You do hear people say privacy is dead, but it's almost always someone who stands to profit from the death of privacy—famously, Mark Zuckerberg. This is a hopeful pitch.
1w ago
The best thing a human being can do is to help another human being know more. But most people, when they find something that works, hoard it. The great failure of capitalism is that the more valuable a piece of knowledge, the more people are incentivized to hide it.
1w ago
Organizational culture is not about perks or ping-pong tables. It is the answer to the question: what behavior gets rewarded and what behavior gets punished when no one is watching?
The crisis was not caused by the producers. It was caused by a society that believed it could consume achievement while attacking the people who make achievement possible. Without the producers, the system that exploited them can no longer function, and society collapses.
the power and problem of Anthropic is the same: the company's safety superpower is that every action it takes looks, from the outside, to be self-serving, even as the company becomes ever more convinced its motivations are pure.
Private insurers may be an unnecessary middleman, but the amount they extract from the system is not large compared to the amount that gets either appropriated or wasted by the people providing the care. So why do Americans — especially American progressives — focus so obsessively on health insurers instead of health providers? In a post two years ago, I hypothesized that it's because insurers are the part of the system we have direct contact with — the people who have to tell us "no" when we can't afford some treatment.
1mo ago
The best way to destroy the last vestige of intellectual freedom is to assume that it doesn't matter, or that the problems it solves are unimportant because they aren't commercial. The truth is that the best part of intellectual work is never commercial.
Here's the unspoken truth: Everything in Hollywood is driven by money—and if the audience wants Michael Jackson, despite all the scandals, the entertainment industry will deliver him on a silver platter.
Gilt holders are often portrayed as the last line of defence for enforcing fiscal discipline and the sherpas along a political path of least drama. Their mob power is rarely more than theoretical.
As these industries become more consolidated, they become more bureaucratic, they move more slowly, they're more cautious. Yet we're more dependent on them than ever before.
2mo ago
The best way to think about the future is not by extrapolating the past, but by understanding incentive structures and what they reward. Most people get this backwards.
AOC seems to mean that in order for someone to get a billion dollars, they have to do something that society ought to forbid. In other words, billionaires can't get their wealth just by being lucky; they have to get it by being bad.
The vast majority of these bets are not on questions that might produce useful information. Roughly 90% of Kalshi's trading volume (dollars exchanging hands between bettors) is from sports betting, making Kalshi effectively a sports gambling website with a small prediction market attached.
The mechanics that make fitness culture highly visible and shareable are not always (or even typically) the ones that produce sustained behavior change.
I was just appalled at how absurd the entire ecosystem is. And not just the technology, which is a big part of it. There are also just terrible incentives that make every broker push plans that pay them more.
Abrams believed draftees undermined discipline and unit cohesion, so he redesigned the Army around high-quality volunteers, proving the draft was neither necessary nor desirable long-term and establishing a model that the other services ultimately adopted.
Basically, spreading hate and divisiveness on social media is a form of entrepreneurship. As Eugene Wei has written, social media is all about getting social status. 10,000 followers on X may not sound like a media empire to rival CBS News, but for most people it's more attention than they would otherwise get in their entire life.
It takes effort to find information. Who is going to go out and spend the effort to find out information about what stocks or bonds or houses are really worth, if they can't make money trading on that information? And if no one spends the effort to find the information, how can it ever be incorporated into the price in the first place?
Human behavior can never be made entirely rational, because the drive for freedom resists all systems. As Jack Nicholson says in Easy Rider, "Don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are."
4mo ago
The best way to get what you want is to deserve what you want. It's as simple as that. If you deserve it, you'll get it. If you don't deserve it, you probably won't.
Mickey's exile is, of course, due to his problematic copyright status. Some aspects of Mickey are entering the public domain, and even though Disney could protect his more updated modern look, it's possible that some outsiders might earn a few coins from a Mickey Mouse resurgence. Disney would rather go mouse-less than let that happen.
4mo ago
The best business decisions come from a place of genuine insight about human nature and incentives, not from financial models. Most people optimize for the wrong things because they haven't thought carefully about what they actually want.
4mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
