Misc

An interesting debate on Marginal Revolution. Of course, the debate is as old as humanity. Still, people in our generation had to really look at the arguments because of how COVID impacted different people based on age.

So the lives of high wealth, low human capital individuals, including older individuals, are overweighted by traditional economic metrics, given that “naive” WTP measures do not adjust for the “wealth transfer upon death” externality.  That is some but by no means all of the elderly.  Their willingness to pay for risk reduction may be as high as the WTP of the young, but in social terms that does not mean their lives are equally valuable.

From here: Are young or old lives worth more? – Marginal REVOLUTION.

India is going through what is, probably, the worst COVID wave in the world since the pandemic started.

What should make us pay attention, even in the countries that fare better now, is how fast things changed to the worst of the worst: in February India had 11,000 new COVID cases per day and now, in April, has more than 300,000/day.

It’s easy to forget what exponential growth means when you look at 500-600 cases per day in Portugal (where I live), but it’s so easy to get to huge numbers in a short period of time. Actually, Portugal just got out of a 3 months quite strict lockdown. We needed it because we jumped from less than 1,000 cases to 15,000 cases per day in less than 3 months (from late October to end of January), after not locking down for Christmas.

chart from here

Having this many new cases per day also means a better chance for the virus to mutate into a more resistant strain.

India’s total eclipsed the previous one-day high of 300,669 recorded coronavirus cases, set in the United States on Jan. 8, according to a New York Times database, though differences in testing levels from country to country, and a widespread lack of tests early in the pandemic, make comparisons difficult.

Over the past two months, the outbreak in India has exploded, with reports of superspreader gatherings, oxygen shortages and ambulances lined up outside hospitals because there were no ventilators for new patients.

More details on what happens in India here

I just found out that Reddit wants to launch their own Clubhouse clone. Which actually kinda make sense, as opposed to LinkedIn doing the same.

Here’s a list of Clubhouse clones, updated as I find out more:

1. LinkedIn
2. Twitter Spaces
3. Reddit
4. Facebook
5. ByteDance (TikTok)

Photo by Bimata Prathama on Unsplash

One of the founders of Adobe, Charles Geschke, died recently, at 81. He is the guy that brought PDF into our lives. You can read more about his life in this Verge article.

But what I found it interesting was that he was kidnapped at some point in his life for 4 days, by some people asking for a ransom. I mean, I never thought a tech executive life would be so exciting (with the exception of John McAfee, of course). Truth is I’m surprised we don’t hear about more new like this, seeing how much wealth is focused in the Bay Area.

A computer software executive kidnapped at gunpoint four days ago was freed Saturday when a suspect caught with $650,000 in ransom money led authorities to a bungalow hideout, the FBI said.

Charles Geschke, 52, president and chief operating officer of Adobe Systems Inc., had been in the house in Hollister, 60 miles south of San Jose, since he was seized by two men as he arrived for work Tuesday, FBI agents said.

″The two men called him to their car to ask him a question, then at gunpoint took him away and secreted him,″ said FBI agent Richard Held. Geschke was abducted at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, about 10 miles northwest of San Jose.

From here: Computer Company Executive Rescued By FBI.

I always wanted to write. I’ve never been actually good at it, but I always wanted to write.

When I was a kid, I would write short stories for school. But when one of my classmates wrote an enthralling story about the Second World War I wanted to be part of the process and I tried to continue what he wrote. And it was bad. And it’s not the adult in me saying it now. I knew THEN it was bad.

Today I found this:

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. Why did the oil refineries around Carquinez Straits seem sinister to me in the summer of 1956? Why have the night lights in the bevatron burned in my mind for twenty years? What is going on in these pictures in my mind?

From here, via this BBC article about the best books of 2021 until now (April).

And I’m thinking one of the (many) issues I can’t write as good as I’d like is that I’m too much in my head. I process my thoughts and feelings in my head and when I express them they’re (most of the time) fully formed. And trying to write how i got to the final idea feels futile and inconsequential.

Oh, well…

I was reading something on BBC.com today and I got lost in two articles on fame and pressures of fame.

One is about Lana del Rey and her issues with social media and keeping private as much as possible:

Interestingly, though, Daly suggests that Del Rey might care less about her own mystique than she did in the past. “I think she was probably more enigmatic at the start of her career when there were all these questions about who she was and where she came from,” she says. Now that she has proven her artistic worth, she has less need for the protective shield that enigma can provide. “To achieve true Prince-like levels of mystery, I think she’d have to be much more removed from the internet and the press than she is at the moment,” Daly adds. She calls what we’re seeing now with Del Rey “a slow dismantling of mystique in real-time”. Whatever happens next, it will be interesting to see how the next generation of stars present themselves. With mystique becoming even tougher to preserve than in the past, it’s hard to blame any artist who decides it’s just not worth the effort anymore.

I’ve also read this article about Dolly Parton. I’ve been fascinated by her public persona for a while and this article actually puts everything together. It’s worth reading both of them.

You can learn a lot about Parton from how she has navigated the Trump era. These past four years, celebrities have found it hard to duck the question, “Which side are you on?” Taylor Swift, like Parton, has a typical Nashville aversion to controversy but she was labelled everything from a coward to a closet white supremacist for her neutral stance until she finally came out as a Democrat in 2018. Parton, however, remains publicly apolitical at a time when it would seem impossible to be apolitical. Even when her 9 to 5 co-stars Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin were savaging Trump right next to her on the stage at the 2017 Emmy Awards, Parton changed the subject with a trusty boob joke. When the topic came up on Dolly Parton’s America, she flatly shut it down: “I don’t do politics. I have too many fans on both sides of the fence.”

The easy explanation is that she puts business before principle, but for Parton those two instincts aren’t in opposition. She is by nature a bridge-builder and unifier, with a talent for smoothing troubled waters.

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Here are the links to the articles, again:

1. Lana Del Rey and the struggle to be mysterious in pop
2. How Dolly Parton became the world’s best-loved celebrity

I feel that LinkedIn wants to be an “elevated” Facebook, while focusing more on resources for professionals rather than on their network. I mean, it doesn’t do anything to help me understand my network better and building “creator tools” doesn’t really move them forward towards that in any way.

Clubhouse’s list of competitors is growing. LinkedIn has now confirmed it’s also testing a social audio experience in its app which would allow creators on its network to connect with their community. Unlike the Clubhouse rivals being built by Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn believes its audio networking feature will be differentiated because it will be connected with users’ professional identity, not just a social profile. In addition, the company has already built out a platform that serves the creator community, which today has access to tools like Stories, LinkedIn Live video broadcasting, newsletters and more.

And just today, LinkedIn formalized some of its efforts in this area with the launch of a new “Creator” mode that lets anyone set their profile as one that can be followed for updates, like Stories and LinkedIn Live videos, for example.

From here: LinkedIn confirms it’s working on a Clubhouse rival, too | TechCrunch.

I need to stop myself from using some sites too much, so I looked for a solution that didn’t involve using another app.

Once thing to keep in mind if using the solution below: it worked initially, but when I edited the file again it didn’t work anymore. I restarted my laptop and it worked, but I’m sure there’s another way you can force hosts to reload.

1. In the command line, type in “sudo nano /etc/hosts”.
2. When asked, type your admin password.
3. In the screen that will appear, you’ll see the host database for your computer.
4. Using your down arrow, go to the bottom, right under where it says, “127.0.0.1 localhost”.
5. Type in “127.0.0.1 hit ‘tab’, then enter facebook.com”.
6. On a new line, type in “127.0.0.1” hit ‘tab’, then enter www.facebook.com”; this is for extra measure.
7. Now, hold down Control + “O”. This will save the changes to the host database.
8. Hit “Return” and then Control + “X” to exit the screen.
9. Remove the existing cache by typing in “sudo dscacheutil -flushcache” in the command line, this refreshes the existing cache on the host database.

From here: How To Block Websites on Your Mac Using Terminal – Mason Sklut.