Hi everyone,
It feels like years ago that I was in Davenport, Iowa slushing through snow drifts to canvass for Joe Biden in advance of the Iowa Caucuses. Though he has been the presumptive nominee for some time, after such a tumultuous primary season it still felt surreal to watch him accept the nomination at the DNC this week…not to mention all the weirdness that the pandemic caused. Oddities aside, election season is now in full swing. Time to register to vote and request your ballot!
The Weekend Reccs
DNC: (1) An analysis on speaking time. (2) The best part of the convention: state roll-call. (3) And of course, Biden's speech.
Set up: This week I stumbled upon MEL, a magazine I hadn’t heard of before. What I found most surprising was their business model. But also I was surprised that I didn’t completely hate it?
Look, if you had said:
Harrison, I've got a men's issues magazine wholly-owned by Dollar Shave Club you've just got to check out
I would’ve responded with:
Appreciate the thought, but the chances of that being good are probably about as slim as the odds a bank accidentally pays almost a billion dollars to creditors and then sues them because the creditors call finders-keepers.
But yet, here we are. It is not exemplary journalism, but there are some good pieces, including: teachers’ perspectives on students being radicalized by the alt-right, how your car door is a lie, and settling whether Kool-Aid Man is the jar or the liquid.
Punchline: Citibank accidentally paid almost a billion dollars to creditors and now has to sue them to get the money back because the creditors called finders-keepers.
[Channeling my inner Matt Levine since he is on paternity leave] This is really bad! Your job as a big bank is to (1) take money and keep it safe and (2) take money one place and put it in a more profitable place, and you should do both of those better than other people. It’s not a good look when you give a lot of money to someone who you kinda told you weren’t going to fully pay back. (s/o Connor Murphy)
Earth Overshoot Day: Today is the day that we pass the threshold from a sustainable year to an unsustainable one. I think this is a great way of thinking about the resources we use. In many ways, it is just like personal finance. We’ve used up all the money we got as interest on our savings and now we’re having to eat away at the principal. That’s not only bad because the principal is finite — it also determines how much interest we get next year.
Policing: A great article from Vox on how fixing policing needs to include fixing 911. (s/o Noah Duncan)
Biology: The way many creatures forage for food appears to correspond to a Lévy Flight, a type of Brownian motion where the segment lengths have a higher probability of being lengthy.
Not to make everything about economics and whatever but in researching this I fell way down into the Wikipedia Rabbit Hole and found a piece of artwork called Black Shoals. The idea behind the piece is that real-time stock market data is fed into an evolutionary ecosystem and is translated into varying amounts of resources for the computer “players” in the ecosystem. I love this so much, not just because it is a nice idea and emergent art is a neat thing, but because it opens up an interesting avenue about what all the trillions of bits of data flying off the stock market is for.
We all generally agree that the stock market is, in its simplest form, people pushing buttons in response to price data in order to make money by buying expected future streams of income. But it doesn’t have to be that. In fact, all the data that flies off the stock market could just be solely for this art project, with all of us as misdirected and unwitting architects of the game, helping or hurting the “players” as they jostle for space on the dome.
This sort of what-you-see-isn’t-what-you-get is certainly true for other processes where humans come together and appear to be doing one thing but really are just pieces in a different thing. Sports are a notable example, where one might think professional soccer players are there to play and win but really there is a much larger game afoot that relates to eyeballs and dollars.
Quick Links: How razors become dull. Food label decoder. A different view on asbestos. Cuomo’s weird COVID-19 poster. Why are screens so boring?
Lagniappe
Tomorrow, Sunday the 23rd, is the Champions’ League Final. Most years, this is the biggest soccer game in the world. Even if you don’t think you like soccer, I recommend giving it a watch. There’s a reason they call the sport “the beautiful game.” The matchup is between Bayern Munich vs PSG, or, if you’re like Caroline and care about exactly two soccer players in the entire world, we can just call it Pavard v Mbappe.
Graph(s) of the week
[WSJ] Even if child care wasn’t crazy expensive and suffered from really bad information issues and cognitive biases as a market (hard gather information on quality, huge premium for risk aversion, few repeat customers, etc.), it just makes sense that we should subsidize it. The economy grows when people specialize. If people want to invest in their education and then use it to become parents, that is awesome, and I fully support them doing that, we’re not only trying to maximize GDP here. But if people want to work, it is in both our economic and general interest to let them, we shouldn’t have 128,000,000 cottage-industry-child-daycares in America. We pay for lots of infrastructure in many ways in order to keep our economy growing and healthy. This is just a softer type of infrastructure.
This was a fun one to write, I hope you enjoyed it.
Your friend,
Harrison