Category: Strong opinion loosely held

TOTD: Being pleasant to work with IS a long-term business strategy

You reap what you sow.

Apple’s app store has been an extremely effective way for them to profit off of developers and the innovations of other companies, but it has frequently exercised anti-competitive practices and capricious and transient app store policies:

Is it any wonder that large companies are hesitant to grant the same bully-tactics on the next possible fore-front of innovation—spatial computing?

When I worked on Kindle, the #1 request was always to make it possible to purchase books from the iPhone/iPad apps. The economics simply do not work when you have to pay 30% of every ebook purchase or content subscription to Apple. This is why you have all of these apps that require enrollment and purchasing from a website before the app works and content can be visible inside of the app on an i-device. No company wants to allow the next wave of economic hostage-taking on Apple’s spatial computing platform.

Unfortunately, when I place my cynical hat upon my head, I expect Apple to carve out one-off exceptions for large providers they need—the YouTube’s, Netflix’s, Spotify’s, and YouTube’s (in the past, as with YouTube, this has been through moves like pre-installing the app on their OS)—and then to play hard-ball with the long-tail of their developer ecosystem.

Indie developers should organize now and hammer out an improved deal with Apple for the spatial computing platform.

Forecasting wildfires for 2021 CA based on chamise water retention

Hailing from Redding, CA, I’ve seen my fair share of wildfires. Once, in high school, while late night swimming at Whiskeytown Lake, some friends and I beat out a fire with our towels alongside highway 299. A car speeding by saw us on the roadside, hit the brakes, and sparks flew everywhere, lighting the roadside scrub in an instant and immediately beginning to spread. Scary stuff.

As bad as the last few years have been for wildfires, it looks like this year is shaping up to be apocalyptic. Wired has an article talking about chamise and how the chaparral scrub is being used to measure the ambient water retention in these dry areas. TL;DR, it’s not looking so great:

And nothing scares a fire weather scientist quite like a year with dehydrated chamise. If it’s dry, then that’s a good indicator that everything is dry. “Right now, these are the lowest April 1 fuel moistures we’ve ever had,” Clements says. This is supposed to be the time of year when moisture levels are at their highest, thanks to recent autumn and winter rains. But California is withering in a drought. […] The California landscape appears ready to burn epically this year.

The Humble Shrub That’s Predicting a Terrible Fire Season, Matt Simon, Wired

So let’s check back on this one. I’ve put a reminder to check-in in the CA situation in November 2021 (hopefully post fire season) this year to see how accurate this forecast is.

Bitcoin and Crypto Investing (some initial thoughts)

I started learning about investing when I joined Amazon in the late 90’s and couldn’t stop staring at each day’s ticker. What did all that movement mean? Why was the stock splitting all the time: How were investors evaluating the company? Was I going to be a fabulously wealthy customer service rep (spoiler alert: only those who joined literally several months prior to me and before got that privilege thanks to the timing of the e-commerce bubble pop). Fast forward 22 years and I now run an investment advisory and have created valuable frameworks that I use to invest on behalf of myself and others.

And now, Bitcoin. A few years back when I took a small position, I spent time reading about it (and all blockchain technology), listening to podcasts, and just generally attempting to educate myself. There’s nothing like skin in the game to keep your interest high, so I took a very small position in 2017 and just watched it.

And then this year in May, even though I can’t say I full understand Bitcoin and the other various major cryptos, I decided to purchase an “option call on the future” by purchasing shares of the private Bitwise 10 Crypto Index Fund, using some money from my self-directed IRA. As of tonight, that stake is up 175%. While it would be nice to claim brilliance and keen insight, I clearly do not have a handle on the space yet.

Even though I’m a long way from being a Bitcoin bull, and I have yet to recommend it to any of my advising clients, I do find most of the arguments against Bitcoin to be moronic and largely addressed answered by reading the first few paragraphs of the original Bitcoin White Paper.

Based on what I see, my hope for Bitcoin is that it starts to roll up more and more transactional value, working up from the least credible and highly volatile fiat currencies to the most trusted and most stable over time. You might have trust in the full faith and credit of the US government, but that doesn’t mean your home bias should apply to the rest of the world’s population. Citizens of Venezuela and Greece, for example, may have a very different tolerance for their currencies than you do. Trust in the USD is not universal and probably not deserved.

My guess is that we’ll see Bitcoin transfers happening across borders at a much larger scale ahead of it being used to purchase daily groceries. The price of Bitcoin is stable enough to transfer funds and convert it into a local currency that can be spent. I would take the uncertainty of that principal changing between point a and point b, over the certainty of feeding financial intermediaries like Western Union or banks.

My strategy, until I learn more, is this. Take a percentage of my assets I am comfortable learning with, find a way of covering as many of my blind spots as possible (hence the cap-weighted index from Bitwise), and let it go. I don’t have to understand everything to understand the asymmetry present if any of these large crypto projects get real traction and adoption globally.

The value of painting yourself into a corner

Years ago, when I ran The Puget News (RIP), a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in a while, gave me a wonderful compliment during a conversation we were having. He said something to the effect of, “You’ve been writing a lot recently, haven’t you? It shows. You’re speaking beautifully and gushing with ideas.” His words were spoken without a hint of irony and is something I think about quite often, not just because it was a gracious thing to say, but because there are so many times that I struggle to articulate a coherent thought.

Building a place on the internet to call home and then writing to a schedule is a challenge, but one worthy of throwing yourself against. It’s especially worthwhile if your goal isn’t notoriety, but clarity of thought.

One of the personal principles I try to live by is: “if you can’t write it or draw it, you don’t know it.” While it won’t always be pretty, this place is my attempt to live by that principle.

Join my new movement—The Spongy Front

As long as he fought imaginary giants, Don Quixote was just play-acting. However once he actually kills someone, he will cling to his fantasies for all he is worth, because only they give meaning to his tragic misdeed. Paradoxically, the more sacrifices we make for an imaginary story, the more tenaciously we hold on to it, because we desperately want to give meaning to these sacrifices and to the suffering we have caused.

Yuval Noah Harari, “Homo Deus”

Can we agree that it’s one thing to be anti-fascist and another to be Antifa? or Iron Front? There’s been a bit of a firestorm in the Pacific Northwest due to our local MLS supporter clubs in Portland and Seattle flying the Iron Front flag at games. In Seattle, representatives of the team compounded the problem by initially ham-fisting their request not to use the symbol — equating it politically to Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.

Oops. That argument lacked a little…nuance.

Now I’m no fan of the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer. In fact, you could call me “anti-” those things and I’d be fine with it; but I think it’s perfectly justifiable to also be uncomfortable with the adoption of symbols and tactics from historical paramilitary groups (e.g. Iron Front). These symbols have power because they pull from complicated legacies that are impossible. Nobody today has the full context of that symbol and group, and everyone reads into it with their own self-righteous response.

My personal belief is that heightening direct opposition to groups like the Proud Boys creates a sense of legitimacy for them and increases its appeal. These guys are trying to stand out and to draw a response—successfully as it turns out. The way to defuse the situation is to NOT draw attention to it and treat them as you would anybody else—have a pint, listen with compassion, and call out their BS as if they were a crazy family member you HAVE TO TOLERATE. They have to find out that there is nobody to fight, nobody windmill to tilt at; they’re just…wrong.