Are You Spending Your Money Wisely? [TED] – “Drawing on his experience negotiating million-dollar deals for global brands, procurement expert Wolfgang Schnellbaecher distills the tricks of the world’s best buyers into three simple rules to help you make the most of your money.”
Category: General
I watched Best in Show before having any exposure to dog shows. I didn’t really get the mockumentary (it was too over the top) until I learned more about dog shows… and now I see why the movie was such a hit!
It was fun (and scary) to read the economics behind it.
The economics of dog shows [The Hustle] – “What drives the people behind the spectacle? As one California-based dog handler told me, “Number one, you have to be competitive. And you have to love the dogs.”
You also have to be willing to sink a small fortune into breeding, grooming, training, feeding, and showing your prospective prize-winners, with no guarantee of a return on investment.”
We probably experience similar trajectories every time new technology is introduced in the workplace. Rapid increase in productivity but also increase in cognitive fatigue and burnout.
Our brains can only go so fast and so hard for so long.
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It [Harvard Business Review] – “One of the promises of AI is that it can reduce workloads so employees can focus more on higher-value and more engaging tasks. But according to new research, AI tools don’t reduce work, they consistently intensify it: In the study, employees worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day, often without being asked to do so. That may sound like a win, but it’s not quite so simple. These changes can be unsustainable, leading to workload creep, cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making. The productivity surge enjoyed at the beginning can give way to lower quality work, turnover, and other problems. To correct for this, companies need to adopt an “AI practice,” or a set of norms and standards around AI use that can include intentional pauses, sequencing work, and adding more human grounding.”
This is a review of a book, Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough, and it sounds like a really fascinating read. I tried to find it on Amazon but apparently not available in the USA – no idea why.
Everybody Loves Our Dollars by Oliver Bullough review – a jaw-dropping exposé of money laundering [The Guardian] – “From handbags to drug gangs to central banks – one of Britain’s finest investigative reporters reveals the surprising links in a global chain of crime”
Follow the incentives…
Why Advisors Don’t Recommend 529s [The College Financial Lady] – “There’s a reason a lot of advisors don’t like 529s, and it has nothing to do with making sure that you have money available for college. Instead it’s this: if you put your college savings into your state’s 529 plan, the advisor usually can’t charge you a management fee for it. There, I said that part out loud. If you are saving for college and working with an advisor who tells you not to use a 529, ask them whether they’re a fiduciary to you because it’s unlikely that that advice is in your best interest.“
Paul Graham was asked (and then unasked) to give a talk to a high school.
He originally published this article 21 years ago and it’s just as accurate today.
This is what he was going to say:
What You’ll Wish You’d Known [Paul Graham] – “But there are other jobs you can’t learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I’ve done in the last ten years didn’t exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it’s not a good idea to have fixed plans.”
Before I was a finance creator, I was a software engineer and worked with a lot of other software engineers.
I know for a fact I would’ve benefited from learning some of these lessons earlier rather than later and many have crossover appeal to other industries… especially the “cleverness is overhead” bit. Humans love being clever, whether it’s in code or otherwise. Simplicity is elegant. 🙂
21 Lessons From 14 Years at Google [Addy Osmani] – “3. Bias towards action. Ship. You can edit a bad page, but you can’t edit a blank one.
The quest for perfection is paralyzing. I’ve watched engineers spend weeks debating the ideal architecture for something they’ve never built. The perfect solution rarely emerges from thought alone – it emerges from contact with reality. AI can in many ways help here.
First do it, then do it right, then do it better. Get the ugly prototype in front of users. Write the messy first draft of the design doc. Ship the MVP that embarrasses you slightly. You’ll learn more from one week of real feedback than a month of theoretical debate.
Momentum creates clarity. Analysis paralysis creates nothing.”
Professor Donald Knuth is a professor emeritus at Stanford University and a 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, considered the Nobel Prize of computer science, and I love this note of his from back in the day.
I don’t know when exactly it was written but I suspect it’s been decades. And it’s just as accurate today as it was then.
Email (let’s drop the hyphen) [Don Knuth’s Stanford website] – “Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.”
I also like this quote:
`I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.’ — Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker
I enjoy Morgan Housel’s “a few things I’m pretty sure about” posts because it’s a rapid fire list of ideas worth pondering.
I went to Carnegie Mellon University to study Computer Science, a very competitive program. At our first day of orientation, the speaker said “you were all in the top 5% of your class, 95% of you will have to get used to the idea that you won’t be in the top 5% anymore.” Welcome to CMU. 🤣
A Few Things I’m Pretty Sure About [Collab Fund] – “An iron rule of math is that 50% of the population has to be below average. It’s true for income, intelligence, health, wealth, everything. And it’s a brutal reality in a world where social media stuffs the top 1% of moments of the top 1% of people in your face.
You can raise the quality of life for those below average, or set a floor on how low they can go. But when a majority of people expect a top 5% outcome the result is guaranteed mass disappointment.”
I think his housing affordability argument has some serious legs.
OK, nothing to do with money but today’s a good day to learn about trains!
(and you get a good shot of Point State Park in Pittsburgh where the Ohio, Allegheny, and Monongahela Rivers meet from 7-13 seconds in)
Every Type of Railcar Explained in 15 Minutes