Luxury belief, nuclear family & Robots - Edition 9

Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols

For humans, expensive hats, expensive cars, and expensive watches and wines are signals to indicate that they have economic success. Animals do that physically - peacock’s good-looking tail. Rich used to use a lot of spices. Then common folks started using spices and the Rich had to move on to something else.

The nuclear family was a mistake

Earlier families used to stick together and extended family was part of your family. In the new world, family means spouses and kids. This decentralization of the family is harming our society.

The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

The Future of Substack

Both substack and Medium are trying to be aggregators. However the path chosen by each is quite different and it has huge implications for the authors. It seems that substack is winning with its strategy. Personally I could never use medium because if I send my readers to medium then medium is showing them content from other authors. I can accept that youtube does similar to medium but then rendering videos with precision is still a hard and costly problem. Secondly youtube has way more users.

The Case for Higher Rates

When the interest rate goes lower it unleashes some assets in a narrow band. However, this strategy starts becoming less effective as we lower the interest rate further and further.

This results in the misallocation of capital, an increase in money supply, and debt load, without a corresponding level of productivity to show for it, ultimately zombifying the economy.

I ordered robot takeout on two campuses with wildly different results

It’s interesting to see how mini robots are slowly becoming useful. As the author mentions there is a tension. If the robots can do more then they need to be on the road competing with cars, people and they can do harm if they are moving at a high speed.