The little red podcast on crime in china. In short, industrialized misreporting and social normilization of crime do not for a happy country make.
Race and Faith: Not anti-or pro diversity. Remarkabally balanced. Deals more with the lack of a healthy discussion surrounding the changes in Britian than the changes themselves. Extract: “There are two related, but separate, sets of serious social problems associated with 21st century superdiversity… One set of issues arises from the decline in overt bigotry. The evidence is that rather than producing integrated societies in which race and ethnicity count for less and less in our destinies, western societies are more and more stratified by these characteristics. Different racial, ethnic and cultural groups display objective differences in behaviour, achievement and outcomes, often for reasons largely unconnected to discrimination. In our brave new world, instead of social classes or castes being distinguished by Greek letters, as in Aldous Huxley’s novel, they can now be differentiated by skin colour or cultural symbols. The second set of emerging concerns swirls around the question of offence. Increasingly, the world-views of very different social identity groupings are colliding. Incompatible attitudes to sex, religion, belief and the rule of law are producing frictions for which the tried and trusted social lubricants seem just too thin.”
A good article on the network effects which keep bitcoin ahead of alternatives such as Etherium.
Overcoming Bias on collapse theories. Some avenues of thought here are unproductive, but the explanation why competition inevitabaly produces fragile systems is worth reading.
The competitive ecosystem of venture capital and inefficiencies therin. Extract: “The only good reasons to charge your customer money is to test what will cause customers to pay money, and to signal that you can successfully charge your customer money! The purpose of a start-up is to turn itself into a future business, and the potential profits of that future business are what is valuable and what everyone is working to create. It raises money by convincing others of these potential profits, then selling off a portion of those future profits, and then uses that money to enhance its ability to signal its future profits. The system works, to the extent it works, when the signal is both correlated to the company’s ability to succeed (better founders with better ideas can signal more effectively) and the signaling actions themselves serve to create a real company. Founders who understand the dynamics involved will be hill climbing in order to send the best signals possible and raise the most money, so it is very important that their doing so results in actual companies that hopefully do actual valuable things for people.”
Map vs Button People. A cynical conceptual model which I do not find overly convincing. Yet, I could well be wrong. Worth reading regardless.
Dissent 