Links: Turkey, Emojis, Betting Markets and Nuance
Turkey’s annual inflation rate measured for today, 9/2/18, is 96%, while the monthly inflation rate is 29%.

Emoji: The World’s First Global Language
He’s been studying in the U.S. legally for 7 years. Bank of America froze his account anyway
Online Bettors Can Sniff Out Weak Psychology Studies
From 1997 to 2017, college textbooks increased in price by 200%, while TVs fell in price by 96%. The difference? College is subsidized and TVs are not
The Courage to Be Disliked:
- Why is it that people seek recognition from others? In many cases, it is due to the influence of reward-and-punishment education.
- Three things are needed at this point: “self-acceptance,” “confidence in others,” and “contribution to others.
- It’s that you are disliked by someone. It is proof that you are exercising your freedom and living in freedom, and a sign that you are living in accordance with your own principles.
- A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others; it comes from one’s comparison with one’s ideal self.
https://www.amazon.com/Courage-Be-Disliked-Phenomenon-Happiness/dp/1501197274
How to Retire in Your 30s With $1 Million in the Bank
Fed up with their high-pressure jobs, some millennials are quitting and embracing the FIRE movement. (It stands for financial independence, retire early).
They saved a sizable portion of their income over the next five years and drastically reduced expenses, until their net worth was around $1.2 million.
Nuance: A Love Story, My affair with the intellectual dark web
- Words like “mansplaining” and “gaslighting” were suddenly in heavy rotation, often invoked with such elasticity as to render them nearly meaningless. Similarly, the term “woke,” which originated in black activism, was being now used to draw a bright line between those on the right side of things and those on the wrong side of things. The parlance of wokeness was being used online so frequently that it began to strike me as disingenuous, even a little desperate.
- the more honest we are about what we think, the more we’re alone with our thoughts.
My investment criteria:
Can this explode?
* What is the product hook?
* What is the distribution trick?
* What’s the friction to scale? Can the team solve?
* How big can it get?
* What makes it hard to copy?
Via David Sacks
“The Art of Happiness” by Epicurus
- If thou wilt make a man happy, add not unto his riches but take away from his desires.
- Men inflict injuries from hatred, jealousy or contempt, but the wise man masters all these passions by means of reason.
- The impassive soul disturbs neither itself nor others.
- Death means nothing to us
Warren Buffett’s view on how most VC’s approach risk is here in his 1993 letter. Mutually-independent is a key aspect of the approach he describes.

Via Tren Griffin
Most Expensive Cities

Daily Prayer is more common in the US than most other wealthy countries

How men rate women vs how women rate men

Trust and inequality: People in more unequal countries trust each other less

The Value of Probabilistic Thinking: Spies, Crime, and Lightning Strikes
There are three important aspects of probability that we need to explain so you can integrate them into your thinking to get into the ballpark and improve your chances of catching the ball:
Bayesian thinking,
Fat-tailed curves
Asymmetries
The core of Bayesian thinking (or Bayesian updating, as it can be called) is this: given that we have limited but useful information about the world, and are constantly encountering new information, we should probably take into account what we already know when we learn something new. As much of it as possible. Bayesian thinking allows us to use all relevant prior information in making decisions.
Successfully thinking in shades of probability means roughly identifying what matters, coming up with a sense of the odds, doing a check on our assumptions, and then making a decision. We can act with a higher level of certainty in complex, unpredictable situations.
The student loan problem cannot be fixed until we face two fundamental problems:
(1) loans must be made on the basis of the quality of the asset they are being lent against, and
(2) we cannot use loans in place of grants when grants are needed.
Via Adam Nash

US online book sales, Q2-Q4 2017
Tesla, Software and Disruption
When Nokia people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling. They shrugged. “No 3G, and just look at the camera!”
When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a not-great car with some cool features that they’re going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they’re selling. “Look at the fit and finish, and the panel gaps, and the tent!”
The idea of ‘disruption’ is that a new concept changes the basis of competition in an industry. At the beginning, either the new thing itself or the companies bringing it (or both) tend to be bad at the things the incumbents value, and get laughed at, but they learn those things. Conversely, the incumbents either dismiss the new thing as pointless or presume they’ll easily be able to add it (or both), but they’re wrong. Apple brought software and learnt phones, whereas Nokia had great phones but could not learn software.
One of the issues that recurs in thinking about Tesla is that tech people don’t really know enough about cars, and car people don’t really know enough about software.
Via Benedict Evans
Blockchains:
Blockchain tl;dr: Blockchains remove the need for centralized trusted authorities. Smart contracts express trust relationships between parties without those authorities.
The future is an ocean of fluid, modular, interoperable, relationships spontaneously forming and disintegrating between human and nonhuman parties without any gatekeepers. It is fractalized autonomous trust.
Via Matt Liston
Bitcoin
There has never existed a money that couldn’t be debased. That’s how big of a deal is bitcoin.
It’s truly a once in a millennia kind of revolution that will take MANY decades to see full ramifications
Via Paul
More blockchain:
What would meaningful “blockchain” re-education look like? Here’s what I’ve done for friends:
- Walked them through cold storage
- - Run a full node
- - Shown them mining hardware and explained the history of mining / current landscape
- - Try different wallets and online services
Via Arjun Balaji
Alt-coins
The reason normies bid up alt-coins is because their first interaction is with a platform like Coinbase — where the UX of Bitcoin is no different than any other project.
With this lens, all tokens “look the same.” Cheaper, faster projects with “useful features” are “better.”
Via Arjun Balaji
Austrian Economics
F.A. Hayek in 1984: “I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce …
Driving
Cars killed 1.25 million people last year, and injured over 20 million. Well over 95% of this was due to human error.
MBAs
Business schools proliferated in the 1920s to train managers to run the first large bureaucratic corporations, then evolved into a new branch of academia.
Going to be interesting watching what happens to startup accelerators & their intellectual output.
Via @sknta twitter
Venture Capital
Venture myth assumes some good or bad outcome in 18 to 24 months.
In reality these things are 5 to 10 year overnight successes.
Organizations and products take that long to reach product market fit, let alone kill incumbents!
Via Garry Tan
Comparing Growth
1. the smartphone and mobile internet are amazing. meanwhile the 19th c invented telecom, the industrial economy, the car, and indoor plumbing
2. yes, china’s growing like crazy. chicago went from a farm town in 1840 to the world’s 6th largest city in 1890!
3. yes, european migration today is a huge story. 5 million britons, in a pop of 27 million, emigrated btw 1850 and ‘80!
4. ~everything the defines the modern nation state — free primary ed, social security, public health, unemployment insurance — were invented/mainstream’d in 19c
Breaking rules
English “manners” were imposed on the middle class as a way of domesticating them, along with instilling in them the fear of breaking rules and violating social norms.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life
Central bank liquidity now below pre-crisis levels

Peace of mind
A busy mind accelerates the perceived passage of time. Buy more time by cultivating peace of mind.
Via Naval Ravikant
