Thought Bricks

I’m inconsistent at best about writing on this blog. The primary reason I persist in doing this is that the best way for me to learn something is to write about it. Even if you aren’t an expert (and I’m not on most of the topics that I’ve written about), it’s OK to write something and expand upon it as your interest and knowledge grow. The secondary reason is to have a journal of the stuff I’ve been interested in that is easy for me to refer to in the future.

An interesting casualty of the pandemic supply chain issues is the availability of trained dogs for bomb-sniffing. I would have thought that we would raise our own dogs for this but only 7% are from the US and we have a chronic shortage. The US Government pays about $8k for a “green” dog (a year old dog that has basic assistance dog training but isn’t specialized yet) This seems like a really good business opportunity for someone who likes dogs and can do basic training.

Elon Musk’s takeover at Twitter has been interesting. He fired a bunch of people and many more resigned. Many of these people were responsible for stuff that Mr. Musk doesn’t think Twitter needs (e.g., content moderation) but others who got the axe did the critical development and infrastructure work. Twitter hasn’t had a catastrophic technical failure yet. That has raised some eyebrows about staffing levels at other Big Tech companies. It’s too early to tell.

The ability to detect earthquakes on fiber optic cables in really interesting. I’m impressed with how accurate and flexible this seems to be. The concrete use cases for early detection of earthquakes and tsunamis is great. That the accuracy allows for detection of more subtle things like traffic is really interesting. This seems like an excellent way to monitor things like bridges and dams for signs of damage and wear. Given the state of the infrastructure in the US, this could be a very good thing.

Esquire had a piece about stoicism recently. The author does a nice job of relating how this philosophy focused on paying attention to the present has helped him. I don’t call it that, but I try to live my life along similar lines. I was very inspired by a quote I read in college by James FitzJames: Act for the best, hope for the best and take what comes. If death ends all…we cannot meet death better.

I’ve had a Patagonia Headway MLC for a number of years now. It’s a great bag and I’ve taken it all over the world as my single travel bag. It’s been very durable with only one real problem in the decade that I have had it. When I got home from my last trip, the big external zipper got caught on something and I yanked it too hard and it came off of the track.

My old 2015 MacBook Pro has finally been retired. The battery was looking suspiciously bloated and I’d rather not start a fire on my desk (or worse, on an airplane). The replacement is a 2020 MacBook Air M1. I debated whether or not it was worth going to a higher end model, but I don’t do much beyond Office apps. My calculation might have been different if I did video editing or something but the most I’ll do is compile a project in XCode and that’s pretty quick.

From the weather outside, it seems another winter is upon us. In the crypto markets, that certainly seems to be the case. The spectacular blowup of FTX has shaken things up a bunch. It turns out that the whole thing was smoke and mirrors. I kicked the tires hard on some crypto investments over the past few years, but really couldn’t get past the fact that so many things about it just didn’t make sense.

Back in the day, I wanted to be an economics professor. The subject is interesting and varied. One thing that economics has at it’s core is the study of what people do in the face of scarcity. What decisions do they make? How do they react when something they need suddenly becomes more scarce? What are universities going to do in the face of a scarcity of college-age students in the next few years?