- “When the British actor Jonathan Routh published the first edition of his Good Loo Guide (“Where to Go in London”) in 1965, he singled out the device for mention every time he found one. Only five toilets, out of more than a hundred, held hand dryers – of the pedal-operated kind that, in the 1965 movie Help!, inhale the jacket sleeves of Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. Mostly, Routh encountered towels of cloth or paper, and quite often, he had to pay to use these products. (“Do loos ever advertise their attractions?” he wondered, while extolling the virtues of the splendid restrooms of Hyde Park in the 1968 update. “Has anyone ever seen an ad saying ‘Just arrived – new free electric hand-drier at the so-and-so loos.’”) Even in the third and final edition of the guide, released in 1987, I counted more instances of electric razors, armchairs and pre-pasted disposable toothbrushes than of hand dryers.”
..
..
The excellent, excellent Samanth Subramanian in this lovely article about (of all things) paper towels and hand driers. Yes, really. What’s more, Samanth won the Financial/Economic story of the year award for this write-up. Read the book by clicking on his name here, also read Following Fish, and definitely read this article itself. Congratulations, Samanth!
..
.. - “And which book takes the very top prize for best of the year? You can’t compare the Alter to the others, so I will opt for Eric Kaufmann’s Whiteshift and also Pekka Hämäläinen’s Lakota America, with Julia Lovell on Maoism and Alain Bertaud on cities as the runner-ups. But again a strong year all around.”
..
..
Tyler Cowen’s list of books he found worth his time in 2019. As he would say, self-recommending.
..
.. - “So what’s a desperate founder to do? Smith impulsively flew to Las Vegas and played blackjack with the last of the company money .Amazingly, when he came back the next week, he had turned the remaining $5,000 into $27,000 – just enough for the company to stay in operation for another week.
In the book “Changing How the World Does Business: FedEx’s Incredible Journey to Success – The Inside Story,” Roger Frock, a former senior vice president of operations at FedEx, describes the scene when he found out what Smith did. “I said, ‘You mean you took our last $5,000 – how could you do that? [Smith] shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘What difference does it make? Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldn’t have flown anyway.'””
..
..
A lovely story about how Fedex came back from the dead.
..
.. - “The money of the world’s mega-wealthy, though, is heading there in ever-larger volumes. In the past decade, hundreds of billions of dollars have poured out of traditional offshore jurisdictions such as Switzerland and Jersey, and into a small number of American states: Delaware, Nevada, Wyoming – and, above all, South Dakota. “To some, South Dakota is a ‘fly-over’ state,” the chief justice of the state’s supreme court said in a speech to the legislature in January. “While many people may find a way to ‘fly over’ South Dakota, somehow their dollars find a way to land here.””
..
..
Oh hey, Tiebout. Whassup.
..
.. - “Behavioral finance is finance. That individual human beings can sometimes do silly things, for reasons to do with either nature or nurture, is not under dispute. That they may make these same mistakes in the aggregate is no longer heretical. That is the gift of those that have been “misbehaving” by attacking hallowed, efficient market doctrine. Economists now can consider potential irrationality versus a standard model of profit-maximizing utility without being disinvited to (those wild and crazy) economist parties. Economists can now suggest that cognitive biases can affect asset prices without threatening their tenure.”
..
..
The term may be overrated – the logic isn’t: in defense of behavioral finance.
Tag: tiebout
Tech: Links for 22nd August, 2019
- “1. first bionic hand with a sense of touch that can be worn outside a laboratory
2. development of a new 3D bioprinting technique, which allows the more accurate printing of soft tissue organs, such as lungs
3. a method through which the human innate immune system may possibly be trained to more efficiently respond to diseases and infections
4. a new form of biomaterial based delivery system for therapeutic drugs, which only release their cargo under certain physiological conditions, thereby potentially reducing drug side-effects in patients
5. an announcement of human clinical trials, that will encompass the use of CRISPR technology to modify the T cells of patients with multiple myeloma, sarcoma and melanoma cancers, to allow the cells to more effectively combat the cancers, the first of their kind trials in the US
6. a blood test (or liquid biopsy) that can detect eight common cancer tumors early. The new test, based on cancer-related DNA and proteins found in the blood, produced 70% positive results in the tumor-types studied in 1005 patients
7. a method of turning skin cells into stem cells, with the use of CRISPR
the creation of two monkey clones for the first time
8. a paper which presents possible evidence that naked mole-rats do not face increased mortality risk due to aging”
..
..
That is an excerpt from an excerpt, but I found the list astonishing. These are advancements from only the field of biology, only from 2018… and as the article goes on to say, only from January 2018. Remarkable. I know very little of how life sciences work, but the article was very informative on that score.
..
.. - Do Uber and Lyft contribute to congestion? Note the funding agencies.
..
.. - Benedict Evans on whether Netflix is a TV business or a tech business.
..
.. - This link comes via MR, and Tyler Cowen said it is Tiebout Twitter. I prefer Voting With your Tweets.
..
.. - “But perhaps he also sensed that power in society is shifting from the institutions he oversaw, to those that distribute private capital—it wouldn’t be the wrong read, even if it’s an unsettling one.”
..
..
A not altogether pretty look at the VC industry and its evolution over time.