Andrew Thappa

Week of March 6th

Some interesting things I read over the past week (ok, ok it was the past week and a half).

Week of Feb 20

Robotic surgery, Ukraine, and Lab Leaks

Power Without Control Is Nothing

Bhagwati on Indian FDI

The total amount of FDI in India in 1991 was less than the budget of a major US university.

Stock Printer Go BRRR!

Stock buybacks to offset dilution get you twice: first with dilution and second with non-economic repurchase. Oh and by the way you now have management teams with calls and puts in their stock option packages.

Most Traded Goods

Semiconductors make up 15% of total goods traded in the world.

Statistic of the Day

The percent of Americans aged 13 and up who listen to a podcast every day hit 18% in 2022.

Cost Cutting in Big Tech

Big Tech needs to cut headcount, establish EBIT margin targets, cut unnecessary projects and buyback their stock at reduced prices.

iPod Release

Breakdown of Steve Jobs' launch presentation of the Apple iPod.

Quote of the Week

John Mayer on Steve Jobs and how free fonts are "********"

Inflation Relief and Aggregate Demand

California and Aggregate Demand.

The Empire Strikes Back

How the IMF is trying to kneecap crypto.

Crypto Reading 📚

Crypto Reading List

The Joe Rogan Effect

Joe Rogan helped "The Terminal List" go parabolic.

"Buy The Dip"

Just kidding...don't.

Predicting the Future, Foreign Policy Edition

"I'm not sure what 2010 will look like, but I'm sure that it will be very little like we expect so we should plan accordingly."

Pop Quiz

Econ 101 Pop Quiz.

The Ghost of A.W. Phillips

The Fed and the pesky Phillips Curve

Don't Tread on Me?

Would Americans fight an invading force?

Thoughts on Tickets

Make your ticket process as simple as possible.

L1 vs. L2

Anatoly and Gün on L2s.

Tracing & OpenTelemetry

Spans, Traces and OpenTelemetry!

Department of High Irony, Energy Edition

European energy market, meet reality.

Fidelity and BTC

Fidelity argues Bitcoin is fundamentally different from every other digital asset and it is best thought of as a non-sovereign monetary good.

Bundling & Unbundling the Calendar

Will Calendly get distribution before Google gets innovation?

Why No One Takes "Tech Journalism" Seriously

YOLO trades, Robinhood, and a microcosm into how tech is covered in 2021.

"Rest In Peace"

Rest in peace, Virgil.

NGMI?

China, America and the AI race.

#science and the danger of 'Scientific Consensus'

If you hear the phrase "scientific consensus" reach for your wallet because you're being had.

The Barcelona Complex

Great interview in which Franklin Foer [https://web.archive.org/web/20210908155607/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_Foer] interviews Simon Kuper [https://web.archive.org/web/20210905080934/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kuper] about his new book 'The Barcelona Complex' in which he discusses the rise and fall

What's Next for Reading Technology

What's the state of reading technology? In this article we'll explore.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics

Lies, dammed lies, and statistics. Florida style.

Natural Immunity vs. Vaccine-Induced Immunity

Israeli pre-print presents evidence that if you got COVID and survived, you have stronger immunity against Delta than those who were simply vaccinated.

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles

To have fire, you need oxygen, fuel and heat. To have a bubble, you need marketability, money/credit and rampant speculation.

Ready, Set, Go!

Online-merge-offline (OMO) is here, it's just not evenly distributed.

Zeal for Zeroism

Zeroism here. Zeroism there. Zeroism everywhere?

My Productivity App

My productivity app: a Quip file with 3 sections: To-Do, Schedule, and Notes

@stalekracker and the Attention Economy

Today, I'm about to learn y'all how @stalekraker's cajun cooking videos launched him into internet superstardom. Let's get it, dude!!

YouTube, Cooking, and Monetization

"Pasta Grannies" is a great way to understand 1) the unique content that YouTube helps unlock and 2) how the attention economy currently monetizes.

Good point...

> Since Facebook has a monopoly on social media, naturally, that’s where you posted this message so that people would read it? — Alex Danco (@Alex_Danco) June 30, 2021 [https://twitter.com/Alex_Danco/status/1410324189945511943?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw]

GitHub Copilot Launch 🚨

In one of the most interesting product launches [https://web.archive.org/web/20210629142841if_/https://copilot.github.com/] I've seen in a long time, GitHub is partnering with OpenAI to launch an AI pair programmer which is a VS Code extension that suggests lines of code, functions, and even tests.

Department of High Irony, Credit Suisse Edition

February 2021: Credit Suisse wins Risk.net's Risk Innovation of the Year award. April 2021: Credit Suisse loses $5.5bn due to risk oversights in their exposure to Archegos Capital.

"Siri, what does it mean to get disintermediated?"

Celebrities realized that on Instagram they could post to an audience potentially much larger than the circulation of any pop culture magazine and essentially disintermediated the legacy media.

Platform Risk

Properly understood, "platform risk" is the risk that you incur when you build on top of rails that you believe to be credibly neutral.

History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes

In 1979 antrax escaped a lab in Russia and killed 66 people. The official story? That people had eaten tainted meat. Fast forward 41 years, and a novel coronavirus shows up in Wuhan, China. The story? Tainted meat from bats. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Headline of the day

Oregon is the third state that legalizes human composting and the Sierra Club rejoices that now you can use your loved ones as soil for your garden. The circle of life indeed.

Not the best CAPTCHA...

A math problem is the worst CAPTCHA ever.

Overdraft Fees

From the WSJ [https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://www.wsj.com/articles/overdraft-fees-are-getting-the-boot-at-ally-financial-11622631600] : > Customers who overdraw their accounts will no longer face a $\(25\) penalty, the bank said Wednesday. The change applies to the roughly 3.6 million checking, savings and money-market accounts at Ally’s online bank.

I, Pencil

A pencil is made of cedar, graphite, factice, and wood. How these raw elements come together into a pencil is a testament to the power of the prices to provide dispersed knowledge which forms the basis of cooperation without coercion.

How to Share a Secret

Review of "How to Share a Secret", Adi Shamir's famous paper which asks "How do you divide data D into n pieces in such a way that D is easily reconstructable from any k pieces, but even complete knowledge of k - 1 pieces reveals absolutely no information about D."

COVID Fiscal Stimulus

Fiscal Stimulus by Country as % of 2019 GDP [https://web.archive.org/web/20210424193516/https://www.moodysanalytics.com/-/media/article/2021/economic-assessment-of-biden-fiscal-rescue-package.pdf]

Global Population

> When cloud formations take physical shape, neither their scale nor duration has an upper bound: We may begin to see cloud towns, then cloud cities, and ultimately cloud countries. At first this sounds rather implausible. Perhaps the internet will spur a wave of internal migrations as online communities begin gathering

Incentives and Vaccines

> "There are two fundamental insights at the heart of economics. The first is that people respond to incentives. Obvious opportunities to be better off are rarely left unexploited. The second is that every economic transaction has two sides: each side gets something and each side gives up something." – Paul Krugman

F1: Power and Downforce

In any F1 race, the key is tuning the car for the optimal balance of power and drag.

Inflation Heuristics

Want a simple heuristic to gague whether we have persistent inflation? Look no further than the price of the $1.50 Costco Hot Dog combo.

Features vs. Companies

In 2011, Steve Jobs famously met with Drew Houston in a bid to acquire the company. After Houston responded that they were really enjoying building the company, Jobs trolled Houston and claimed they were a feature rather than a product: > "And so he started trolling us a little bit, saying

Application Rewrites, Part II

You made the "worst strategic mistake" that any software company can make and decided to rewrite your application. Now what?

Theory vs. Practice: The Curious Case of the EU

Theory The goals of the European Union are [https://web.archive.org/web/2/https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-in-brief_en#:~:text=The%2520goals%2520of%2520the%2520European,and%2520justice%2520without%2520internal%2520borders] : * promote peace, its values and the well-being of its citizens * offer freedom, security and justice without internal borders

Application Rewrites, Part I

20 years ago, Joel Spolsky claimed the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make is deciding to rewrite code from scratch. Fast forward 20 years and it's still a terrible idea.

Corporate Reputation Rankings

Moderna and Pfizer break into the Harris Poll's Top-10 corporate reputation rankings.

Origin of Covid, A Timeline of Narratives

Did COVID naturally emerge or was there a lab leak? I compile a timeline of who was saying what, when.

Famous Last Words

While re-reading some of Chairman Jerome Powell's March comments downplaying concerns about inflation I couldn't help but recall Ben Bernanke's 2007 comments about the subprime housing market. Jerome Powell on Expected Inflation > “We do expect that inflation will move up over the course of this year...Our best view is

How To Evaluate Stablecoins

The simplest way of reasoning about a stablecoin is to understand the design decisions around centralization and collateralization.

Web3.0

Today, there's a lot of discussion about Web3 [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=web3%2Cweb2&year_start=1990&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3#] and how it's possible to build a decentralized internet which breaks from the " surveillance capitalism [https://www.econtalk.org/shoshana-zuboff-on-surveillance-capitalism/]" that we saw

Rust in the Linux kernel

There is now a serious attempt to bring a second language to the Linux kernel and earlier this month Miguel Ojeda put up an RFC [https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1023] for adding Rust to the Linux kernel and the Google Security Team mentioned [https://security.googleblog.com/

Memorabilia and NFTs

Back in 2015, Don McLean auctioned his handwritten lyrics [https://web.archive.org/web/20210401104403/https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32208584] to 'American Pie'. The 16-page draft – which divulged the true meaning of the song – ended up selling for $1.2mm [https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-don-mclean-the-complete-working-manuscript-5885030/?from=salesummary&intObjectID=

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

These days, when you hear the name “Benjamin Franklin” you are more likely to think of $100 bills [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_All_About_the_Benjamins], rather than the genial Founding Father whose image adorns the front of those bills. Indeed, this is what prompted me to

Welcome!

My name is Andrew Thappa. Welcome to my blog! As you might imagine, I'm going to write things and post them on this site. The obvious follow-up is what will I be writing about, and it turns out there are a couple different perspectives on this. On the one hand,

The Front Nine

In this book, Vardy pursues a simple question: Why are we so bad at following through with the projects we think are important, and what can we do to get better.

Death of Distance

"By and large I think what we are going to see is that communications as human interactions are going to be digitalized to a degree that we can't even imagine yet."

Blue Links - October 2017

Interesting links (October 2017)