Canada, Trump and the new world order https://t.co/AZfyf71Idb via @ft
— Michael Ignatieff (@M_Ignatieff) January 18, 2025
Best thing I’ve read about the vision for American foreign policy in 2025. Create a big, beautiful buffer zone paid for and defended by vassals, controlled by American overwatch and for the benefit of oligarchs in Rome. A generational project, not unlike the original Bretton Woods institutions after WW2.
America’s price is rising and it’s going to keep going up for a while.
Adam Neumann spotted a big funding bubble, and found the most efficient way to exploit it, by taking an existing asset that he could buy at a real estate multiple funded by equity he raised at a startup multiple. This drew money away from better companies in a sense, but the money it was going after probably would have ended up in some other business with similarly bad returns on capital. What WeWork accomplished was to speed up this process and make it more visible—someone who ruthlessly exploits a poorly-justified bubble is basically an efficient markets accelerationist who is heightening the contradictions and pushing the system towards its inevitable collapse as a side effect of their effort to get rich quick at the expense of others.
From “Financial Markets aren’t Closed Systems” in Capital Gains by Byrne Hobart.
“I don’t have any wonderful insights that other people don’t have. I just have slightly more consistently than others avoided idiocy. Other people are trying to be smart. All I’m trying to be is non-idiotic. I find that all you have to do to get ahead in life is to be non-idiotic and live a long time. It’s harder to be non-idiotic than most people think.”
-Charlie Munger, as quoted by William Green in Richer, Wiser, Happier
Finally someone is doing something about the artificial Sykes Picot borders between Canada and America
— Karl Sharro (@KarlreMarks) January 7, 2025
But honestly, I appreciate the Peanuts special more for how it looks directly at the Christianity of it all. It’s not trying to hide the ball. It is …
Why Linus’ Speech Matters (to Jews)
Shared by my good friend Shanan; a wonderful read.
This also reminded me of the Monster/AB InBev deal mentioned in “The Little Book that Builds Wealth:”
To be fair, it is occasionally possible to take the success of a blockbuster product or service and leverage it into an economic moat. Look at Hansen Natural, which markets the Monster brand of energy drinks that surged onto the market in the early part of this decade. Rather than resting on its laurels, Hansen used Monster’s success to secure a long-term distribution agreement with beverage giant Anheuser-Busch, giving it an advantage over competitors in the energy-drink market.
Anyone who wants to compete with Monster now has to overcome Hansen’s distribution advantage. Is this impossible to do? Of course not, because Pepsi and Coke have their own distribution networks. But it does help protect Hansen’s profit stream by making it harder for the next upstart energy drink to get in front of consumers, and that’s the essence of an economic moat.
Once you find product-market fit you need to quickly scale distribution to own as much of the market as possible and preempt new entrants.
This is a great article from Ars Technica that explains how a bunch of published and defacto standards come together – more or less – to make Mastodon go and create a decentralized social web.
