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Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.
160 subscribers
Nov 11 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
It is useful to understand when you are dealing with a person who can be persuaded and when you are dealing with a state machine which has formal transitions for some things you could say and literally no emotional response per policy. The second is a much better model for many large bureaucracies than the first.

This drives some people to hate bureaucracies, which is an aesthetic reaction they are welcome to. And it causes some people to return to the interpersonal maneuvering script that they expect to work.
Nov 7 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Being bad at counting things is a policy choice. I once had a conversation with California about counting. They were counting shots delivered. Bloomberg had published a league table which showed California ~48th in nation on delivery versus shipments, a fed number.
Oct 25 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is sort of a niche financial product but I’ll explain mechanics since plausible a few readers will eventually be able to use it:

Banks want you to have ~20% equity in your house to protect them against default risk. (Lower down-payments are subsidized by USFG through GSEs.) That equity will almost always be in the house but for wealth management customers it could be in many other things. You could pledge a CD (hah) or basically anything you keep in your brokerage account. (Some restrictions apply.)
Oct 11 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I am reminded of the absolutely enormous detection of embezzlement as restaurants switched to cash registers, a switch which was not motivated by concerns of embezzlement. (The combination of physically absent manager, socioeconomic realities of employee population, and no bookkeeping of marginal pizza created meant that places which believed they were high-trust environments were in fact not.)
Oct 6 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Interesting new AI interaction model which we'll see a lot of in the future, spotted on Bench (bookkeeping service):

Patrick: *uploads statements*
Regular computer system chugs
AI: We have questions on ten line items. Your chat about them will be reviewed by a human bookkeeper. AI: What's this use of Paypal for?
Me: *explains that it is a coworking space*
AI: Was that for daily or monthly use of a coworking space?
Me: Yes.
AI: Preliminary categorization is as Rent or Lease Expense. Should I proceed.
Me: Yes.
AI. Noted for your bookkeeper. Next.
Oct 3 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
@GrantSlatton @waltuuuhr @tenobrus Some gaishikei (Western firms) do quite well for themselves in Japan (AppAmaGooFaceSoft for example) and *some* of those are *comparatively* not managed in the fashion of traditional Japanese companies *in many of their divisions.*

Real question is probably about startups right? @GrantSlatton @waltuuuhr @tenobrus Question of why startups which adopted other-than-traditional management don’t just win outright is a subset of “Why don’t startups just win outright.” A Twitter thread will not usefully hold the answer to it.

Note: offering “better” culture *not necessarily in direct interest.*
Oct 3 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
@waltuuuhr @tenobrus There have been many many attempted efforts at reform around the edges, with a low-to-moderate level of success comparable to other society-wide reform efforts in e.g. the U.S. There are some individual workplaces which attempt differentiation but they largely can’t outcompete. @waltuuuhr @tenobrus And this is far beyond the power of a single visionary or cabal to fix, even within a single organization. You’re asking for a world historical success in cultural change.

Those are possible. History books are full of them. Most of humanity’s experience downselected for history.
Sep 10 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Of many points one could make here:

1) There are other examples of business models which are essentially status arbs.

2) Plausibly there should be more businesses which say “This biz is an extended argument that X should be higher status and will win if we win that argument.” “Any examples?”

See that is one of the weird rules of the status game: by convention you lose points if you make it obvious you’re playing it, and someone who says “You’re playing it” makes themselves an enemy.
Sep 5 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This week on Complex Systems I was joined by @David_Kasten.

We talked mostly about our experiences together at VaccinateCA, in creating essentially public infrastructure while being nominally outside the usual trust graph. That "nominally" thing is important, and we discuss the importance of policy engagement, PR strategy to court favor with (and cooperation of) more formal actors, laundering blog posts into the policy apparatus by being crafty about it, etc.
Sep 5 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
(If one diagrams out what one has to do to actually exploit this, one can predict with pretty high confidence where secondary aut/auth happens and why the bank didn’t rescind the policy after massive losses they were trivially liable for.) Like there are way to turn a compromised securities account into value extracted elsewhere but they will often stick out like a sore thumb and require pre-work that many popped accounts will not have done for you.
Sep 4 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
a) Kinda genius.
b) On those rare occasions when I use terminal these days I continue to surprise myself with how many wildly different things I can get the LLM command to do for me. (If you haven’t seen this it is on homebrew or and you’ll need an API key from your provider of choice, though there is a run locally option.)github.com/simonw/llm
Aug 24 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
Worth noting, apropos of the occasional discourses about getting customer service via Twitter, that the entire U.S. government has a blessed side channel.

It is calling your Congressman’s office. Can’t get a passport? Call and talk to Constituent Services. They do this all the time.

Immigration issue? Half their caseload.

Tax issue? They will happily bug the IRS on your behalf.
Aug 24 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
I have come around to thinking this pattern is actually probably positive on net. It is lower friction than the previous ways to achieve escalation, works fairly deterministically, and while sometimes annoying for the organization that is assisted in dealing with the issue does give them agency for improving blessed path (versus escalation through Legal).
Aug 22 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I'm joined this week on Complex Systems by @dsquareddigest , my favorite non-fiction author of recent years, to talk about organizational design, financial fraud, and the quirky business that is selling words for money.

complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/dan-d… His new book, the Unaccountability Machine, is an exploration into how modern organizations work that goes deeper than "It's the Algorithm" or "Late stage capitalism."

We cover information flow (and blockages), finding and losing technology of organizational design, etc.
Aug 16 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I am surprised that a financial infrastructure provider would have the described policy regarding employees benefitting from equity appreciation in their customers.

coindesk.com/tech/2024/08/1…
Image The policy is, in brief, that the company kept a list of employee wallet addresses (anonymous numbered accounts) and provided it to customers, who would respond by voluntarily (maybe) cutting each of those employees in for equity ownership.

(Crypto pretends it isn’t equity.)
Aug 16 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Falsehoods that compliance departments believe about addresses, example #2742. Note that this is very often addressable by individual compliance departments the same way a vast number of inconsistencies are addressed: a human eyeballs the situation, writes down a tweet length note, and hits Approved.
Aug 4 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Imagine you’re talking to a time traveler back in 2000:

“Oh some good news: America does have end-to-end supply chain for high-value electronics.”
“Really?”
“Receivers for worldwide geosynchronous satellite-based ISP. Also ours.”
“Holy cow.”
“Private space industry, naturally.” “Wow American had a sound industrial policy?! Or perhaps some technological revolution?”
“Nah it was basically one guy.”
“One guy.”
“He also runs one of the major auto manufacturers.”
“Oh so he’s from Ford or…”
“No that’s new too.”
“What.”
“Yeah he’s enormously controversial.”
Aug 4 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
There is something specially cursed about having one’s conversation about running vaccination infrastructure blocked out of concerns for misinformation, with a banner telling the user to go to the CDC for up-to-date accurate information. Ahh excellent, why didn’t I think of that in 2021. In lieu of running a nationwide information gathering effort to find the vaccine and distribute the information, I could have simply told people “Oh ask the CDC. I bet they know where it is.”
Aug 2 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
If a bank app displays something which appears to be a policy of the bank, consider that the people who caused that text to appear there may not understand the bank’s policy or be able to speak authoritatively regarding it, or that one may not have interpreted the text correctly. For example, the text “You cannot change this limit.” does not necessarily imply “We cannot change this limit.”
Jul 31 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
The good news: we got much better at running The Sort. The bad news: we got much better at running The Sort. We, the societal we, implemented a relatively effective nationwide (and increasingly worldwide) dragnet for talent, then plucked that talent from the not-random-but-constrained walk through lives it would counterfactually have encountered and tracked it fairly narrowly.
Jul 29 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
An extended anecdote to demonstrate the power of a Dangerous Professional incantation: “What are my options?” Today I’m traveling to Japan with Ruriko and the kids. The plan was a single stopover flight on my usual carrier, who shall remain nameless.

On checking from the car, it looked like the first flight was 2 hours delayed. And thus scene set for a chat.