Wednesday, February 7, 2018

February 2018 Links

  • Most books are a BIG IDEA exploited during hundreds of pages so that in that way you have to pay 20 dollars for the idea. Sometimes this bloating is better, sometimes worse (i.e., inspirational anecdotes), but most books can have their "usefulness" reduced to 10-20 pages. To get these 10-20 pages, I read in EPUB files and highlight interesting passages and write notes through PocketBook. Then I export the highlights and notes in xhtml format and convert them to a Google Doc through an R script. Then, most important of all, I try to "rewrite" the book from this Google Doc during trips. This is the moment when I really learn from the book. Not only is much easier to retain concepts from 10 concentrated pages than from 300 bloated pages. Rewriting it forces me to link the concepts and really understand them. It works in a similar way to the advice of learning something by trying to teach it to someone. [MR]
  • Here is how I pack. One hand held bag with a shoulder strap. In it I pack five good quality black cotton t-shirts, five changes of socks and underwear, a pair of cotton chinos, a woolen jumper, a woolen beanie, a waterproof goretex jacket, a pair of sandals, one nice button up shirt, a baseball cap, a pair of jeans, and my toiletries bag. Any room left over I pack with books. These books will be swapped with other travelers as I meet them on my journey. If I need anything else I purchase it on the way. [Pushing Rubber]
  • Multiculturalism is a lie and a betrayal of Western culture. Not all cultures are equal. If you believe they are then go and live in Africa or Afghanistan and see how you like it. [Pushing Rubber]
  • You may believe that it does not matter how you dress, but it does. You may think that people should not judge by appearances, but they do. You might well consider yourself to be special and above the hierarchies of social status, but you are not. [Pushing Rubber]
  • You don't have to work hard to have a great relationship. A great relationship is easy, that's what makes it a great relationship. Any relationship which requires work isn't worth being in in the first place. [Pushing Rubber]
  • Quasi-religions such as environmentalism and new age nonsense don't seem to offer much spiritual comfort when the doc informs you that you have the big C. But the Boomers infected the Church much like they infected everything else; or rather they failed to protect the treasures that had been passed down to them by previous generations. [Pushing Rubber]
  • The modern man has spent time alone. Use this time well. Take up some hobbies, learn a language, become more interesting. Prove to yourself that you don't need anyone else in order to be happy. If you can do that then you'll be in the position of never being vulnerable. And when you do find someone then there is a greater possibility that she will enhance your life. Not only that but women are very attracted to a man that doesn't need them. That's why alone time is so important. It ends up making you even more attractive. So not only will you not die alone, you'll end up with someone far superior than you were able to attract before. [Pushing Rubber]
  • Common to all the great marriages and relationships that I personally know, (and there aren't many of them), both partners are genuinely happy people. They wouldn't think about taking their frustrations out on their partner or making them demean themselves for their own short-term contentment. They are marriages of equals. The husbands do not have to ask 'permission' to do something. The idea of asking my wife for permission is completely alien to our relationship. I simply let her know what I'm doing. She in turn is happy that I'm having a good time. [Pushing Rubber]
  • There's strong market demand for smaller homes with a patch of garden in tolerably walkable neighborhoods near a Main Street. The architects have already arrived with their Dwell Magazine aesthetic. I first began to understand this dynamic in Portland, Oregon some years ago. Halfway between the urban core and the fringe sprawl is a particular sweet spot for a lot of people. [Granola Shotgun]
  • We never see the world as our retina sees it. In fact, it would be a pretty horrible sight: a highly distorted set of light and dark pixels, blown up toward the center of the retina, masked by blood vessels, with a massive hole at the location of the "blind spot" where cables leave for the brain; the image would constantly blur and change as our gaze moved around. What we see, instead, is a three-dimensional scene, corrected for retinal defects, mended at the blind spot, stabilized for our eye and head movements, and massively reinterpreted based on our previous experience of similar visual scenes. All these operations unfold unconsciously—although many of them are so complicated that they resist computer modeling. For instance, our visual system detects the presence of shadows in the image and removes them. At a glance, our brain unconsciously infers the sources of lights and deduces the shape, opacity, reflectance, and luminance of the objects. [SSC]
  • No other farmer, not even Gallo, had cornered a market the way Resnick had cornered the growing, buying, processing, and selling of pistachios. He had his hands on 65 percent of the nation’s crop. [link]
  • Dozens of entrepreneurs, made newly wealthy by blockchain and cryptocurrencies, are heading en masse to Puerto Rico this winter. They are selling their homes and cars in California and establishing residency on the Caribbean island in hopes of avoiding what they see as onerous state and federal taxes on their growing fortunes. [NYT]
  • Older adult residents' socio-demographic factors were found to be associated with gait speed. Those with slow gait speed were not physically active and had less frequent contact with people through religious activities and this might place them at risk of being socially isolated, which can have consequences. Gait speed can be included as a routine assessment tool to identify at-risk groups for interventions which aim to keep the older adults socially engaged and healthy. [NLM]
  • By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!" [Paul Graham]
  • There could be a period when stocks and bonds go down together. For example, instead of stock declines -> people wanting the security of bonds, people might decide that stock declines lead to bailouts which are really stealth currency devaluations, and decide they want no part of the long end of the yield curve. [CBS]
  • While sales of other "light lagers" like Molson Coors Brewing Co.'s Coors Light and Miller Lite also declined, the fall at Bud Light is the steepest. The brand suffered its biggest volume drop ever last year—down an estimated two million barrels, or 5.7%. [WSJ]
  • It's been more than a decade since South Florida Rep. Mark Foley was forced out of Congress for sending sexual text messages to teenage boys. But Foley tapped his congressional campaign fund to dine on the Palm Beach social circuit four times in early 2017, ending with a $450 luncheon at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches. [link]
  • We knew the alt-right was a rapidly-growing far-right threat to society. So we did what we do best – got inside. For the past year, we sent Patrik Hermansson undercover in the alt-right. He infiltrated the heart of the movement, and he caught it all on hidden camera. [Kickstarter]
  • This pessimistic view of the universe, in which civilisations must exist in isolation for the sake of their own safety, illustrates a point that Cixin makes throughout the series: that virtuous behaviour is a luxury, conditional on the absence of threat. [LRB]
  • Sound cards happen to carry sound most of the time, but they are perfectly happy measuring any AC voltage from -2 to +2 volts at 48,000 times per second with 16 bits of accuracy. Put another way, your microphone jack measures the voltage on a wire (two wires for stereo) every 0.02 milliseconds, and records it as a value between 0 and 65,535. [link]
  • Aspirin and atenolol (beta blocker) enhance metformin activity against breast cancer - use of cheap, safe drugs against cancer is fascinating but I doubt it will catch on, no money to be made. [Mangan]
  • When people are subjected to artificial blue-rich white light at night, from screens and electronic devices as well as artificial illumination, the photosensitive ganglion cells in the retina signal the brain to stop producing melatonin. Such disturbances can have wide effects: on sleep and waking cycles, eating patterns, metabolism, reproduction, mental alertness, blood pressure and heart rate, hormone production, temperature, mood patterns and the immune system. [link]
  • Probably placebo effects rode on the coattails of a more important issue, regression to the mean. That is, most sick people get better eventually. This is true both for diseases like colds that naturally go away, and for diseases like depression that come in episodes which remit for a few months or years until the next relapse. People go to the doctor during times of extreme crisis, when they’re most sick. So no matter what happens, most of them will probably get better pretty quickly. [SSC]
  • I view the infamous "Dean Scream" as one of the last triumphs of the controlled Establishment Media. Dean was mildly outside of the mainstream consensus, but still he was effectively kneecapped by the media over some mild overexuberance. At the time, I found the whole episode ridiculous and I still feel that way. Say what you want about Dean, but at least he was against The Iraq War, unlike the eventual Democratic nominee, John Kerry. Contrast the media's ability to sideline Dean with the Donald Trump campaign. Internet comments and social media allowed the Trump campaign to leapfrog the Establishment Media framing that traditionally blocked non-conformist politicians. If Dean had access to Twitter and Facebook, his supporters could have transmogrified the "Dean Scream" into a humorous meme and simply moved on. [Sailer]
  • SENS Research Foundation, a leading Silicon Valley nonprofit focused on diseases of aging, announced today the receipt of a $2.4 million Ethereum donation from Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum and the co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. [link]
  • Trump's Treasury forecasts borrowing over $1 trillion in 2019 and over $1.1 trillion in 2020. Before taking office, Trump described himself as the "king of debt," although he campaigned on reducing the national debt. [WaPo]
  • Brendan is thirty and the founder of a tech company. He is bright, cheerfully handsome, well-related, well-connected, an alumnus of Brown University and Goldman Sachs, where he did operational risk management, which he concedes was "not exactly a crushing-it kind of job." One day a couple years ago, Brendan looked at his bosses and saw his future self: "charting numbers under fluorescent light, two kids at home, counting vacation days, and at what cost?" He quit and tried writing comedy sketches but found it too solitary, plus he didn't want to move to L.A. Last year, Brendan scraped together his life savings and started a dating app called Hater. [Esquire]
  • The question, as always, is the following: what source of fixed investment will disappear as the result of the backup in interest rates? There is obviously a fair amount of malinvestment going on (cough, Bitcoin mining, cough), but it is unclear to me that this enough to derail the global business cycle. [link]
  • Former firefighter Thomas Futterer, an avid runner who lives in Long Beach, hurt a knee "misstepping off the fire truck," three weeks after entering DROP, according to city records. The injury kept him off the job for almost a full year. Less than two months after the knee injury, a Tom Futterer from Long Beach crossed the finish line of a half-marathon in Portland, Ore., in a brisk 2:05:23, according to race results posted online. Only one Tom Futterer lives in Long Beach, according to public records. [LA Times]
  • For years, when it arrived in a port, the Blue Ridge would be welcomed by a familiar sight on the pier: a beaming Leonard Francis, flanked by a black sport-utility vehicle or limousine and an entourage of comely young women. His company, Glenn Defense, held Navy contracts to provide everything the crew might need while in port, including fuel, food, fresh water, tugboats, security guards and ground transportation. But Francis, also known within Navy circles as "Leonard the Legend," was renowned for the perks that he provided off the books. Besides paying for meals at Asia's fanciest restaurants, he was famed within the Navy for the prostitutes and strippers he had on call from China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Russia, Thailand and Vietnam. [WaPo]
  • I wonder how many of the people making predictions about the future of truck drivers have ever ridden with one to see what they do? One of the big failings of high-level analyses of future trends is that in general they either ignore or seriously underestimate the complexity of the job at a detailed level. Lots of jobs look simple or rote from a think tank or government office, but turn out to be quite complex when you dive into the details. [MR]
  • Owls are intensely territorial, and when a male hears a rival male of the same species invade his territory, he attacks. By posing as an intruder, an observer equipped with speakers can quickly bring an aggrieved male into view. [NY Books]
  • At a total lifetime intake of 7,100 liters of 100 proof whiskey, you're guaranteed to get cirrhosis. However, 50% of the alcoholics had cirrhosis at an intake of about 2,000 liters. [Mangan]
  • Calls for rent-control legislation are growing across the U.S. as apartment tenants endure sharply rising rents and memories fade of the downsides of price caps. [WSJ]
  • U.S. officials have long maintained the federal government would make a profit on its $1.4 trillion student loan portfolio or at least break even, but two recent reports suggest just the opposite will be the case. [WSJ]
  • The relationship between patent law and antitrust law has challenged legal minds since the emergence of antitrust law in the late 19th century. In reductionist form, the two concepts pose a natural contradiction: One encourages monopoly while the other restricts it. The inherent tension can be framed in the following manner: Can a body of case law that grants monopoly opportunities be reconciled with a body of case law that curtails monopolization. To avoid uncomfortable dissonance, the trend across time has been to try to harmonize patent and antitrust law. Since the 1930s, for example, the Supreme Court has ruled that antitrust law operates only when patent holders reach beyond the boundaries inherent in the patent grant. It is an inspired attempt at reconciling the two bodies of case law. Unfortunately, no one has been able to determine what boundaries are inherent in the patent grant, a confusion that has spawned almost a century of consternation and conflict over what exercise of power lies within the patent grant and what lies outside. [pdf]
  • I'm looking at great industrial companies I own — like MMM, Honeywell and Boeing. Their P/Es are high. Should we see a 15% decline, I'll think about trimming. Or maybe adding more. For now, I'm thinking this is not 2001-2002 or 2008. The world's economies are firing on all cylinders. The big growth is in tech. And that’s where I will continue to be heavily invested, for now. [Technology Investor]
  • If Beverly Hills built a lot of high-income housing, it would have a salutary ripple effect moderating housing prices in surrounding areas all down the Great Chain of Housing. In contrast, Beverly Hills building a handful of low-income units is just a way to funnel pay-offs to the relatives of politically well-connected folks. [Sailer]
  • Our Bolshevik overlords are quite devoted students of Dystopia Engineering. We received a sinister blend of both Orwell and Huxley's worst nightmares. Amused to death in private, and ruthlessly silenced in public. Porn & Scorn. [Heartiste]
  • What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. [link]
  • In the largest sense, jamming is a problem in a field called tribology—the study of friction, lubrication, and wear between interacting surfaces. In the nineteen-sixties, the British government asked an engineer named H. Peter Jost to investigate this subject; the 1966 "Jost Report" found that poorly lubricated surfaces—sticky ball bearings, rusty train rails, and the like—cost Britain 1.4 per cent of its G.D.P. (The term "tribology," coined by Jost, comes from the Greek verb "to rub.") [New Yorker]
  • All automakers "cheat" off each other. They buy their competitors' cars, disassemble them, and learn precisely how they work and how they're made. This reverse engineering is called "competitive benchmarking," and while sometimes it's done in-house, there are also entire companies devoted to the practice. One of them is Munro and Associates, a firm of manufacturing experts contracted by OEMs and suppliers to tear down cars and car parts to the very last nut and bolt. [link]

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