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Was trying to explain the phenomenon of package theft to my wife, who has lived her entire life in Japan. It did not go over well.

Ruriko: Someone stole an Amazon package?!
Me: Oh no this is a widespread, regular thing.
Ruriko: Like, it happens every week?
Me: No like Xk / day.
Ruriko: ... WHAT?
Me: Yeah.
Ruriko: WAIT WHO KNOWS THIS.
Me: I mean this is a broadly recognized phenomenon.
Ruriko: SO AMAZON AND THE DELIVERY PEOPLE AND THE POLICE KNOW THIS.
Me: Yes.
Ruriko: AND IT STILL HAPPENS!?!
Me: Yes.
Ruriko: WHAT. THE. #%(#)(. AMERICA.
There are parts of Japan's sense-of-self that I like more than others but just being able to broadly count on competence and absence of crime as being pervasively usual state of affairs is a) mostly justified and b) really, really nice.
And if a package went missing in Tokyo you have better than even odds of a supervisor coming out to your house to apologize in person and tell you what they will do to rectify their missteps in the future because, you know, one job and all.
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
If you’re interested in tech platforms recapitulating finance, take a look at what Groundfloor (a Georgia company, very outside of SV circles) is doing to fund real estate loans.

It’s an interesting and retail-accessible (and legible) version of a very old model.
Their basic business is being a “hard money lender”: they write mortgages secured by first lines against projects that small-scale real estate investors/developers do, which banks would be unwilling to do because of execution risk in e.g. a rehab of a single-family home.
So a typical loan might be “You lend me $200k at 11% for 12 months. I put on $50k. I buy property for $200k and sink $50k plus my labor into repairs. I intend to either resell for $350k in a year post repairs or refinance to a now-conforming easy-to-get mortgage.”
Read 13 tweets
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Having seen this from both sides of the table: a great essay is a much better window into a candidate’s ability than any resume and most full interview packets.

Also, unlike resumes, senior people read them for fun and start outbound hiring conversations based on them.
And yes, though it might be counterintuitive, I think you can easily justify a hiring conversation with one essay. It generally suggests a deeper background understanding than the artifact itself.
I think this also goes for technical people and is a better use of time, hour per hour, than the oft-suggested “just Github your way to a career upgrade” path.

Past your first engineering job, most of the work is people and systems issues, not “Can I get this function to do X?”
Read 4 tweets
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Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
A fun story about finance, justice, and (if you compare what is happening here versus the version probably closer to your own experience) the tremendous societal good enabled by something many people don't agree exists: lenders who predictably deal fairly, day in and day out.
(An underappreciated through line of the history of the last 50 or so years is not just the widening of credit availability but the rationalization of it, driven partly by regulation, partly by societal shifts, and in great part by technology changes.)
(A lot of those technology changes were primarily adopted because they were profit maximizing but also produce more just results than the underwriting processes they substantially misplaced, because high-functioning capitalists shouldn't turn away/overcharge good credit risks.)
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