Just a few of my favorite things:
Just.game is autodecentric (self-decentralizing) technology. The autodecentric infrastructure is C.U.R.V.Y (cute, unstoppable, recursive, virus, yikes) – how software uses money to keep itself alive.
Consumer subscription software: pricing and frequency usage (circa Dec 2019)
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Dave Goldberg on Music
Is Uber a substitute or complement for public transit?
“Uber’s entry increases public transit use for the average transit agency and that effect grows over time”. Turns out that people use Uber as a “last-mile” tool – to get them to the final point in their destination.
How Nick Maggiulli thinks about levels of wealth (x axis as log scale)
- Level 1. Paycheck-to-paycheck: $0-$0.99 per decision
- Level 2. Grocery freedom: $1-$9 per decision
- Level 3. Restaurant freedom: $10-$99 per decision
- Level 4. Travel freedom: $100-$999 per decision
- Level 5. House freedom: $1,000-$9,999 per decision
- Level 6. Philanthropic freedom: $10,000+ per decision.
Our levels of wealth are more of steps, rather than a smooth line. The above table outlines how much would be trivial in our decision making. A $8 decision impacts a Level 2 more than a Level 6, because $8 is a much larger percentage of Level 2’s overall wealth.
The Cloud Appreciation Society
First introduced to me by a friend, I now cannot avoid the Cloud Appreciation Society.
Not that I mind. Because they post pictures like this. And I personally love the clouds. Check out their online gallery here.
No hedge fund outperformed Kumail Nanjiani in the 2010s.
Turns out we’ve been getting more turnt than we thought from what we are drinking.
Yoga is really, really good for you.
” Brain regions showing differential task-related activation in yoga-practitioners. Yoga practitioners showed less activation than non-practitioners in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during the encoding phase of a Sternberg Working Memory task (yellow). Yoga practitioners also showed less activation than non-practitioners in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right superior frontal gyri, but more activation in the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during various aspects of an Affective Stroop task (red). All regions shown were created by making a 5 mm sphere around the coordinates provided in the studies reviewed.
Is there a loneliness epidemic?
“There is no empirical support for the fact that loneliness is increasing, let alone spreading at epidemic rates.” Loneliness =/= aloneness. We might be spending more time alone, but that doesn’t mean that we are lonely.
According to Jonathan Hall of the University of Toronto:
- When roads get congested, they get clogged, and throughput falls
- Carefully designed tolls can increase highway capacity
- If travelers were identical, this would be enough to conclude that everyone is better off. Drivers pay a toll, but travel times fall.
- Problem: Drovers are not identical. We do not all value our time the same way.
- Pricing just some of the lanes can help everyone, without requiring everyone to pay the toll AND increases social welfare by $1,740 per driver per year.
Category density and opportunity of 729 digitally native brands
Enterprise Margin Crisis in Software Startups
All via Martin Casado:
- Artifical intelligence is expensive
- Lack of a central buyer in non-traditional verticals like forestry, mining, etc
- Data costs are high – expensive to collect, store, maintain, move, process, label, and keep fresh
- Automation isn’t magic – humans are sometimes the easiest (albeit not the cheapest) option
- Unoptimized cloud – cloud implementations can be inefficient as companies scale out
- Reselling clouds – back-end cloud costs get resold without the direct discounting authority attached to it
- Dropping ACVs – need to boost annual contract value
- Getting to market – there has been a shift to bottom-up adoption, but larger dollar pools are reached via enterprise sales.
- Services – continual shift of customer dollars from product to service
kylascanlon.com 