or most variables are knowable. Things like pure math, chess, etc. Such people can be paralyzed when presented with too many variables. People with lower IQs accept that many variables are unknowable so adopt heuristics to deal with that. Often the heuristics they come up with are completely bogus, but they at least allow them to make a decision and move on. [LoTB]
• If universities actually are delivering something of value to professors' children via tuition waivers, shouldn't these good folks want to pay tax on that value? A core principle of U.S. income tax is that you pay tax on the fair market value of stuff that you receive in exchange for work. Also, if universities are delivering something of value to graduate students in exchange for work, why should a Walmart cashier have to work extra hours to make up for the tax not collected? These same folks have spent years on Facebook arguing for the government to collect more in taxes. Now they've found a tax that they don’t like! [PhilG]
• Mr. Rockefeller recorded contact information along with every meeting he had with about 100,000 people world-wide on white 3-by-5-inch index cards. He amassed about 200,000 of the cards, which filled a custom-built Rolodex machine. He kept the 5-foot high electronic device at his family’s suite of offices in New York City’s Rockefeller Center for about half a century. [WSJ]
• Speaker Martha Stewart joked, "I hear NBC executives call Matt the 'Cock of the Rock,'" according to The Voice. [link]
• The president of a school that costs roughly $70,000 per year to attend in person says that maybe people would be safer doing an online degree for minimal $$ at Western Governors University. Why incur these risks if one can do a degree in 2.5 years from the comfort and privacy of one’s home? And at a much lower cost? [PhilG]
• By the way, it's unclear why Chetty's study of inventors is entitled "Lost Einsteins" rather than "Lost Edisons." Chetty, who sometimes seems not all that familiar with his adoptive country, appears to have gotten the European scientific theorist Albert Einstein (who, although he once worked in a patent office, was not much of an inventor) confused with the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison (whose name is on 1,093 U.S. patents). [Sailer]
• The majority of doors are capitalist commodification of inefficiency and the world would be better without them. For me, removing closet doors also makes me more accountable of the things i own and remember to donate what i continue to stare at and never use. doors allow us to pile up stuff we never use or need [Twitter]
• We analysed the chess knowledge discovered by AlphaZero. Table 2 analyses the most common human openings (those played more than 100,000 times in an online database of human chess games). Each of these openings is independently discovered and played frequently by AlphaZero during self-play training. [Hsu]
• Napoleon benefited from the large number of battles in which he led forces. Among his 43 listed battles, he won 38 and lost only 5. Napoleon overcame difficult odds in 17 of his victories, and commanded at a disadvantage in all 5 of his losses. No other general came close to Napoleon in total battles. While Napoleon commanded forces in 43 battles, the next most prolific general was Robert E. Lee, with 27 battles (the average battle count was 1.5). Napoleon's large battle count allowed him more opportunities to demonstrate his tactical prowess. Alexander the Great, despite winning all 9 of his battles, accumulated fewer WAR largely because of his shorter and less prolific career. [Medium]
• "In the past few months we've seen an increase in the volatility in the value of Bitcoin and a significant increase in the fees to process transactions on the Bitcoin network," Valve said in a post on Steam. "For example, transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year, topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin). Unfortunately, Valve has no control over the amount of the fee. These fees result in unreasonably high costs for purchasing games when paying with Bitcoin. The high transaction fees cause even greater problems when the value of Bitcoin itself drops dramatically." [link]
• A weird thing about Obama as President was he didn’t really know many people. He had this tiny circle of wealthy black friends from Chicago, and he avoided socializing with people who might know stuff and tell him gossip. For example, he played golf more than 300 times as President, but typically chose low level staffers to fill out his foursome, like his ski bum body man Marvin Somebody. Obama even played dozens of rounds of golf with Marvin the Ski Bum's brother, a complete nobody. Presumably, Obama liked golfing with guys who wouldn’t try to tell him anything important. [Sailer]
• The four leading tech companies of the current cycle (outside China), Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, or 'GAFA', have together over three times the revenue of Microsoft and Intel combined (Wintel, the dominant partnership of the previous cycle), and close to six times that of IBM. [BE]
• With this blunder, Senate Republicans have achieved the unthinkable: They’ve written a giant corporate tax cut that many of their corporate donors do not like. [NY]
• If in doubt with sizing, ignore what your current trousers say they are, and measure them instead. Lay them out flat, run the tape-measure from one side of the waistband to the other, and then double it. That's your size. [link]
• Since vitamin D is fat soluble, you can do individual mega-doses, and this is a convenient way to run experiments because you don't have to worry about compliance (you just have the subjects come in once a month for an injection under medical supervision). Hence all the experiments doing injections of 50k or 100k or higher. [Gwern]
• The number of people with Coinbase accounts has gone from 5.5 million in January to 13.3 million at the end of November, according to data from the Altana Digital Currency Fund. In late November, Coinbase was sometimes getting 100,000 new customers a day — leaving the company with more customers than Charles Schwab and E-Trade. [NYT]
• Swildens was surprised that Uber had not filed its own re-examination request of the 936 patent and saw time ticking away toward the case's initial October trial deadline. So he took the unusual step of challenging the 936 patent himself, filing what is called an ex-parte reexamination request. He gathered the prior art he had discovered, completed reams of paperwork, and pulled together his detailed arguments into a 101-page document that he filed with the USPTO on August 1. "I'm proud of my work. There's no fluff in there," he says. He then wrote a $6,000 personal check for the reexamination fee. Swildens would not see this money again, whether or not his request was successful. [Wired]
• Why do high-IQ companies such as Goldman Sachs and Google offer such generous employee benefits and give their employees so much leisure and creative freedom, whereas low-IQ jobs are much more restrictive and regimented and much less fun? The reason is not because high-IQ companies are more generous, but because high-IQ employees generate much more economic value than low-IQ ones, and also high-IQ companies, relative to firm size, have far fewer employees than low-IQ companies, so that means each employee gets more. But service sector companies, which tend to hire a lot of average and low-IQ employees, have a much lower revenue per employee (around $60,000) and much worse working conditions. [link]
• Trump views his presidency as a day-to-day battle for legitimacy against liberal news channels, insiders said. The TV allows him to remain aware of the battleground. He even tells staff to view each new day as a new 'episode' in a show about him defeating his opponents. [DM]
• "One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind." [Dickens]
• Scientific knowledge is actually surprisingly "patchy"—and the deepest mysteries often lie close by. Today, we can convincingly interpret measurements that reveal two black holes crashing together more than a billion light-years from Earth. Meanwhile, we've made little progress in treating the common cold, despite great leaps forward in epidemiology. The fact that we can be confident of arcane and remote cosmic phenomena, and flummoxed by everyday things, isn't really as paradoxical as it looks. Astronomy is far simpler than the biological and human sciences. Black holes, although they seem exotic to us, are among the uncomplicated entities in nature. They can be described exactly by simple equations. [Atlantic]
• Housen, who does not consider himself a sommelier, leans on Stephen Curry and Shaun Livingston for wine expertise. Their rule of thumb: pinot noirs and Cabernet Sauvignons that are a 2012 vintage or older. "They're not drinking Keystone," Housen said. [NYT]
• Unpadded metal surfaces, blunt knobs and rods, steering columns that impale—and seatbelts weren't even on the options list. We may think highly of the 1955 Chevrolet, but like all cars of the era, it didn't think much of its passengers; here we use it as a lens through which to view the state of automobile safety of the time. [link]
• In the diagram above, we can see that in the early games, AlphaZero was quite enthusiastic about playing the French Defense, but after two hours (this so humiliating) began to play it less and less. The Caro-Kann fared a good deal better, and held a prime spot in AlphaZero's opening choices until it also gradually filtered it out. So what openings did AlphaZero actually like or choose by the end of its learning process? The English Opening and the Queen's Gambit! [link]
• The Man in Seat 61 is your answer to train travel. A energetic British train enthusiast, Mark Smith, has created a vast website which has become the clearinghouse for train travel world wide. [KK]
• As 1974 drew to its agonized close, the compound annual return on stocks for the previous ten years had fallen to 1.2%. That's right: from January 1, 1965 through December 31, 1974, stocks earned 1.2% annually, even after counting their generous average dividend yield of 3%. Throw in taxes, expenses and inflation, and the typical taxable stock investor had lost at least 6% annually over the previous decade. A really skillful (or lucky) tax-exempt investor might have lost four or five percent annually. The best major asset was cold hard cash, which had outperformed stocks by 4.2 percentage points, compounded annually for a decade, after inflation. [link]
• Case fatality rates and percentage of influenza cases complicated by pneumonia were available from survey data for twelve United States locations in the 1918–1919 pandemic. This study analyzes case fatality rates and cases complicated by pneumonia with respect to estimated summertime and wintertime solar ultraviolet-B (UVB) doses as indicators of population mean vitamin D status. Substantial correlations were found for associations of July UVB dose with case fatality rates (r = -0.72, p = 0.009) and rates of pneumonia as a complication of influenza (r = -0.77, p = 0.005). [link]
• Each of the nine hallmarks of aging is connected to undesirable metabolic alterations. The main features of the "westernized" lifestyle, including hypercaloric nutrition and sedentariness, can accelerate aging as they have detrimental metabolic consequences. [NLM]
• It sometimes makes seemingly crazy sacrifices, like offering up a bishop and queen to exploit a positional advantage that led to victory. Such sacrifices of high-value pieces are normally rare. In another case the program moved its queen to the corner of the board, a very bizarre trick with a surprising positional value. "It's like chess from another dimension," Hassabis said. Hassabis speculates that because Alpha Zero teaches itself, it benefits from not following the usual approach of assigning value to pieces and trying to minimize losses. [link]
• This year, there have been almost $14 billion worth of new listed shares in blank-check companies, a record, outstripping 2007's $12.3 billion global issuance, and giving it all a peak-of-the-markets feel. Between 2007 and 2017, listings were fewer and issuance averaged less than $3 billion a year. [WSJ]
• Unlike the lumpy, potato-shaped asteroids of our solar system, the 400-meter-long 'Oumuamua is perhaps 10 times as long as it is wide, an extreme aspect ratio that trumps any of the known asteroids. Astronomers don’t know how the universe could have produced an object such as this. Most natural interactions between an object and its surrounding medium favor the creation of rounded objects, Loeb said, like pebbles on a lakeshore made smooth by lapping water. [Atlantic]
• Take a map of your town and put a pin at the address of each important person. The mayor, the fire marshal, the police chief, the superintendent of schools, the district attorney… You can be sure they tend to cluster in a few concentrated spots. And those spots will have the best roads, schools, police protection, and public parks along with the highest property values. Everyplace else? Not so much. [Granola Shotgun]
• Meanwhile, in a sign that change is coming to Japanese corporate culture, Japanese asset managers are now also opposing company management more. For example, after the adoption of more-stringent voting criteria in areas such as the election of directors, the number of Nikko's votes against management doubled in two years, reaching 17% in 2017. [link]
• Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn't feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home. [SamA]
• When you look at large manufacturing companies, it becomes very clear that the machine that makes the machine is just as important as the machine itself. There's a lot of work in the iPhone, but there's also a lot of work in the machine that can manufacture over 200m iPhones in a year. Equally, there's a lot of work in a Tesla Model 3, but Tesla has yet to build a machine that can manufacture Model 3s efficiently, reliable, quickly and at quality at the scale of the incumbent car industry. [BE]
• So there's an economic rule to be gotten out of this. When real per-capita income increases, it gets entirely eaten up by increasing prices for positional goods and cost disease, plus occasionally some new product becomes a "necessity" because everyone else now has one. [LoTB]
• One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling. [link]
• Rippetoe visited my gym one day. I liked him immensely—funny, eccentric, a brilliant technique coach. He told me that to become competitive, I would have to get vastly bigger—to something like 275 pounds. But I didn't want to be 275 pounds. [link]