Isaac Grafstein on right-wing anti-interventionism; Ted Gioia's fantasy newspaper; Eric Kaufmann on American Jews at ebb tide; Marc Andreessen on the real source of cost disease
"Newspapers never figured this out. As long ago as 2001, I suggested that newspapers needed to get out of the walled-garden model. I wrote The Club vs. the Silo. Today, Substack is not so far from what I called the club model."
Over the last half year or so, Substack has definitely been trending in the direction of "walled-garden", with dozens of major changes introduced subtlely or at a gradual pace*.
It's kind of a common internet business model to be free and open at first to try and grow as fast as possible and attract users and popular content creators, etc. but then when one hits critical mass or self-sustaining momentum or whatever, start monetizing, monetizing, monetizing (or in the non-profit world, "just paying the bills" or whatever.)
The newspapers that survived and thrived did indeed figure out that they needed subscribers and also 'micropayments' from everybody who read every article. It's just that people pay in the form of having some of their attention drawn by targeted ads, and also by (let's face it, unwittingly) giving away the recent updates of personal behaviors and information which in aggregate is highly valuable to advertisers. Most people can't read the article without giving up however many cents worth of personal info it takes to keep the paper afloat.
Micropayments Triumphed! Just not in the form once hoped for.
*You can tell by looking at how many penetrative scripts and trackers they've added to the web experience, becomming alarmingly "Facebook-esque" in the process. That's also part of why it took forever for them to come out with a simple app for Android Smartphone, despite the (apparent, not actual) almost minimalist need for any functionality, just displaying graphics and text.
That would ordinarily be something you would expect Silicon Valley types to crank out in about 15 minutes.
Yes, I'm sure negotiations with Google about side-payments outside the ecosystem and trying to get them to make an exception to their typical cut of all subscriptions, etc. But I also suspect that Google knows a thing or two about the non-apparent functionality of the long-delayed app ("Uber-esque" i.e., borderline spyware). Maybe they had to trim it back, maybe they came to a deal, who knows.
In practical terms, to be "anti-interventionist" with respect to the war in Ukraine is to favor a Russian victory. Ukrainians already have plenty of experience, old and new, of what to expect from Russian rule; that is why they are fighting. Given the historical experience of the Jews in Eastern Europe, I would have expected a Jew to be more aware of the consequences of letting a large, bellicose dictatorship overpower a smaller, peaceful neighbor.
re: Kaufmann, I wonder about the rates of Jewish-Asian intermarriage in the US. Anecdotally it seems fairly high. I'd be interested to know what people who have studied it think, whether it is actually true and, if so, why might that be.
Re: "For the same reasons that we are skeptical about government’s domestic interventions, we should be skeptical about government’s foreign interventions."
We should be doubly skeptical about government's foreign interventions. Checks and balances are weaker in foreign interventions. Voter ignorance is greater about foreign affairs. Irrationality predictably emerges and becomes entrenched in wartime psychologies; for example, sunk-cost fallacies, visceral hatred, "face," illusion of control (despite risk of escalation), zero-sum thinking that produces negative-sum interaction.
Re: Ukraine, a particular Reddit forum I frequent has alot of "grey tribe" amoral interventionists. They say things like "it's cheap for the US to keep Russia bogged down in a war, to our benefit." It's the anti-interventionists in this case who are moralists, thinking it cruel to prolong someone else's war and directly inject weapons into it.
"Going forward, will teachers’ unions and legacy universities succeed in keeping the education process backward?"
I agree with grouchy Marc, and will say the teachers' unions and big universities succeed in stifling all innovation while furthering the decline of their own product.
I hadn’t previously understood the difference in your position and the Baumol position. That was illuminating. But in essence regulation creates a Baumol condition doesn’t it? Labor costs go up because those who save and make money from the productive areas of the economy spend their dollars on the unproductive part? Here’s how you play the difference. I have a friend who runs a title insurance company. He’s doubled the normal profit margins by moving almost all the labor to the Philippines.
"Newspapers never figured this out. As long ago as 2001, I suggested that newspapers needed to get out of the walled-garden model. I wrote The Club vs. the Silo. Today, Substack is not so far from what I called the club model."
Over the last half year or so, Substack has definitely been trending in the direction of "walled-garden", with dozens of major changes introduced subtlely or at a gradual pace*.
It's kind of a common internet business model to be free and open at first to try and grow as fast as possible and attract users and popular content creators, etc. but then when one hits critical mass or self-sustaining momentum or whatever, start monetizing, monetizing, monetizing (or in the non-profit world, "just paying the bills" or whatever.)
The newspapers that survived and thrived did indeed figure out that they needed subscribers and also 'micropayments' from everybody who read every article. It's just that people pay in the form of having some of their attention drawn by targeted ads, and also by (let's face it, unwittingly) giving away the recent updates of personal behaviors and information which in aggregate is highly valuable to advertisers. Most people can't read the article without giving up however many cents worth of personal info it takes to keep the paper afloat.
Micropayments Triumphed! Just not in the form once hoped for.
*You can tell by looking at how many penetrative scripts and trackers they've added to the web experience, becomming alarmingly "Facebook-esque" in the process. That's also part of why it took forever for them to come out with a simple app for Android Smartphone, despite the (apparent, not actual) almost minimalist need for any functionality, just displaying graphics and text.
That would ordinarily be something you would expect Silicon Valley types to crank out in about 15 minutes.
Yes, I'm sure negotiations with Google about side-payments outside the ecosystem and trying to get them to make an exception to their typical cut of all subscriptions, etc. But I also suspect that Google knows a thing or two about the non-apparent functionality of the long-delayed app ("Uber-esque" i.e., borderline spyware). Maybe they had to trim it back, maybe they came to a deal, who knows.
In practical terms, to be "anti-interventionist" with respect to the war in Ukraine is to favor a Russian victory. Ukrainians already have plenty of experience, old and new, of what to expect from Russian rule; that is why they are fighting. Given the historical experience of the Jews in Eastern Europe, I would have expected a Jew to be more aware of the consequences of letting a large, bellicose dictatorship overpower a smaller, peaceful neighbor.
“….we should be skeptical about government’s foreign interventions.”
So how would that apply to Ukraine? Would a skeptical libertarian have said no intervention, all-in, or somewhere in between?
re: Kaufmann, I wonder about the rates of Jewish-Asian intermarriage in the US. Anecdotally it seems fairly high. I'd be interested to know what people who have studied it think, whether it is actually true and, if so, why might that be.
Worth keeping in mind that the most valuable company in the world, Apple, is still succeeding with its walled gardens, in defiance of Joy’s law.
Re: "For the same reasons that we are skeptical about government’s domestic interventions, we should be skeptical about government’s foreign interventions."
We should be doubly skeptical about government's foreign interventions. Checks and balances are weaker in foreign interventions. Voter ignorance is greater about foreign affairs. Irrationality predictably emerges and becomes entrenched in wartime psychologies; for example, sunk-cost fallacies, visceral hatred, "face," illusion of control (despite risk of escalation), zero-sum thinking that produces negative-sum interaction.
Re: Ukraine, a particular Reddit forum I frequent has alot of "grey tribe" amoral interventionists. They say things like "it's cheap for the US to keep Russia bogged down in a war, to our benefit." It's the anti-interventionists in this case who are moralists, thinking it cruel to prolong someone else's war and directly inject weapons into it.
"Going forward, will teachers’ unions and legacy universities succeed in keeping the education process backward?"
I agree with grouchy Marc, and will say the teachers' unions and big universities succeed in stifling all innovation while furthering the decline of their own product.
I hadn’t previously understood the difference in your position and the Baumol position. That was illuminating. But in essence regulation creates a Baumol condition doesn’t it? Labor costs go up because those who save and make money from the productive areas of the economy spend their dollars on the unproductive part? Here’s how you play the difference. I have a friend who runs a title insurance company. He’s doubled the normal profit margins by moving almost all the labor to the Philippines.