Links to Consider, 9/27

The Zvi's solution for spam and unwanted notifications; Lee Bressler on Delta Airlines' credit card; Tove K on Peter Turchin; Aaron Renn on getting ahead by knowing what vs. knowing who

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

If you use my communication channel, and I decide you wasted my time, you can push a button. Then, based on how often the button gets pushed, if this happens too often as a proportion of outreach, an escalating tax is imposed. So a regular user can occasionally annoy someone and pay nothing, but a corporation or scammer that spams, or especially mass spams using AI, owes big, and quickly gets blacklisted from making initial contacts without paying first.

These days, Gmail solves the spam problem for me fairly well. It’s notifications that drive me nuts. Especially the ones that just pop up on my computer. No, Microsoft, I don’t want to be reminded in three days what I don’t want to do today. No, McAfee, I don’t want to turn on safety features. LinkedIn, I’ve told you half a dozen times I don’t want your notifications—why do you keep sending them?

Also, the binary choice of notifications “off” or “on” is not always sufficient. I could use an AI assistant that learns my preferences concerning when and how I want to be notified and filters my notifications accordingly.

If I could charge senders a penny for every unwanted notification, that would help solve the problem. But the infrastructure for that is not easy to set up, and processing a whole bunch of one-cent payments would be costly.

The Zvi’s variation is to have a generic “annoying notification” button that I can press. A third party tallies the number of times it is pressed for each sender. It then charges a fine to the sender. I think that has the potential to be workable. And the third party could make money doing it by collecting the fines.

Lee Bressler writes,

Somehow Delta became the airline of business travelers and high spenders in the US and managed to get all of them to sign up for their American Express credit cards.  This instinctively makes me bullish on Delta and American Express.  If the Delta program is desirable, and having the credit card is a path to getting into the program, lots of folks will sign up for the card.

It is interesting how many companies whose primary business has a low profit margin are able to make their money in related businesses. Amazon’s retail business is low margin, but the profit margin is high in Amazon Web Services. The grocery business is low margin, but grocers (and Instacart) get a high profit margin selling advertising.

Tove K writes,

Saying that people get more violent than otherwise when they see their children starve to death is one thing. Saying that people get violent when they see their relative wages decline compared to those of their parents is another thing. Saying that people who trained as warriors for their whole lives will turn their warring capacity against each other when they need to is one thing. Saying that people who go to university and only get minimum-wage jobs afterwards will get radicalized and sooner or later contribute to a major disruption of society is another thing. 

Aaron Renn writes,

Stock exchanges are non-proprietary networks - open networks. You don’t need anyone’s permission to start trading stocks. As long as you play by the objectively defined rules, you are welcome to participate. You won’t get banned for having the wrong political opinions.

International chess competition is an open network. The better you play, the higher you can climb.

When I was in graduate school, the field of macroeconomics was turning into a closed network. To get anywhere, you needed to be on Stan Fischer’s good side.

Contrarian types and original thinkers thrive in open networks. Smooth operators and conformists thrive in closed networks.

substacks referenced above:

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Are You In an Open Network or a Closed Network?

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The philosophy of Peter Turchin

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Delta Interesting Fact

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AI #30: Dalle-3 and GPT-3.5-Instruct-Turbo