Notes

“You’ll be fired for using AI,” and “You’ll be fired for not using AI” are the same unhedged bet.

Risk is rarely that clean. And all-in looks like a power move right until the other side calls the bet.

Taxes never stay in their weight class.

Action is not efficacy, and staying busy doesn’t mean you are getting things done.

Especially true in my chosen professions.

Attention is capital—maybe the only form traded, leveraged, and grown no matter the underlying political or economic system.

A classically liberal society protects the annoying from the dangerous. Be wary of those who can’t tell the difference.

What consultants and hookers know: Clients shop for the product, but pay for the experience.

We can afford our villains being rich a lot more than we can afford them being powerful.

Given a choice, I’d rather be effective than smart.

Small World: The superior Disney attraction. But also the most American Disney attraction—fight me.

Global peace and happiness? Through an American lens on American terms. Your culture? The stuff of our childhood amusement. Your ancient tongue? Added around the edges for local color. For years it even had corporate advertising gently urging you on at the start of the ride.

All run by an American company that, when it first expanded outside of the U.S., put one park in a nation we conquered and one in a nation we saved.

It is a small world after all. But it’s that way in no small part because we’ve got satellites and drones.

Today’s smart quote from a colleague: “Saying no is a form of customer service.”

Many, many problems summarized:

Conversations we once had with our neighbors have been outsourced to the government.

Grace to others means treating their problems as objectively hard, even if they seem subjectively easy.

America in two stats:

• In a new Gallup poll 60% of Americans surveyed think their taxes are too high.

• A 2022 analysis by the Tax Policy Center reported that about 40% of U.S. households would pay no federal income taxes for tax year 2022.

The biggest voting block in America isn’t right or left, Republican or Democrat; it’s people who want more government than they are willing to pay for.

Cynicism is easy and safe; optimism is dangerous.

Live dangerously.

Most people are like most people.

And most people don’t want to hear that.

Several folks this week have referred to the lottery as a tax on poor people, a tax on stupid people, etc. I want to be pedantic about this, because words matter.

No one is forcing anyone to buy a lottery ticket.

No one’s being threatened with jail time if they don’t buy a lottery ticket.

No one’s being dragged into a legal process where they are presumed guilty until proven innocent if they don’t buy a lottery ticket.

There are not tens of thousands of enforcers out there looking for people who didn’t buy their lottery ticket.

There are no hotlines to anonymously report those who didn’t buy a lottery ticket.

Politicians do not regularly buy voter approval by fucking around at the margins with lottery ticket payouts.

There is no organized industry—hundreds of thousands of people—lobbying Congress to keep the purchase of lottery tickets as complicated as possible so they can keep their jobs.

You may not like the lottery. You may never play the lottery. But don’t mistake it for a tax. Because doing that makes it too easy to forget the sheer tonnage of force, coercion and political strongarming a real tax involves.

Virtually all consulting: “We apply our standard solution to your custom problem.”

You can be calm and also be relentless.

This paper compares English Coffeehouses and Parisian Salons during the Enlightenment.

DO NOT EYEROLL MY READING, PEOPLE!

The best part? The arbitrage run by the Londoners of the period.

Coffeehouses offered access to the day’s papers, and the price of admission was only the price of a cup of coffee (a penny for unlimited refills). This squeezed newspaper margins, so the papers raised their prices for the coffeehouses in response.

Coffeehouses retaliated by going direct-to-consumer and printing their own newspapers. This was easier than it sounds—coffeehouses were the center of gossip so it just required someone writing down what they heard.

The newspapers vertically integrated as well, starting their own coffeehouses. Those CNBC stores in the airports? They have, in a sense, 350 years of history.

Everything old is new again.

If you want a more thoughtful takeaway, it’s right there in the abstract: “... (C)offeehouses were the most important public sphere institutions in London and the same was true for the salons of Paris. Three key characteristics were shared by the coffeehouses and salons as public sphere institutions: sociability, equality and communication. Within the realm of the coffeehouse and salon, a heterogeneous group of people came together to engage in rational debate without regard to rank.”

The illiberal trilemma:

a) Diversity of values
b) Liberty
c) A strong central government

Pick two.

Threat velocity, not magnitude, drives response. It’s why we militarize police while globally coordinated climate action is likely forever out of reach.

Both sides: “If we back them into a corner, they’ll see reason.”

History disagrees.

Reminder: Better tech and/or a better product rarely beat better go-to-market strategy.

News item: In December, Harry and Meghan trademarked the “Sussex Royal” brand, including 100 items ranging from notepads and socks to counseling services.

As Eric Hoffer once said: Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

Many folks passionately want to change the world. A smaller number are serious about it.

Save your energy for the second group.

When it comes to privately regulating speech on the internet, the author posits that you can have any two—but not all three: scalability, effectiveness or consistency.

I usually distrust generalizations that easily boil down into quips, but this one has a ring of truth to it.

Responding late to Q1: Your fees are too low if you’re winning work primarily on price, rather than on positioning. #solopr