Category: Food for thought

Color surrounds us in nature, and we re-create it with pigments. You can think of pigments as pulverized minerals, heavy metals, or chemicals that we swish into oil and spread over a canvas or car: Cobalt becomes blue; ochre red; cadmium yellow. “But nature has a very different way of creating color than we do,” Chanda says. Some of nature’s most vivid looks—the kind worn by peacocks, beetles, and butterflies—do their thing without pigment.

Those colors come from topography. Submicroscopic landscapes on the outer surfaces of peacock feathers, beetle shells, and butterfly wings diffract light to produce what’s known as structural color. It’s longer-lasting and pigment-free. And to scientists, it’s the key to creating paint that is not only better for the planet but might also help us live in a hotter world. 

This Is the Lightest Paint in the World

SVB: Hey, I just lost a ton of money selling government guaranteed bonds, so please invest in us

Others: Wait, why?

SVB: Haha, these startups, they seem to actually not be able to raise money, so we’re bleeding deposits, but it’s all fine, just give us some more capital and we’re fine

The VCs: Excuse me. You don’t have money to pay depositors?

SVB: No, what we’re saying is, we do. It was locked in with MBS earlier, and we sold it now and have $20 billion, which is like gazomba huge types. So yeah, relax, don’t panic.

Everyone: Don’t panic?

SVB: Yeah.

Instantly, everyone panics.

What we should not learn from the SVB crisis

For programming languages to survive indefinitely, they have to either:

1. Be simple enough to be implemented with little cost.
2. Become irreplaceable critical infrastructure of many large organizations.

Simplicity and Survival

Powerful words. Unfortunately can’t find this book on Amazon India.

One can fight evil but against stupidity one is helpless. … I have accepted the fact, hard as it may be, that human beings are inclined to behave in ways that would make animals blush. The ironic, the tragic thing is that we often behave in ignoble fashion from what we consider the highest motives. The animal makes no excuse for killing his prey; the human animal, on the other hand, can invoke God’s blessing when massacring his fellow men. He forgets that God is not on his side but at his side.

On Turning Eighty by Henry Miller (via Henry Miller on Turning 80, Fighting Evil, And Why Life is the Best Teacher)

Not having an investment view on every imponderable in financial markets can seem like ignorance, but it actually shows an acute awareness of the environment in which we operate. It is far more ignorant to believe that we can accurately predict all manner of complex and unfathomable things.

Rather than have an ever-evolving set of views and positions, we would be far better off allowing others to pontificate and trade, and instead wait until there are opportunities where the probability of good outcomes are firmly on our side.

Investors would be far happier (and better off) not having a view on most things most of the time.

The Power of Not Having a View

Intriguing.

The problem isn’t that the youngest generation hates work; the problem is that many of the jobs offered to the youngest generation aren’t work at all.The spreadsheet-heavy, mid-level-manager-dominated, buzzword-filled roles offered to us are jobs, but they are hardly “work.” 

For any gamers out there, one of the oldest tricks in the book is giving your younger sibling an unplugged/disconnected controller, so they feel like they are “playing”, while you are in control the whole time. 

Many “jobs” today are simply unplugged controllers. The work would get done, whether or not we take part in the process. We are simply moving numbers, smashing buttons, and staying busy, with no regard for actual productivity. 

On Meaningless Careers

In recent years, Earth has been speeding up. In 2020, timeanddate reported that Earth had achieved its 28 shortest days since accurate daily measurements using atomic clocks began in the 1960s.

The shortest day of all in 2020 was -1.47 milliseconds on July 19.

Earth continued to spin quickly in 2021, although the shortest day of the year in 2021 was fractionally longer than in 2020.

Now, in 2022, things have speeded up again. On June 29, Earth set a new record for the shortest day of the atomic-clock era: -1.59 milliseconds.

Earth nearly beat its record again the following month, posting a length of day of -1.50 milliseconds on July 26.

Earth Sets New Record for Shortest Day

And there is something called as Leap Second.

People are very good at forecasting the future, except for the surprises, which tend to be all that matter.

…

The biggest risk is always what no one sees coming. If you don’t see something coming you’re not prepared for it. And when you’re not prepared for it its damage is amplified when it hits you.

Look at the big news stories that move the needle – Covid, 9/11, Pearl Harbor, the Great Depression. Their common trait isn’t necessarily that they were big; it’s that they were surprises, on virtually no one’s radar until they arrived.

It’s like that every year. It’ll be like that every year.

Never Saw It Coming

Interesting metaphor for technical debt by Andy Hunt.

Researchers studying urban decay wanted to find out why some neighborhoods escape the ravages of the inner city, and others right next door—with the same demographics and economic makeup—would become a hell hole where the cops were scared to go in. They wanted to figure out what made the difference.

The researchers did a test. They took a nice car, like a Jaguar, and parked it in the South Bronx in New York. They retreated back to a duck blind, and watched to see what would happen. They left the car parked there for something like four days, and nothing happened. It wasn’t touched. So they went up and broke a little window on the side, and went back to the blind. In something like four hours, the car was turned upside down, torched, and stripped—the whole works.

They did more studies and developed a “Broken Window Theory.” A window gets broken at an apartment building, but no one fixes it. It’s left broken. Then something else gets broken. Maybe it’s an accident, maybe not, but it isn’t fixed either. Graffiti starts to appear. More and more damage accumulates. Very quickly you get an exponential ramp. The whole building decays. Tenants move out. Crime moves in. And you’ve lost the game. It’s all over.

We use the broken window theory as a metaphor for managing technical debt on a project.

Don’t Live with Broken Windows

Makes me wonder, if some day electric cars rule over the Indian car market what will happen to all the tax revenue from petrol and diesel?

When it comes to sales of electric cars, Norway is in a league of its own. In September, battery-powered electric vehicles accounted for 77.5 percent of all new cars sold. That figure makes Norway a world leader by a long way—leapfrogging over the UK, where 15 percent of new car sales were electric as of October, and the US, where that number is just 2.6 percent.

Norway’s electric dream has been credited to a series of tax breaks and other financial carrots that mean brands like Tesla can compete on price with combustion engines. But these incentives—and their success—have created a unique predicament: Norway is running out of dirty cars to tax.

Norway Is Running Out of Gas-Guzzling Cars to Tax