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We’re told early on in life that memorization is the path to success. Education systems seem to be largely based on this idea. Most school lessons involve some degree of memorization, and creativity is generally discouraged in core curriculums. I’m pretty sure this is a bad idea, because there’s not really that much benefit to memorization.

I’ve made my share of bad predictions. I’ve had lots of good predictions too. And being right often doesn’t matter, because in the end almost nobody will care if you were right or wrong, and if you’re going to go about placing bets based on your predictions, it’s incredibly difficult to get the timing right.

Once upon a time, the US government enforced antitrust legislation. One of the most famous examples of this is the case of Standard Oil. To understand what happened to Standard Oil, we need to take a short walk back in time through history. The year is 1890, and the US Congress is a well-functioning body with rational officials who’s brains still function at a high enough level to pass sensible legislation.

I had the recent pleasure of speaking with someone from a big tech company about their interview process. They wanted to put me through the funnel to run the gauntlet and see if I “had what it takes” to make it to the offer stage. I declined, but (against better judgement) I gave them 30 minutes to pitch their company to me anyway.

Photo by Denys Nevozhai If you happen to know me personally, you are probably familiar with my opinions on cars, and likely tired of hearing about them. I belong to the group of people who frequent subs like r/fuckcars. My favourite YouTube channels are “Not Just Bikes” and “Climate Town”.

Humans are pretty bad at intuiting about exponential growth. Whether it’s pollution, population growth, or the way a virus spreads, our brains are bad at understanding the impact of such growth. Exponential growth tends to feel slow at first, and then at some point you realize it’s all happening quite quickly.

The word on the street is there’s a “labour shortage”. If we look at the data, however, it tells a different story. I’ve heard theories about people retiring, or too many COVID excess deaths, or people being flush with cash because the government gave everyone a coulpe thousand bucks (which is about one month’s rent), but looking at the data I’m not seeing numbers that reflect most of those theories.

If there’s anything that annoys me about modern culture, it’s the pursuit and obsession with self. I suppose the classic modern day example of this is how everyone believes they’re an “influencer”, a term that is annoying on its own because most of those who call themselves influencers are likely not influencing anyone in any meaningful way, unless you count getting involved in an MLM or some advertising scheme as “influencing”.

I’ve noticed a trend amongst startups (particularly those in the financial-ish space) which amounts to some variation of “hey guys, maybe we can get customers if we use memes?”. This is not dissimilar to the “viral” craze of the early 2010s in startup land, where a number of companies raised mountains of VC cash entirely on some silly app gaining millions of users overnight.

One of my many unpopular opinions is that therapy is mostly a waste of money. To be clear, I’m referring to the kind of therapy where you pay someone for 45 minutes to an hour of their time to sit there, listen to your problems, and perhaps give you some kind of feedback or suggestions (or maybe they’ll just give you CBT book recommendations after they’ve extracted enough revenue from you).