90+% value comes from 10% of what we read. Here’s what stood out in May & June
Books
- A prayer for the crown shy by Becky Chambers
- Monk & Robot sequel about wandering and life. Very insightful way to approach philosophy again
- The robot Mosscamp is still trying to understand what do people need and realizes it’s either something immediate and acute or a larger philosophy
- Love this section too which focuses on how each of see the exact same things literally differently
- Makes you think, doesn’t it?” “Makes you think of what?” Dex panted. “Of how any sighted individual’s perception of the world is entirely based on the way the structures in their eyes receive light.” Mosscap smiled at Dex. “I wish I could borrow your eyes for a day, see what that’s like.”
- Sibling Dex’s struggle with identity mirrors our own struggles to figure out where we fit in with work and my career
- You don’t have to have a reason to be tired. You don’t have to earn rest or comfort. You’re allowed to just be. I say that wherever I go.” They threw a hand toward their wagon, its wooden sides emblazoned with the summer bear. “It’s painted on the side of my home! But I don’t feel like it’s true, for me. I feel like it’s true for everyone else but not me. I feel like I have to do more than that. Like I have a responsibility to do more than that.” “Why?” Mosscap said. “Because I’m good at something,” Dex said. “I’m good at something that helps other people. I worked really hard to be able to do it, and I benefited from the labor and love of others while I did so. I’m able to do what I do because everybody else built a world in which I could do it. If I just say ‘Thanks for all of that, but I’m running off to the woods now,’ how is that fair? That doesn’t sit right with me, not at all. I’d just be a leech if I did that.”
- Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
- Details the beginning of WW1 and goes through each country involved and the colorful characters who ineptly started the war. Extremely beautiful prose and does a great job humanizing everyone, but I struggled a bit with the very detailed military maneuvers from specific generals whose names I forgot
- My takeaways
- WW1 was already bubbling for a long time before it actually happened
- Germans and French specifically had super built out war plans
- Allegiances were what dragged in (Austrian duke killed by serbians which pulled in Russians and then it all dragged through)
- Germans had multiple opportunities to win WW1 and take France at least, but failed and then war dragged on inevitably
- If they didn’t invade Belgium, then would’ve had less troops in Belgium and very possible the British wouldn’t have joined
- By fighting the Russians as well they had a two front war and this drew men away from the Western front where they could’ve defeated French by themselves
- Allowed French to retreat at key moments which allowed them to survive and never be truly beaten/keep dragging war out
- The French were extremely stupid early on and tried to fight an offensive war when they should’ve been in a defensive position. Left their left flank basically undefended and were saved by a few strong battles, the Belgians, and luck
- Tried to fight an offensive war by driving straight to Berlin through heart of Germany
- Epic Belgian response when they were completely outmatched helped slow down Germany and was where true bravery was. Their leader King Albert was equally impressive
- Belgium took their neutrality seriously and only did something once Germans came through
- Didn’t let themselves be annexed and that showed the true fight for independence
- Everyone believed it was a quick war and acted that way
- Famous line is “you’ll be back before the leaves fall” when it started in August
- The English military leader Kitchener was the only one who truly prepared for a long war and began building a bigger army
- German slaughter of villages and citizens turned the world against them
- This likely also contributed to US joining as the slaughter of citizens was repulsive to the general population
- Germans blamed citizens for attacking them with guns in villages/breaking supply lines but this really turned tide of public opinion against them
- Lack of unity in command hurt the Allies early on
- In particular the French relied on the British in key moments and the British just didn’t show up and help protect the left flank
- Japan used opportunity of war to join the Allies and expand its influence
- This allowed it to project its sea power and expand into China
- The Russians were fairly inept in early parts of WW1, but their entrance and creation of two front war was what undid the Germans in the long run
- Germans ended up sending divisions to the east
- Russians at one point ran out of ammo in a battle and got annihilated.
- They had soooo many people though that over time they could grind out Germany as their war machine started to actually get moving
- Financial ties pulled the US into the war
- British general sir john french really sucked
- Basically didn’t fight with French at all and almost led to the defeat of Paris
- In France’s time of need, the Russia showed up even if they died and were unprepared and the British backed away from the left flank despite being extremely well trained and organized
- Germans turn away from Paris left their flank undefended and this gave France a critical opening to attack
- This was lifeline French needed and after that the war just dragged on and on
- WW1 was already bubbling for a long time before it actually happened
- Specific quotes I love
- All Europe’s ruling families were related to each other and this was highlighted at the funeral of Edward who was the former ruler of England
- Edward, the object of this unprecedented gathering of nations, was often called the “Uncle of Europe,” a title which, insofar as Europe’s ruling houses were meant, could be taken literally. He was the uncle not only of Kaiser Wilhelm but also, through his wife’s sister, the Dowager Empress Marie of Russia, of Czar Nicholas II. His own niece Alix was the Czarina; his daughter Maud was Queen of Norway; another niece, Ena, was Queen of Spain; a third niece, Marie, was soon to be Queen of Rumania. The Danish family of his wife, besides occupying the throne of Denmark, had mothered the Czar of Russia and supplied kings to Greece and Norway. Other relatives, the progeny at various removes of Queen Victoria’s nine sons and daughters, were scattered in abundance throughout the courts of Europe.
- The Germans inconsistency throughout the war is what caused their failures. Beautiful prose from Tuchman here
- Bismarck had warned Germany to be content with land power, but his successors were neither separately nor collectively Bismarcks. He had pursued clearly seen goals unswervingly; they groped for larger horizons with no clear idea of what they wanted. Holstein was a Machiavelli without a policy who operated on only one principle: suspect everyone. Bülow had no principles; he was so slippery, lamented his colleague Admiral Tirpitz, that compared to him an eel was a leech. The flashing, inconstant, always freshly inspired Kaiser had a different goal every hour, and practiced diplomacy as an exercise in perpetual motion.
- War never made sense economically, but still happened anyway. This is a lesson for right now too
- Page 46 professor in England: he showed how “new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of aggressive wars.” A twentieth century war would be on such a scale, he said, that its inevitable consequences of “commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering” would be “so pregnant with restraining influences” as to make war unthinkable. He told an audience of officers at the United Service Club, with the Chief of General Staff, Sir John French, in the chair, that because of the interlacing of nations war “becomes every day more difficult and improbable.”
- Then page 47 German perspective on why they must do it: War, he stated, “is a biological necessity”; it is the carrying out among humankind of “the natural law, upon which all the laws of Nature rest, the law of the struggle for existence.” Nations, he said, must progress or decay; “there can be no standing still,” and Germany must choose “world power or downfall.”
- The German Kaiser didn’t want war, but just the spoils of war and the greater prestige
- Face to face no longer with the specter but the reality of a two-front war, the Kaiser was as close to the “sick Tom-cat” mood as he thought the Russians were. More cosmopolitan and more timid than the archetype Prussian, he had never actually wanted a general war. He wanted greater power, greater prestige, above all more authority in the world’s affairs for Germany but he preferred to obtain them by frightening rather than by fighting other nations. He wanted the gladiator’s rewards without the battle, and whenever the prospect of battle came too close, as at Algeciras and Agadir, he shrank.
- Germans view on the war mirrored manifest destiny as they thought they were the best and making the world better as was their right
- In August, sitting at a café in Aachen, a German scientist said to the American journalist Irwin Cobb: “We Germans are the most industrious, the most earnest, the best educated race in Europe. Russia stands for reaction, England for selfishness and perfidy, France for decadence, Germany for progress. German Kultur will enlighten the world and after this war there will never be another.”
- Killing of citizens was standard operating procedure for Germans
- When Bülow’s Army took Namur, a city of 32,000, notices were posted announcing that ten hostages were being taken from every street who would be shot if any civilian fired on a German. The taking and killing of hostages was practiced as systematically as the requisitioning of food.
- The German obsession had two parts: that Belgian resistance was illegal and that it was organized from “above” by the Belgian government or by burgomasters, priests, and other persons who could be classified as “above.” Together the two parts established the corollary: that German reprisals were righteous and legal, regardless of degree. The shooting of a single hostage or the massacre of 612 and the razing of a town were alike to be charged to the Belgian government—this was the refrain of every German from Hausen after Dinant to the Kaiser after Louvain.
- Staggering amount of people died in the war
- When the war was over, the known dead per capita of population were 1 to 28 for France, 1 to 32 for Germany, 1 to 57 for England and 1 to 107 for Russia.
- All Europe’s ruling families were related to each other and this was highlighted at the funeral of Edward who was the former ruler of England
Articles
- Emily Oster: How Much Should We Worry About Microplastics?
- Microplastics have been around for decades
- “Micro” refers to any particle less than 5 millimeters in diameter; you may also hear the term “nanoplastics,” which are particles less than 1 micrometer. Both of these are created as plastic degrades, which happens over time.
- Not exactly clear how you avoid them really as the main exposure is water you drink and the air you breathe.
- Much is overblown
- The plastic credit card you consume through food every year is wrong and it is more like every thousand years
- Not using ziploc bags/switching to glass water bottles wouldn’t even eliminate the issue
- Not strong evidence microplastics are bad yet
- Main evidence against it is in brains of mice but that’s at very high levels of exposure
- Not clear that low level exposure (like humans receive) has negative health impacts
- Microplastics have been around for decades
- Benedict Evans: AI eats the world
- Yearly deep dive into tech and it’s all about AI taking over
- Biggest question is will AI keep scaling
- Models are getting wayyyy bigger ($$ billions to train)
- At same point, the old “we have no moat and neither does OpenAI” Google article still seems applicable
- Capex went to $220B in 2024 from $90B in 2023 from Big4 tech and growing even more in 2025
- Two things are happening though
- Costs are decreasing as scaling occurs
- Open source means best models available at fraction of price
- Things he thinks are certain from tech
- Semiconductors are cyclical
- Commodity tech goes to marginal cost
- Every new tech produces a bubble
- Biggest problem with LLM usage is liability in wrong answers
- The strongest use cases are coding, marketing (where isn’t wrong answers), and online entirely fields
- He points out it’s not entirely clear how we deploy all this yet
- As someone who tries and struggles to use AI regularly I get it
- There is the 1000 interns aspect, but it requires workflow changes that are hard to wrap your head around
- Future can take a very long time to implement
- He points out cloud today is even only 30% of workflows despite a long window
- This may be the case with AI too
- Points out the most boring stat in tech (slide 75) is e-commerce slowly increasing and is now 15% of US sales
- Other interesting notes
- Most media spending from Netflix/Disney now. Companies have to compete across whole value chain
- Robotaxi trips in CA are finally starting to shoot up after a decade
- Colossus Review: Is Space Investable?
- Deep dive into investing into the growing space industry.
- Summary is no
- Most space companies are not investable, due to the time required to develop and ramp a business, combined with high capital requirements.
- Fewer than one in four venture-backed companies even make it to orbit. To get to this point, tens to hundreds of millions—in some cases billions—of dollars of capital are required. The vast majority of this capital must come from external sources, creating the prospect of enormous dilution for the earliest investors.
- Ultimately, though, looking at today’s landscape, it’s perhaps unsurprising that some of the biggest space companies of the past decades—SpaceX, Blue Origin, even Iridium—have foundational backers operating outside of the typical VC model.
- Most emerging markets are too nascent for the typical investor to consider and require significant technological progress before viability.
- Opportunities for investment today include software for space, space operations, and reuse of existing space assets
- Most space companies are not investable, due to the time required to develop and ramp a business, combined with high capital requirements.
- Howard Marks: More on Repealing the Laws of Economics
- Talked again how governments sometimes try to override laws of economics
- Rent control has two issues
- Government is choosing winners and losers (particularly losers are not in those apartments)
- Discourages building of new apartments
- Fire insurance in CA is also an example of this
- Government said companies couldn’t use their forward facing models of insurance risk
- Because of this, many companies pulled out of writing fire insurance policies entirely as it wasn’t worth risk and then come 2025 fires, many were uninsured
- Focuses on tariffs too
- Tariffs are a tax on importer
- Tariffs protect domestic manufacturers and they often rise prices or create inferior products as they don’t have to compete as hard with importers
- Uses example of how with US cars, the move to German imports was probably inevitable over time as Germany/Japan had lower cost structures than US
- This made consumers just realize they were a bad deal
- This is why manufacturing has dropped too and apparently this is common across every advanced economy as people leave manufacturing due to high cost of it
- Every single economy that industrialized, from the late 18th century through the 19th century into the 20th century, reached a peak at some point along the way, roughly when the per capita GDP reached $40,000 [presumably in today’s dollars], after which manufacturing as a share of employment declined. And the decline is essentially identical for all developed economies, as people move out of working in factories and move into service-sector jobs, which are less physically demanding and require more education. So that happened everywhere. It wasn’t just in the United States. . .
- According to Ferguson’s research, that probably didn’t have much to do with the automobile industry in particular or with unfair trade practices applied by other nations. And it’s probably not because people couldn’t find jobs in manufacturing: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are about 400,000 job openings today in U.S. manufacturing, and no one’s rushing to fill them.
- Howard Marks is very worried about US spending and I agree with him
- As I mentioned in Nobody Knows (Yet Again), the U.S. is able to do this because to date the world has given it virtually unlimited credit at particularly low interest rates. The result has been fiscal deficits in 41 of the last 45 years and trillion-dollar-plus deficits in all of the last five. If your brother-in-law behaved this way, you’d call him irresponsible.
- We spend more on interest rates than defense every year now
- Buffett also called out how this will be unsustainable over a long period of time though we don’t know how long that time will be
- We are simply not tackling budget deficit
- All budget reduction items for austerity are tough (higher taxes or lower programs) so US has basically just not done it from either side of the aisle
- Social security is also underfunded as there’s not enough young people paying into system and older people are living longer
- His social security section nailed it on the head that it faces major issues, but no one is doing anything about it
- The math is simple: there are x dollars in the Trust Funds, and they earn interest at Treasury rates. By projecting growth in the number of workers and retirees, benefit payments and life expectancies, you can estimate with some confidence the year when, in the absence of corrective action, the Trust Funds will be exhausted. That year is 2035. At that point, either (a) benefit payments will have to be cut so that they equal tax receipts (and it’s estimated that receipts will be sufficient to pay only 79% of the promised benefits) or (b) the shortfall will have to be paid from the general U.S. government budget, further adding to the deficit. Nothing in this paragraph is conjecture.
- The members of the Baby Boomer generation to which I belong – people born between 1946 and 1964 – are unusually numerous, disproportionately affluent and probably above average in tendency to vote. Thus, they have significant political influence, having cast 38% of the votes in the 2020 presidential election. All the Boomers are in or near retirement, and no politician wants to antagonize them. Thus, elected officials can’t stand the political heat associated with fixing Social Security, so they punt. As a result, the insolvency of the Social Security Trust Funds is sure to occur only ten years or so from now.
- He also talks about how it is insane that wealthy Boomers get social security benefits and I agree this is bananas
- Finishes talking about how any attempt to change free markets usually ends with issues
- The bottom line on all the above is that free-market economies don’t produce perfect solutions, but efforts to significantly control them make things much worse. There can be no solution that gives everyone what they want. All things considered, however, the laws of economics lead to the best solutions that can be attained.
- Noah Smith: China’s industrial policy has an unprofitability problem
- China started developing industrial policy in 2000s under Xi
- It’s crazy to see how much China invested in manufacturing and how it took off
- Most of China’s production is actually in China. If you look at cars where it is largest exporter in world, it’s a great example
- Image
- Most of China for most Chinese industries is domestic because it’s so much larger than everyone else.
- This also means though that it can’t dump to trading partners everything it builds particularly as the world levies tariffs against it
- Because China subsidizes all the companies competing against each other, the profitability goes down as they compete for share with nothing there
- Image
- This is fascinating and he does talk about China problem of subsidizing too much leading to possible waste in their economy
- I buy that without profits, it’ll only go for so long
- Question is does gov allow consolidation and do they have the stomach for layoffs especially if the companies are pseudo gov entities as funded by Chinese credit
- Our World in Data: Childhood leukemia: how a deadly cancer became treatable
- Childhood Leukemia is way more treatable now
- Before the 1970s, fewer than 10% of children diagnosed with the disease survived five years after diagnosis.
- But since then, this outlook has improved dramatically. In North America and Europe, around 85% now survive that long.
- Leukemia is most common childhood cancer (1/4 of childhood cancers in US)
- Good description of how leukemia is a blood based cancer
- Leukemia is a cancer of the blood and bone marrow — the tissue that produces blood cells. It develops when immature white blood cells grow out of control and crowd out healthy ones, leading to symptoms like fatigue, infections, easy bruising or bleeding, and pale skin.
- Most of the improvement tracks the rise of chemotherapy
- Rounds of chemo eliminated chances of cancer coming back and they were given personalized chemo treatments
- Much of the improvement based on widespread trials
- There’s also a note about how this helped standardize care
- This reminds me of Collision point that there’s a lot to be gained from just making the best practice a standard practice
- Childhood Leukemia is way more treatable now