Thought-provoking by @paragkhanna and @balajis
"Rather than a unipolar Pax Americana or a bipolar “New Cold War,” the future will be a decentralized race to the top as countries, cities, companies, and communities compete to attract talent and capital."
"the United States is experiencing a relative decline in strength across economic and military axes. Its global role is more a function of its victories in 1945 and 1991 than its capabilities in 2021."
"Traditional geopolitics ... concerns itself with the eternal location of territorial powers.
the internet is adding a new dimension to this. It is not merely a passive data layer ... but a new kind of geography comparable in scope to the physical world."
"Every asset will be traded against every other asset in a gigantic table we call the “defi matrix” (defi is short for decentralized finance), including CBDCs themselves."
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The BCB hired “sifu,” a Cantonese term that loosely translates to “masters” but corresponds in practice to consultants. “Whenever they wanted to get into a new area, a new market, a new trade, they would hire someone to teach them how to get it done,”
To learn the credit card business, they hired manufacturers. For the drug trade, they hired chemists. They brought an industrial approach to organized crime. And Tse would become their greatest innovator.
"By 2020, Shein’s sales had risen to $10 billion, a 250% jump from the year before. In June, the company accounted for 28% of all fast fashion sales in the US — almost as much as both H&M and Zara combined" restofworld.org/2021/how-shein…
"For years, European brands like Zara and H&M have embodied fast fashion ... Shein isn’t chasing runway trends — rather, it often knocks off items seen on TikTok and Instagram, where hype cycles move significantly faster.
... Whereas Zara typically asks manufacturers to turn around minimum orders of 2,000 items in 30 days, Shein asks for as few as 100 products in as little as 10 days. “They want factories to be much more nimble,” said Lu"
"managers like Foley tend to give investors cognitive dissonance: some investors choose to ignore the bad altogether, joining the fanboy club. Some get so dogmatic about the bad that they can’t see any of the good"
"Foley’s ultimate quality is that he is a true and tested moneymaker. But caveat emptor, he always makes sure to extract his chunk of change for doing so."
He bought his first stock when he was 16 and turned $2,000 into $40,000 (about $340,000 in today’s money).... He ended up round-tripping, losing every dollar he had made. This had a profound impact on him. Foley became a big fan of boring companies."
"I think a lot of people took the Elon playbook and basically said, if I just promised the moon, I can get too big to fail, I can just keep raising money as I raise expectations. And if I raise expectations, fundamentals don't matter." @wolfejosh
"To The Moon is a constant encouragement of people. These are all pressure tactics weaponized to induce people to be greater fools. And it's almost like a pyramid scheme"
"my business is a speculative business. My job is investing in scientists and entrepreneurs
'We believe before other people understand.'
But we want ...to develop real technology and businesses that are solving real problems with margins and economics and cash flow"
"I write about Jason Karp. He was running this very successful hedge fund and suddenly became a not very successful hedge fund. He started to realize that there was not really a connection between his process and the outcome. He could work unbelievably hard and ...
be incredibly talented and driven and competitive.
It didn't mean that his results would be good.
He said that disconnect between effort and performance was torture. He was being judged weekly or monthly by his investors and peers, but he didn't have any control over that."
"He likened it to these experiments with rats. They would put a lever in a cage and either it would give them a treat or an electric shock. They didn't know which. At a certain point it would induce insanity.
What he was saying, basically, is I'm going nuts. This is killing me."
"There's no fixed definition of happiness or wellbeing. We're trying to help the person do some of that definition for themselves and realize that you're not just going to be able to sit down and take a brain zap and be done."
"I'm fascinated how complex systems change.
I'm interested in climate change for this reason as well. You have these stable chaotic systems. And then all of a sudden you change one little variable. Take a psychedelic. Change the right variables and the whole system can change."
"Your brain is mapping, meaning on top of the input. And the input is just photons hitting your eyeballs and air molecules vibrating into your ears and vibrating the little cells, the little hair cells in your ears. That's just sensory data coming in. Your brain is wrapping ...