I was going to write a post today about how liquidity in financial markets goes down as concentration of holdings goes up but then I woke up to the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas last night. I have written extensively before about the need for better gun control, so won’t rehash that today other than to note that the statistics for 2017 show already over 11,000 deaths year-to-date. What yesterday’s mass shooting does make eminently clear yet again though is just how much damage and tr...

I was going to write a post today about how liquidity in financial markets goes down as concentration of holdings goes up but then I woke up to the news of the mass shooting in Las Vegas last night. I have written extensively before about the need for better gun control, so won’t rehash that today other than to note that the statistics for 2017 show already over 11,000 deaths year-to-date. What yesterday’s mass shooting does make eminently clear yet again though is just how much damage and tr...

I just spent a couple of days in Vienna, Austria at a conference. The upcoming Austrian elections were the talk of the town. One of the major parties is campaigning in part on the promise of introducing an estate tax for all estates about 1 million Euros. Austria has a wealth distribution that is also highly concentrated with the top 1% of the population controlling 40% of total wealth. Also during the last couple of days the new tax proposal by the Trump administration includes an eliminatio...

I just spent a couple of days in Vienna, Austria at a conference. The upcoming Austrian elections were the talk of the town. One of the major parties is campaigning in part on the promise of introducing an estate tax for all estates about 1 million Euros. Austria has a wealth distribution that is also highly concentrated with the top 1% of the population controlling 40% of total wealth. Also during the last couple of days the new tax proposal by the Trump administration includes an eliminatio...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday I introduced a definition of climate as the probability distribution over weather states. That post ended with a question about how historically observed statistics relate to this distribution. I am in Vienna Austria for a conference and the temperature yesterday got up to 70 degrees (Fahrenheit). Intellicast shows historic average high temperature for September 27 to be 65 degrees (unfortunately not saying how many years of data are averaged which is something I wi...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday I introduced a definition of climate as the probability distribution over weather states. That post ended with a question about how historically observed statistics relate to this distribution. I am in Vienna Austria for a conference and the temperature yesterday got up to 70 degrees (Fahrenheit). Intellicast shows historic average high temperature for September 27 to be 65 degrees (unfortunately not saying how many years of data are averaged which is something I wi...

Having been outspoken against Trump since before the election, I am encouraged to see that we may have found a particularly effective form of protest in #TakeAKnee (or #TakeTheKnee). We have the initiative of Colin Kaepernick and those who followed his lead to thank for that. I realize that this started out as a protest against police violence as part of the Black Lives Matter movement during the Obama administration. I believe it has the potential though to morph into a broad and effective p...

Having been outspoken against Trump since before the election, I am encouraged to see that we may have found a particularly effective form of protest in #TakeAKnee (or #TakeTheKnee). We have the initiative of Colin Kaepernick and those who followed his lead to thank for that. I realize that this started out as a protest against police violence as part of the Black Lives Matter movement during the Obama administration. I believe it has the potential though to morph into a broad and effective p...

By now most CEOs of startups understand that they urgently need to figure out what role machine learning will play in their business. Large established companies too are actively engaged in this process. This is not an easy task in and of itself, as machine learning isn’t a panacea for everything wrong with your business and you cannot just sprinkle it on top of your existing business process and strategy. Instead, you likely have to jettison many assumptions about “how things are done” in yo...

By now most CEOs of startups understand that they urgently need to figure out what role machine learning will play in their business. Large established companies too are actively engaged in this process. This is not an easy task in and of itself, as machine learning isn’t a panacea for everything wrong with your business and you cannot just sprinkle it on top of your existing business process and strategy. Instead, you likely have to jettison many assumptions about “how things are done” in yo...

Today’s post is over at USV.com on “The Unknown Path to a Decentralized Future.” Here is the opening:Some companies with currently centralized services have been criticized for issuing tokens and raising money in ICOs. There are even allegations that venture investors are pushing companies to do so as a ploy for liquidity. I suspect that some situations like that do actually exist, but I know from first hand conversations that many of the entrepreneurs pursuing this route are doing so out of ...

Today’s post is over at USV.com on “The Unknown Path to a Decentralized Future.” Here is the opening:Some companies with currently centralized services have been criticized for issuing tokens and raising money in ICOs. There are even allegations that venture investors are pushing companies to do so as a ploy for liquidity. I suspect that some situations like that do actually exist, but I know from first hand conversations that many of the entrepreneurs pursuing this route are doing so out of ...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday I introduced how think about weather using the concepts we have developed in this series. We saw that our improved data collection and ability to process more complicated weather models has given us significantly improved predictions. We also learned that because of the chaotic nature of weather, despite our massive progress on short term forecasts we still do quite poorly for forecasts that go out further than a week. Now a key question that we asked throughout thi...

Last Uncertainty Wednesday I introduced how think about weather using the concepts we have developed in this series. We saw that our improved data collection and ability to process more complicated weather models has given us significantly improved predictions. We also learned that because of the chaotic nature of weather, despite our massive progress on short term forecasts we still do quite poorly for forecasts that go out further than a week. Now a key question that we asked throughout thi...

My book World After Capital has been an ongoing project for a couple of years now. I am excited that as of this weekend I feel it includes all the ideas I want in there. Some of them, such as strategies for overcoming the dominance of nation states, are so far in a protozoic stage, but at least they are there. Others, such as the chapter on the sufficiency of “Capital“, are in need of a substantial rewrite because they have fallen out of sync with other parts (see the rewritten chapter on “Ne...

My book World After Capital has been an ongoing project for a couple of years now. I am excited that as of this weekend I feel it includes all the ideas I want in there. Some of them, such as strategies for overcoming the dominance of nation states, are so far in a protozoic stage, but at least they are there. Others, such as the chapter on the sufficiency of “Capital“, are in need of a substantial rewrite because they have fallen out of sync with other parts (see the rewritten chapter on “Ne...

So far in Uncertainty Wednesday we have mostly built up concepts and ideas, with only one extended example. Given the two massive hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the weather received a lot of attention, including the question to what extent the occurrence and/or severity of these storms lets us draw any conclusions about climate change. For that reason we will spend the next few Uncertainty Wednesdays looking at the weather using the ideas and concepts from the series. First, let’s put weather in...

So far in Uncertainty Wednesday we have mostly built up concepts and ideas, with only one extended example. Given the two massive hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the weather received a lot of attention, including the question to what extent the occurrence and/or severity of these storms lets us draw any conclusions about climate change. For that reason we will spend the next few Uncertainty Wednesdays looking at the weather using the ideas and concepts from the series. First, let’s put weather in...

Going to work today will feel odd because the weather reminds me so much of 2001. Gorgeous blue skies. Not quite summer anymore, but also not yet fall. The weather is one of my strong memories from 2001. The other memory concerns later in the day. We knew a horrific act of terrorism had been carried out that killed thousands of people. And yet on the Upper West Side where we were living a the time it didn’t feel entirely real as we saw much of it on television. I am experiencing that sensatio...

Going to work today will feel odd because the weather reminds me so much of 2001. Gorgeous blue skies. Not quite summer anymore, but also not yet fall. The weather is one of my strong memories from 2001. The other memory concerns later in the day. We knew a horrific act of terrorism had been carried out that killed thousands of people. And yet on the Upper West Side where we were living a the time it didn’t feel entirely real as we saw much of it on television. I am experiencing that sensatio...