Hi All,
Week 6 of Social Distancing. How am I ever going to reintegrate with society? That being said let me start this week with a video of a puppy working out and another thing I find humorous ; Why do reporters always find photos to *match* the article being written?
Given that we’re in a pandemic, I thought the below three were interesting reads for our times ..
Firstly, from the Farnam St Blog with all due credit to them, I loved the below:
We're prone to thinking that life is improved by addition.
A new house will make our life better. A new friend will add excitement. A new car will make me happier. A new idea will make us smarter.
Instead of addition, try subtraction.
Remove a negative relationship from your life.
Cancel one subscription.
Drop a mindset that is holding you back.
Stop adding things and start removing what's holding you back.
Secondly, his article from a Haasie on how to kickstart your passion:
One activity that really resonated with me is the idea of a personal date, which came from the best-selling book, The Artist’s Way. The idea is that for at least a few hours each week, you will engage in a self-nurturing activity that has no purpose other than pure self-care
And thirdly, this article on the 3 equations for a happy life. Quite simple really.
“We need to learn how to want what we have, not to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness”
This week’s COVID-19 articles:
Food delivery trends. At the start of WFH, let me cook, 2 weeks later.. let me order, instead!
A good list of tech initiatives that various countries have taken to inform/educate/alert users:
Coronavirus Apps From Around the World, Translated and How Chinese Apps Handled Covid-19
For the scientifically inclined the various types of coronavirus tests. Fair warning that I understood only the basics (i'll stick to tech, but for those of you smart peeps out there ….)
Coronavirus is Testing the World. How Do We Test for Coronavirus?
Speaking of unethical companies that pretend they care, top of the list are Uber, DoorDash and Postmates. Look we get that it is a business but these companies want to fleece off both sides, screw the driver or delivery person over and claim that the cap is “a bad thing”? What are the unit economics for each delivery? For many deliveries in a location? For a specific delivery person? And they are “worried that restaurants will close down?” Wow. Just Wow.
San Francisco mayor caps Uber, Postmates, DoorDash delivery commissions
“A proposed cap on these commissions would result in fees for consumers rising and service areas shrinking, cutting off consumers from the services they rely upon in this crisis. Delivery people — who are currently relying on on-demand work opportunities to earn an income — would have fewer work opportunities and lower earnings. And restaurants that need revenue to maintain operations would see fewer orders, potentially forcing more of these businesses to close their doors,” the companies said.
As Scott Galloway has aptly put it in Capitalists or Cronyists?
Earlier this week, I was on MSNBC with an early Uber employee, who reminded us, “We’re all in this together.” What bullsh*t. My guess is this executive registered $10-100 million in equity crafting software that figured out an elegant way to pay their 3.9 million “driver partners” less than minimum wage, ensure Uber isn’t obligated to provide them with health insurance, and avoid paying payroll taxes to adequately fund the CDC. But Dara Khosrowshahi and his several-hundred-strong comms department wrote a compelling letter to the government urging them to help his driver partners.
Dara, pay your “partners” before picking up the pen again.
Driver partner, indeed! I share the same incredulity about Uber! Not wasting a good crisis and asking for a bailout! In the same vein, Coronavirus boosts Instacart — but not its workers speaks about this as well
Food for thought on donations from the ultra rich. Taxation would be law and as such won't add to a rich person's “legacy”. A “donation” however will. Look I get it, a company has a fiduciary responsibility to their stakeholders which means find ways to lower taxes (totally acceptable right? And smart, too - ask any MBA or finance guy). In a lot of the tech companies the stakeholder is the founder and they get rich, donate to causes. Build their “legacy”. Let me clearly state that I have no issue with such founders. The issue is the tax law and the politics imo : The risks of relying on Bill Gates and Jack Dorsey in the coronavirus crisis
In recent news are all the companies talking about tracing and why bluetooth apps might not solve the problem : Why Bluetooth apps are bad at discovering new cases of COVID-19
And finally this presentation on COVID-19 impact on pollution, traffic etc from Luke Wroblewski
This weeks chart from Pew Research:
This week’s reads:
On SVOD “fatigue” : The Flaws of "Subscription Fatigue", "SVOD Fatigue", and the "Streaming Wars"
The question : What was PayTV’s core job to be done is entertainment. All entertainment is not the same. Sports for example held the pay TV package “together”. The argument that Matthew Ball makes here is an interesting one - each SVOD serves a different JTBD
He talks about Quibi which to me made no sense prior to his article (and I am still a bit skeptical about) but the JTBD could very well occupy chunks of time that we’d otherwise use for Twitter, LNKD, Snap, FB, Gaming etc. So Quibi is not trying to steal time from other SVOD’s but rather from other micro entertainment (boredom removing moments)
He has also made an extremely prescient observation that its the sum of the part being greater than the whole that matters (Prime strategy, Apple’s future, as well as Disney’s past plus future)
The last super interesting point is the value of AVOD’s. Essentially free to the subscriber (supported by advertising dollars) moving away from Pay TV to VOD, but better primarily because advertisers can target much better. This might just be the last nail in the PayTV coffin. The next decade will see traditional PayTV go the way of landlines.
On grocery waste, this stupidity has to stop and I love the idea of a “grocery happy hour”. Obviously one can understand the reluctance of doing that as a grocery store : The World Wastes Tons of Food. A Grocery ‘Happy Hour’ Is One Answer and Study Finds Farm-Level Food Waste is Much Worse Than We Thought
“Food waste might be a uniquely American challenge because many people in this country equate quantity with a bargain,” said Meredith Niles, an assistant professor in food systems and policy at the University of Vermont. “Look at the number of restaurants that advertise their supersized portions.”
The growth of lifestyle streaming. Have you ever seen the movie EdTV? Reminded me of this movie! : The Rise of Lifestyle Streamers
Great read on Samsung! : Samsung Rising goes deep on corruption, chaebols, and corporate chaos
It speaks to the Korean chaebol culture of not trusting outsiders at work, of trying to control pretty much everything you can from the headquarters itself. The problem with Samsung’s consumer brand doesn’t come from the products itself. The deeper problem is from the corporate culture — the reluctance to really do something big and new. I mean, I think that a lot of the innovations we’re seeing from Korean companies now are just incremental innovations. They essentially build what the leaders have been doing. They tinker with improvements here and there, you know, a new processor or a new OLED screen or new curved display. But they’re not really doing the big-shot product that’s going to change things like what the iPhone did in 2007.
On Power laws and the effects of compounding : Power Laws: How Nonlinear Relationships Amplify Results
When we learn a new language, it’s always a good idea to start by learning the 100 or so most used words.
In all known languages, a small percentage of words make up the majority of usage. This is known as Zipf’s law, after George Kingsley Zipf, who first identified the phenomenon. The most used word in a language may make up as much as 7% of all words used, while the second-most-used word is used half as much, and so on. As few as 135 words can together form half of a language (as used by native speakers).
Opinions are a dime a dozen but have you really done the work to have an opinion? : The Work Required to Have an Opinion
Conjunctive Events Bias : Unlikely Optimism: The Conjunctive Events Bias
We can’t pretend that knowing about conjunctive events bias will automatically stop us from having it. When, however, we are doing planning where a successful outcome is of importance to us, it’s useful to run through our assumptions with this bias in mind. Sometimes, assigning frequencies instead of probabilities can also show us where our assumptions might be leading us astray. In the housing example above, asking what is the frequency of having building permits delayed in every hundred houses, versus the frequency of having permits delayed and electrical going in on time for the same hundred demonstrates more easily the higher frequency of option one.
Self control is overrated. Willpower is too.
‘Want to’ goals are more likely to be obtained than ‘have to’ goals,” Milyavskaya said in an interview last year. “Want-to goals lead to experiences of fewer temptations. It’s easier to pursue those goals. It feels more effortless.”
Another great read from Matthew Ball on The Most Important Media Businesses of the (Past and) Future
And because of real estate scarcity, lengthy build times, enormous capital requirements (exacerbated by Baumol’s Cost Disease), Disney’s theme parks, resorts, and cruises are incredibly difficult to replicate by another Western media company. It would take twenty years and tens of billions of dollars for AT&T/WarnerMedia to receive permits, design attractions, and build a fully operational theme park, for example (and it’d probably be in the middle of nowhere). It’s especially hard to imagine all of this occurring while the company is investing tens of billions per year into HBO Max, new 5G network infrastructure, and maintenance capex (while also sustaining tens of billions in dividends and debt service, and fending off agitated investors).
Why video gaming will take over (entertainment) in the future : 7 Reasons Why Video Gaming Will Take Over
How Zero day exploits have spread around the world ...
This Map Shows the Global Spread of Zero-Day Hacking Techniques
From Piper Jaffray : Piper Jaffray 38th Semi-Annual Taking Stock With Teens® Survey, Fall 2019. This infographic was cool and insightful …
Thank you for reading! Stay Safe