Everyone in the United States is playing Pickleball. Everyone! Yet I think a sport that is fairly new to the United States, padel, is set to eclipse the growth rate of pickleball.

Padel is a sport that looks like a combination of tennis, pickleball, and squash. It features a lightweight, high tech padel racket with carbon fiber, and a slightly softer tennis ball.

Padel and pickleball are also very different. Padel vs pickleball is a common question. In short, pickleball uses a different ball (whiffleball), and you cannot use the walls. By using the walls in Padel, you create an entirely more complex sport. It also is a little more dangerous- it is possible to run into the wall in padel!

I think padel is going to grow extremely fast for a few reasons

1. The vibes are very cool. Traditionally, padel has been played by folks from Latin countries who emphasize the style of the sport
2. It’s fast paced. It’s faster paced than tennis or pickleball, with more complexity with the ball regularly bouncing off of the wall. Players can even run off the padel court to return a ball! It’s a high adrenaline sport
3. It can be played outdoors
4. It’s a team sport (played 2v2), so it’s very social and great for friends and family to play together
5. It has cool terminology like in this padel dictionary!
6. The gear is awesome

Currently, there are over 25 million padel players worldwide, but under 1 million in the US. That will change quickly. There are cool padel clubs coming online in places like Miami and New York.

I would bet that within ten years, there are over 10 million padel players in the United States. Furthermore, celebrities like Christiano Ronaldo and Roger Federer love playing padel. You might, too!

Trust is finicky. It can be gained, lost, and faked. Perhaps no skill matters more than the ability to know who to trust, how much to trust them, and for how long.

Knowing if someone is telling the truth, or not, is one function of trust. Just as important is knowing whose ability to trust. Trust permeates personal relationships, and life and financial outcomes.

Even more than trust, leverage is an increasingly popular concept in tech and business. There are popular blog posts by luminaries, like the most celebrated of all philosophers in the history of humanity, Naval, on how to expand one's leverage across industries. Seemingly everyone I know wants to know how to better leverage their time.

Properly placed trust is the highest leverage any of us can find. The higher in a given hierarchy your trustworthiness meter is accurate, the more leverage you generate, and the more margin you have for error in every other area of your life. If someone trusted Warren Buffett with his or her money in 1956, most every other decision with his or her money would have been a rounding error.

In technology, the most trusted CEO in Silicon Valley is almost surely Patrick Collison. Collison is a former math and science prodigy who has turned Stripe into a powerhouse. Stripe now runs a printing press, processes more payment volume than the GDPs of several countries, and has incorporated hundreds of thousands of new small businesses. I don’t know him, but I would trust Patrick to watch my dog, I would trust Patrick to run any company that I’m invested in, and I would trust Patrick as the President of most countries.

Conceivably you could spend a lifetime perfecting the art of knowing which software engineers who claim to be good at coding are actually good at coding. The same goes for data scientists. Instead, focus on moving your evaluation of trustworthiness up the hierarchy. Rather than look for good individual coders, look for someone who would create an organization and hire people who are good at identifying good coders.  This creates a recursive trust function: by trusting the right person at the top of a hierarchy, you are trusting their ability to evaluate their employees' trustworthiness-those employees are hiring folks who determine their subordinates' trustworthiness, and it's turtles all the way down. Ultimately, by investing with (let's use investing dollars with someone as a proxy for trust) Patrick Collison, you are also raising your odds of selecting for trustworthy software engineers in your investment stack. Patrick hires trustworthy people whose trustworthiness partially lies in their ability to identify trustworthiness in others. This also applies as you look at employees one layer abstracted from your targeted level in the hierarchy. People choosing to work for Patrick is a signal that he is trustworthy because he hired the trustworthy people reporting to him. Perhaps I should use the word trustworthy a few more times in the previous sentence.

The same applies outside of the narrow area of technology and business. In a leader, look for someone who you believe is of personal integrity and ability, and whom you believe can identify subordinates with high levels of personal integrity and ability. Making decisions on trustworthiness higher in a hierarchy saves time, provides more leverage, and makes life easier.

Practically applied, if you truly trust someone, outsource decision-making to them in areas where they are trustworthy. Hiring based on the recommendation of someone who knows you well and knows what you need is one application. If you’re in the market for an entry-level mountain bike, and you have a friend whose opinion on mountain biking you trust entirely-let them pick out your first bike. Finding a trustworthy spouse is also important for this reason.

One way to apply this is to look at areas where you could move your trustworthiness decision one level up the hierarchy. So long as you are able to parse someone’s ability well enough to know that they are better than you at a certain task, moving your investment up the hierarchy creates hidden leverage. Hiring a VP of Engineering who you trust to hire good entry-level engineers is much easier than figuring out which entry-level engineers are hireable.

Professional athletes and billionaires apply this practically. They have a “guy” for everything. A Car Guy, a Travel Guy, a Health Guy (also called a doctor), a House Guy. We all should find our “guy” (or girl) in areas we don’t want to become experts. This identification of folks higher in the hierarchy creates leverage, better outcomes, and saves time. It’s much easier to defer to a “car guy” than it is to spend years identifying the proper type of tire tread for each type of vehicle you own.

There is also a downside to moving decisions up a level in granularity: if you trust the wrong person, your errors result in more harm, downside, and loss by an order of magnitude. If you’re going to move decisions on trustworthiness up the hierarchy, you must be sure that you are right.

This all hinges on one’s ability to parse someone else’s ability and trustworthiness appropriately. Funnily enough, the first step in this process is understanding how much you can trust your own ability to judge someone else’s trustworthiness.

Acorn Bluff Farms sells Mangalitsa Pork, often called the Kobe Beef of Pork. Mangalitsa is probably the best tasting pork in the world. We needed to create a lasting brand identity and logo. Through multiple iterations as well as our designer extraordinaire co-owner, Seth Todd, we have created a lasting brand identity that is really latching on.

Visual Identity

The brand speaks to our positioning as an

A) Heritage Brand

B) High End Brand

We've also built out a variety of secondary identities, hats, etc.

We've been able to generate sustainable organic traction to our website and order page . We recently shifted to Shopify. Unfortunately our 301 redirects somehow got messed up in the transition from Squarespace to Shopify. As a result, our organic traffic has gone from extremely healthy to almost nil. We used to have the #1 ranking for "best tasting pork" which generated several sales a week. As we patch up 301 redirects and build a link profile, we hope that we are able to return.

Social

Our Twitter is actually a big driver of sales. Whenever we had personal tweets go viral, we would affix a tweet steering people to Acorn Bluff. Our ability to consistently sell out of available pork is largely due to a well placed tweet. We are tweeting maybe once a week right now. Our guess is that if we moved to 3x a day, we could consistently get several hundred dollars of revenue a week out of our Twitter. Along those lines, if our social following got to 10k instead of 500 people, the economic implications would be enormous.

Instagram has been pretty spotty for us in generating revenue, and will remain a part, but not a key part of our strategy.

TikTok could certainly work but we lack the time or frankly, energy, to carry it out!

SEO

Mangalitsa is a competitive keyword. 301s somehow getting messed up were a really negative blow for us. We are working on building a backlink profile. In that, we also had some sites literally copy and paste our copy talking about how great natural farming of Mangalitsa hogs is, our methodology, and the taste of Acorn Bluff Farms.

We only get about 70 visitors a month to learn more about our Mangalitsa feeder pigs for sale, but that's proven to have a very high hit rate in conversion.

Local Sales

Friends and family have continued to be huge supporters, often discovering a deeper love for culinary delicacies than they are able to buy at their local grocery store.

Where do we go from here?

Our next step at Acorn Bluff Farms is to launch a new brand. We've learned that the Mangalitsa niche is extraordinarily rewarding, but also a limited market that we create. We are going to anchor around our Mangalitsa pork while launching new items from the home, with our same ethos.

In the meantime, to stay tuned, follow us on Twitter and Instagram.

Oh, and buy a hat!

Suburb always felt weird to me. Disquieting, weird, just WRONG. I couldn’t place my finger on why until I really began to dig in. Not only are suburbs missing almost every element that I’ve identified as necessary for making someone feel at home, but there architecture also sucks. Ranch homes, with the exception of maybe Eichler’s are an abomination. Our public architecture has gone from buildings like the Library of Congress with its striking composite order to crappy Federal buildings that make you question whether nihilists are too optimistic.

I began reading and reading and reading on the topic, and now feel I have a better grasp. This is a fluid list that I’ll update as it grows, but includes resources that have been helpful for me.

• Christopher Alexander’s books A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building are great gateways to understand that there is an inherent life in buildings that modernity has oftentimes stripped away. There’s a cure too, and Alexander’s work draws from math, art, and light to create a method for capturing the gestalt. Alexander was a mathematician first, and married math to beauty and language in such a beautiful way that A Pattern Language is often used to teach programmers how build better code.

• Vitruvius’ De Architectura or The Ten Books of Architecture is splendid. The book was more or less lost until a discovery in ~ 1450 by a monk. The book contains a description of classical Roman architecture, but more important the forms and formulas that allow the mind to be at ease. The three bases of architecture were forever captured by Vitruvius. Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas.

• Pallladio’s Four Books on Architecture is also fantastic. He explores classical techniques and his dissemination of them lead to an explosion in classical architecture across the continent. He also made some pretty amazing villas himself, as you see above.

• Calder Loth’s YouTube series is fantastic as well. He distills hours of reading into a detailed, thorough, and memorable lecture series in partnership with the ICAA. Loth walks through the genesis of the orders Roman and Classical, the reintroduction of such, and minor details that make or break again, the Gestalt.

This is the beginning of my education on Classical Architecture, but I’m excited to learn much, much more. I hope this resources are helpful. Feel free to email me if this has been useful or if you have suggestions, corrections, or comments!

In the town I grew up in in Iowa, there was a rutted, bumpy, unmarked dirt path across a cornfield that had been used as a shortcut to Highway 61 south of town since I was young. It was called the “Cow Path” and saved a good 5 minutes off of a trip to Wapello, if you were willing to risk destroying your truck’s suspension system. Technically it was private property, but no one cared.

Over time, the Cow Path got more and more popular. Soon, teenagers were running it in their pickups as fast as they could, for fun. Eventually, the cow path got too popular, the price of corn and liability insurance too high and the path was plowed under, and planted with corn.

As high trust, low headcount organizations scale, they inadvertently force their most trustworthy employees into a conundrum similar to that of the cow path’s owners. The employees are forced to choose between the older, faster, unofficial ways of doing things-taking the cow path to Wapello -and following an organization’s rules that were put in place as the organization grew and was no longer able to rely on uniform trustworthiness.

There is a distinction in Silicon Valley between a startup person and a “Big Company” (BigCo) person. Startup executives detest politics (I think of business politics as (time spent managing irrational egos/total time)), and big company people love to prattle on about business terminology that doesn’t mean anything, and implement new rules. Organizations grow, add layers of bureaucracy and begins to resemble other companies. The scale leads to lower trust; self policing and decision making become increasingly difficult as the liability from one additional bad actor doesn’t outweigh the marginal benefit of freedom.

Companies keep adding Byzantine rules and processes as they scale, which forces early employees to either prove they care about the company by breaking the new rules, or prove they are trustworthy, but don’t care about the company, by honoring the new rules. Which, paradoxically, makes them less trustworthy.

For instance if an early engineer at a company could purchase a new tool without approval, so long as he thought he needed it, and now has to wait three weeks for a supervisor to sign off, the best thing for the company is for the engineer to just purchase the software on the company card and deal with consequences later. But if the engineer purchases the software, he will be perceived as low trust by the org, while engaging in trustworthy behavior for the betterment of the entire org!

Action without waiting for organizational approval is the simplest example of this concept. So are informality in communication, lack of documentation, taking time off without supervisor approval, controversial marketing statements, and many other actions.

As well-trod cow paths get plowed up and replaced by rules, startup people leave in droves. There is a way to save the cow path: hire trustworthy people, and de-centralize the company further as it scales.

Subsidies are hated by most every economist. Economists believe subsidies distort markets and reward dollars to inefficient projects. The 30% solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) is often decried by oil and gas think tanks, libertarians, and pure market economists.

Read this quote from what is clearly an industry-backed thinktank, the “Institute for Energy Research”:

“The U.S. Treasury estimates that the Production Tax Credit will cost taxpayers $40.12 billion from 2018 to 2027, making it the most expensive energy subsidy under current tax law.”

This statement may be true in a vacuum, but it ignores the positive externalities associated with a manufacturing subsidy, and it is wrong on a couple of fronts.

First, sunshine is a non-rival good. The materials and man hours needed for solar panel production are rival in the short term-someone making a solar panel cannot also be making shoes. But long term, if subsidies truly do push the solar cost curve down, the rival marginal production cost of each solar panel is almost nothing. And, if that’s the case, there is a key element here that is different from ethanol subsidies.

Ethanol subsidies affect corn, which, no matter how efficiently produced, comes from limited land with limited nutrients. Corn has a law of diminishing returns on input dollars-over time, to eke one more bushel of corn out of an acre of land requires more and more input dollars and man hours.

Solar though, has nearly infinite power available. It is not a production subsidy, but rather a manufacturing subsidy. That is, similar to Moore’s Law in semi-conductors, for every doubling in manufacturing capacity of solar panels, we see cost reductions in the total Levelized Cost of Energy (LCEO) of 20%. This is known as Swanson’s Law or the Swanson Effect. Below is an old graph. Costs per watt in 2020 on solar panels are closer to 30 cents a watt!

The costs come down because as we build things, we learn to build them better. T P Wright’s seminal 1936 paper on airplane construction was one of the first formalizations of this relationship. Build something over time, and initially you get way better at it really fast, and then over time you continue to get better at building the item, but you need more inputs for the same rate of improvement. Think of a concert violinist, for instance. They may achieve 98% mastery by 2,000 hours of practice, but take another 2,000 for the final 2%. Building things work the same way, but there is never mastery. The only asymptote is the availability of raw goods.

Solar used to be insanely expensive. California bought a whole bunch of it when they shouldn’t have. Now they have too much solar, at a cost 5x the market, because they signed long term contracts. In retrospect, this was not wise. It was shorting the price of all other power sources, and natural gas became capable of providing clean-ish energy at 1/5th the price.

But, at the time California signed their ill-fated Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs), it seemed that the only way to start making panels so that solar became more affordable so that we could make more solar was for energy prices to rise. Now, with energy prices falling, we were faced with a conundrum. The eventual marginal price of solar should be close to the raw inputs, assuming we’re going to make a whole bunch of it. That’s definitely good. But solar was super expensive, so you would need hundreds of loss leader.

That’s where the 30% solar subsidy came in. We still had hundreds of loss leaders, but many were losing because the subsidy worked even better than expected. Solar has gone from 30+ cents a kiloWatt hour (kWh) to 2 cents. That is a dramatic decrease in cost that beat even optimistic projections from the past.

The short term losses from subsidies are real. It is no different than a tax in support of solar. There are key distinctions however.

First, the subsidy was on the total cost of the project rather than at a fixed rate or a fixed procured amount. This incentivized total costs of production to decline dramatically.

Second, when faced with an a threat to the human species, subsidies alter the temporal position of energy production. CO2 produced now vs CO2 produced in the future has a different position on the (quantity, marginal potential harm) graph. By shifting CO2 production into the future, you are not only creating a net positive for each marginal CO2 shift, you are also buying more time for other innovations (maybe actually learning to build nuclear again), and avoiding non linear responses. Perhaps there is a certain amount of CO2 we can pump into the atmosphere with no changes ,and adding a single molecule more of CO2 will have a massive negative effect. Non linear relationships dominate in complex systems, and, when manufacturing subsidies produced Gigawatts of Solar, they enabled us to reduce our chance of hitting an unknowable threshold.

Now, where the United States likely went wrong is not requiring the 30% subsidy to be used on parts from Americans or close trade allies (read: not China). The inverse happened. China heavily subsidized their solar panel production, then sold it into a subsidized US market. China absorbed even more up front losses than the United States on the solar production curve, but now they have knowledge that puts them so far ahead of the US that solar panel manufacturing is almost extinct in the United States.

Ironically, this means the United States is facing a similar question to that which it faced before: for the nation to learn how to manufacture solar again would require that we take an even larger short term hit to solar panel prices than hit the United States’ imposition of a 30% tariff in 2018 caused. But, without an imposition of a large import tariff (which will cause less solar to be built in the US in the short term), we cannot ever learn to build solar panels ourselves.

So now the relative CO2 position must reverse in the short term. Manufacturing subsidies worked and worked well. Solar’s price per kilowatt hour is now among the cheapest forms of energy in the history of humankind, and before long the marginal cost will be nearly zero. But if the United States can’t manufacture the needed technology, we will have shifted the ability to produce zero marginal cost power to a nation that puts millions of people in concentration camps. And, when China inevitably introduces export controls to the United States in 10 years or so, if the United States has never had the guts to learn how to make solar panels, a country that cares not at all about pollution, like China, will continue to burn coal, simply because they have plentiful supplies, cheap, and near power generation stations.

Manufacturing subsidies work, and likely produce substantially more benefits than harms in areas that we know have plentiful to limitless natural material available. They shift potential harm into the future and reduce non-linear complex responses. However, the original manufacturing subsidies on solar didn’t go far enough. We are now faced with a choice. To best lower future energy costs in the United States to zero, as well as prevent long term spikes in CO2 production, it’s time to again produce solar panels in the United States.

Pandemics are deflationary. A demand shock happens before a supply shock. It takes times for supply chain disruptions to be felt, but people stop buying immediately. A good portion of what we buy is discretionary. Entertainment, travel-these are dollars that do not have to be spent. Food must be purchased, but most everything else does not have to be, and reduction in demand should lead to price drops. Price drops allow purchasing power to increase. Technological innovation also causes deflation that we might not see until a sudden shock forces it to concentrate its powers on goods that can’t be substituted for. Food, health, housing. However, two staples of our financial system force federal intervention at a much deeper level than we should accept. Pension obligations, and debt.

Pensions have unrealistic return targets, trillions in liabilities, and are eventually going to cause a massive financial crisis post-CoVID. In the short term the pensions’ need for an immediate return to fulfill existing obligations puts massive political pressure on the Fed to reduce interest rates beyond equilibrium. Especially if pension funds don’t understand how to hedge tail risk. This creates larger long term liabilities in the market by leading to inefficient allocation of capital in both public and private markets. Simultaneously, pension targets, even adjusted for changes in the CPI, are too slow to adjust, and too inflexible-promised returns should not exist! They’re also absurdly high.

Now, let’s look at debt and interest rates. Interest rates can only be dropped so low. It does not make sense to pay a borrower to borrow money. It just doesn’t-I could go into a huge dissertation on why now, but it comes down to: It doesn’t make sense. When interest rates make money free, there’s nowhere left to hide when something that’s even slightly unexpected happens. Progressively lowering interest rates has a concave effect-it multiplies poor capital allocation. Corporations and individuals lever up even more than they already were because capital is cheap, enabling them to cover existing debt and take on more debt, when they should be taking on less. We already know risk models don’t properly price risk, because they use backwards-looking estimates of variance and tail risk, and there’s no guarantee that things won’t be worse than they have in the past. Thing inevitably get worse than we expected, because humans are optimistic creatures. And when there are layers of debt, all dependent on receiving a debt payment from someone else who is receiving a debt payment from someone else, when the system misses (as it inevitably will), a single event can cause a massive debt cascade. It’s turtles all the way down. Think of forest fires in the Western United States that burn after years of fire prevention. Without localized fires, we get conflagrations that threaten eco-systems.

Avoid debt at all costs. Avoid guaranteed returns because they inevitably aren’t guaranteed. Americans must accept both of these statements going forward, or we’re going to see crashes at some point in the not so distant future that make 2008 and CoVID-19 look small. Successively larger shocks will have implications far beyond 401ks ticking down for a few years. We falsely believe that future floods won’t be larger than previous floods, we falsely believe that future financial drawdowns won’t be larger than previous financial drawdowns, and we falsely believe our political and social systems will maintain equilibrium when faced with new and unexpected shocks.

Originally Published on November 24, 2019

While traveling, I’ve tasked my free headspace with discovering the hidden algorithms (aka set of rules) that seem to govern the places that are both beautiful and in which I feel at home. Barcelona. Old downtowns in forgotten Midwestern cities. Alleys in Salt Lake City. Downtown Florence. The 15 hours of my life I’ve spent in London which clearly makes me an expert. Bilbao. Andersonville and Bucktown in Chicago.

Some of these are cribbed from people I follow on Twitter via osmosis, so not sure who gets credit for what. Apologies there, and if you see an idea from someone specifically happy to credit. I’ve seen Steve Mouzon, Leon Krier, @wrathofgnon, and Charles Mahron talk about a lot of these ideas.

1. Backyards don’t exist or are minimal. Rooftops are more fun than backyards anyways.
2. Minimal setbacks from the street. Encroaching right on the street. Old town Zionsville, IN is a great example of this. Get close to the people!
3. Every retail establishment is mixed use. People live on top. Retail below.
4. 1:4 or smaller ratio of large building that cover multiple zoned plots to smaller, single zoned lot buildings. This breaks up the surface of buildings at street level for pedestrians.
5. Narrow Streets
6. Minimum building height of 2 stories. You feel at home/enclosed without feeling trapped.
7. Alleys. Alleys. Alleys.
8. No garages in front, except for detached carriage houses on larger estates.
9. Mixed-use buildings with a higher frequency of bars, including in residential areas
10. Brick or stone, maybe wood, never vinyl or all glass exteriors.
11. Brick industrial buildings for small scale manufacturing.
12. Either a grid zone with smaller parcels, or a wavy, seemingly random streetscape with unexpected dead-ends
13. Smaller parks more frequently are generally > monolithic parks.
14. Trees shockingly close to and/or overhanging the street
15. Lots of churches
16. Buildings with symmetry and or what I call (foreground/background) composition, essentially a main portion of the home and a secondary portion. Not a typical McMansion’s stultifying mix of window styles, random arches, and garage doors.
17. Fractals 🙂
18. Flowers (especially roses) in front lawns and/or window boxes
19. A canal, river, or stream with houses along it
20. Tables on the sidewalk for people to eat/drink
21. Either A) no street parking or B) 2:1 street parking to driving area
22. Flags. Country/state/regional. In windows or next to front porches.
23. Shopkeepers sweeping the walk in front of their place

I plan on updating this list as I pattern match over time, and adding pictures. Let’s Bring Back Great Architecture to help places feel like home.

Originally published on Medium on June 2, 2019

Contemporary wisdom asserts that we are not evolving or moving towards or from a state. Our existence is a product of a random evolutionary process. The dynamic state of the world at large also renders many of our existing behaviors obsolete.

In the previous iteration of evolution, it was believed that the universe is locked in a battle for the survival of the fittest organism, with the winners receiving their reward, the right to reproduce. This lead to the conclusion that might makes right, and consequently social Darwinism, which was responsible for millions, if not billions of deaths. The implication of survival of the fittest -that might makes right and the left side of the bell curve should be removed from the gene pool-is evil.

Now survival of the fittest is anathema to modern evolutionary theory. Instead, every passed on genetic trait is believed to have happened for survival relative to a certain point in space time, and may or may not help fitness or survival long term.

Accepting the argument that evolution is at its core random implies that genes are only effective relative to the environment at the moment. This, of course, removes the idea of evolution as omniscient, or even really efficient relative to the contemporary rate of environmental entropy.

Thusly, modern evolutionary theory implies that psychotherapy and mental health treatments are useless. If traits are designed to be efficacious relative to a shifting and dynamic environment, and the derivative of our environment nor the position of the environment can be known (A more uncertain Heisinger’s uncertainty principle), our interaction with said environment has to be largely random. If that is the case, how can a baseline mental condition even exist, let alone have an ideal state that can possibly be known by humans?

The alternative for an atheistic evolutionary theorist is that there is an ideal mental state, which leads to long term survival of the fittest. If that’s the case, if mental conditions are caused by genes, they shouldn’t be treated. If they aren’t, then treatment is fine but you still don’t want the left hand of the human potential bell curve to reproduce. This is also known as eugenics. So either mental health can’t exist as an effective tool, or you must endorse eugenics to be a consistent evolutionary anthropologist. To be clear, I endorse neither removing mental health treatment nor eugenics.

Originally Published on May 13, 2019

We’ve all heard it. “Software Is Eating The World” or so sayeth Marc Andreessen. Andreesseen postulated in 2011 that as microprocessors allow us to automate more and more tasks, every business will eventually become a software business. Coding will obviate the need for repeated and non-replicable human decision-making. So far, he’s largely been proven right. Manufacturing, driving, trading, marketing, even writing have all since been partially consumed by the increasingly voracious beast known as software.

From conversations I’ve had at several dinner meet-ups in the Bay with People who Know Things about Computers, advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) are real and just getting started. Exponentially more information can be processed than ever before, with machines making many of the necessary resource allocation decisions previously left to humans. We shall term computer replacing humans’ in a decision making context “HRBC”-Humans Replaced By Computer.

We see HRBC in higher and higher levels of decision making.

Yet there is still one area of society, that is arguably the most important for long term economic growth and human flourishing, that is largely untouched by the rise of HRBC-that of designing physical objects. We have software that augments human ability, sure. AutoCAD helps designers of houses and physical objects create 3D mockups. CNC Machines and 3D printers take that CAD file and create objects out of metal, or plastic. But none of these are replacing the human who is initially designing the object and engineering the final process. Why can’t the design and engineering steps be automated? Previously, the complexity of the designs forced algorithms to hit an asymptote, namely available compute restraints, but as of late compute restraints are much higher.

As Christopher Alexander points out in his gem of a book A Pattern Language pre-1930s architecture was created by laymen based on a simple set of interdependent “pattern languages.” Those languages need a human to decide if they live and breathe-but what keep us from using AI/ML to create and tweak house designs based on those pattern languages (which are really just non-codified algorithms)? Furthermore, why do we need mechanical engineers to lay out duct work, or electrical engineers calculating loads and lay-outs? Those lay-outs in fresh builds are a complex but decipherable set of rules: amps need to match a wire’s ampacity, air flow rules are based on building’s square footage, volume, and dimensions. Why do we need humans to design and engineer fresh builds with all of our available computing power right now? Furthermore, over time, algorithms can and will build more efficiently than anyone else; code constraints limit creativity as is, which reduces complexity.

The same can be said for design. Let’s say I want to design a new type of camera with a known dimension, battery rating, and an external design that has been completed. Why do we need a designer to complete the entire interior layout? For that matter, why can’t we use AI/ML to design chipsets and remove the need for engineers to design our processors as we continue to wage our battle against Moore’s law?

Within 10 years, computers will first design, then soon thereafter design and engineer many of the physical devices we use. Eventually, they’ll invent new ones too.

Originally Published on April 17, 2019

I’ve spent part of the last week arguing on Twitter with a couple of Not In My Backyard (NIMBY) proponents on Twitter. They neglect many of the possibly good argument for their stance, resorting instead to a combination of covetousness, thinly-veiled classism and zero or negative sum economic thinking.

After a little more thinking, I realized what the dominant mode of thought is amongst coastal California progressives. Stated specifically, they believe in unrestricted inter-country migration, and they do not believe in intra-state migration. To wit:

Gentrification is viewed as unequivocally bad. Gentrification, or the movement of those classes of people with money and/or power into an area that is pre-dominantly occupied by the perceived oppressed class, is believed to displace people groups and hurt community ties. Certain criticisms of gentrification are valid-for instance, if a community has everyone sitting on their stoops playing music every night, and newcomers attempt to ban the playing of public music, it is infringing on the rights of the existing community. But generally, the acquisition and movement of capital will end up benefiting the poorest among us the most due to the marginal utility created by innovation, which largely happens with free flowing capital. Housing will get cheaper, displacment will lessen, and those communities will be able to gain more capital. Rent control, using local planning to block development, etc, largely hurts the “oppressed” classes the most. This leads to point 1: coastal progressives believe and actively promote policies that areas currently occupied by the perceived oppressed classes should not allow people to migrate into them.

Secondly, there are limited coastal lands. Building where fires can and do happen not only inevitably leads to the loss of houses on a long enough timeline, but creates worse fires when they do happen. Californians, rightfully so, are not fans of building in fire prone areas and are moving to slow it down

Progressive elites-especially Californians, prevent the development of infrastructure in many un-occupied areas due to environmental concerns.

Okay, so building is prohibited in areas occupied by oppressed communities. It is also prohibited inland, and water can’t get to almost any other new housing development that is not coastal. Even more, progressive coastal elites have instituted zoning policies which prevent building new homes for less than $1 million, or apartments at all. In almost every wealthy area in California. This, again, hurts ethnic minorities as well as people from other classes from moving into the community.

So we have established that California residents and newcomers can’t move into areas where the oppressed live if they are not from that oppressed class. They can’t create new infrastructures or towns. And the oppressed classes or newcomers definitely can’t move into areas where the rich live already. In essence, California’s infrastructure, zoning, tenant protections, and housing policy has created a situation in which intra-class geographic migration is highly discouraged, if not de facto prohibited.

Simultaneously, the majority of Californians believe in offering sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants. Amongst this favored class, the open borders/no walls movement is growing in favor; this same group is also extremely pro free international trade and global people movement. This creates an interesting pragmatic policy juxtaposition. The implicit Californian’s progressive agenda is to prohibit intra-state migration while encouraging inter-country migration. When people move into California, where are they supposed to live? And where are they even allowed to live?

Originally published on February 27, 2019

Descartes talked a lot about dualism-how our minds and bodies are intertwined yet separate, with the mind hypothetically taking precedence over the body. Here’s Wikipedia on the mind-body problem. This paradox of dualism (how do two things exist seemingly independently when they are symbiotic?) is not likely to be solved by anyone. That didn’t stop Arthur Koestler from trying. In his well known book The Ghost in the Machine Koestler argues that our body has varying degrees of primitive algorithms that are competing for our body and mind’s attention-the output of the algorithms comprise the titular Ghost in the Machine, our every thought a dynamic equilibrium between the warring algorithms.

That same mechanism of warring algorithms, various underlying processes fighting for the attention of the mind while in many cases seeking to sabotage the greater body, exists in the media and the collective conscious of our society.

How society as a whole pictures someone is largely a function of how the various ghosts in the societal-perception-machine function interact. The largest ghost remains the public media, with social media amplifying the second biggest ghost in the hidden Titanomachian struggle. The outcome of this hidden turmoil is a public creature, or rather a perception of a public figure, that represents something quite distinct from that person.

In one of my previous careers I got to know a lot of decently famous people. Let’s call the average semi-famous to famous day to day character, personality, traits, quirks, loves, hates of our subjects Persona A. While there is no such thing as a true self (Chuck Klostermann has done a great job of dismantling the “true self” in “The Visible Man” which I highly recommend), we can reasonably curate a view of a person as the sum of their daily actions. Persona A is the day to day action and character of the famous subject, with nothing left out. Good friends of the person will know most of the quirks and character of someone, significant others almost all. It will vary some, between business, family and personal, but there is a typical underlying thread of behavior.

Then, we have the widely accepted public perception of this person. Let’s call this Persona B. Persona B, in my experience is usually manufactured by the media or social media latching onto one or two character traits of someone and then building out a mythology around those traits. When the real life person behind Persona A does something to violate the public’s corpus of knowledge of the subject (for better or worse), they are often mocked, belittled, or exalted.

What I am proposing is that this contrast between Persona A and Persona B is merely the mind-body problem transposed into a different realm: that of public and private. Sometimes Persona A and Persona B are reasonably close, but often they are not. When a public figure violates their Persona B, the reason for the vitriol directed at them, is that Persona B not only has a prescribed action set that is allowed, but often has evolved into the point where it is, like a meme, practically its own living organism, with a set of expectations, actions, and virtues.

A great example of this is the recent (and not so recent) idea of “shipping” a couple. I’m an old man now and recently discovered this phenomena which means I will be explaining it wrong (a fractal example of the mind-body problem if you really think about it). In essence, fans of famous performers or actors often see a sign of public affection and decide that those involved should be in a relationship. Bradley Cooper ( a highly successful actor), croons to Lady Gaga (a fairly successful actress) in a pantomimed love song from a movie where their characters are in love, and the crowd clamors for them to get together. What the crowd is really doing is separating each of them from their imago dei. It is fundamentally de-personalizing them and creating a mythologized version of the two actors, who are required to act in a manner consistent with the ascribed mythology, regardless of its relationship with real life. Persona B has become a monster, out of control and untethered nearly completely from persona A. I say nearly completely because the actions of Persona A can still somewhat influence it, although often in unpredictable ways. Donald Trump, whose Persona A I am guessing is quite different from his Persona B, has figured out how to tame the wild beast and essentially solve his individual mind body problem. Same for Cardi B. It’s important to remember that both of them are granted power because the medium is the message, and they understand how to properly choose the dosage of medium and which parts of Persona A they inject into the machine.

But if you violate your status as a modern day god by doing something with Persona A that is not acceptable for your persona B, and the public finds out, you can expect a Promethean punishment. Leading, as always, to a Girard-ian sacrifice and a cycle of violence.

As I mentioned before, I got to know a lot of semi-famous people. Public perception, their Persona B, varies from more-or-less right but simplistic, to completely and totally off.

The implication of this is simple. Privately disregard the public’s view of anyone and everyone that you don’t know personally, while choosing to create a persona B that acts largely in concert with your persona A. Or, better yet, live a quiet life and work with your hands.

Originally Published on February 25, 2019

My brothers have started a farm in Columbus Junction, my hometown, about 45 minutes south of Iowa City.They are raising local meat that is as high of quality as any pork in the world. Their farm, Acorn Bluff Farms , is one of the few that raise a breed of pork known as Mangalitsa, which is known as the Kobe Beef of Pork.

Just look at these pork chops…

And this Iowa bacon…

Feel free to learn more at https://acornblufffarms.com/

Or follow them on Instagram

Acorn Bluff Farms (@acorn_bluff_farms) * Instagram photos and videos264 Followers, 375 Following, 183 Posts – See Instagram photos and videos from Acorn Bluff Farms (@acorn_bluff_farms)www.instagram.com

Originally published on February 21, 2019

I grew up in a hyper local environment, in small town Columbus Junction, Iowa, population 1,899 (with its two suburbs, Fredonia, and Columbus City, the population of CJ is closer to 2,300). My dad was the town veterinarian, my Grandpa the banker, and my Great-Grandma the lunch lady. Everyone knew everyone. Give me a pencil and a few old copies of the Gazette and I could likely triple Dunbar’s number with just relationships I had in Columbus Junction, and I could possibly meet Dunbar’s number with relatives in Columbus Junction’s county, Louisa, alone. Localism like the kind I grew up with has been under duress for a long time in America. While reductionist philosophers in their Ivory Towers may eschew local connections, I believe that a large part of the alienation Americans feel today is not because they are not dynamic enough in seeking opportunity, but rather because they are not rooted enough in a community.

Capitalism works like water working its way from the top to the bottom of a worm farm. It follows the path of least resistance, but eventually ends up at the local maximum (in the case of the ant farm, the bottom, and in the case of capitalism, value creation). Working from a neoliberal framework, it seems reasonable that artificial restrictions on trade and a lack of global freedom were the only restrictions holding our economy back. It follows then, that local economies have been gutted and localism is on a fast pace for extinction.

Laissez-fair capitalists and the more strident leftists make this same argument.

What they seem to ignore is the path dependence of the current state. Where we are now is not natural and only occurred because of top down intervention. While neoliberals and misguided conservatives fight to maintain the status quo where everyone is miserable, they forget that path dependence created a completely unnatural, inorganic state. They are not fighting to preserve capitalism, or free trade, but rather an antiquated system more closely akin to fascism than either spontaneous Hobbes-ianism or utopianism.

The status quo defends zoning and implicitly the absurd and unsustainable levels of municipal debt that created those sterile, inefficient, carbon-spewing miserable places known as suburbs. It defends the interstate highway system (a top down edict that likely destroyed hundreds of billions in value that would have been priced if not for land seized by eminent domain). The status quo defends rule by regulation. As my brother, the eminently quotable and mysterious @_s7ODD says

Simply put, the globally-connected, locally disconnected status quo is no result of Hayek-ian, bottoms up organization, but rather the direct result of government intervention at scale. The proposed solutions from both sides (spend trillions more for oil, re-create Venezuela but in the US ) are bad. Aegrescit medendo, to quote Virgil because I wanted to look smart.

But even as the powers that be (read: mostly power hungry sociopathic congressman and people convinced that crony capitalism is real capitalism) try to institute their perverted definition of neoliberalism, capitalism is inexorably finding its way to the bottom of the ant farm. And the more organic, developed state of human relationships is local. The next wave of Silicon Valley startups is following the return to localism.

These startups include:

NextDoor, home to the same hilarious local color our ancestors would have engaged in. Twitter is enabling spread out communities to coalesce around shared noble ideals, like Iowans’ love for Busch Light and Casey’s Pizza.

The French startup La Ruche Qui Dit Oui is bringing back local food, with taste. I would be surprised if, as we learn more about the gut-brain axis, we find that eating local food with local microbes isn’t extremely beneficial.

Meanwhile, Shopify and Etsy enable people to produce and sell their goods directly, without the required corporate reduction in personality, and AdTech, which originally hurt many small businesses, is now evening the playing field for companies who can, with smart Instagram marketing, have better signal fidelity over a wider range than at any point in history.

In my next Blog I’ll talk about how a cycle between localism and market expansion may provide the best overall return for world well-being while avoiding the risk of ruin.

Originally Published on December 28, 2018

When you meet a person or business who is very well paid, doesn’t have to work many hours, and generally loves their job and its benefits, there are three possibilities. Remember these before you get too jealous.

1. They have sacrificed years of blood, sweat, and tears to craft a wide enough moat. (Many family businesses)
2. They have regulatory capture advantages and are only this way because of the government. (Health care, real estate, ag, airlines, some finance groups).
3. They are about to get run over by a disruptive new business and have no idea what’s coming (Health care, real estate, ag, airlines, some finance groups).