Mind Tavern Edition #8
Welcome to the 8th 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!
Invention of Jaywalking
When the cars started hitting the road, people weren’t really fans of the machines taking over their daily space for walking and just loitering. Streets which were once safe had suddenly become dangerous for the everyday pedestrian. In the US, over 200,000 people lost their lives in car accidents. To counter the public angst, they fought back with the term jaywalking by putting the blame on careless streetwalkers. Read here.
It’s not totally clear who invented the phrase, but it was a fiendishly clever portmanteau. In the early 20th century, the word “jay” mean an uncultured rube from the countryside. To be a “jaywalker” thus was to be a country bumpkin who blundered around urban streets — guileless of the sophisticated ways of the city.
“Jaywalker” was a catchy term, and it caught on. Pretty soon city “safety councils” began holding events teaching pedestrians that it was their job to watch out for cars and not to jaywalk. They’d hire clowns to perform in safety parades; in one 1924 New York parade, a clown went down the street followed by a car, getting rear-ended by it over and over again. Only true idiots would allow themselves to get hit by a car, right?
Competition and Umpires
Another lovely article by Scott Galloway. He goes back in history to give a number of examples of how competition has led to the advancement of the human race, whether it is innovation (Apple), scientific exploration (Darwin) or Sports. But at the same time, he talks about the failure of regulators to control the big companies, especially in the tech sector which is now subverting innovation despite the glut of VC money. We should encourage competition and not winners. Read here.
China’s economy went from starving its people to minting self-made female billionaires after Deng Xiaoping embraced private enterprise and competitive markets. “To get rich is glorious,” he proclaimed.
From flame-broiled burgers to retina displays, companies are spurred to improve their products not by ideals or curiosity, but because if they don’t, the other guy will eat their lunch. Avis made an entire ad campaign out of the premise: “When you’re only No. 2, you try harder.”
Silicon Valley was birthed from the “space race” competition between the U.S. and the USSR. In October 1957 the Soviets launched a dog into orbit. Within a year, the U.S. founded NASA and ARPA and authorized the investment of millions of dollars in math and science education, all of which funded the first generation of Valley firms. Competition has been in tech’s DNA ever since. Steve Jobs founded Apple 362 days after Bill Gates founded Microsoft.
Our failure to police Big Tech’s anticompetitive conduct is suppressing innovation. Despite an explosion in VC funding, the growth rate of innovative young companies has actually slowed. For startups in developing sectors, a Big Tech acquisition is a kiss of death. Yes, the folks who get acquired can take the money and run, but the sector itself dries up. Research shows that when Google and Facebook purchase a company, VC investment in that sector drops 40% within three years.
TATA Neu: Another attempt at a failed idea
A couple of weeks back, this brainchild of the Tata Sons CEO was launched with a lot of fanfare. Neu aims to bring a plethora of Tata services under one app. Apart from the operational and business issue, Neu faces a number of privacy issues as well. Many people on social media have voiced their concerns about the apps pulling data from sources used over a decade back from one of the 30 companies and their numerous subsidiaries. Medianama takes a deep dive into the same. Read here.
The fact that companies can acquire another company and change the acquired company’s privacy policy without informing its users and using the personal data of the users in any way they want, stresses the need for a comprehensive data protection regime that gives users some form of protection.
Last week’s Nutgraf from The Ken has a great story on the subject going into the design of the apps and the business sense of the idea. Read the story here (Paywalled).
“Whenever I see a lot of hype around super apps… the question there becomes: what is it that you are increasing the efficiency of? Otherwise it’s just traditional diversification… There needs to be some common asset that you’re increasing the efficiency & experience for, [then] using that to diversify. A super app is a platform play where the underlying, core shared asset is not a software product asset in a traditional sense, it’s something less obvious like, in our case, our fleet.” -Sidu Ponnappa, Gojek’s SVP of Engineering & former MD of Gojek India
The First Cigarette
A fascinating story of how Buksh Ellahie brought the cigarettes to the nobility of Calcutta and became one of the richest men in the city. Bukhsh Ellahie's dominance of the Indian market was so comprehensive that when foreign firms like Wills and ATC first arrived in India, they had to form agreements with Ellahie and rely on the latter's distribution networks. Much before the landmark Torches of Freedom PR campaign by Edward Bernays, here was Ellahie deploying Gauhan Jaan in print advertisements to keep Read here.
Notwithstanding recent awareness of the unhealthfulness of smoking, Calcuttans continue to smoke in large numbers today. A recent survey found the city is the highest consumer of cigarettes in all of India. Few of these modern smokers however, have ever heard of Bukhsh Ellahie. His once legendary fame and wealth have, alas, disappeared from public memory like the smoke from his Gauhar cigarettes.
Curiosity and Equality
The writer of one of my favourite books Being Mortal, Atul Gawande periodically writes thoughtful articles in the Newyorker. Here he talks about the ideas of equality and standing by your fundamental principles in any situation. He points out how the society of ours has become like an airport with a number of boarding lanes, each with different sets of rights and privileges who think they deserve what they have more than the others behind them. Read here.
We’ve divided the world into us versus them—an ever-shrinking population of good people against bad ones. But it’s not a dichotomy. People can be doers of good in many circumstances. And they can be doers of bad in others. It’s true of all of us. We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.
Regarding people as having lives of equal worth means recognizing each as having a common core of humanity. Without being open to their humanity, it is impossible to provide good care to people—to insure, for instance, that you’ve given them enough anesthetic before doing a procedure. To see their humanity, you must put yourself in their shoes. That requires a willingness to ask people what it’s like in those shoes. It requires curiosity about others and the world beyond your boarding zone.
Something Fascinating: Almost Natural Crevasses
"Intricate underground wonderlands have been painstakingly chiselled, dug, and carved by New Mexico artist Ra Paulette in natural crevasses in the New Mexico backcountry. Paulette sees his caves as more of a pastime or a public service than a money-making endeavour, and when he's done, he usually just leaves them to be discovered by others." Imagine coming across such a lovely area by chance.
A podcast you should check out: The Startup Operator
I have followed and added a number of podcasts to my Spotify account but rarely listen to most of them. But this is one podcast, that I regularly listen to. Hosted by Roshan Cariappa, it curates wisdom from founders, operators, and inventors on executing at startups. I also love the weekly round-up of what is buzzing in the startup universe. Episodes are crisp and not too long that you would drift off, at 1.5x you can finish an episode on your commute. Check it out here.
Thread of the week: Magic of Wikipedia
Tim Urban asked people on Twitter, what their favourite Wikipedia was. It is a treasure trove of intriguing pages which will keep you occupied for hours. My personal favourite is List of lists of lists.
It is a list of articles that are themselves lists of article lists. In other words, each of the articles linked here is an index to multiple lists on a topic. Some of the linked articles may contain lists of lists as well.
Internet is Beautiful
Fun stuff for you to discover
Tune into random forests of the world, listen to the birds chirping across European dark forests to African Savannah.
A Rube Goldberg machine that feeds you. Check out this cool video.
1300 free vector elements to spruce up your designs, probably a bit different than the usual sites. All 100% free.
If you watch a lot of TV shows, BestEpisodes allows you to compare the IMDB ratings of each episode of your favourite show.
Hey.Go: Virtual live tours of several places are available for free and are streamed in HD! The Christmas Lights of Vigo, Galicia's largest city, and Rio's Sunday Hippie Market in Ipanema are some examples of what's on offer.
90s TV: Take a walk down the memory lane with 90s TV shows.
Busy Simulator: Feign busyness with repeating notification sounds. I don't know why you would use this because notification sounds personally drive me crazy, but it could probably be a good prank.
Trivia Corner: The Lesser-known Benz
We are all aware of the marvellous Carl Benz and the remarkable company he built. But like they say, behind every successful man, there is a woman. And in this case, she was quite something, even more determined than her husband who would have given up if not for her.
Bertha Benz and her two oldest boys silently left their house on August 5, 1888, and unintentionally transformed the world forever. She left with a note to her sleeping husband saying that they were off to see her mother in Pforzheim, Germany. She went to the garage and fired up his husband’s Benz Patent-Motorwagen and embarked upon what would be the first long-distance journey ever taken by automobile.
She did so to prove to the world that the machine Carl invented in 1885 wasn’t a dud as the market was showing. Bertha's drive sparked interest in the Motorwagen by demonstrating its utility as a mode of personal mobility. In her journey, she made numerous improvements and repairs like using her garter to repair the ignition and a hatpin to clean a blocked fuel pipe. She also stopped in the town of Bauschlott to get a shoemaker to replace the leather on a brake shoe, inventing the first set of replacement brake pads.