Misc

Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.

Misc

Wang Huning

  • Must read profile of Wang Huning.
  • “A member of the CCP’s seven-man Politburo Standing Committee, he is China’s top ideological theorist, quietly credited as being the “ideas man” behind each of Xi’s signature political concepts, including the “China Dream,” the anti-corruption campaign, the Belt and Road Initiative, a more assertive foreign policy, and even “Xi Jinping Thought.”“
  • “Wang Huning is arguably the single most influential “public intellectual” alive today.“
Misc

The Monty Hall Problem

  • 🚪🚪🚪Three doors.
  • Behind one is a car 🚗. Behind the other two are goats 🐐.
  • You pick a door. The gameshow host opens another, revealing a goat.
  • You can choose to stay with your original choice or switch. What should you do? [Give it a try!].
  • The Monty Hall problem became famous when a columnist, Marilyn vos Savant, known as the world’s smartest woman, said you should switch, resulting in hundreds of letters, including from the brightest minds in mathematics, arguing she was wrong.
  • This engrossing article by Steven Pinker shines a bright light on this dilemma.
  • “People’s insensitivity to this lucrative but esoteric information pinpoints the cognitive weakness at the heart of the puzzle: we confuse probability with propensity.”
  • “A propensity is the disposition of an object to act in certain ways. Intuitions about propensities are a major part of our mental models of the world.“
  • Probability is “the strength of one’s belief in an unknown state of affairs“
  • “The dependence of probability on ethereal knowledge rather than just physical makeup helps explain why people fail at the dilemma.“
  • “They intuit the propensities for the car to have ended up behind the different doors, and they know that opening a door could not have changed those propensities. But probabilities are not about the world; they’re about our ignorance of the world. New information reduces our ignorance and changes the probability.“
  • Surely there is an analogy here to investing.
Misc

Lab Grown Meat

  • Lab-grown meat is all the hype right now.
  • Yet according to this article, reality is very far away, if not unachievable.
  • First, you need a bioreactor facility – even one that is equivalent to 1/3 of all the volume of the entire biopharmaceutical industry today would only yield 22m pounds of lab-grown protein or 0.02% of US meat production.
  • To get to 10% of global meat consumption in 2030 you need 4,000 of these at a cost of $1.8 trillion.
  • The bigger problem is these are live animal cells and hence are very vulnerable to any contamination. Bacteria would crush these cells as they grow much faster, while viruses would infect as the culture has no immune system. These cascade shutting down entire production facilities.
  • The solution – clean rooms – are very expensive.
  • Full paper on the topic and h/t NZS Capital (which lists many other problems from the article).
Misc

Remystifying Supply Chains

  • A really beautiful must read piece written by a self-professed supply chain nerd.
  • Weaving in analogies that bounce in time – from the internet age to husbandry – supply chains are brought to life.
  • “Supply chains are a new class of engineered-emergent artifact, one that includes a few other globe-spanning things like the internet, the air travel system, and low earth orbit, that exist at a level of Gaian phenomenology, terraforming, and planet-scale husbandry. We only ever catch local glimpses of these things.” 
  • “We have to understand these beasts, in all their evolving, learning glory, while living within their bellies.“
Misc

Lawns

  • Grass lawns are really bad.
  • How bad? “Forty million acres of land in the US consists of lawns. Maintaining them requires 800 million gallons of mower fuel and three million tonnes of (carcinogenic, endocrine-disrupting) fertilisers a year, and they guzzle up to 60 per cent of fresh water in urban areas.“
  • To make matters worse, grass only works as a carbon sink if it is left wild.
  • “Maintaining a patch of blank land on which no food grows, no animal feeds and no carbon is stored is as absurd as installing fake plastic grass.“
Misc

Online Display Eating TV

  • Online display advertising is rapidly displacing TV in the UK.
  • “However, despite the increase in online, TV advertising remains the medium of choice for big brands wanting to reach an audience quickly and at scale, with advertisers citing TV’s ability to drive both short-term sales and longer-term brand equity as a major advantage.” 
  • Source: Ofcom.
Misc

Investing Aptitude

  • “Aptitude is the rate at which you level up, by changing the nature of the problem you’re solving (and therefore how you measure “improvement”). The interesting thing is, this is not purely a function of raw prowess or innate talent, but of imagination and taste.“
  • This is a nice way to think about learning in investing – as returns to a particular area diminish, it is key to open a new front.
Misc

Crossover Taking Over

  • “Crossover investors have become more active in Europe (e.g. Tiger Global, BlackRock, RA Capital, Coatue).
  • While in 2019 only 2 made the top 15 investor league table, now, as at the half year, 4 of these (all from the US) are part of the top 15, with the number 1 overall being Tiger Global.”
  • Source: Lazard.
Misc

US is bad at Payments

  • The US, despite being the key player in the global financial system, is woefully behind when it comes to its own payments system.
  • Frictions abound.
  • For example, It costs $10-$35 to wire money same-day between major banks, something that in the UK is free, 24/7 and takes seconds.
  • A staggering 34% of companies rely on paper checks for the majority of their payments (costing $4-$20 per transaction).
  • This is a great paper covering all these frictions and more. A sobering read.
  • NB paper written by individuals associated with Diem (formerly Libra).
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