Recency Bias

The treatment of journalism as a business like any other has proven to be a mistake. The interesting caveat is that government funded media like the CBC, TVO and NPR are under attack as being puppets for the administration.   Media are required by capitalists to be profitable. More small niche orgs like Canadaland, Betakit and the like are filling gaps created by neverending stream of cuts to traditional journalism outlets. The massive media conglomerates are falling all around us.  The internet turned the cost of distributing information to near 0. which destroyed classifieds and other complimentary revenue streams. The ability to get news for free without a subscription was revolutionary like the guttenberg press. However the ROI on each reader was negligible. As google took the lionshare of the revenue newsrooms have been gutted. Mainly local newsrooms, at the cost of oversight.  It also brought the cost of disinformation to 0 as well. The signal to noise ratio ha...

  It's important to be able to reconsider a bad decision. Interesting episode with Adam Grant. So many applications for work and life in general. I've heard of the pre-mortem to try and identify landmines for a venture. Similarly here the recommendation is to look for "kill signals" so you know when to hold or fold.  From a corporate culture standpoint, disconnecting people from projects helps them call a project a failure and move on. Too often project owners feel their careers are tied to a successful outcome, but the ability to stop throwing good money after bad is very useful Charlie Munger didn't strive for brilliance but to simply avoid making mistakes. https://www.ted.com/podcasts/worklife

We have a lot of self-appointed experts who are medical professionals but like many of us lack an understanding of their limits. As a doctor you think about the individual but in pandemic epidemiology it's very different. Of all the perspectives I've seen Michael Mina speaks really clearly on it.  I found Dr Mina  was on the pivot podcast  and shared the dangers of all the vaccine optimism; why we need to stay disciplined and increasing our testing and tracing; finally why other non-epidemic health professionals perspectives aren't helpful. There's so much conflicting information that doesn't strike me as anti-vax or just bad faith, some people are well-intentioned but a pandemic has different rules and requires a different mentality.

We're in wartime-like circumstances requiring significant sacrifice. An interesting side-effect of this is the "new normal". Window of acceptable behaviour has changed dramatically in one week. Things like open offices, UBI, socialized medicine and general innovation Covid-19 has rapidly accelerated the virtual office trend. Many will agree that open offices are contrary to focus. The cost of real estate is not cheap. If businesses can prove that they can function reasonably at home - during a pandemic. Then when people aren't anxious I imagine productivity could be much higher. Moving operational tools to the cloud was already in style but there wasn't a tremendous urgency. Covid19 will be the #1 driver of an organizational digital transformation. Laptop and asset procurement With so many people reliant on the gig economy and hourly work for basic survival it's an interesting time. As CERB comes to an end I hope everyone with have rental properties, are...

Listen : Mike Maples of Floodgate talks with Shane on Farnam Street about the mental models he uses when evaluating startups. He doesn't think of a startup as a company, rather a group of people living in the future SignUp ! The makers of Basecamp are going to try and remake email, they wrote a note explaining their main problems with email. Similar to slack, email was the original timesuckSignup for early access now

Read : The "left" has lot sight of progressive ideals being too deep in identity politics. Umair argues that the suffering from war, basic sanitation and poverty is not the equivalent as microaggressions but the outrage mobs feel equally upset. I thought this was a bit inflammatory calling them the zombie alt-left; but when we lose sight of the larger injustices; he makes a good case. Listen : "Canada is a state built on the removal of Indigenous peoples to make way for resource extraction companies." The removal of indigenous people for the sake of the economic benefit of the rest of us is not new. It's definitely an inconvenient truth. Some argue that members of the indigenous community will get jobs out of it, so they should just be grateful and shut up. The cost to the environment is significant as well as their ability to self-govern the little land that hasn't been stolen. Were someone to take over my backyard, potentially poison the groundwa...