As summer rolls around, here’s Part II for your beach reading!
The Man Who Broke Bowling
If you’re anything like OM, you occasionally find yourself at the bowling alley throwing a sad mix of 7s and 8s with the odd strike thrown in. You’re certainly not like Jason Belmonte, who’s revolutionized the sport by throwing…two-handed!
(Eric Willis, GQ magazine)
Relax for the Same Result
This is an old post that OM goes back to every so often when stressed and rushing to get something done by a deadline. It’s a good reminder of the unproductive effort due to stress and how it neither helps the quality or speed of our work.
(Derek Sivers)
What Will Transformers Transform?
As regular readers will know, OM is a fan of Dr. Rodney Brooks and often posts his year-end update of prior predictions. With everything that’s been written about Artificial Intelligence and GPT models (both the good and the bad), his article from a couple of months ago is worth rereading. The punchline; “Calm down people. We neither have super powerful AI around the corner, nor the end of the world caused by AI about to come down upon us.”
(Rodney Brooks)
30,000 Reasons Wages aren’t Falling
We’ve spent much of the last year being told recession is imminent, unemployment is about to spike, and that wage hikes are coming to an end. While we might be getting closer to that point, OM suspects that the world has also changed somewhat; that we are moving from a world that favoured capital to one that benefits labor. It’s been something OM has been meaning to write about for a while now, but it’s a complicated subject and he’s never quite found the right words. The good news is that Erik Renander found some of them…
(Erik Renander, Your Weekend Reading).
Turkey: How Mehmet Simsek convinced Erdogan to drop his low interest rate policy
A portion of OM’s portfolio is in dislocation investing, where on first read the idea will look ugly. Hopefully, kind reader your initial reaction will be “WTF??? Are you insane!” but will slowly trend towards “that’s weird, but kinda interesting!” over time (e.g. Uranium). The key is being able to invest when valuation is cheap, fundamentals are turning, and there’s a narrative to draw others in! Well, Turkey is exceptionally cheap, there are hints of a change, and it has the benefit that it can be geopolitically promiscuous between the US and China. However, especially after Erdogan’s recent victory at the polls, it has lacked a narrative that will draw investors in. Perhaps this major change in economic policy is the start of a ‘normalization’ in Turkey that at least removes the negative narrative.
(Ragip Soylu, Middle East Eye)
This is Biology’s Century – We’re not Ready for it
The phrase ‘biology’s century’ has been around for a while but has so far accurately encapsulated the 2000s with a record number of drugs approved including novel treatments for cancer, diabetes, numerous vaccines and the first gene therapies. However, biotech’s limits are now testing the medical infrastructure that we have built and many of the solutions favor the expedient over the rigorous.
(Matthew Harper, STAT)