Saturday Links

• We are a very data-driven company. Now, most companies say that, and everybody goes by that old saying that “in God, we trust; everybody else, bring data.” But we really live it. And we’ve lived it for a very, very long time. A/B testing was our mantra really. A lot of people weren’t doing that. A lot of people were doing stuff where it was the old style based on the highest-paid person’s opinion — we never believed in that. We always believed “show us the data” because digital commerce is really one of the greatest experimental bench tables you could ever play with. And you can see right away, if I do this, what happens? If I do that, what happens? And we’ve been very fortunate, and that’s really how we came from, really nothing, to be the size that we are — by continuing to look at what is actual real in terms of data versus just what is somebody’s opinion. [Booking Holdings]
• Topology is the study of spaces in the most abstract sense, so abstract that they may not even support a well-defined notion of distance (if your spaces are guaranteed to have distances, then you are now doing geometry rather than topology). Topology takes a coarser view of space: forget about curvature, distance, or really anything involving numbers at all. To a topologist, two points can be “near” each other or not, “connected” or not, and beyond that it doesn’t matter. This is the source of all the jokes about topologists mistaking donuts for coffee cups, but the kind of topology that studies multi-holed donuts, algebraic topology, is actually comparatively tame and normal. Also relatively normal is differential topology, which is the next neighborhood over from differential geometry, and which produces cool videos like this. No, the scary part of town, the place where the true freaks and degenerates hang out, is general topology. [Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf]
• The real world is just a lot more complicated and interesting than anything even the best of us can pull out of thin air. Robert E. Howard knew it, and so did Tolkien, which is why they both drew so heavily on history — and why their works are so enduring and beloved. Really, just about any nonfiction book interesting enough to read to the end will contain the seed of at least one cool story, and probably many more. Patrick Stuart, for example, drew more than a dozen ideas from the late James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (which we reviewed here). Actually many of the other books we’ve reviewed could inspire: my vote would be for the samurai-bureaucrats from MITI and the Japanese Miracle or the “cult of the undead ancestor in your back yard” from The Ancient City, and the post-apocalyptic world imagined by The Knowledge would make a great setting. Alas, it’s probably cheating for me to point to Howard’s Conan stories (reviewed here) or The High Crusade, since they have already been gamified in an obscure little number called Dungeons & Dragons… [Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf]
• The longest discussion in the book is headed “Latte vs. Flat White vs. Cappuccino vs. Cortado,” to which my only response was the instantaneous impression that anyone who has ever publicly uttered the words “flat white”—a phrase so acutely and cloyingly precious, so knowingly, smugly tedious, so redolent of the sort of faux sophistication and moral foppishness that aroused Swift’s righteous hatred—to a poor uniformed server deserves to be expertly beaten up. [The Lamp] 
• Trist's negotiation was controversial among expansionist Democrats since he had ignored Polk's instructions and settled on a smaller cession of Mexican territory than many expansionists wanted and felt he could have obtained. A part of this instruction was to specifically include Baja California. However, as part of the negotiations, Trist drew the line directly west from Yuma to Tijuana/San Diego instead of from Yuma south to the Gulf of California, which left all of Baja California a part of Mexico, and Polk was furious. [Nicholas Trist]
• In spite of the increased demand, silver prices were checked by the fact that the Treasury would redeem silver certificates: paper money exchangeable for silver dollars (or the bullion equivalent, 0.7734 troy ounces), thus placing a ceiling of $1.29 per ounce on the market. Without government as the supplier of last resort, silver would rise in price, likely making it profitable to melt not only silver dollars, but the subsidiary silver coins as well. In 1963, the gap between production and consumption by the non-communist world amounted to 209 million ounces. Just lower than world production (210 million ounces), this gap was filled by the sale of Treasury silver at $1.29 per ounce. [Coinage Act of 1965]
• On May 10, 2024, we acquired the East Stateline Ranch, consisting of approximately 103,000 surface acres and associated surface use contracts, from a private third-party seller for aggregate cash consideration of approximately $360.0 million pursuant to the East Stateline Acquisition. In connection with the East Stateline Acquisition, we entered into a partial assignment and assumption agreement with WaterBridge, pursuant to which we assigned our rights to acquire certain produced water and brackish supply water assets to WaterBridge prior to the closing of the East Stateline Acquisition, and in exchange WaterBridge funded purchase consideration of $165.0 million at closing of the transaction. In accordance with the partial assignment, we also acquired the associated surface use contracts. [LandBridge Company LLC]
• Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45. Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide. [David Samuels]
• After having been forced to leave the Soviet Union 1929 Trotsky has ended up in Mexico 1940. He is still busy with politics, promoting socialism to the world. Stalin has sent out an assassin, Frank Jacson. Jacson befriends a young communist and gets an invitation to Trotsky's house. [The Assassination of Trotsky (1972)]
• Employing household-level transaction data and a staggered difference-in-differences framework, we find sharp increases in sports betting following legalization. This increase does not displace other gambling activity or consumption but significantly reduces households' savings allocations, as negative expected value risky bets crowd out positive expected value investments. These effects concentrate among financially constrained households, who become further constrained as credit card debt increases, available credit decreases, and overdraft frequency rises. [Gambling Away Stability: Sports Betting's Impact on Vulnerable Households]
• Arnott embraces index funds, which tend to beat most active managers over the years, but he is a luminary in the world of finance nerds constantly trying to build a better mousetrap. A paper he wrote in 2005 with Jason Hsu and Philip Moore helped ignite the smart beta trend that now guides more than one trillion dollars in assets. Research Affiliates, founded just three years earlier, says it has created strategies now used by funds with about $150 billion under management. The basic idea of Arnott’s original paper was to create an index based on fundamental factors such as profitability instead of market value. Its main U.S. stock index beat a standard capitalization-weighted one by 1.8 percentage points a year from 1992 through 2022—a substantial edge. The one tracking small companies was even better, edging the comparable index by 2.7 points a year. [WSJ]