Journal

35 entries for 2025

Monday, May 26, 2025

Why You’re Thinking About Unemployment Wrong

[The economy is what enables masses of people who don’t know each other to coordinate and push the possibilities of society.]

[Prices are the language that businesses use to communicate to consumers.]

Sunday, May 25, 2025

In 1940, there were forty-two workers per retiree, but that number has fallen to three to one, meaning that there are not nearly enough workers to support Social Security beneficiaries.

Part of Kyla Scanlon: In This Economy?.

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism

[In a material world, being poor goes beyond what you have to include being undervalued and therefore treated as negligible. The more equal people are in terms of what they have, the happier they will be.]

Saturday, May 17, 2025

Scott Galloway: We’re Raising The Most Unhappy Generation In History! Hard Work Doesn’t Build Wealth

[Information asymmetry benefits whoever has symmetry and knows the information. Bosses know how much everyone is getting paid but may discourage talking about salaries to avoid someone finding out their colleague makes 30% more for the same work.]

[Everyone you’re ashamed to ask for fear of rejection will be dead. Willingness to take uncomfortable risks and endure rejection opens yourself up to outsized returns. Get out a spoon and eat shit.]

[Think of the emotions you want them to feel and practice it every day in your content storytelling.]

Sunday, May 11, 2025

the key to capturing clicks is convincing people that you have the answers to their questions—that you hold the proverbial key to all the solutions. If you can over-complicate simple things loudly, people will pay attention.

Part of Kyla Scanlon: In This Economy?.

Saturday, May 10, 2025

The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction

we have a world where friction gets automated out of experiences, aestheticized in curated lifestyles, and dumped onto underfunded infrastructure and overworked labor. The effort doesn’t disappear; it just moves.

The economic signal (the diploma) still circulates as if the underlying work has occurred. But the work isn’t there. We’ve just shifted the friction offscreen, and have outsourced it to a chatbot and let the system pretend nothing’s changed. So at this moment, we are credentialing fluency with tools that do the thinking for you.

friction has become a class experience. Wealth has always helped smooth over bumps - but when the physical world is such a mess and the digital world is so easy, it’s simple to curate the digital into the physical if you have money.

The American economy has been running a decades-long experiment in removing friction, both through technological advancement and through financial engineering that pushes costs into the future. The resulting prosperity has been very real, but it’s been built on the proverbial kicking the can down the road.

When Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta builds frictionless social interfaces, that cognitive smoothness is subsidized by somewhere, somehow, right? The same economy that produces simulated friends for the lonely American also produces understaffed air traffic control towers. The same investor class that funds “never think alone” startups also lobbies against infrastructure spending, or perhaps, housing.

Amazon’s one-click ordering creates a seamless customer experience by offloading friction onto warehouse workers and delivery drivers.

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

There’s nothing worse than being right and everyone agreeing with you. There’s no way to make any cash.

Part of Gary Stevenson: The Trading Game.

Monday, May 5, 2025

Compliance is the New American Dream

a world built on compliance might function for a while. But it will never lead. And right now, we really need people who can lead.

Thursday, May 1, 2025

For the interview with Goldman I turned up in my hoodie and trainers and I told them that I definitely didn’t want the job. They put me through to the second round after that.

Stocks never go down. Stocks only go up. When the economy is good stocks go up, and when the economy is shit, they print so much money stocks go up even more. Same with fucking houses. Everything goes up. The asset holders never lose.

Part of Gary Stevenson: The Trading Game.

One hundred days

You are NOT right if you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.

Monday, April 28, 2025

Why Labour and Trump will both fail

[Money is not a real resource like food or housing; it’s used to determining the allocation of real resources.]

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

there are too many problems i’ve solved with nail clippers

composing (to place/put together) becomes necessary when you don’t have everything

Tuesday, April 22, 2025

[The economy is people and their ability to live, not numbers. We didn’t need to make conversations with our cleaners to understand the lives of everyday people.]

[In the best trades, you use your nose to smell stupidity.]

Part of Gary Stevenson: The Trading Game.

Sunday, April 20, 2025

Surviving Crappy Markets 101

[Market downturns are more the norm than exception, yet bull market gains often make up for them in multiples.]

Saturday, April 19, 2025

This is another general rule of trading: you don’t necessarily make money by being right, but by being right when others are wrong.

Part of Gary Stevenson: The Trading Game.

Wednesday, April 16, 2025

Trevor Noah: My Depression Was Linked To ADHD! Why I Left The Daily Show!

[Growing up in abusive households make you sensitive to your environment to the point where I knew by the sound of his footsteps whether or not my stepfather was coming home drunk.]

[You’ll be surprised at how often your ‘screw them’ choice reflects something you perhaps need to be doing more of.]

Tuesday, April 15, 2025

[It’s easier to burn down a building than build one up.]

[‘Destroying’ someone will not convince them.]

The person who helped me shift never made me feel small. Minds change when they are made to feel large. When they are respected and gently challenged. When they are helped to stretch and make more room for another point of view.

Part of Carlos Whittaker: How to Human.

Monday, April 14, 2025

The Technium: Better Than Free

[When copying makes things free and infinite, 8 ‘generative’ values that people might pay for include: immediacy; personalization; interpretation, support, or guidance; authentic versions; easy access on multiple devices, and backup; physical representations or in-person events; appreciation through patronage; discoverability and distribution.]

Friday, April 11, 2025

CONSPIRACY

[Nudging people towards your conclusion while making them think they arrived there themselves will keep them resistant to questioning their basis for belief.]

[Conspiracism is more invested in the issues of specific leaders (bad satan worshippers) than the structure of power itself.]

[The face of Jesus and Mary may be commonly found on toast and fruit in Christian nations, wheras the name of Allah might be found on cantaloupe skins in Indonesia.]

[‘Is it possible that…’ has a very low barrier for proof.]

[One function of the ‘satanic ritual abuse’ conspiracy is to deny that sexual violence is banal and that culture empowers men to do it.]