Category Archives: Links

Link roundups, interesting reads, and quick shares with commentary.

Great Writing

Economics, Links

Especially in an age where generating words is cheap, when you come across truly great writing, it really stands out. I want to pull two quotes from The Economist’columnist Charlemagne’s article Luxury goods are Europe’s global tax on vanity.

Flogging luxury goods is one of the few fields of business in which Europe excels (if one excludes the crafting of regulation). In an ironic twist, an egalitarian continent with an ever-declining share of global GDP hosts an industry that thrives on inequality and bombastic money-making. For how many seasons more can this alchemy of aspiration endure?

I mean, gosh, look at every word there. How they flow. The density of concepts and metaphors. Here’s another delicious excerpt.

Luxury houses sell the idea of scarcity, with hordes of publicists explaining that the years-long wait for a Birkin handbag is due to the lack of sufficient artisans to craft these pinnacles of refinement. This is a fairy tale stitched in fine silk. The luxury-goods industry has roughly tripled in size since 2000; its €358bn in annual sales—half a Walmart or Amazon, give or take—betrays how thoroughly mainstream supposed exclusivity has become. Fifty years ago, Louis Vuitton had but two outlets, both in France. These days it has two stores in Ningbo, China’s 34th-biggest city. Exclusive, moi?

I guess this post also serves as an endorsement of why it’s worth subscribing to publications like The Economist.


I wish that when you use Find My to find your iPhone, it would also flash the flashlight, which would be great for finding it in a bag or a dark room. 

The writer Aadil Pickle has a great profile of one of my favorite hackers, “Training the Idea Muscle” on Riley Walz. Riley epitomizes the term “high agency,” and I’ve been continually impressed with his ability to rapidly code novel ideas and interfaces on top of public or reverse-engineered data. He’s a hacker, artist, and provocateur.

I’m enjoying this slower time of the year, and it looks like this will be the warmest Christmas I can remember in Houston; it was 80° F today! Makes me appreciate what Christmas in the southern hemisphere must be like.

The Wall Street Journal has a fun article about the Nex Playground, The Hottest Toy of the Year Is Made by a Tech Startup You’ve Never Heard Of. It’s a very fun way to game with friends and stay active, so afterward you have that same great feeling like after playing a sport. I think this is the first time one of Audrey Capital’s companies (we invested when it was the Homecourt app) is the hot Christmas item. Here’s it on Amazon, though it looks like it doesn’t ship before Christmas right now.

The colors here have now gone blue for winter, and snow has started, thanks to the excellent Snow Fall plugin. I also wanted to congratulate Wealthfront on their IPO. Many on their team have been friends or advisors over the years, from David Fortunato responding to my email about their WordPress blog being on an old version when they launched, to the amazing Adam Nash who teaches CS 007 Personal Finance for Engineers at Stanford, and he now runs the awesome Daffy donor-advised tax fund startup. I was an early customer, and even on their homepage as a testimonial in 2011, Audrey Capital has been an investor since 2013 and if you sign up with this link we both get 5k extra managed for free.

Self-driving

Links, Tech

There has been some lovely writing about self-driving this week, first in the New York Times where Jonathan Slotkin makes the medical case for autonomous vehicles. But I was really taken by The Economist’s look at how self-driving cars will transform urban economies. It’s behind a paywall. I enjoyed how they thought about the second-order effects of self-driving.

America is home to 1m taxi and bus drivers, as well as over 3m truck drivers—adding up to 3% of the working population. Other potential losers are less obvious. Without car accidents there will, for instance, be less demand for personal-injury lawyers. If people stop buying cars, dealers and used-car salesmen will go. 

It’s fascinating to think a few chess moves down the line, for example, fewer personal-injury lawyers funding politicians might lead to some form of Tort Reform, an area of society that, like gun control, has centrist changes most Americans would agree with, but has been captured by special interests.

The app that changed my life is Simplenote, linked to Notational Velocity. I have Simplenote on my phone and Notational Velocity on my computer, and I’m obsessed with to-do lists and lists about my to-do lists. It allows me to have my lists on my phone and my lists on my computer, and they sync… if you are a list freak, with lists of lists, it will change your life.

— Lena Dunham

From a talk with Kara Swisher on Re/code. Listen to the whole podcast, Simplenote comes up at the 48-minute mark. Hat tip: Toni Schneider.