Hey there.
Have a great week — “tough time never last, only tough people last” — hope you are staying safe. You got this!
Articles to Read.
Some facts I put together that you may find interesting:
27% of land in the US is government owned
Wheeled luggage was invented in 1972
There are an estimated 3.5 million youth sport coaches in the United States
11% of Americans have never traveled outside of the state they were born
13% of Americans have never flown in an airplane
population of China doubled (150 million to 300 million) between 1650 and 1800
the fastest pigeons can fly up to 95 mph
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We are all of us children of earth; grant us that simple knowledge. If our brothers are oppressed, we are oppressed. If they hunger, we hunger. If their freedom is taken away our freedom is not secure. – FDR, 1942
Everyone wants a map. Just a simple guide to what’s going to happen next.
Is this like 2008? Similar to 9/11? Is this like the 1918 flu pandemic? Or maybe the Great Depression? But none of those fit today’s ordeal.
Today’s halt in economic activity is worse than 2008. The enemy is more invisible than 9/11. Our medical knowledge far exceeds that of 1918. Policy response is now faster and deeper than in the Great Depression. Pandemics kill people and recessions ruin people. Saying they have silver linings is a step too far.
But I wonder if the best map we have that tells us what to expect next is the kind of extreme cooperation, solidarity, and empathy we last saw in the 1940s. And I wonder if we’ll look back at COVID-19 as one of the worst things to happen to us, yet triggering something positive that couldn’t be achieved any other way.
History never repeats itself, but man always does.
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When to Copy Ideas, When to Steal Ideas
"Good artists copy. Great artists steal" plays on a truth that whenever we build something new, we're really building upon what's currently there, and that ought to be acknowledged and embraced unashamedly.
It's very important to note that while more skill is implied the further you go towards stealing, copying is not bad. On the contrary, it's explicitly good. An artist needs to do both. The question becomes, when to copy and when to steal?
You don't make a whole cake out of icing - you don't even start there - you make the sponge base first. That's exactly what this person was saying. Copy the same sponge any cake could use, then using your own creative talents as icing to make something uniquely great in the areas that make a difference in your product's niche.
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We’re not going back to normal
Social distancing is here to stay for much more than a few weeks. It will upend our way of life, in some ways forever.
To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members.
So how can we live in this new world? Part of the answer—hopefully—will be better health-care systems, with pandemic response units that can move quickly to identify and contain outbreaks before they start to spread, and the ability to quickly ramp up production of medical equipment, testing kits, and drugs. Those will be too late to stop Covid-19, but they’ll help with future pandemics.
In the near term, we’ll probably find awkward compromises that allow us to retain some semblance of a social life. Maybe movie theaters will take out half their seats, meetings will be held in larger rooms with spaced-out chairs, and gyms will require you to book workouts ahead of time so they don’t get crowded.
Ultimately, however, I predict that we’ll restore the ability to socialize safely by developing more sophisticated ways to identify who is a disease risk and who isn’t, and discriminating—legally—against those who are.
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The quick economics of bodegas
Convenience stores: Imagine a world without them. You wouldn’t wanna live in it! Whether you’re cruising in for a six-pack, or you live in the big city and depend on your corner store for, well, just about everything, they’ve usually got you covered. But how do they survive selling nothing but inexpensive merchandise? Also, what’s with all the random stuff on the shelves — detergent, a key-making machine, old DVDs, dollar-store toys — and how’d they get there?
Usually around 80 percent of a store’s revenue comes from Cigarettes and Lottery Tickets.
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The Story of Henry Ford's $5 a Day Wages: It's Not What You Think
There's an argument you see around sometimes about Henry Ford's decision to pay his workers those famed $5 a day wages. It was that he realised that he should pay his workers sufficiently large sums to that they could afford the products they were making. In this manner he could expand the market for his products.
It should be obvious that this story doesn't work: Boeing would most certainly be in trouble if they had to pay their workers sufficient to afford a new jetliner. It's also obviously true that you want every other employer to be paying their workers sufficient that they can afford your products: but that's very much not the same as claiming that Ford should pay his workers so that they can afford Fords.
So, if creating that blue collar middle class that could afford the cars wasn't why Ford brought in his $5 a day wages, what was the reason?
Actually, it was the turnover of his staff.
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Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel
Wheels are the archetype of a primitive, caveman-level technology. But in fact, they're so ingenious that it took until 3500 B.C. for someone to invent them. By that time — it was the Bronze Age — humans were already casting metal alloys, constructing canals and sailboats, and even designing complex musical instruments such as harps.
The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It's figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder.
The invention of the wheel was so challenging that it probably happened only once, in one place. However, from that place, it seems to have spread so rapidly across Eurasia and the Middle East that experts cannot say for sure where it originated. The earliest images of wheeled carts have been excavated in Poland and elsewhere in the Eurasian steppes, and this region is overtaking Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) as the wheel's most likely birthplace. According to Asko Parpola, an Indologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, there are linguistic reasons to believe the wheel originated with the Tripolye people of modern-day Ukraine. That is, the words associated with wheels and wagons derive from the language of that culture.
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More to Check Out:
- The Best Resources for Developers to Learn Finance
- How early American inventors funded their ventures
- Cultivate the Skill of Undivided Attention
- How to Eat for $1.50 per day
- Just Walk Out (by Amazon)
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My Update:
In SF. Lucky to be able to work remotely. Thinking about what’s going on in the world right now.
Blocked Twitter.