From a conversation with a friend:

Tech should build more cathedrals, less in the religious sense and more in the "Make a beautiful, physical space which is open to the public and will endure for hundreds of years to say This Is Who We Were And What We Hoped, 2021 Edition."
Will allow partial credit for "Our cathedral is The Internet" but I don't think that necessarily drains resources from doing it IRL, too.
If people are very wigged out by the word "cathedral" specifically I sort of feel that that's unfortunate but can I downsell you to "There should be a museum, not specific to any one company, with at least as much brainpower put into it as an N+1 reskinning of Gmail."
Though as someone who appreciates both cathedrals and museums a thing I appreciate a bit more about the cathedral model is the open invitation for you, the visitor, to participate not just experiencing the physical space/etc but in The Work generally.
"Is that the best thing in the world you can imagine spending the marginal dollar on?"

I mean if it's that competitive then make the cathedral a ~36 inch by 36 inch tungsten cube on which you inscribed what, in lieu of a cathedral, was the best possible thing to spend money on.
That's also a statement piece to schoolchildren, future generations, etc.
"Let the record reflect that, in 2021, the most transcendently beautiful thing we could imagine was to fund the following:"
"P.S. This block is tungsten because of a meme about cryptocurrency and if either of those concepts didn't survive to the future wow we sure screwed up those predictions, huh."

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More from @patio11

9 Dec
In markets in everything news, apparently the culture that is Japanese golf somewhat encourages you to throw a party for all your friends at the golf club if you score a hole in one or albatross.

It's a big deal. Branded goods, lots of alcohol, etc. Costs about $10k.
You could of course simply not throw a party at the golf club which costs $10k, but what kind of salaryman hits a hole in one but doesn't take their buddies out for a round of celebratory drinking? A bad salaryman.

So you can buy a rider to your golf insurance which covers this.
"A what?"

So you will probably at some point get told "You should really buy an insurance, which might not explicitly be branded as golf insurance, to cover the case where e.g. you hit your golf ball out of bounds and it shatters a window or injures a bypasser."
Read 12 tweets
9 Dec
I find this interesting on multiple levels:

draculatheme.com

1) It's a really good cross-program color scheme.
2) It's a commercial product.
3) It's effectively ungated; what's being sold is the OSS plus warm fuzzies.
4) Total sales ~$200k (based on their public info).
And look how professional everything is! They actually either are a commercially proficient designer or hired one to do icons (for their site, not their product, because color schemes don't need in-product icons).

And they have a sensible brand, etc, with the name, scheme, etc.
That's a pretty cool model for OSS! "I'm going to promote myself and/or my small team into being the czar with respect to one problem. We're going to solve it across the ecosystem in N months. And we'll turn on payments. Let's see if worth our while."
Read 6 tweets
7 Dec
If I ever write my memoirs as a light novel that would be a genre-appropriate title.
The light novel bit is an inside (?) joke that the medium of light novels in Japan, which are… I guess you could call them manga but without the pictures?… sometimes have sentences which are absurdly involved as titles, as a trope.
Read 15 tweets
6 Dec
Personal opinion, but I am glad that Pfizer and Moderna shared their vaccines with the world by inventing and distributing them. I hope we massively increase the production of vaccines to be shared with the world, and incentivize future sharing appropriately.
(I very rarely engage in politics, but there is an ethics of capitalism, and by goodness “We had an effective vaccine ready in *two days.* You’re welcome.” might be one of the clearest examples in history of why that ethics is important.)
And I’d heartily support “The United States thanks you for your service to humanity. We consider it in the national interest for you to produce 7 billion courses of treatment plus boosters as fast as possible. By what timeline could you do this and what bottlenecks exist?”
Read 4 tweets
4 Dec
Shower thought:

Crypto “earn” products (“give us your stablecoins/etc and we’ll lend them you; you get interest”) are sold as deposits but are actually complex structured products containing multiple equity derivatives.
“That seems like a bunch of really complicated words to describe something which isn’t that different from what banks do.”

Yeah but the word “that” is pulling much more weight than most people think.
(It’s not a new realization that these products are shadow banking. Of course they’re shadow banking. But they appear to have made shadow banking *more* risky, not less, by implementing it on top of the substrates they picked and selling it for the use case they sell it for.)
Read 7 tweets
4 Dec
In a bit of extremely potent irony given that I’ve this week been on a writing tear about charitable donations and why they’re unexpectedly implicated in the fraud supply chain, a bank saw some of my end of year planning and locked my account due to suspicious activity.
On the one hand I’m annoyed, on the other hand now every time silly bank stuff happens to me I get to spend less time wracking my brain for newsletter topics, so I suppose I should be thankful.

Though next time would appreciate risk actions *before* I exit writer’s block.
A weird thing is that during conversations with banks to get these sort of things reversed sometimes I get dug in deeper when I try to be empathetic and say “Oh no worries I’m not angry; I understand exactly what happened. You were worried this account was being card tested.”
Read 5 tweets

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