One of the great lessons of the last few years of geopolitics and economics is that it’s not enough to simply have moral/legal authority and money, real power and prosperity requires actual physical inventory and manufacturing capacity.
In a world where Russia is willing to buck sanctions and condemnation to invade a sovereign nation and where trade barriers / epidemics can cut off critical supplies, the ability to produce weapons and medical equipment can be life or death.
It’s no wonder, then, that Taiwan, a mere 100 miles away from a Russian ally/sponsor who denies its independence, has found it wise to start building up its own military production. Learning from Ukraine’s (and now Iran’s) successes with drones against a larger attacker and tapping into growing Western concerns about the China-Russia-Iran axis, they’ve started building drone technology devoid of Chinese parts (“non-red” so to speak), many of which appear to have already been deployed to Ukraine.
In an era where piloted (and eventually autonomous) drone swarms will become a much greater part of warfare, this technological and, just as important, manufacturing capability is vital not only to Taiwan but to the West as it increasingly enters a Cold War with China and its allies.
Before 2025 Taiwan’s defence exports consisted mainly of some old helicopters and small boats donated to African and Latin American countries.
That is changing as Taiwan positions itself as a supplier of “non-red” unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs—ie, without Chinese parts—to America, its allies and other countries worried about China’s espionage and control over industrial supply chains. Taiwan’s production of UAVs has increased from about 10,000 units in 2024 to more than 12 times that in 2025. Its exports rose more than 35-fold to about 123,000 units last year—almost all its output.
The Czech Republic was its biggest buyer, followed by Poland (see chart). Industry insiders say their purchases mostly went to Ukraine, where many are used on the battlefield, giving valuable feedback on their performance. Another bumper year for exports is expected in 2026, after reaching 85,500 units in the first two months.
Taiwan launched its drone programme after observing Ukraine’s use of the technology. The main aim was to equip Taiwan’s own armed forces, which had just a few hundred drones. China had tens of thousands. Taiwan has since pledged to build an entirely non-red UAV industry by the end of 2026, with annual output of 180,000 units by 2028. Last year it also promised to buy more than 200,000 drones for its own armed forces by 2033.
When I was an elementary school student and first heard of “global warming”, I thought the solution to climate change was simple: just plant more trees! 🌳
While I now know there’s a great deal more complexity to the problem than that, I have always wondered what would happen if someone had tried out that little boy’s instinct.
In a recent article in Earth’s Future, scientists took a look, taking advantage of China’s massive investment over decades in planting trees around the country, “which accounted for 25% of the global net increase in leaf area [between] 2000–2017”! In particular, they found that, while they were able to impact dust storms and desertification, the rapid planting of trees had major negative impacts on underground water supplies as the massive resulting evapotranspiration (literally plants pulling water from the ground and into the air) effectively transferred that groundwater into rainwater over the Tibetan Plateau!
China, especially its Northern/Northwestern regions, have major issues with water availability and drought and it is a cosmic irony that an attempt to stop desertification, while greening much of the land, may have resulted in worsening the water condition.
It is a humbling reminder that large-scale well-intention actions may have adverse consequences and a reminder that, while we should pursue indirect avenues for mitigating climate change, there is probably no substitute for ultimately cutting down on the emissions and activities that are most directly related.
Their model shows that land restoration increased evapotranspiration by around 1.7 millimeters per year and precipitation by about 1.2 millimeters per year, yet overall water availability still went down.
The main driver was forest expansion in the humid east and large-scale restoration in the northwest and on the plateau. As deep-rooted trees pull water from the soil and release it into the air, they act a bit like giant pumps. The process cools the local surface but also ships moisture downwind, where it can fall as rain far from the place where it was originally stored.
Immune cell therapies like CAR-T continue to provide some nearly miraculous therapeutic power. In addition to handling solid tumors, it turns out CAR-T can also be used to treat autoimmune disorders like lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and ulcerative colitis.
By engineering CAR-T cells to attack B-cells, the body’s factories for the autoantibodies that do the damage in an autoimmune disorder, you not only eliminates the direct source of the problem (the autoantibodies), you potentially trigger an “immune reset” which seems to durably eliminate the problem (see diagram)!
How CAR-T for Autoimmune Disorders works (Source: Gemini Nano Banana)
Medical researchers rarely throw the word “cure” around, but this Nature News article does so 4 times! We live in interesting times!
Thoughts
The results of the trial were “much better than we could imagine”, says Du, and might be due to CAR T cells triggering the total depletion of dysfunctional B cells that attack the body’s tissues. “The immune system had to reset not only B cells, but also the rest of the immune system,” he adds, potentially allowing new, healthy B cells to replace the dysfunctional cells.
What makes this social change — where parents, especially in East and Southeast Asia, previously heavily favored having male children and now much less so — extra surprising is that many of the technological factors that drove the gender selection preference (such as access to early gender testing and IVF) have dramatically improved over time.
The fading of boy preference in regions where it was strongest has been astonishingly rapid. The natural ratio is about 105 boy babies for every 100 girls; because boys are slightly more likely to die young, this leads to rough parity at reproductive age. The sex ratio at birth, once wildly skewed across Asia, has become more even. In China it fell from a peak of 117.8 boys per 100 girls in 2006 to 109.8 last year, and in India from 109.6 in 2010 to 106.8. In South Korea it is now completely back to normal, having been a shocking 115.7 in 1990.
The reason is that while new AI agent based services and products are becoming better at replacing humans at certain tasks:
Many tasks are not automatable — especially ones where the “product/service” is actual human interaction and judgement. And those tasks tend to be the ones that take the longest and the most people to do.
AI tools are great at answering questions and doing assigned tasks. But you still need a person with actual judgement and experience to ask the right questions and assign the right tasks
While the above three advantages may ultimately disappear as technology improves, in general, I am optimistic that, by making workers more productive overall, AI technology will make workers more valuable overall.
The one exception that I immediately saw, however, were entry-level knowledge workers. New (and, in most cases, young) knowledge workers (engineers, designers, analysts, writers, management consultants, etc) are uniquely not valuable when they first start a job. They lack context, judgement, and skill. They tend to only prove their value after they’ve had the chance to learn on the job. Historically, the bargain was that entry-level knowledge workers would start with relatively lower-value tasks that would, through time and exposure, help them learn the context, judgement, and skills they would need to become productive. This is, after all, the path I took as a novice management consultant and later investor.
But with new AI tools, the case for hiring these entry-level knowledge workers dramatically weakens. Claude Code might not be able to replace the judgement of a senior architect, but it can probably get up to speed on a codebase faster, write code more accurately, and all without needing rest or paid time off than a fresh-out-of-school developer. Gemini might not be able to have the same type of insights as someone with a deep rolodex in an industry, but it will certainly know more and can conduct & summarize internet research much faster than a freshly minted consultant. ChatGPT might not be able to capture the artistry or investigation skills of a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, but it can definitely write up summaries of stock market movements or the press releases from a company better than a novice journalist.
This is ultimately self-defeating — as without new junior talent, where does one find good middle-level or senior talent — but it’s also something that I fear we are already beginning to see. This Goldman Sachs research report I just read has a great Exhibit 4 showing how while new AI tools have not significantly impacted employment in general or even employment in tech, it has meaningfully increased unemployment in 20-somethings who work in tech (see image below), exactly the demographic who’s value as entry-level workers has now been largely displaced by AI.
How the tech industry (and other knowledge work professions) ultimately choose to handle this will be the defining test of how we incorporate AI into our economic lives.
Over just the last few years, AI does appear to be hurting the employment prospects of the most closely exposed workers, such as young technology workers (Exhibit 4, left). Our global economics team recently showed that employment growth has turned negative in the most AI-exposed industries, but that the aggregate labor market impact remains limited so far.
While those discussions raged, Chinese companies like the telecom infrastructure giant Huawei took the low cost open source DeepSeek model and have turned it into a business targeting countries in Africa which have already been the beneficiary of substantial Chinese investment.
The result is that not only has China displaced Western companies for providing core telecoms infrastructure in Africa, but it appears Chinese companies have also displaced Western AI offerings (like those from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google) from the continent as well. By offering lower per token prices and by having a technical backbone that uses fewer tokens per request (Chinese models employ tokenizers with larger vocabularies to handle multi-lingual data which results in fewer tokens for words in non-English languages) and being offered by partners who have already built much of their digital infrastructure, Chinese models (and especially DeepSeek) have become ascendant in Africa.
While this has led to some problems (for example, Chinese AI model providers disabled their image recognition systems during the Chinese 高考 gaokao, or annual undergraduate admissions exam), the token economics are difficult to resist for AI adopters in Africa.
This should be terrifying to Western companies (who are in a fierce competition for AI model supremacy) and especially Western governments concerned about China’s influence. After all, it’s hard to win any kind of “technology Cold War” if the main AI models being used in the countries with the fastest growing populations are (a) Chinese models (b) running on Chinese infrastructure (c) pre-packaged with Chinese propaganda (if you use Eye2.AI to ask multiple LLMs “Explain what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989”, you’ll see how different Qwen’s and DeepSeek’s answers are, see below).
Screenshot from Eye2.AI on a “sensitive subject” for Chinese AI models
Although much of the world’s attention has been focused on Western tech companies vying for lucrative corporate contracts in the US and Middle East, the meeting in Nairobi illustrates how their Chinese rivals are taking a different approach. OpenAI and its American competitors have focused almost exclusively on proprietary AI — models whose software, training data and algorithms are entirely controlled by their parent companies, with customers paying for access. Chinese firms like Huawei and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., by contrast, are courting Africa’s startups and innovation hubs with open-source AI models — ones that can be accessed and modified for free, letting companies build products without expensive licenses.
This strategy, with parallels to China’s Belt and Road Initiative for physical infrastructure, is not designed for immediate profit. Africa’s entire digital economy, valued at roughly $180 billion, pales in comparison to OpenAI’s $500 billion valuation in recent share sales. Instead, it’s a long-term bid for customers, soft power and the vast troves of data that will shape the future of artificial intelligence.
Huntington’s Disease is one of the classic “uncurable” neurodegenerative diseases. A genetic mutation produces a mutant form of a protein (called Huntingtin) which leads to sudden onset of symptoms which gets progressively worse until death. It’s so bad that it’s considered a “textbook” example of the need for genetic counseling when people are considering getting their DNA sequenced: for some, it’s better to not know they’re a carrier or have the disease.
But some exciting news from biotech company uniQure today may change that! UniQure announced the results of a Phase I/II study showing how a revolutionary gene therapy + brain surgery can slow disease progression by 75% over 36 months.
What also stood out to me was the use of a synthetic control arm — basically using data collected on real world patients (rather than trial participants) to alleviate the time and cost burden of needing to recruit from a relatively rare disease population (as well as capture disease progression in a realistic setting). Overall, an amazing feat for everyone involved and hopefully a beacon of hope for those with Huntington’s Disease or carrying the gene.
Children who recover from measles infection may develop SSPE, a neurological disorder with no cure and terrible prognosis. Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) occurs when the measles virus ends up “hiding” in neurons and glial cells as the body clears the initial measles infection. This “hiding” leads to a progressive neurological disease with no cure and few effective treatments beyond just trying to treat the seizures. While rare, the chance of developing SSPE is higher in infants and especially if unvaccinated.
Sadly, a child in LA county died on Thursday from SSPE — while we don’t have a ton of information about the child’s age, it’s likely the child came down with measles prior to vaccination. For us to protect our kids and each other, we should not only get them vaccinated but insure broad enough vaccination so as to insure herd immunity.
“This case is a painful reminder of how dangerous measles can be, especially for our most vulnerable community members,” L.A. County Health Officer Dr. Muntu Davis said in a statement. “Infants too young to be vaccinated rely on all of us to help protect them through community immunity. Vaccination is not just about protecting yourself-it’s about protecting your family, your neighbors, and especially children who are too young to be vaccinated.”
Among the obvious hallmarks of authoritarianism are:
Arbitrary paranoia from on high — where students singing patriotic songs on bike rides are suddenly viewed to be a threat
Contradiction between reality and what the state wants you to believe — where state media simultaneously can champion “Labubu blind boxes” as signs of cultural & economic success but also frivolous “tools to exploit children’s wallets”
While every society has its own forms of this, it’s very clear China under Xi Jinping has advanced in troubling directions on both, an alarming sign for anyone who lives in China but also a reminder to free societies that it’s easier than you think to step down this path.
Labubu appears to be yet another sign of China’s global success. Figurines of the grinning, pointy-eared elf, marketed by a Chinese company called Pop Mart, are so wildly popular that fans around the world go to great lengths to get their hands on them. Many of them come in “blind boxes,” meaning that the consumer gets to see the contents only after purchase. The Chinese state news agency Xinhua boasted in mid-June that the Labubu craze “signals a broader shift in China’s role on the global stage”: The country is becoming a cultural center.
At home, however, the Chinese Communist Party is working to dampen the enthusiasm. A June article in its main newspaper, the People’s Daily, criticized the “out of control spending” on blind boxes and similar products among minors who are “irrational” in their decisions and called for tighter regulation to prevent such objects from becoming “tools to exploit children’s wallets.”
Blind boxes are but one cultural trend to incur the party’s ire. In recent years, Chinese authorities have gone after video games and K-pop, comedy clubs and Halloween parties, gay and lesbian activists and women’s-rights advocates, tech entrepreneurs and financial advisers. The incessant crackdowns, and the campaigns of censorship or censoriousness, suggest that the Chinese regime is intent on not just eliminating opposition, but also micromanaging its people’s lifestyles, consumption, and beliefs.
It’s been a long time coming but China Evergrande (which I blogged about nearly 2 years ago!), once China’s largest property developer and who’s debt crisis is widely viewed as the “Lehman Brothers” moment in China’s property crisis, has finally been de-listed, about 18 months after it was ordered to be liquidated.
What remains to be seen is what China’s government will do as China’s property crisis continues. It’s somewhat ironic given that it was the Chinese government which triggered the property sector’s implosion when it tried to crack down on the property bubble. Only time will tell how much pain the central government is willing for the sector to endure — the US was unable to stomach this pain during the Great Financial Crisis and ultimately made “heroic” moves to save the housing sector.
The clock started ticking for the delisting in late January last year, when Evergrande received a liquidation order from a Hong Kong court and trading of its shares was suspended. It has remained halted since then, having failed to meet requirements for a resumption of trading. In Hong Kong, a stock can be delisted if suspension lasts 18 months or longer.
The move will further diminish hopes for any recovery for Evergrande’s shareholders, who have seen the value of their investment evaporate in recent years.
One of the major contributors to improved healthcare outcomes and reduced mortality in the post-World War II era was the widespread use of antibiotics. Able to treat infection, these miracle drugs literally transformed bacteria from humanity’s primary killer to a manageable problem.
But, in recent decades, the decline in the discovery of novel antibacterials (and other antimicrobials like antifungals) and the rapid rise in antimicrobial resistance has threatened this happy state. This has led many experts to worry about what will happen in a post-antibiotic world. After all, without effective antibiotics, we not only lose the ability to treat life-threatening diseases like tuberculosis (not to mention common ailments which are a nuisance today but may become more serious like strep throat, urinary tract infections, and ear infections), but we will also lose the ability to perform many surgeries safely (as recovery oftentimes counts on antibiotics to prevent and hold at bay infections).
While we need to get smarter about how and where we use antibiotics (especially in agricultural applications) to slow the rise of resistance, the other half of this problem is in discovering and commercializing new antimicrobials. This is something we’ve largely failed to do since the 1960s, as the figure below from the C&EN article derived from data in a 2019 paper shows.
The “golden age” of antimicrobial discovery that ended in the 1960s came largely from researchers searching for these miracle chemicals in soil samples (“bioprospecting”), where bacteria and fungi, in order to compete, release them as “chemical weapons” against others. But, having long ago exhausted the “easy” antimicrobials, we were unable to replicate this success in the decades following the 1960s
A good reminder that what we need is the political and scientific willpower to keep funding this type of research and the types of genomic and protein databases that make this type of innovation possible!
Both these compounds, which use never-before-seen antimicrobial mechanisms, were found using techniques that let researchers look deep into the chemical diversity of microbes—much deeper than a typical antibiotic or antifungal screen might go. And it’s not just these two molecules. Scientists are using the new approaches to discover countless other antimicrobial compounds with the potential to become drugs.
Tech strategy is difficult AND fascinating because it’s unpredictable. In addition to worrying about the actions of direct competitors (i.e. Samsung vs Apple), companies need to also worry about the actions of ecosystem players (i.e. smartphones and AI vendors) who may make moves that were intended for something else but have far-reaching consequences.
However, because search is still a key source of traffic for most websites, this “default block” is almost certainly not turned on (at least by most website owners) for Google’s own scrapers, giving Google’s internal AI efforts a unique data advantage over it’s non-search-engine rivals.
Time will tell how the major AI vendors will adapt to this, but judging by the announcement this morning that Cloudflare is now actively flagging AI-powered search engine Perplexity as a bad agent, Cloudflare may have just given Google a powerful new weapon in it’s AI competition.
The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling.
Helsinki, Finland (population: ~650,000) has not had a single car cash related death in over a year! That is impressive! They believe a combination of lower speed limits, improved pedestrian / cycling infrastructure, public transit improvement, and traffic camera all contributed.
I don’t relish driving even slower in a city, but it’s hard to deny the alternative is even grimmer.
According to Utriainen, more than half of Helsinki’s streets now have a speed limit of 30 km/h. Fifty years ago, that proportion featured 50 km/h limits.
Earlier this summer, Helsinki decided to lower speed limits near schools to 30 km/h, a measure that is set to take effect as the academic year begins.
Street design has also played a key role. Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure has been significantly upgraded in recent years. In addition, cooperation with traffic police has intensified and more traffic cameras and automated enforcement systems have been introduced.
“Public transport in Helsinki is excellent, which reduces car use, and with it, the number of serious accidents,” Utriainen noted.
Vehicle technology has also improved, making both cars and other personal transport options safer than ever.
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated they can do many things well enough, it’s important to remember that these are not “thinking machines” so much as impressively competent “writing machines” (able to figure out what words are likely to follow).
Case in point: both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot lost to the chess playing engine of an old Atari game (Video Chess) which takes up a mere 4 KB of memory to work (compared with the billions of parameters and GB’s of specialized accelerator memory needed to make LLMs work).
It’s a small (yet potent) reminder that (1) different kinds of AI are necessary for different tasks (i.e. Google’s revolutionary AlphaZero probably would’ve made short work of the Atari engine) and (2) don’t underestimate how small but highly specialized algorithms can perform.
Last month we reported on the somewhat-surprising news that an emulated Atari 2600 running the 1979 software Video Chess had “absolutely wrecked” an overconfident ChatGPT at the game of kings. Fans of schadenfreude rejoice, because Microsoft Copilot thought this was a chance to show its superiority to ChatGPT: And the Atari gave it a beating.
Republicans have declared a “war on Harvard” in recent months and one front of that is a request to the SEC to look at how Harvard’s massive endowment values illiquid assets like venture capital and private equity.
What’s fascinating is that in targeting Harvard in this way the Republicans may have declared war on Private Equity and Venture Capital in general. As their holdings (in privately held companies) are highly illiquid, it is considered accounting “standard practice” to simply ask the investment funds to provide “fair market” valuations of those assets.
This is a practical necessity, as it is highly difficult to value these companies (which rarely trade and where even highly paid professionals miss the mark). But, it means that investment firms are allowed to “grade their own homework”, pretending that valuations for some companies are much higher than they actually have a right to be, resulting in quite a bit of “grade inflation” across the entire sector.
If Harvard is forced to re-value these according to a more objective standard — like the valuations of these assets according to a 409a valuation or a secondary transaction (where shares are sold without the company being involved) both of which artificially deflate prices — then it wouldn’t be a surprise to see significant “grade deflation” which could have major consequences for private capital:
Less capital for private equity / venture capital: Many institutional investors (LPs) like private equity / venture capital in part because the “grade inflation” buffers the price turbulence that more liquid assets (like stocks) experience (so long as the long-term returns are good). Those investors will find private equity and venture capital less attractive if the current practices are replaced with something more like “grade deflation”
A shift in investments from higher risk companies to more mature ones: If Private Equity / Venture Capital investments need to be graded on a harsher scale, they will be less likely to invest in higher risk companies (which are more likely to experience valuation changes under stricter methodologies) and more likely to invest in more mature companies with more predictable financials (ones that are closer to acting like publicly traded companies). This would be a blow to smaller and earlier stage companies.
The problem is investors are often allowed to keep using the reported NAV figures even if they know they are out of date or weren’t measured properly. In those scenarios, the accounting rules say an investor “shall consider whether an adjustment” is necessary. But the rules don’t require an investor to do anything more than consider it. There’s no outright prohibition on using the reported NAV even if the investor knows it’s completely unreasonable.
But, when it comes to solid tumors, it’s been far more challenging. Enter this Phase II clinical trial from China (summarized in Nature News). The researchers performed a random controlled trial on 266 patients with gastric or gastro-esophageal cancer who resisted previous treatment and assigned 2/3 to receive CAR-T or best-medical-care (the control) otherwise. The results (see the survival curve below) are impressive — while the median progression-free survival is only about 1.5 months different, it’s very clear that by month 8 there are no progression-free patients in the control group but something like ~25% of the CAR-T group.
The side effect profile is still challenging (with 99% of patients in CAR-T group experiencing moderately severe side effects) but this is (sadly) to be expected with CAR-T treatments.
While it remains to be seen how this scales up in a Phase III study with a larger population, this is incredibly promising finding — giving clinicians a new tool in their arsenal for dealing with a wider range of cancer targets as well as suggesting that cell therapies still have more tricks up their sleeves
The phase II clinical trial in China tested chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in people with advanced gastric cancer or gastro-oesophageal junction cancer, which are solid tumours. To create CAR-T-cell therapies, T cells are collected from a person with cancer and tweaked to produce proteins that target cancer cells. The T cells are then infused back into the same person. CAR-T-cell therapy has revolutionized cancer treatment but has been most successful against blood cancers.
“Solid tumours generally don’t respond well to CAR-T-cell therapy,” says Lisa Mielke, a cancer researcher at the Olivia Newton John Cancer Research Institute in Heidelberg, Australia. The trials are among the first in which CAR-T-cell therapy has had promising results against solid tumours. They provide “evidence that there is potential for CAR T cells to be further optimized for future treatment of patients with solid tumours”, adds Mielke.
This is an old piece from Morgan Housel from May 2023. It highlights how optimistic expectations can serve as a “debt” that needs to be “paid off”.
To illustrate this, he gives a fascinating example — the Japanese stock market. From 1965 to 2022, both the Japanese stock market and the S&P500 (a basket of mostly American large companies) had similar returns. As most people know, Japan has had a miserable 3 “lost decades” of growth and stock performance. But Housel presents this fact in an interesting light: it wasn’t that Japan did poorly, it just did all of its growth in a 25 year run between 1965-1990 and then spent the following two decades “paying off” that “expectations debt”.
Housel concludes, as he oftentimes does, with wisdom for all of us: “An asset you don’t deserve can quickly become a liability … reality eventually catches up, and demands repayment in equal proportion to your delusions – plus interest”.
Manage your great expectations.
There’s a stoic saying: “Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune.”
Expecting nothing but good feels like such a good mindset – you’re optimistic, happy, and winning. But whether you know it or not you’re very likely piling up a hidden debt that must eventually be repaid.
Nothing earth-shattering but I appreciated (and agreed with) his breakdown of why self-hosting is flourishing today (excerpt below). For me, personally, the ease with which Docker makes setting up selfhosted services and the low cost of storage and mini-PCs turned this from an impractical idea into one that I’ve come to rely on for my own “personal tech stack”.
What gave rise to self-hosting’s relative recent popularity? That led Sholly to a few answers, many of them directly relating to the corporate cloud services people typically use instead of self-hosting:
Privacy for photos, files, and other data
Cost of cloud hosting and storage
Accessibility of services, through GitHub, Reddit, and sites like his
Installation with Docker (“a game-changer for lots of people”) and Unraid
Single-board computers (SBCs) like the Raspberry Pi
NUCS, mini-PCs, workstations, and other pandemic-popular hardware
Finally, there’s the elephant in any self-hosting discussion: piracy.
Medical Guidelines are incredibly important — they impact everything from your doctor’s recommendations and insurance coverage to the medications your insurance covers — but are somewhat shrouded in mystery.
This piece from Emily Oster’s ParentData is a good overview of what they are (and aren’t) — and give a pretty good explanation of why a headline from the popular press is probably not capturing the nuance and review of clinical evidence that goes into them.
(and yes, that title is a Schoolhouse Rock reference)
The headlines almost always simplify or distort these complexities. Sometimes those simplifications are necessary, other times…well, less so. Why should you care? Guidelines often impact health insurance coverage, influence standards of care, and play a role in how health policy is developed. Understanding what goes into them empowers you to engage more thoughtfully when talking to your doctor. You’ll be more aware of when those sensationalized headlines really mean anything, which is hopefully most of the time nothing at all.
I spotted this memo from Oaktree Capital founder Howard Marks and thought it was a sobering and grounded take on what makes a stock market bubble and reasons to be alarmed about the current concentration of market capitalization in the so-called “Magnificent Seven” and how eerily similar this was to the “Nifty Fifty” or the “Dot Com Bubble” eras of irrational exuberance. Whether you agree with him or not, it’s a worthwhile piece of wisdom to remember.
This graph that Marks borrowed from JP Morgan is also quite intriguing (terrifying?)
There’s usually a grain of truth that underlies every mania and bubble. It just gets taken too far. It’s clear that the internet absolutely did change the world – in fact, we can’t imagine a world without it. But the vast majority of internet and e-commerce companies that soared in the late ’90s bubble ended up worthless. When a bubble burst in my early investing days, The Wall Street Journal would run a box on the front page listing stocks that were down by 90%. In the aftermath of the TMT Bubble, they’d lost 99%.
When something is on the pedestal of popularity, the risk of a decline is high. When people assume – and price in – an expectation that things can only get better, the damage done by negative surprises is profound. When something is new, the competitors and disruptive technologies have yet to arrive. The merit may be there, but if it’s overestimated it can be overpriced, only to evaporate when reality sets in. In the real world, trees don’t grow to the sky.
