Tag: business

Chased by Snack Robots

because of self-checkout, people are doing fewer impulse buys waiting in line, so shoprite designed a robot to accost you with snacks throughout the store. this is the future we want, apparently. can’t wait to have to dodge tiny aggressive sales-robots AND people that aren’t paying attention when i go shopping

Innovation Wealth

People who don’t look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn’t get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don’t look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies? Why are people starting so many more new companies than they used to, and why are they getting so rich from it? The answer to the first question, curiously enough, is that it’s misphrased. We shouldn’t be asking why people are starting companies, but why they’re starting companies again. In 1892, the New York Herald Tribune compiled a list of all the millionaires in America. They found 4047 of them. How many had inherited their wealth then? Only @20% — less than the proportion of heirs today. And when you investigate the sources of the new fortunes, 1892 looks even more like today. Hugh Rockoff found that “many of the richest … gained their initial edge from the new technology of mass production.”

See also income inequality

China Slackers

Buy a large thermos bottle, and fill it with either Chinese herbal tea or whiskey, as a desk-side companion. Set a reminder on your phone to drink 8 glasses of water every day, and leave your workstation every 50 minutes to get that water. Start doing 15 minutes of stretches, or planking, in the office pantry. Set the goal of becoming the person who uses the most toilet paper in the company.

These are some of the tips for how to slack off at work provided by Massage Bear. Her philosophy of “touching fish” (mō yú), synonymous with lazing around at work, has resonated with many Chinese, increasingly exhausted by society’s ever more intense rat race.

as China becomes more prosperous, bullshit jobs are growing, just like in other advanced economies. Makes me wonder whether the transition to UBI will happen faster in China if these trends accelerate, as they likely will.

Corporate donations moderate

Individual donors prefer to support ideologically extreme candidates while access-seeking PACs tend to support more moderate candidates. Thus, institutional changes that limit the availability of money affect the types of candidates who would normally fund-raise from these 2 main sources of campaign funds.

an inconvenient finding for all the fans of grassroots funding. other than a vague “get money out of politics” (how?), i don’t see any policy prescriptions to address this.

WFH whistleblowers

The work-from-home phenomenon has triggered a fresh frustration for US corporations: Americans are blowing the whistle on their employers 31% more. The isolation that comes with being separated from a communal workplace has made many employees question how dedicated they are to their employers. What’s more, people feel emboldened to speak out when managers and co-workers aren’t peering over their shoulders.

Shopify interview

You know, the best thing that ever happened to me was when I worked for… well, I can’t talk about the broader company, but a specific part of Siemens, in a specific office. The reason why it was the best thing for me is because it’s almost the perfect counterfactual to how you should run a company. I honestly think that, you know, a coin flip has a batting average of 50%. If you just do the perfect opposite of literally everything about that place, you would probably clock in at 60 to 70% of getting everything right, which would mean you would outperform probably 90% of all companies in the world. So that was really, really helpful.

Among other things, almost every incentive system was just wrong. For instance, there was no way you would get a promotion or recognition if you weren’t dressed in a suit or if you didn’t use slides in a particular way that resembled the legal profession.

They really taught everyone that, regardless of your gender, creed, or background, you should basically emulate the same 60-year-old lawyer in persona. Effectively, your career was dependent on whether you got this right, and to me, that just seemed insane. This is infantilization, but the funny thing is that they call this professionalism. To me it is the exact opposite. It’s infantilization because you literally have a policy about how to dress. If you have a policy on how to dress, that means you don’t trust people to dress. It was a pretty stark experience.

Never Going Back

Third-Order Consequences
This is where things start getting really wild. Unshackled by the office’s location, people will move where they want to move, often out of expensive cities and into more affordable towns with better weather. Those are first-and second-order effects. Some third-order effect might be that because they’re saving more money, they have more money to invest, and the trends that I wrote about in Software is Eating the Markets towards more retail investment in stocks, art, real estate, and more will accelerate.

Other potential third-order effects include:

Rise of Alternative Education. As mobility increases, more people will need to give online or alternative education a real shot, because they’ll be loath to gain freedom from the office but remain tied down by their childrens’ schools. Homeschooling options like SchoolHouse, which matches groups of families with teachers to form microschools, Primer, an online homeschooling community and infrastructure startup, or Outschool, which lets kids take online classes or camps from anywhere, will appeal to parents who want to move while keeping their kids well-educated.

More Fluid Employment. Productive employees may work multiple full-time roles. In GitLab’s fourth phase, Intentionality, employees are measured on output. If employees can keep up the output, employers will be comfortable letting them work multiple jobs. The absolute star performers, who Dror calls “The 10x Class,” will put their talents up for a global auction, and will reach income levels similar to top athletes and celebrities.

New Employee Stock Options. As companies and employees enjoy a more transitory relationship, and as Remote leads to more precise performance tracking, equity will have to evolve to be rewarded for performance and contribution instead of tenure and rank. As Sari and I wrote, we think that Fairmint is in a great position to make this possible technically. Remote will make it acceptable culturally.

Dose variation

The reason we do a second vaccination is that these later doses help to solidify immune memory, in part by giving extra training to the cells that produce antibodies, a process called affinity maturation. But this process begins with the single dose, and the evidence collected between the time of the 1st and 2nd doses in 10Ks of people in the Phase 3 trials suggests that the level of affinity maturation may provide enough protection to meet the standards we have set for vaccine approval during this pandemic even without the 2nd dose. we should begin immediate single-dose trials, recruiting volunteers from low-risk populations who are 1st in line for the vaccinations.

Magical extra doses and supply chain optimization:

some of the vaccine distribution sites had access to low dead-volume syringes, syringes that leave less vaccine trapped between the plunger and needle — the “dead volume” — after a shot is given. Thus, less vaccine was wasted in the syringe and more available for putting into arms using the low dead-volume syringes.

This is quite remarkable. Increasing vaccine supply by 20% by building more factories could cost billions. We should do that, it would be worth it. But in this case, we managed to increase supply by at least 20% use a relatively inexpensive redesign of the syringe. What this indicates is the importance of thinking along the entire supply chain for opportunities for optimization.

Single-Shot and first doses first

The FDA panel voted unanimously to authorize the J&J vaccine. Good. Note, however, that the single-shot J&J vaccine is quite comparable to the first dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Yet, few people are demanding that J&J be required to offer a second shot at all, let alone in 3-4 weeks (What about vaccine escape! How long does immunity with a single-shot last! What about the children!). It really is scandalous how these objections to a single-shot have disappeared. This is evidence of what I call magical thinking–an undue focus on the clinical trial design as having incantatory power.

Why did J&J focus on a single-shot? Was this because of “the science”, i.e. something unique about their vaccine? No. J&J focused on a single-shot vaccine for the same pragmatic reasons that I favor First Doses First.

J&J chose to begin with the single shot because the World Health Organization and other experts agreed it would be a faster, more effective tool in an emergency. (emphasis added).

Since that time, Dr Dolittle has insisted we stick to the 2 shots regime. Criminal negligence.

Fractional doses work

in an article on new vaccine boosters there is this revealing statement:

Any revised Moderna vaccine would include a lower dose than the original. The company went with a high dose in its initial vaccine to guarantee effectiveness, but the company is confident the dose can come down, reducing side effects without compromising protection.

Arrgh! Why wait for a new vaccine??? Fractional dosing now! The article also notes:

One of Moderna’s co-founders is known for his research on microneedles, tiny Band-Aid-like patches that can deliver medications without the pain of a shot. Moderna has said nothing about delivery plans, but it’s conceivable the company might try to combine the 2 technologies to provide a booster that doesn’t require an injection.

The skin is highly immunologically active so you can give lower doses with a microneedle patch. The microneedles are sometimes made from sugar and don’t hurt.

Dose stretching works extremely well

A new paper on dose-stretching makes 3 big points. First, “Neutralizing antibody levels are highly predictive of immune protection from symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection.” Future vaccines may not have to go through lengthy clinical trials but can instead rely on these correlates of immunity.

A 50% or 25% dose of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine looks to be more effective than the standard dose of some of the other vaccines like the AstraZeneca, J&J or Sinopharm vaccines. The point is not that these other vaccines aren’t good–they are great! The point is that by using fractional dosing we could rapidly and safely expand the number of effective doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.

Second, even if efficacy rates for fractional doses are considerably lower, dose-stretching policies are still likely to reduce infections and deaths. A 50% dose strategy reduces infections and deaths under a variety of different epidemic scenarios as long as the efficacy rate is 70% or greater.

Third, it is better to start vaccination with a less efficacious vaccine than to wait for a more efficacious vaccine. Thus, Great Britain and Canada’s policies of starting First Doses first with the AstraZeneca vaccine and then moving to second doses, perhaps with the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines is a good strategy.