Week 12
Link
Deutsche Bank will outsource large parts of its wholesale banking IT infrastructure to U.S.-based Hewlett-Packard (HP) in a multibillion-dollar deal [..] Part of the bank’s long-standing restructuring efforts have included moving to a more flexible digital platform as pressure rises on the financial sector overall to cut costs, embrace web-based client platforms, and face competitors coming from outside of traditional banking [Feb 24]
Great
DB ATM cards cannot even be used in the Netherlands. Hopefully this gets fixed.
This must be good news for HP tho..
Link
HP share price tumbles as earnings fall far short of analysts’ forecast [Feb 26]
Huh?
After the multibillion $ deal… ?
Link
[There has been a] shak[e up at] the Human Brain Project.
Good news
Question
But basic income was never considered seriously by anyone before.
Incorrect
Richard Nixon almost enacted it into law. From The Second Machine Age,
pg. 429
Basic income is not part of mainstream policy discussions today, but it has a surprisingly long history and came remarkably close to reality in twentieth-century America. One of its early proponents was the English-American political activist Thomas Paine, who advocated in his 1797 pamphlet Agrarian Justice that everyone should be given a lump sum of money upon reaching adulthood to compensate for the unjust fact that some people were born into landowning families while others were not. Later advocates included philosopher Bertrand Russell and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote in 1967, “I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective—the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income.”
Many economists on both the left and the right have agreed with King. Liberals including James Tobin, Paul Samuelson, and John Kenneth Galbraith and conservatives like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek have all advocated income guarantees in one form or another, and in 1968 more than 1,200 economists signed a letter in support of the concept addressed to the U.S. Congress.
The president elected that year, Republican Richard Nixon, tried throughout his first term in office to enact it into law. In a 1969 speech he proposed a Family Assistance Plan that had many features of a basic income program. The plan had support across the ideological spectrum, but it also faced a large and diverse group of opponents. Caseworkers and other administrators of existing welfare programs feared that their jobs would be eliminated under the new regime; some labor leaders thought that it would erode support for minimum wage legislation [..] Minimum wage cannot relied upon to deliver such redistribution, because in US only 44% of people aged 18+ have a job according to Gallup. Plus imposing artificially high minimum wage requirements can hurt a business’ competitiveness. Basic income is both the social and free-market oriented solution (hence the support of Friedman and Hayek).
Yann LeCun
The CS department at Yale has long suffered from a disease that is widespread among CS department at stodgy, conservative universities, including Harvard, Chicago, and Princeton. CS is a quickly evolving field. Because of excess conservatism, these departments have repeatedly missed important trends in CS and related field, such as Data Science. They seem to view CS as meaning strictly theory, crypto, systems and programming languages, what some have called “core CS”, paying lip service to graphics, vision, machine learning, AI, HCI, robotics, etc. But these areas are the ones that have been expanding the fastest in the last decades, particularly machine learning and computer vision in the last decade.
True
Universities are lagging in some other areas too; a lot of engineering curriculums still do not include statistics, and linear algebra. But they have Calculus all the way from I upto IV. Gilbert Strang of MIT complained about this here.
Mercedez-Benz CEO
[Paraphrasing, in response to Apple planning to get into car manufacturing business] A car is much more complicated to build than an iPhone.
Maybe
But as far as complexity goes, these companies also deal with software that are in millions lines of code territory, that is pretty complex. In this day and age, it’s all about mixing; Amazon might get into hosting, a search engine into ads (remember Google before the whole ads thing?). So I’d watch out.
Businessinsider
UBS, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley stand out in the global wealth management industry, each responsible for handling more than $1 trillion in investors’ assets.
But they’re now under siege from well-funded startups that offer a wide array of advisory services at a low cost thanks to broad use of automated functions.
These are the robo-advisors.
We’re only in the first inning of the wealth management wars, but this business that has historically been dominated by well-staffed big banks and a network of good-old-boy relationships is seeing its competitive landscape evolve rapidly [..] Betterment, Wealthfront, FutureAdvisor and Personal Capital are among these new firms.
Great
Question
Why not Bush?
Common Turd
Standardizing education will not work as it is an industrial era modern concoction, which is exactly what Common Core is. Conservatives are up in arms about it as they should be.
An economist
[Paraphrasing] In order to spur the economy, in post-modern times, it is better for governments to invest in infrastructure.
True
A public Wifi network that is always on in each part of every city, for example, would be a major boon. Infrastructure spending is good because it helps everyone equally.
Also, nowadays, there is another kind of infrastructure, a human infrastructure, that is a combination of environmental / cultural constructs that promote courage, enterpreneurship, trying something new and failing fast. In order to support this infrastructure, one needs to mitigate its adverse effects, i.e. abject failure, which can occur more often than not. Another motive for basic income.
Link
Want to get paid for shampooing someone’s hair? In California, you may need to have at least nine months of experience and pass a licensing test overseen by the state barbering and cosmetology board, whose members include salon professionals.
Do you clean dogs’ teeth for pay as part of a grooming service? You might run afoul of the state Veterinary Medical Board, which includes four veterinarians and a veterinary technician among its eight members [..].
[A recent Supreme Court] decision means that “the vast majority of commissions and boards in all 50 states are untenable and illegal,” says Robert Fellmeth, a veteran antitrust expert who is executive director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego law school. The court has established, he says, that “the king has been wearing no clothes for the last 72 years.”
Good
The behaviour outlined above is second wave specialization: “In both capitalist and socialist industrial states, […] specialization was accompanied by a rising tide of professionalization. Whenever the opportunity arose for some group of specialists to monopolize esoteric knowledge and keep newcomers out of their field, professions emerged”.
In 3W world noone decides who, for example, a professional taxi driver is. Good drivers are rated well in Uber or Lyft and get more demand. Peer-to-peer, decentralized. End of story.
History
In 1978 [the leader of China] Deng Xiaoping was on a state visit in Singapore [..] Deng was curious about what the Singaporeans had done to develop their country so rapidly [.., and] he confesse[d to Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of today’s Singapore] that he doubted whether China would ever become as successful as Singapore. Lee reportedly replied, “we, the Singapore Chinese, were the descendants of illiterate landless peasants from Guangdong and Fujian in south China, whereas the scholars, mandarins, and literati had stayed and left their progeny in China. There was nothing that Singapore had done that China could not do, and do better.”
Hah
The story is Xiaoping was so effected by Yew’s comments that it became one of the reasons China started to change. But was Yew correct? I believe the real advantage Singapore had was not having too much history; it made them more agile. China, overburdened with history could not do anything different, for a long time.
Link
Roughly one third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year — approximately 1.3 billion tonnes — gets lost or wasted.
Big waste
George Orwell
It is curious to reflect that out of al the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939 [..] A few writers of conservative tendency, such as Peter Drucker [emphasis mine] foretold an agreement between Germany and Russia, but they expected an actual alliance or amalgamation which would be permanent. No Marxist or other left-wing writer, of whatever colour, came anywhere near foretelling the Pact.
Nice
Orwell quoting Drucker! It feels like seeing a reference to Macbeth in the Illiad. Probably the reason that feeling is that Orwell, being the influential figure that he is, comes accross as if he should be from an earlier age. Drucker, because he talked a lot about hi-tech, the knowledge economy and management feels like should be younger. But Orwell lived btw 1903-1950, Drucker was born at 1909, and lived until 2005.
The Economist
A recent paper, by Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Kominers, suggests that the rise in patent-related litigation has not really helped protect the rights of inventors. The authors collected a comprehensive dataset on non-practicing entities (NPE), relevant patents and lawsuits between NPEs for the period 2001 and 2011. The paper’s authors found that rather than acting as benevolent patent enforcers, NPEs simply target the firms with the most cash—however good or bad their argument that a patent has been infringed is. For example, the probability of being sued by NPEs doubles after a firm experiences a sudden increase in its cash balance. Patent trolls are also more likely to go after firms that employ fewer lawyers. And the largest NPEs are the worst offenders.
Economists say that patent trolls can play a useful role by helping to transfer the profit generated by patents from manufacturers to inventors. But the new research finds that inventors only receive 5% of their patent’s value after successful infringement cases. The rest goes to lawyers and NPEs that do not engage in innovation.
In effect, this damages productivity by punishing innovators for their success. The authors find in their data that firms that lost lawsuits against patent trolls or settled out of court spent on average $211m less on research and development than firms that won. This meant that they were also less likely to conduct research that produced new patents in the future. Because economic growth is fuelled by innovative firms boosting their productivity, these disincentives could be holding back the wider economy.
News
This week Google shared details about a Project Ara store through which users will be able to buy snap-on hardware blocks for the customizable smartphone.
Are you kidding me?
Google is doing that too? Is there anything cool that Google is not involved in, that’s what I wanna know..
Note: We all remember the Phonebloks video released some time ago. PB and Ara sometimes collaborate apparently, but are seperate entities.
Question
Where does the wave picture of the blog come from?
Here
Link
[G]etting eco-friendly hydrogen is still a bit of a challenge. Right now, a lot of hydrogen is produced through mixing steam and natural gas [but that method is not so green..] A new study published [..] announces the development of a transparent film that uses energy from the sun to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, without some of the dangerous side effects inherent in the process.
Sweet
Clean oxygen through sun energy! Awesome.
Analyst
When [a certain pattern] occurs, we noticed [a certain stock] went up 6 out of 9 times. So there is a 66% chance the next time [the same pattern] occurs the stock will go up. This stock could be invested in, during these times.
Do that and you will lose your shirt
This “analyst” clearly does not know statistics. If u look at the 95% confidence interval of that ratio,
x=6.;n=9.;p=(x+2)/(n+4); z = 1.96
print p + np.array([-1,+1])*z*np.sqrt(p*(1-p)/n)
The result is [0.30 0.93], so the low percentage is 30%. The sound
investment strategy would look at this number, not the higher one, or
the average. If you go by that number, there is no clear connection
between the said pattern and the said “increase”.
Question
Why do you keep suggesting an INTJ for prez? Do they know everything?
No
But this is the right temparament for the job. This is a decisive Rational who is not afraid to change their mind, and is “creative enough” to make a difference. Are they always right? Hell no. Look at B. Gates talking about evil AI and so forth.. he clearly doesn’t know what the f is going on in this space, not in detail, but, (and this is key) the action an INTJ would take for that view would not be insane, it would be something tangible, reasonable, and once they realize they are wrong, they can course correct immediately. BG again, he wrote a book about the future (1995), a year later Internet became huge which was not predicted in the book. M$ course corrected.
Everyone knows the Keynes quote about “changing his mind when necessary”; this is a good advice overall of course, and more pressing / in line with NTJ’s strategy of thinking/acting. They grok the idea, the tech in a way that is sufficient for them to commit to an action. The idea could be wrong (more often than not, it is right). Rinse and repeat.
Grokking tech at a sufficient level is a helpful skill. I heard Gates talk about a mathematical method called MCMC once [geek] which allows statisticians to sample from complex distributions, and calculate multidimensional integrals [/geek]. He says he learned about it from researchers in biology (during his philantrophy work I am sure), most likely in the context of calculating the trajectory of outbreaks so forth. The level at which he talked about it was pretty detailed, for an outsider to the field at least.. So he hears about this method, and sort of got the “geek vibe” of that, internalized it, and now he knows a problem area, the general things the method can solve, and at a level at which he can talk about it to others, use it to make decisions, etc. Being an INTJ, if he wanted to he could dig in and grok the shit completely, but this level is fine too, and very useful. The INTJ does this really, really well. This combo happens to be an immensely useful skill IMO for a tech CEO, any CEO, and now, the Presidency. Cuz in this day and age, tech drives all major social change right?
Link
In November, Tom Loverro of RRE Ventures wrote that “banks are under attack” and showed a few of the major players leading this trend. Inspired by his post [..] we wanted to dig in and see how banks are being unbundled by startups. The graphic [in the article], details companies attacking bank services ranging from robo-advisers wealth management services like Wealthfront and Betterment to small business loan companies like OnDeck Capital and Kabbage to small business service providers like Zenefits and ZenPayroll, and many other areas.
Sweet
Comment
Link
[Repeat item] Want to get paid for shampooing someone’s hair? In California, you may need to have at least nine months of experience and pass a licensing test overseen by the state barbering and cosmetology board, whose members include salon professionals. Do you clean dogs’ teeth for pay as part of a grooming service? You might run afoul of the state Veterinary Medical Board, which includes four veterinarians and a veterinary technician among its eight members [..].
[The recent Supreme Court] decision means that “the vast majority of commissions and boards in all 50 states are untenable and illegal,” says Robert Fellmeth, a veteran antitrust expert who is executive director of the Center for Public Interest Law at the University of San Diego law school. The court has established, he says, that “the king has been wearing no clothes for the last 72 years.”
Good
The behaviour described above is second wave specialization: “In both capitalist and socialist industrial states […] specialization was accompanied by a rising tide of professionalization. Whenever the opportunity arose for some group of specialists to monopolize esoteric knowledge and keep newcomers out of their field, professions emerged”.
In 3W world noone decides who, for example, a professional taxi driver is. Good drivers are rated well in Uber or Lyft and get more demand. Peer-to-peer, decentralized.