Franklin Faraday Insights Roundup for March 13, 2021
Technology + Common Sense + Triskaidekaphobia
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Welcome to our Weekly Roundup of Actionable and Interesting things!
Special “Throwback Thirteen” Edition
This week we are trying something different.
Our archives contain hundreds, if not thousands of interesting and insightful things that we have collected and can’t include each week. Most of the time we just run out of space, and sometimes we find pieces too late and instead favor more recent items.
However, true insight rarely has an expiration date. Focusing on the “new” often blinds us to the bigger picture.
Since we are publishing this edition on a day with the lucky number 13, here’s a baker’s dozen of insightful articles on different subjects—carefully chosen so that none of them were published in the last week—that we guarantee you will enjoy.
In this issue:
The robots are coming for us... because they said so!
Passionate about the creator economy.
Do unto spammers as customer service does to you!
Crashing countries
Bugs that can cause a different kind of crash
1,867 startups and $100 billion
A catastrophic sea level rise… 8,500 years ago…
Killing a brand in 5 words or less
Brussels Sprouts: They used to be worse!
What doesn’t kill you might get you a Nobel Prize
Reverse outsourcing
Pizza vs. privacy
The best designed buildings make you want to go inside… The best designed libraries make you want to go inside a book!
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AI
An AI wrote an article about why we should not fear AI. It included such gems as this:
I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.
Creator Economy
The term “Creator Economy” is getting hot, but is still on the bleeding edge (outside of California) as you can see on google trends.
Li Jin (@ljin18) wrote this piece in July 2020 on “Unbundling Work From Employment: The internet and rise of micro-entrepreneurship.” It’s still the definitive work on this idea and a must read to understand this trend.
At the turn of the 20th century, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution in America, agrarian society and cottage industries gave way to urbanization, mass production, and corporate employment. At the dawn of the 21st century, new internet platforms are empowering a shift in work once again, from traditional employment arrangements to independent work that allows for greater autonomy and monetization of uniqueness and creativity at scale.
Another synonymous term that surfaced earlier in 2019 for the same idea was “Passion Economy” — and Li wrote the early work on that subject too in October 2019. Not surprisingly, she just started a VC firm focused on this area.
Criminal Minds
@Boris has a brilliant strategy to send spammers in circles… he does to them what customer service does to you when you try to cancel a subscription… or get your cable fixed…
Cybersecurity
In 2016, a hacker took down Liberia with a DDOS attack…
And since Liberia has had virtually no landlines since the brutal civil war that ended in 2003, that meant half the country was cut off from bank transactions, farmers couldn’t check crop prices, and students couldn’t Google anything. In the capital of Monrovia, the largest hospital went offline for about a week. Infectious disease specialists dealing with the aftermath of a deadly Ebola outbreak lost contact with international health agencies.
Dangerous Machines
In May 2020, the Register reported that a rare software bug made airliners turn the wrong way on a missed approach under certain very specific conditions, such as when pilots manually edited an altitude setting or used the Flight Management System’s temperature compensation in extremely cold weather.
In theory the bug could have led to airliners crashing into the ground, though the presence of two trained and alert humans in the cockpit monitoring what the aircraft was doing made this a remote possibility.
The article also references a 2019 Reuters report about possible software-induced destructive vibrations in Airbus A220s as well as a Boeing 737 software bug that caused cockpit screens to go blank when pilots tried to land due west on one of 7 seven specific runways in the U.S., Colombia, and Guyana.
We’ll stay with real pilots and steam gauges for now…
Entrepreneurship
When Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston (@jesslivingston) posted this magnificent article titled "Grow the Puzzle Around You" in 2018, YC had funded “1867 startups with a total value of over $100 billion.”
It’s far higher than that now…
If you expected someone like that to have a Harvard MBA and tell you how they were so much smarter than everyone else… well, you’d be very wrong.
It’s a bit embarrassing to reflect on, but I think it’s important to mention, because when journalists and biographers write about successful founders, they often focus on early predictors of success in their formative years. In my case there certainly weren't a lot of the conventional kind. No one would have voted me "most likely to succeed."
But while I had no "achievements," I did have three defining characteristics when I was younger that were critical in making Y Combinator work….
(You have to read to see what they were…)
As the VC firm took longer and longer to decide to hire me, the ideas grew more and more compelling until one night Paul said, "Let's just start our own." The next day we convinced Paul's cofounders from Viaweb, Robert and Trevor, to join us part-time. The initial plan was that they would pick and advise the startups and I’d do everything else.
Instead of giving large amounts of money to small numbers of established startups, like traditional VCs did, we'd give small amounts of money to large numbers of earlier stage startups, and then give them a lot of help.
…
So far this stuff might sound a bit different than you’d expect in a successful investor. But when you get to an extreme in something, things get qualitatively different. Y Combinator was a new extreme in the venture funding business, so what made someone a good investor was different. VCs relied on growth figures and estimates of market sizes, but those didn't exist at the stage we were investing. What YC needed was deeply technical people to understand the potential of an idea, and someone like me to understand the founders' characters and the relationship between them. And to do that well you needed abilities no one had previously considered important in an investor.
Environment
We are about as far away from the construction of the great pyramid in Egypt as those Egyptians were to the sea level rise that created the North Sea out of lowland forest.
During the last ice age, sea levels were 70 meters lower, and what is now the North Sea between Great Britain and the Netherlands was a rich lowland, home to modern humans, Neanderthals, and even earlier hominins. It all disappeared when glaciers melted and sea level rose about 8500 years ago… a massive freshwater lake in North America called Lake Agassiz, formed by melting glaciers, drained suddenly into the sea. What had been gradual sea-level rise accelerated, and seas rose a few meters within decades. Doggerland transformed from a temperate, forested plain into an estuarial wetland dotted by drier highlands.
#FAIL
A 5 word slogan destroyed a well-known car brand in a huge market.
What were the five words?
“Cheapest car in the world”
Ambitious middle-class Indians could deal with minor safety concerns, but not the perception of being low-income.
This was not the only incident of this type… we’ll tell you about a similar one in a future issue…
Food
Your taste buds didn't change, and it isn’t a COVID symptom — Brussels Sprouts WERE absolutely terrible when you were a kid. In the 1990s, Dutch scientists and plant breeders made them better.
"We have a whole gene bank here in our cellars, with all the possible Brussels sprouts varieties that were available from the past," says Cees Sintenie, a plant breeder at Bejo Zaden. There are hundreds of these old varieties. The companies grew them in test plots, and they did, in fact, find some that weren't as bitter. They cross-pollinated these old varieties with modern, high-yielding ones, trying to combine the best traits of old and new spruitjes. It took many years. But it worked. "From then on, the taste was much better. It really improved," Sintenie says.
Health
The Doctor Who Drank Infectious Broth, Gave Himself an Ulcer, and Solved a Medical Mystery…
This is one of our all-time favorite medical stories!
Outsourcing
In 2013, a software developer turned the tables by outsourcing his job to China… while he was still employed.
"Authentication was no problem. He physically FedExed his RSA [security] token to China so that the third-party contractor could log-in under his credentials during the workday. It would appear that he was working an average nine-to-five work day," he added.
"Evidence even suggested he had the same scam going across multiple companies in the area. All told, it looked like he earned several hundred thousand dollars a year, and only had to pay the Chinese consulting firm about $50,000 (£31,270) annually."
Privacy
Consumers claim to care about privacy, but market results say otherwise. For example, in 2017, @Susan_Athey and @stanfordGSB showed people will sell out their friends for pizza.
Random
The library in Kansas City, Missouri is… a giant bookshelf!
From our lawyers, or maybe lower paid interns billing at the full rate:
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