jonnathanson

If you want to get into the angel game in 2017, and you want to do it to make money, then I'd sincerely advise you to go take out $5-10k for a weekend in Vegas, and try to get really good at a game of complete chance, like roulette.

"Good" at roulette, you're thinking? What can that possibly mean?

It means having a large bankroll and knowing your tolerance for burning through it. It means understanding how to pace yourself, so that you're not blowing through your bankroll in the span of a few minutes. It means getting the itch out of your system, if, indeed, this is merely an itch.

Can't afford to fly to Vegas and blow 10 grand in a weekend? Don't get into angel investing. You can't afford it. I say this not as a snobby rich asshole, but rather, as the sort of nouveau-riche asshole who lost quite a bit of money many years back, doing exactly what the author did, and losing money I learned in retrospect I didn't really want to lose.

I still make the occasional investment, but as part of a group. By and large, those investments go to founders we've worked with before, or who come highly regarded. We invest super early, we eat a fuckton of risk, and we expect to lose 99.999% of the time. We're too small-time to play the game any other way at the moment.

Angel investing is about bankroll and access, and if you're wondering whether you've got the right access, you don't. So you're left with bankroll. Have fun, and try to get lucky if you can help it. :)

Don't get me wrong; I'd love if they simply cut to the chase. But airlines are not in the business of customer service, as is often painfully obvious. They seem to take their business practices from the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. (In particular, the dictum, "Once you've got their money, never give it back.")

The moment an airline attendant announces an oversold situation, that announcement kicks off a frantic battle between dopey consumer game theory calculus on the one hand, and rigid airline offer-escalation procedure on the other. This slow, maddeningly predictable war of attrition often results in delays of 45 minutes or more. Those delays cascade into further delays when the flight misses its departure window.

We have a "not enough dopes" problem. There need to be more people willing to take buyouts, and since that's not happening, we can consider pretty much any alternative solutions that make sense.

That being said, I would gently, if pedantically, advise anyone interested in diving deeper down the rabbit hole to note that the author is very much writing a primer -- not the authoritative textbook. Human behavior may be "Platonically" reducible on the basis of one or more animal behavioral models, but if we're going to start mixing in a sprinkle and a dash of complex concepts like Game Theory, we complicate the task and perhaps confuse our purpose.

Zahavi's handicap principle of prestige signaling, for instance, makes a lot of intuitive sense when you see it applied to birds. Almost immediately we grok the natural political dynamics of it all, and we look for analogues in human society. And we usually look at (apparently) obvious analogues, such as the practice of conspicuous consumption as a wealth and status signal.

Seems pretty elegant, doesn't it? It's less costly for the rich guy to buy the ostentatious car, and he suffers no real penalty if his opening move in the social game is rejected -- so we should expect that very expensive "signal" cars are usually bought by the people who can not only afford to buy them, but indeed, can afford to expensively signal their ability to dispose of wealth on such big-ticket inessentials. If we apply the bird model in this case, we should not only expect this result, but indeed, we should count on it. "Honest" signals are costly, and in the animal kingdom, they're usually accurate because of that fact.

Same thing with people, right?

Right?

Turns out, nope, that's not really how it works. At all. The dude who buys the Lambo is more likely to be someone who can't afford it: he's often an insecure member of a (perceived or real) lower social class or out-group who wants to prove he's rich. Ironically, he sends an out-group signal to the in-group he wants to signal he's part of. So who is the display really for? The poor folks. They don't know any better. So our "rich man" in the Lamborghini is an upwardly mobile striver who wants to be the prestigious alpha of a less competitive social set.

So basically, our hypothetically aspirationally mobile millennial (he's a HAMM - why not?) is making a very costly investment in a signal that will directly bar his entry into the desired circle / lower his prestige, and which will maybe earn him the occasional (but certainly not net-beneficial) admiration of the poorer friends he grew up with. And he has so many less costly ways to do the latter, if indeed he even needs to invest towards status-building in that group in the first place. This is just one of many human-behavioral edge cases in which we learn a fun, frustrating lesson: humans are mostly rational decisionmakers...except when they're not, which is more of the time than we probably even realize. :)

I suppose you could boil all of this down back to the two principles of dominance and prestige, and I'm not going to bother attempting the mental gymnastics on either a formal logical basis or by way of a hunt-and-cite search engine scramble. I'll leave the debate to smarter and less presently occupied minds. :)

But to suffice to say this much: beware anyone who claims to be able to account for human behavior using a series of rules. Human behavior is fucking complex and operates on so many nested and situationally interdependent contextual variables that such general rules are almost never cleanly observed in the wild.

I would encourage those interested in Zahavi's (ingenious, nevertheless) theories to drink deeply of the more recent well of Israeli human insight -- that is to say, read some Tversky & Kahneman, and horrror in the heuristic shortcuts that usually override and make a complicated mess of our efforts at elegance.

The author hints at all of this in his footnotes, to give him due fairness. I am not taking issue with his post, so much as issuing a plea for further study if you really do want to keep chasing the white rabbit of human behavioral insight.

Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordosis

Big Corn is infinitely more powerful than Big Tobacco, and arguably more dangerous.

I'd also expect a decent amount of what is essentially wire fraud from "startups" who never intend to ship anything.

The blockchain is a revolutionary concept, but right now it's looking like little more than a wild west of fly-by-night opportunism.

To this day, whales have vestigial arm, wrist, hand, and finger bones in their front flippers. Baby whales of certain species are also born with a very light amount of fur, which they shed a few weeks after birth.

Cetacean evolution is a fascinating topic.

But your point about further concentrating power and enabling further regulatory capture, and hence, more rents, is an important one.

The product was very very very MVP and alpha-like, but came at a finished-product price tag. I have to imagine that this strategy reaulted in a very small and non-representative test cohort of wealthy tech geeks in the Bay Area. Many of them no doubt purchased Glass as an in-crowd signal, with little serious intention of dogfooding the product or developing for it.

Hardware at that pricetag can't just be soft-launched like software. When you charge $1,500 for a device in basically v0.1, you're setting people up for disappointment.

You realize that nobody will care as much about most of the things they currently care about when buying a car. Performance? Mileage? Handling? Horsepower? Fucking irrelevant if I'm chilling in the back seat and my car is just getting me to where I need to go.

So what still matters? Price. Comfort. Amenities. The upsell becomes the main sell. At a certain point, Tesla isn't even selling "cars" so much as it's selling mobile offices to one segment, and mobile living rooms to another segment. I could also see Tesla finding a way to place the burden of price elsewhere and offer effectively "free" cars to consumers. For instance, leasing or selling fleets to employers. Or to cities. Or to Uber. Or to Amazon.

Uber, on the other hand, sees a world in which nobody owns a car, nobody drives a car, and everyone hails an automated car whenever and wherever. Like that scene in Minority Report.

Both of their strategies are banking on the idea that cars, as we currently understand and experience them, will eventually become pure commodities. The difference is that Tesla is seeking margin and Uber is seeking volume. The cliche that Tesla is Apple and Uber is Amazon is sort of true in that respect.

This whole data set is oddly fascinating.

By contrast, publishers have a very weak grip on us, the end users. We prefer to consume our content on platforms like FB and Snapchat and Twitter, or linked on boards like Reddit and HN. Very few of us are actually direct-navigating to publishers' sites and apps to consume content at the source. And we have decreasing loyalty to any particular publishing brand.

Ultimately this may lead to a weaker grip on content. If anyone can make the economics of publishing work while retaining a smaller staff of better compensated journalists, they will be able to have their pick of the best journalists in the world. The compensation bar is really really low these days, and anyone who pays journalists a comfortable living wage in 2017 can clear that bar and win a ton of goodwill. It's the revenue side of the equation that's tricky to make work.

In hindsight, we see how that decision looks naive. Xbox was always about the games, and the Netflix consumption was incidental. But original programming wasn't a completely stupid idea on its face back in ~2008-10, or whenever it was. In fact, it's possible they could have succeeded; they just never seemed to be able to get the studio off the ground.

The first big problem is that the macroeconomics of local tend to suck. The opportunity cost associated with keeping supply constrained in a small market grows in proportion with our ability to reduce transportation costs and integrate national and international markets. Meanwhile, a fragmented patchwork of smaller farms and companies serving local markets tends toward waste: farms invest in the high-end produce they think will maximize yield per acre in the local market. Unit costs per item are higher, and nobody has incentives to produce the essential, but low-margin items that the market still needs.

The second big problem is that consumers don't actually know what local means. Not really, at any rate. Enjoying blueberries in Southern California in the summer? Those aren't local. Oh, but we still want them? And we want them year round? So...I guess we're back at some combination of local + (inter)national, in which case we're still supporting factory farms, giant monocultures, and seed conglomerates -- we've just conveniently pushed these things out of our minds. But they still exist, and we haven't really solved the problems we've set out to fix. The point is, consumers want their goddamn blueberries. And their bananas, which, don't even get me started how much actual blood has been spilled over the international banana trade. (Seriously. Look up Chiquita on Wikipedia. You'll be tempted to use the phrase 'conflict bananas' after reading up. Don't use that phrase. But, like, still. Wow.)

There is probably some sort of ideal market, combining the economic efficiencies of concentration with the variety and quality of specialization. I think we'd all love to get there. But this is the kind of problem Jeff Bezos seems precisely better equipped to solve than John Mackey did.

This is a civil rights issue, and it should be written about as such.

I sure hope they're getting their mysterious benefactor a really nice father's day gift.

It's reasonable to speculate that drone swarms will become a real thing, probably very soon. Will they replace aircraft carriers? Not for decades, unless we stumble into a war and get humiliated by an enemy swarm. (For what it's worth, I think we've become so arrogant that another military humiliation in our lifetimes is almost a certainty. But now I'm editorializing.)

But again, this seems so reasonable as to almost seem inevitable. When you no longer have to worry about feeding, accommodating, and protecting human sailors, it's pretty amazing how much smaller, faster, cheaper, and more performant your ships can get.

At every turn the couple seems to make monumentally reckless decisions -- from spending more than they can afford, to buying a nearly condemned halfway home and expecting modest repair work, to buying it pretty much sight unseen, to hiring a friendly stranger as a contractor, to commencing $300k+ in contract labor without funding secured, to bribing squatters with big wads of cash. Squatters who obviously know where the couple lives.

Yikes. I do feel sorry for these folks. But I read this entire article between the gaps in my fingers, my palm fixed to my face, my lips silently mouthing, "Nooooo!"

Huh?

The only animal on Earth known to be capable of exceeding the intelligence of the average human is the above-average human. Octopuses, dolphins, chimps, crows, and elephants are all extremely intelligent, but let's not get carried away.

To put my question a different way: how confident are we in our current map of the system?

I'm asking as a legitimately curious layperson. Perhaps this comment is naive, and if so, I'm admitting to my naivete in advance.

First, the author assumes there is a bubble brewing. That's not his thesis; that's his background assumption. His thesis is that, assuming there is a bubble, you should do X, Y, and Z, and not do A, B, and C.

So yeah, after reading this, we could argue once again about whether there's a bubble or not. But the more interesting argument is about whether his advice is sound. Not whether his assumption is sound.

Facebook, Amazon, and Google are collecting info that is willingly passed their way.

We are probably talking about buying data entry and management bloatware from a big mediocre enterprise contractor and then integrating the monstrosity.

From a moral standpoint, little that I can imagine. From a human-cost standpoint, howabout unchecked and cascading climate change? If the world's powers retrench into regional hegemonies, and trust erodes along with trans-regional communication, then we're less and less likely to do anything on a global scale -- and we need to. If we let the ball get away from us here, we're talking about potentially billions of lives lost to war and famine, not to mention the billions whose way of life will be lost.

And the worst part is, we don't even need fascism to get us there. We get there easily enough through the direction the status quo is bending towards.