There’s no end to sops: Subsidies. Loan waivers. Quotas. All of these increase over time even as poverty reduces. And it’s likely UBI too is a purely cynical short-term political weapon with decades long impact, just like the rest.
There’s are massive supply-side issues across India. Not enough jobs. Not enough roads. Not enough colleges. Not enough healthcare. Not enough land productivity. Not enough energy. Not enough people paying taxes. Not enough social mobility. But there’s very little to no thinking on expanding any of these.
And it has real problems on a gigantic scale: there is so little slack in the economy that even a modest stimulus in the form of a reduction in interest rates causes inflation to skyrocket. This means borrowing costs must remain high for businesses, meaning even slower growth even by the private sector.
In essence, the polity is breathtakingly opportunistic and profligate with public money without a thought to either increasing revenue, reducing outright waste or building long-term social/public assets.
You might say this is nothing new. It isn’t, other than the scale, and that it’s a fifth of the way into the twenty-first century.
This article, sent as an email to a few friends in November 2018, is still relevant. This was in the wake of their most recent quarterly results, in which iPhone sales had stagnated, leading to the Yahoo-esque question of What Apple Is:
Year on year sales have been flat. Revenue has increased only because average selling price has increased, but can’t go much higher (USD 1000/INR 100,000).
And the need to have the latest and greatest is diminishing, as this article says:
But there’s a bigger problem that has nothing to do with the relative inconspicuousness of phones: incremental innovation. Each year, we’re told via loud, energetic ads that we should upgrade to the next version of our device. But at the end of the day, what are we really getting in exchange beyond a slightly better camera and screen?…
My point is simply that phones have lost their differentiation, with little physical difference to support consumers who love status symbols and only incremental improvements for those who are focused on utility. If your phone isn’t broken, there’s really little reason for you to upgrade all that often.
This had happened with iPads years ago, with Macs even earlier, now with iPhones. It’s probably also why Apple announced that it’s going to stop reporting unit sales for product lines going forward.
If Apple is a hardware company, what does this say for its future in general and its principles in particular?
It’s been able to take its stance on privacy, on customer-centricity because its sole customer is the guy that buys the device. Its investments have also been driven by the same incentive: instead of investing in say ad-tech, they have invested in hardware: their own range of chips, in TouchID & FaceID. Instead of deploying AI in targeted advertising, it’s used it to make photography better. When its AI analyses customer data or runs Siri, it’s designed to run locally, not in a vast data centre commingled with other millions’ data. These decisions could become unsustainable with falling revenue.
So where does Apple go? I think it’s becoming a very interesting entity indeed.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery thinks Apple’s investing in its own ‘real world’ social network with Apple Stores and Today at Apple daily programmes to make it a regular part of people’s lives, like Starbucks is, not a destination to visit when you’re in the market for a new device or want repairs.
Speaking of devices it’s also getting into new areas. Last year someone wrote a piece saying its most important device is the Apple Watch. HomePod may fail, CarPlay may be a commodity, but what Apple is doing with Healthkit and with Medical Research is building extremely strong loyalty – you’re definitely not going to switch to an Android (or Fitbit) watch, and by extension another phone for a few hundred dollars, when your medical history, your patient records with your GP, hospital and insurer, and your participation in clinical trials relevant to you, are tied to your Watch.
Lastly, it’s shifting from a pure hardware company to a mix of hardware and content one. Its App Store has had editorial content since iOS 11. There’s alway been a human team that picks editorial content on Apple News. And it has been getting into producing original media as well:
Apple is spending about $1 billion on original content this year, targeting “PG-rated” shows that appeal to wide audiences and won’t get the company in trouble by making them available for free to owners of all devices, said the people. Apple is also looking for “tent pole” franchises that could serve as linchpins to a paid Netflix-like subscription service down the road, two of the people said. Think “Game of Thrones,” but without the sex and violence. The Wall Street Journal reported last month Apple has about 24 original shows in production and development
And, like Amazon Prime, will be available for free to owners of its device, according to the article I quoted above.
It’s interesting that it isn’t moving ‘up the value chain’ traditionally. That would mean that the media, apps, data and such that run on Apple’s devices would, over time, become their new main revenue stream. But instead of going down that road, it’s creating new reasons for people to buy its hardware by giving away for free part or all of this new value created. That’s hard, but that keeps Apple’s incentives aligned with those of us who buy their devices. It’s incredible.
This Twitter bot now posts articles that I save to Instapaper.
It’s pretty simple to set up as an IFTTT workflow. Write one as follows: When a new item is added to your Instapaper queue (connect IFTTT to Instapaper), send out a tweet in a particular format (connect IFTTT to your particular Twitter account. Sadly, only one at a time).
I wish more people would do this – I want to know what people find interesting. In the old days of the Internet you could follow someone’s bookmarks on del.icio.us, but there hasn’t been something of the sort for years. Even if Twitter is a closed system, it’s made for mobile, and with the share sheet on iOS and Android you can add these articles to your own Instapaper/Pocket/bookmarks, share over email/message, whatever your workflow is.
What I really want is a way to publish to a personal RSS feed, so when people set it up I can follow them via my RSS client as well.
[EDIT May 2019: Twitter keeps locking the account for ‘suspicious activity, which I guess is when I save several articles to Instapaper in the span of a few seconds. That combined with the fact that I don’t actually ever log into the @rahulisreading account via the Twitter web, app or third-party client. It’s up now, though I’ve lost a fortnight’s worth of posts]
… was a question someone asked in response to this article quoting Ellen Pao, Reddit’s former CEO. She had written on Twitter confirming, in turn, this article in NY Mag (definitely, heart-sinkingly worth a read) about how website engagement stats are almost entirely untrustworthy.
But anyway, back to the question. I realised that fake internet stats are merely one inevitable symptom of the entire incentive structure of the internet, one that is weaponised in every way against privacy online. So I wrote:
“It’s relevant in that belief in these metrics has led to the ad-based model of the web – even the internet as a whole. It’s led to complicated licensing agreements about the use of our privately identifiable information. It’s led to large databases of personal information that then become targets for theft, and in fact have been repeatedly stolen, leading to – almost certainly identity theft. The network effects of amassing data has led to the consolation of the web in the hands of a few giants, who entities like WhatsApp then feel tempted to sell (sell out?) to, ostensibly to free them from the distractions of running a sustainable business (!) but ultimately betraying the privacy-centric promise they originally made to their customers. It’s led to the proliferation of super-cheap devices like Google Home that are subsided by the ability to monetise – yes via ads. And if you’re in a room with someone else’s Echo or Home, you’re exposed to second-hand data leakage. It’s led to the acceptance of real-world surveillance, because we’ve grown to used to being tracked online.
That’s just the bits that have directly to do with privacy. This doesn’t even include how the assumption that ads will pay for everything has led to the normalisation of unsustainable business models for services that people end up depending on, but which ultimately fold. That nearly all web pages are now bloated because of ad delivery engines and trackers. Then there is the opportunity cost of hundreds of millions of man hours of some of our most brilliant minds that are spent engineering data collection. That it’s led to design practices that are optimised for data collection than for actual functionality.
We may be witnessing that entire model starting to crumble before our eyes. The ad giants had already lost the trust of us in /r/privacy, but when they start to lose that of advertisers and publishers, that is the beginning of the end.”
"... searches don't just involve agents skimming through your contact lists or photos—the border police can use software to rapidly dump the contents of your phone, and download your full history from every social media site you use."
And
Companies that have maneuvered billions of people into storing their most personal information on their servers, and worked aggressively to insert themselves into every facet of social and family life, owe it to their users to fight, and fight hard, for their safety.
No they don’t, and they won’t. The profit motive is too strong.
Let’s be clear. The person on social media is the product. The product serves the needs of its users, the advertisers. This’ll be clear to anyone who’s run a paid ad on social media or seen a social media analytics dashboard. Complying with authorities either on data requests at the borders or otherwise is but a risk-return decision: will compliance with such orders result in enough people leaving to hurt profits significantly? Is building a ‘travel mode’ for social media accounts that locks sensitive data away from border agents worth the trouble with governments? The answer in each case is almost always no.
So. Expect nothing from companies you entrust your data with, beyond the service itself. In general, own your data and make your decisions on where to store your data, what to carry and how to conceal or encrypt it. There are no easy answers, and social media/cloud storage companies are certainly not going to provide any.
From the NYT article profiling him for the 50th anniversary of the first publishing of The Art of Computer Programming:
When Knuth chooses to be physically present, however, he is 100-per-cent there in the moment. “It just makes you happy to be around him,” said Jennifer Chayes, a managing director of Microsoft Research. “He’s a maximum in the community. If you had an optimization function that was in some way a combination of warmth and depth, Don would be it.”
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively
Which itself features a quote from Umberto Eco:
‘I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.’ — Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker
After his event, the attendees mob the aisles to get closer to their heroes—entirely ignoring the “beautiful ladies” who the host tells us have just taken the stage for the “women in blockchain” panel. It’s a shame, because they miss moderator Olga Feldmeier’s summation, delivered in a pitch-perfect Russian lilt: “Being a woman in blockchain,” she says, “is like riding a bicycle. Except the bicycle is on fire. And everything is on fire. And you are going to hell.”
And
…it’s clear this is not the Burning Man-style celebration of the liberatory potential of decentralization I was promised. This is a locked-room, hard-sell pitch session to a literally captive audience of high-roller crypto investors, whose only escape is the lifeboats. The whole place smells of aftershave and insecurity.
Exhibit A for why people will welcome the inevitable overbearing regulation and market capture by the same too big to fail incumbents of the existing financial system. Because the alternative, they think, is this sort.
But of course it’s a simple, old world hustle. A paid event not unlike those selling Amway or time-shares.
A capybara named Cheesecake, photographed relaxing with a puppy at Rocky Ridge Refuge in Mountain Home, Arkansas, on May 22, 2017. Cheesecake acts as a babysitter at the refuge, minding the smaller animals.
“Two struggling strangers connect during a mind-bending pharmaceutical trial involving a doctor with mother issues and an emotionally complex computer.“
