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"We place the highest value on actual implementation and taking action. There are many things one doesn’t understand and therefore, we ask them why don’t you just go ahead and take action; try to do something?
You realize how little you know and you face your own failures and you simply can correct those failures and redo it again and at the second trial you realize another mistake or another thing
you didn’t like so you can redo it once again. So by constant improvement, or, should I say, the improvement based upon action, one can rise to the higher level of practice and knowledge."
—Fujio Cho, President, Toyota Motor Corporation, 2002
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Hey there,
In case you missed it, my partner Jason was recently on the Meb Faber podcast. We posted it to Mutiny Funds Podcast. They discuss all things related to broadly diversified portfolios, different investing philosophies, and different investing vehicles that an entrepreneur could put together for clients.
If you enjoy or get value from The Interesting Times, I'd really appreciate it if you would support it by forwarding it to a friend or sharing it wherever you typically share this sort of thing - (Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack groups, etc.) You can read past editions here.
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Rest of World
One of the interesting things about language is that it is logically decentralized. There is no "right" way to speak English.
If someone from Victorian
England listened to the average American speak today they would be likely to say "that’s not English!"
Another way to say that is to say language is highly emergent and tends to morph in ways that are hard to control.
This makes controlling speech more difficult than it might seem. This is a terrific example of the phenomenon showing how Chinese citizens use puns to talk about topics that would otherwise be banned.
"A few months ago, people were posting a lot about the Netherlands on Chinese social media platform Weibo. "Wake up, sleeping people of the Netherlands!" said one post. Others lamented that the people of
Amsterdam wanted their tulips back.
These Chinese social media users aren’t expressing a nascent interest in all things Dutch. They’re talking about recent protests over frozen bank deposits in the province of Henan. Ordinarily, discussions about a controversial topic like this would be censored on Chinese social media, and
posts containing the word "Henan" could be blocked or deleted. But "Henan" (河南) sounds a lot like "Helan" (荷兰), the Mandarin word for the Netherlands. By swapping the names around, people were able to get past the censors and keep the conversation going."
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Subpixel Space
On the diminishing marginal value of graphic design and what might take its place. The author argues that the emergence of the large social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, etc.) commoditizes graphic design. Everything is quickly copied and spread.
The result is a shift in the market structure of aesthetics.
If image and aesthetic production is
a fully saturated behavior, we should expect to see that the market for aesthetics is no longer about disruptive, product-driven innovation but about sustaining, process-driven innovation characterized by customer-stealing and market consolidation. In fact, this is exactly what we have, with established graphic designers competing with young guns to sell the aesthetics they originated, and an endless homogeneity of Instagram lifestyle influencers all competing over the same types of aspirational consumer.
Because anyone can make and distribute graphic design, there isn’t a lot of new innovation and it’s become more process
driven.
As with most technological change, this doesn’t mean innovation goes away, it merely shifts to another part of the value chain. In this case, it is shifting from simple graphic design to branding.
Creating a clothing brand solves the
context flattening problem posed by aggregator interfaces because a piece of clothing is not merely visual—it can also be worn. Moreover, from the perspective of the cultural producer, a brand is categorically better than a single form of media because of its flexibility—a single brand concept can be expressed through video, images, garments, text, and subsets of all of the above.
With the recent ban from the U.S. Biden administration on certain components and employment rules in the Chinese semiconductor industry, there is a lot of talk about how exactly the semiconductor industry works.
This conversation is a detailed overview of the history of semiconductors, how they are manufactured, and who the key players are in the space that I found fascinating and enlightening.
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As always, if you're enjoying The Interesting Times, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend (or three). You can send them here to sign up. I try to make it one of the best emails you get every week and I'm always open to feedback on how to better do that.
If you'd like to see everything I'm reading, you can follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn for articles and podcasts. I'm on Goodreads for books. Finally, if you read anything interesting this week, please hit reply and send it over!
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The Interesting Times is a short note to help you better invest your time and money in an uncertain world as well as a digest of the
most interesting things I find on the internet, centered around antifragility, complex systems, investing, technology, and decision making. Past editions are available here.
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Here are a few more things you
might find interesting:
Newsletter Past Editions: Read past editions of The interesting Times Newsletter.
Interesting Essays: Read my best, free essays on topics like bitcoin, investing, decision making and marketing.
Consulting & Advising: Are you looking for help with making decisions around scaling your company from $500k to $5 million? I’ve been working with authors, entrepreneurs, and startups for half a decade to help them get more out of their businesses.
Internet Business Toolkit: An exhaustive list of all the online tools I use to be more productive.
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