Hi All,
Hope you all are doing great and your week is going great. I started writing (and I use that word a bit loosely for now) this week. I wrote an article on the art of reading and I’m hopeful that this will be the start of me trying to regularly publish. They say that publicly announcing goals may help one keep their goal (and of course there are always naysayers whom I’m going to ignore) and keeping that in mind (given that we’re in mid May) I hope to write 20 original articles this year. You all can keep me honest (and have side bets ;)) As always thank you for reading. Stay safe, be well and I’d greatly appreciate if you can share or repost this, if you found it valuable or useful!
This week I came across this little toy that a child lost. It was on the ground. It reminded me of a quote from Mark Twain:
“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: By the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.”
Jobs Resources
If you are one of those that has been affected by the recent space of layoffs, this link has a tonne of great resources for you : 💪The Ultimate COVID Job Resource Stack
On commodity prices
This below tweet and article shows how much we as a people have progressed
On writing:
Crisp writing maketh a good business person (or person?) These Amazon inspired tips were really good!
On Bailouts
I never knew that states are sovereign. As such there should be no bailout
In the United States, we have a bankruptcy law for individuals, another one for businesses, and yet another one for municipalities and their subordinate agencies. We do not have a bankruptcy law for the states or for the federal government, for the same reason: They are sovereigns.
…..
Because bankruptcy law is federal law, putting states into bankruptcy reorganization would upend our basic constitutional arrangement, making state governments answerable to federal bankruptcy judges and, behind them, to Congress. The people in Illinois are, for their sins, represented by the elected officials of Illinois in matters pertaining to Illinois.
….
Sovereigns don’t go bankrupt. Sovereigns default.
And that is what is likely to happen with the pension crisis, at least as far as states’ creditors are concerned. It is what should happen. It will be unpopular: Unlike many other financial instruments, municipal bonds are held mostly by households, not by financial institutions.
On understanding what other people do : Ladder of inference
We all know about Hanlon’s Razor and we also wonder why people take specific actions and here is where the ladder of inference comes in handy
COVID-19 Reading this week
These photos are a good indication of how Social Distancing will look when the world does gradually reopen. This is our new world. As we head toward re-opening this article on which are the riskiest places and this article on virus loads is interesting to read. There is a sentence I never thought I’d ever write!
A single breath releases 50 - 5000 droplets. Most of these droplets are low velocity and fall to the ground quickly. There are even fewer droplets released through nose-breathing. Importantly, due to the lack of exhalation force with a breath, viral particles from the lower respiratory areas are not expelled.
Unlike sneezing and coughing which release huge amounts of viral material, the respiratory droplets released from breathing only contain low levels of virus. We don't have a number for SARS-CoV2 yet, but we can use influenza as a guide. Studies have shown that a person infected with influenza can releases up to 33 infectious viral particles per minute. But I'm going to use 20 to keep the math simple.
Speaking of opening the world, COVID-19 could change dating forever
This week’s chart from PEW Research
This week’s reads:
Link between employer reviews (on Glassdoor) and stock prices : Crowdsourced Employer Reviews and Stock Returns by T. Clifton Green, Ruoyan Huang, Quan Wen, Dexin Zhou
We find that firms experiencing improvements in crowdsourced employer ratings significantly outperform firms with declines. The return effect is concentrated among reviews from current employees, stronger among early firm reviews, and also stronger when the employee works in the headquarters state. Decomposing employer ratings, we find the return effect is related to changing employee assessments of career opportunities and views of senior management. It is unrelated to work-life balance. Employer rating changes are associated with growth in sales and profitability and help forecast one-quarter ahead earnings announcement surprises. The evidence is consistent with employee reviews revealing fundamental information about the firm.
Advertising: Ads Don't Work That Way
An interesting take on advertising and why certain companies send a cultural imprintation message. Human beings like to be associated with certain traits so if everyone has seen the ad then the message is more clear.
Couple of notes:
Clothing brands have less appeal today so we’d expect that such brands spend less on advertising such as billboards etc so cultural imprintation or preening is less important.
The article talks about superbowl ads (which are expensive AF) as well and its interesting that companies such as Wix have advertised even though such an association was much harder to make in 2019 Superbowl ads
an example was much rarer in 2019
Amazon and COVID-19 spend : Amazon lends its expertise — and its cash — to Covid-19 research
It's abundantly clear that Amazon is interested in all types of commerce, healthcare included. The coronavirus testing for Amazon yields two key purposes:
Amazon provides confidence to its own staff to be confident to come into work (Amazon is its own best customer)
Expand this footprint out into other areas of medical services
In the next 18-24 months I predict that Amazon will get into telemedicine themselves
A good comparison of the factors that are important for streaming content and how they compare from Matthew Ball : Content, Cars, and Comparisons in the "Streaming Wars"
Super list of user research interview methods : User Research Methods - Fact of the Day 1
Tech & Fashion. How tech is impacting fashion : Fashion Technology & Tech Fashion Trends l
Really brilliant read on Universal Basic Income : Universal Basic Income and the Capitalist Production of Consciousness
Bad Arguments and How to Avoid Them : A good read on how people try to break down arguments. Have you ever noticed this, in conversation or otherwise?
Cloud gaming. A good read on cloud gaming, cloud gaming challenges, types (lot I had no clue about!) : Cloud Gaming: Why It Matters And The Games It Will Create
On the Bikeshedding effect. Another mental model in the toolkit!
Why We Focus on Trivial Things: The Bikeshed Effect
Mental Models again. I come back to this again and again lest I forget them.
Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (109 Models Explained)
Positioning
How understanding customer pain points led to a product reposition (from an almost failed product!). This always goes back to the customer! : How I helped reposition a database product that went on to make $1 billion in revenue
I go back to my boss at the time and the executive team, and I'm like 'good news and bad news'. Good news is that I made a hundred calls I know what people are doing with the product, and the vast majority don't use it, don't like it, and aren't gonna be one bit sad if we turn it off. But, I've got this handful of outliers that are using this product in a way we never expected, and they're going to be very disappointed when we turn it off.
That sparked a conversation internally about how we could we reposition this database into something completely different and sell it successfully as this other thing.
We did it, we repositioned it so that instead of being desk productivity software that competes with excel, it would be an embeddable database for mobile devices.
The good thing was that there was not a lot of competition for 'embeddable database for mobile devices' at the time. However, there were people building homegrown things trying to accomplish the same thing that we did.
Thank you for reading. Stay safe! Be Well! I’d greatly appreciate if you can share or repost this, if you found it valuable or useful.