daniel splittgerber - what I read online

We might describe our world as having retail sanity, but wholesale madness. Details are well understood; the big picture remains unclear.

Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done. […]

The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. […]

I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment.

There’s no way you can wear Ed Hardy and be cool in other parts of your life.” Translation: A man’s clothing is the window to his soul, and a jeweled viper with kanji detailing does not reflect well of that soul.

Under federal law, the SEC isn’t permitted to listen to live wiretaps. “I don’t mean this in a dismissive way,” Wadhwa says. “But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has access to wiretaps, but the SEC doesn’t? And somehow you expect us to oversee Wall Street? There has to be some
relationship between the responsibilities and the tools.

“[Khodorkovsky] would come home at 10,” says Nevzlin, who lived in the house across the street from Khodorkovsky’s in Apple Orchard. “After a little while the light would go on in his study, where he would read until two.” […]

“I saw business as a game,” Khodorkovsky later wrote about this period in his life. “It was a game in which you wanted to win but losing was also an option. It was a game in which hundreds of thousands of people came to work in the morning to play with me. And in the evening they would go back to their own lives, which had nothing to do with me.” […]

At the age of 34, one of Russia’s richest men realized that business could no longer be just a game. He now understood that capitalism could make people not only rich and happy but also poor and powerless. Khodorkovsky swore off his absolute faith in wealth just as he had sworn off his absolute faith in Communism.

Mathematical Impossibilities

1. Germany wants the rest of Europe to raise exports and become more competitive while simultaneously protecting its export machine and imposing numerous austerity measures on the rest of Europe. Mathematically, it cannot happen.

2. China wants to wean itself off an export model but does not want the pain associated with measures that would actually increase domestic demand. Mathematically, it cannot happen.

3. Japan wants to raise taxes, increase consumer spending, and protect its export model, all at the same time. Mathematically, it cannot happen.

4. The US needs to reduce its budget deficit, rein in pension promises, and fix various structural problems (many associated with public unions - the same as in Greece and Spain), but lacks the political will to do so. Mathematically, U.S. deficit spending is not sustainable.

Each blockage HowAboutWe found among the committed couples they
studied has a corresponding feature on the new site. To overcome the
inertia it detected, the site will offer fully packaged date ideas. To
address logistical woes, HowAboutWe is working to make the packages
available with a single click that will book your taxi, theater
tickets and corner table at the Italian trattoria. […]

For Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout, each idea leads to another.
They could arrange babysitters for couples. They could help slouchy
husbands send, with one click, fancy date invitations that suggest a
labor of many clicks. They could allow couples to follow the dates of
other couples they admire — a digital way to keep up with the Joneses.

Art pricing is not absolute magic; there are certain rules, which to
an outsider can sound parodic. Paintings with red in them usually sell
for more than paintings without red in them. Warhol’s women are worth
more, on average, than Warhol’s men. The reason for this is a
rhetorical question, asked in a smooth continental accent: “Who would
want the face of some man on their wall?” […]

It was soon enough apparent that “Sotheby’s girls”—like rally girls or
Suicide Girls —are screened for a certain set of qualities, and though
these are not explicitly erotic criteria, they are, of course, many
clients’ sexual preference.

In 2005, VC investment in clean tech measured in the hundreds of
millions of dollars. The following year, it ballooned to $1.75
billion, according to the National Venture Capital Association. By
2008, the year after Doerr’s speech, it had leaped to $4.1 billion.
And the federal government followed. Through a mix of loans,
subsidies, and tax breaks, it directed roughly $44.5 billion into the
sector between late 2009 and late 2011. Avarice, altruism, and policy
had aligned to fuel a spectacular boom.

Anyone who has heard the name Solyndra knows how this all panned out.

(…) There was an additional factor at work: impatience. Venture
capitalists tend to work on three- to five-year horizons. As they were
quickly finding out, energy companies don’t operate on those
timelines.

(…) All told, federal subsidies for renewable energy nearly tripled
between 2007 and 2010, rising from $5.1 billion to $14.7 billion.

The technology trade magazine IEEE Spectrum notes that a premium-class
automobile runs 100 million lines of computer code, more than Boeing’s
new 787 Dreamliner.