Mind Tavern #9
Welcome to the 9th edition of Mind Tavern. Thank you for subscribing to this free newsletter, I don't intend to capture any data, but do consider sharing it on your social networks if you like it!
Spreadsheets are not just calculators now
From being a humble number cruncher, this handy application has now turned into a complex system capable of performing a variety of tasks from handling backend operations for a restaurant to automatically tracking loan applications. Companies like spreadsheet.com are coming up with newer and newer codes to automate day to day to tasks that can be done through your spreadsheets. Read here.
Tarouca (Mário Tarouca, a Portuguese entrepreneur) used Rows as the backend for his service: Customer orders flowed into his sheets from his web site, and local cooks typed their inventory into forms he created with Rows; if a formula detected the cooks weren’t making enough of a particular item (orders for omelettes > supply of omelettes), the sheets would blast a warning out to his team’s Slack so someone could deal with it.
Musk and Twitter
The last two weeks’ front pages were littered with Elon Musk and it culminated with him taking Twitter private for close to 44 billion USD. In this opinion piece, Vox’s editor Ezra Klein tries to provide a rationale behind this outrageous act and what Twitter actually aims to do. By gamifying a thread, it offers immediate, vivid and quantified evaluations of one’s conversational success, that makes you stick to the platform. With loads of ideas floating around, interesting to see which ones make the cut. Read here.
You don’t get people to drink less by selling them whiskey. Similarly, if your intention was to foster healthy conversation, you’d never limit thoughts to 280 characters or add like and retweet buttons or quote-tweet features. Twitter can’t be a home to hold healthy conversation because that’s not what it’s built to do.
Twitter takes the rich, numerous and subtle values that we bring to communication and quantifies our success through follower counts, likes and retweets. Slowly, what Twitter rewards becomes what we do. If we don’t, then no matter — no one sees what we’re saying anyway. We become what the game wants us to be or we lose.
Another great NYT article delving into the politics of Elon Musk, which doesn’t align strictly with any side other than what serves his business interests. Read here.
Acquisition Costs are not just rising for Netflix
Everyone by now has seen the Q1 results, where for the first time they have lost subscribers and the future is looking bleak for them with stagnating growth and revenues. As the billionaire tech investor has said, this could be a canary in a coal mine moment for the industry as the costs are beginning to rise across the board to acquire new customers. Read here.
Rajat Agarwal from Matrix Partners had published this data just a few days ago on the CAC trend seen for B2C companies
El Salvador’s tryst with Bitcoin
It was all fun and games for the El Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele when he was making daily appearances on Twitter backing Bitcoin after making it a legal tender in the country. The idea has started to crumble in the face of practical problems of the nation such as poor financial inclusion and know-how to understand the workings of cryptocurrencies. Looking at the rising national debt and sovereign risk because of the volatility, there are tough times ahead for the island nation. Read here.
El Salvador is a country where cash is still king; almost 70% of the population is unbanked. Critics say the country’s Bitcoin transition leaves behind those who don’t have a smartphone — mainly older Salvadorans — and those without internet access. In 2019, about 50% of the population was not online.
As a result (of rising sovereign risk), the Bukele administration has been shut out of international capital markets. The usual way out of this debt would be through a multilateral loan. But, thanks to the Bitcoin Law, Bukele has been chided by the International Monetary Fund. In late January, the organization warned him to remove Bitcoin as legal tender. Bukele responded on Twitter with a meme from The Simpsons.
Economics of Voting and Elections
I was on an Amit Verma reading binge going through his blog posts in India Uncut, I came across this thoughtful piece, where he talks about the psyche of an average voter who neither has the mental bandwidth nor the time to look at the big picture and analyse every candidate. A very short read.
Every voter knows that his single vote won’t turn an election, so the cost of not voting, or voting for someone bad, is negligible. However, he would have to put in a substantial investment in terms of time and effort to make an informed choice. He’d have to understand economics, and the complex consequences of decisions the government was likely to take. He’d have to understand the political economy, the incentives of all the different political actors, and the likely consequences. He’d have to develop enough understanding of history and human nature to know which politicians were making the right promises and how likely they were to deliver. That’s a lot of effort for no likely reward — so why bother?
Container Shipping Companies going Green
An industry which contributes around 3 per cent to global carbon emissions is looking to decarbonise and many big players have moved up their deadlines to become net-zero emitters. This seems like a very ambitious target as these carriers use bottom of the barrel fuel, which is basically a sludge and guzzling 66 gallons of fuel per minute underway. The options in the trial include using natural gas, methanol and battery-powered ships. Read here.
Danish firm Maersk, one of the largest container shipping companies in the world, operates more than 700 ships. It initially set a target of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, but earlier this year, Maersk decided to move up its deadline to 2040. The company also aims to cut its emissions per container 50 percent by 2030. At the terminals it controls, Maersk wants to cut emissions by 70 percent by 2030.
Many container ships are already using fuel conservation strategies like slow steaming. This is where a ship sails significantly slower than its rated cruising speed. It makes journeys longer, but it uses much less fuel for a given distance. A 10 percent reduction in speed may lead to a 19 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Rising Temperatures and Heatwaves
Most parts of the country this year are wilting in the extreme heat that kicked off in March, which has been the hottest in the past 122 years and from then temperatures have been going up and up. As it is with any natural calamity, its effects are disproportionate with the poor and marginalised facing the brunt of heat stress. The plight of farmers, construction workers, rickshaw pullers and delivery drivers compounds working all day in the scorching heat. Read here.
Something ambitious: Oceanix Busan
A project proposed by UN-Habitat, Oceanix and the city of Busan in South Korea aims to find a way for allowing coastal cities to evolve sustainably as the sea levels rise. The design for this project would have 3 interconnected islands with an area of 6.3ha and a population of 12000. Each platform will be used for a different purpose: one for housing, one for public spaces like schools and theatres, and a third for floating cities’ R&D.
All the floating platforms would be prefabricated in the factories and anchored using a material called biorock. This uses low voltages of electricity to stimulate the growth of limestone out of ocean mineral deposits. The material has been mainly used to revive and create coral reefs.
Read more about the project in this official release here. Splainer on Thursday did a remarkably detailed story on the same as well (Sign up paywall).
A book you should check out: The Code Book
Last week on Wednesday was the International Morse Code. This reminded me to go back to one of the best books I have read on the subject of Cryptography. This book by Simon Singh, takes us through the history of secret-keeping, from the days of ancient Greeks and Romans to how Navajo Code Talkers who helped the Allies win World War II. The book goes into mathematical and technical explanations of the encryptions and the process which led to cracking them.
Vigenère’s work culminated in his Traicté des Chiffres (“A Treatise on Secret Writing”), published in 1586. Ironically, this was the same year that Thomas Phelippes was breaking the cipher of Mary Queen of Scots. If only Mary’s secretary had read this treatise, he would have known about the Vigenère cipher, Mary’s messages to Babington would have baffled Phelippes, and her life might have been spared.
Jack Good, a veteran of Bletchley, commented: “Fortunately the authorities did not know that Turing was a homosexual. Otherwise we might have lost the war.
Thread(s) of the week:
Hypocrisy of Musk
In the past couple of weeks, Elon Musk has been made into a paragon of free speech and how he will transform social media for everyone. But the truth is he has played fast and loose with the concept when it comes to his life. Read this thread where a user gives tonnes of examples of the same.
Nutritional Wisdom
In this elaborately informative thread, the author of Dorito Effect, Mark Schatzker talks about inherent nutritional wisdom hard-wired into all living beings.
Brilliance of Dall-E
Sam Altman asked Twitter to come up with the whackiest description of an image they can think of and he would generate that with the OpenAI program, Dall E. This resulted in a number of really cool pictures.
Internet is Beautiful
Fun stuff for you to discover
Check out these truly enchanting pictures from a firefly lit forest in Japan.
Ocean Vuong's Brief But Spectacular Take on grief and language. Video here.
Earth Clock: Sit back, relax and enjoy the smooth zoom animations that depict your current time via satellite imagery.
Probable Futures: This site is worth exploring in more detail: “Probable Futures aims to increase our chances that the future is good. We offer tools to visualize climate change along with stories and insights to help people understand what those changes mean.” Don’t miss the many great interactive maps scattered across the site to see how changes in heat, water and (soon) drought will affect your corner of the world
Hubble’s newest camera gave us a spectacular image of two merging galaxies this week. The colliding galaxies have been nicknamed "The Mice" because of the long tails of stars and gas emanating from each galaxy.
The FBI's 83-page guide to internet slang is hilarious. Check it out here.
Trivia Corner: Step Count as a PR strategy
Did you check your step count today? The most likely answer would be a resounding yes. Whether you are using your fancy smartwatch or simply tracking them through a plethora of apps like Google fit, this has become a global standard for casual fitness watchers. You will even find some devices for your cats and dogs in the market as well. But like most of the successful ideas, this also finds its roots in a marketing campaign.
In the run-up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, a company called Yamasa corp. came up with a device which they started marketing to the health-conscious. It was called the Manpo-kei: “man” meaning 10,000, “po” meaning steps, and “kei” meaning meter. Some believe the company chose the name because the Japanese character for 10,000 sort of looks like a man walking. Read more about it here.
Having said this, walking 10,000 steps is not a bad thing, so please don’t stop your lovely morning walks. Cheers :)