June 3rd Links

• "Menashe's hummus is magnificent, a ring of silky, airy purée surrounding a big spoonful of chunkier, denser stuff; a green rivulet of olive oil; smears of spicy, smoky harissa and green puréed herbs." [LA Times]
• An inventor should always ask, "how can I implement the essence of my idea in different forms"? The answers to this question should be included in the materials that get filed in a provisional application. In addition, as many other features or planned features that have not been included in working prototypes but that are able to be sufficiently described in writing and through figures should also be included in the materials that are ultimately filed in the provisional application. [JDBIP]
• Most public criticisms of Uber have focused on narrow behavioral and cultural issues, including deceptive advertising and pricing, algorithmic manipulation, driver exploitation, deep-seated misogyny among executives, and disregard of laws and business norms. Such criticisms are valid, but these problems are not fixable aberrations. They were the inevitable result of pursuing "growth at all costs" without having any ability to fund that growth out of positive cash flow. [link]
• "The snowball property of growing companies means that if you are extracting cash fraudulently, you usually need to be growing the fake earnings at a higher rate. So people who are correctly identifying frauds can often look like they are jealously attacking success." [link]
• This culture of superstars is a major obstacle frustrating any attempt to improve existing technology. It more or less works for commercial websites, where the startup capital requirements are low, profits per employee are vast, and employee turnover is such that corporate culture is impossible. People get extremely rich for doing something first, even if in their absence their competitors would've done the same six months later. Valve, a video game company that recognizes this, oriented its entire structure around having no formal management at all, but for the most part what this leads to is extremely rich people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg who get treated like superstars and think they can do anything. In infrastructure, this is not workable. Trains are 19th-century technology, as are cars and buses. Planes are from the 20th century. Companies can get extremely successful improving the technology somehow, but this works differently from the kind of entrepreneurship that's successful in the software and internet sectors. The most important airline invention since the jet engine is either the widebody (i.e. more capacity) or the suite of features that make for low-cost flights, such as quick turnarounds. What Southwest and its ultra low-cost successors have done is precious: they’ve figured how to trim every airline expense, from better crew utilization to incentives for lower-transaction cost booking methods. This requires perfect knowledge of preexisting practices and still takes decades to do. The growth rate of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook is not possible in such an environment, and so the individual superstar matters far less than a positive corporate culture that can transmit itself over multiple generations of managers. [link]
• Mount Olympus, nearly 8,000 feet tall, is a mere 35 miles from the Pacific Ocean, one of the steepest reliefs globally and accounting for the high precipitation of the area, as much as 240 inches of snow and rain on Mount Olympus. [Wiki]
• Something to keep in mind is that the NYT figured out a while ago that it could cheaply generate a lot of clickbait content without sending out expensive foreign correspondents to Rangoon or wherever. Instead, it could just pay its intersectional interns to generate cheap content in genres that they would obsess over for free anyway, like "The White Patriarchy Is Trying to Erase My Hair." [Sailer]
• I don't either, but I think I understand. In the absence of a legally enforced class system, there's something deeply disturbing about having poor people of your same genetic stock around. They sort of remind you of where you come from, and where you might go back. When I see all those smart enterprising Chinese working their asses for 200 dollars a month, I feel uneasy, that they might some day replace me, or I'll end up like them. Prole co-ethnics are the personification of downward mobility. And downward mobility is the most pure source of fear in the world. It's fear itself. [Bloody Shovel]
• And thus, in less than 20 years since the Communist takeover, the most ancient culture on earth was shattered, and replaced by a signalling spiral, all by sheer cognitive overload. [Bloody Shovel]
• The following scenario is quite common: In merger negotiations, the target company and the buyer retain their own attorneys. At closing, the target company and all of its assets transfer to the buyer by way of the surviving company. That transfer involves the transfer of computer systems and email servers, which contain pre-merger communications between the target company's owners and representatives (i.e., the sellers) and the target company's counsel. Thus, in a postclosing dispute between the sellers and buyer, the buyer possesses the target company's privileged pre-merger attorney-client communications, including those concerning merger negotiations. This common scenario gives rise to the question currently before the Court: When may a buyer use the acquired company’s privileged pre-merger attorney-client communications in post-closing litigation against the sellers? [Delaware Chancery]