columnist for Bloomberg View. He was previously an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University. He also blogs at Noahpinion. https://noahpinion.substack.com

Scott Alexander: Still Alive. As I was trying to figure out how this was going to work financially, Substack convinced me that I could make decent money here. With that in place, I felt like I could also take a chance on starting my dream business. You guys have had to listen to me write ad nauseum about cost disease - why does health care cost 4x times more per capita than it did just a generation ago? I have a lot of theories about why that happened and how to fix it. But as Feynman put it, "what I cannot create I cannot understand". So I'm going to try to start a medical practice that provides great health care to uninsured people for 4x less than what anyone else charges. If it works, I plan to be insufferable about it.

change, invention (more)

cf Customer Discovery, Product Development (Solution Discovery, Solution Interview)

Elite overproduction is a concept developed by Peter Turchin, which describes the condition of a society which is producing too many potential elite-members relative to its ability to absorb them into the power structure.[1][2][3] This, he hypothesizes, is a cause for social instability, as those left out of power feel aggrieved by their relatively low socioeconomic status. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction (more)

term for Business Model where website (esp Newspaper) has some amount of content available for free, but makes you pay for more. (more)

one variety of learning to Say No (more)

Derek Thompson: A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems. During the holiday week, I spent a frigid afternoon standing in a long line outside the local library to pick up a COVID-19 rapid test. Lines for essential goods are a pretty good sign of failed public policy. (more)

Martin Cagan: Scaling with Process vs. People. In my last article I provided an overview of the six major models of Product Ops that I have encountered (thus far), and I shared my views on each. But while I highlighted the models that I consider dangerous or harmful, I didn’t elaborate on the root cause of the harmful models (more)

Martin Cagan: Two in a Box PM. In this article I’d like to talk about the tendency to want to split the product management job in two, referred to as the “two in a box” PM model. (more)

Wastelands and Wonderlands: Steven Johnson on Innovation. The thesis of Steven Johnson’s new book Wonderland is right there in its title: “How Play Made the Modern World.” Through a series of historical case studies, Johnson explores how certain ostensibly recreational activities led to a host of social, political, or technological breakthroughs–for instance, how the English fondness for pubs led to an abundance of them in their colonies in North America, which in turn proved to be a hotbed for the movement for independence. (play ethic, (2010-01-03) Dixon The Next Big Thing Will Start Out Looking Like A Toy)

Noah Smith: A New Industrialist roundup. Six years ago, I wrote a pair of Bloomberg columns predicting the rise of an intellectual movement that I called New Industrialism — though I was sure that people would name it something else. Basically, the idea was that America wasn’t investing enough (i.e., not building enough productive capital), and that we needed a new economic outlook that emphasized building more stuff. Now that movement is springing to life before my eyes, so I think it’s time to take stock of where we are. (more)

WikiLeaks (/ˈwɪkiliːks/) is an international non-profit organisation that publishes news leaks[3] and classified media provided by anonymous sources.[4] Its website, initiated in 2006 in Iceland by the organisation Sunshine Press,[5] stated in 2015 that it had released online 10 million documents in its first 10 years.[6] Julian Assange, an Australian Internet activist, is generally described as its founder and director.[7] Since September 2018, Kristinn Hrafnsson has served as its editor-in-chief.[8][9] The group has released a number of prominent document caches. Early releases included documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war,[10] a report about a corruption investigation in Kenya,[11][12] and an operating procedures manual for the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.[13][14] In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder footage from the 12 July 2007 Baghdad airstrike in which Iraqi Reuters journalists were among several civilians killed. Other releases in 2010 included the Afghan War Diary and the "Iraq War Logs". The latter release allowed the mapping of 109,032 deaths in "significant" attacks by insurgents in Iraq that had been reported to Multi-National Force – Iraq, including about 15,000 that had not been previously published.[15][16] In 2010, WikiLeaks also released classified diplomatic cables that had been sent to the US State Department. In April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing 779 secret files relating to prisoners detained in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.[17] In 2012, WikiLeaks released the "Syria Files," over two million emails sent by Syrian politicians, corporations and government ministries.[18][19] In 2015, WikiLeaks published Saudi Arabian diplomatic cables,[20][21] documents detailing spying by the U.S. National Security Agency on successive French presidents,[22][23] and the intellectual property chapter of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a controversial international trade agreement which had been negotiated in secret. During the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, WikiLeaks released emails and other documents from the Democratic National Committee and from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, showing that the party's national committee favoured Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries, leading to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC.[26] These releases caused significant harm to the Clinton campaign, and have been attributed as a potential contributing factor to her loss in the general election against Donald Trump.[27] The U.S. intelligence community expressed "high confidence" that the leaked emails had been hacked by Russia and supplied to WikiLeaks. (cf Russian Interference In The 2016 Election) WikiLeaks said that the source of the documents was not Russia or any other state.[28] During the campaign, WikiLeaks promoted conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks (more)

Zeynep Tufekci: Why Aren't We Wearing Better COVID-19 Masks? We’d hoped that by 2021 supply chains would have ramped up enough to ensure that everyone had better masks. Cloth masks, especially homemade ones, were supposed to be a stop-gap measure. Why are so many of us still wearing them? (more)

Society Design of Karl Marx. (more)

Renee DiResta - Opinion Here’s how Russia will attack the 2020 election. We’re still not ready. In 1983, an anonymous letter from an author claiming to be an American scientist appeared in an Indian newspaper, asserting that the HIV virus raging across the world was a bioweapon released by the United States. Over the next several years, similar claims appeared in leftist and alternative newspapers around the world and ended up becoming widely believed among those predisposed to distrust the Reagan administration. As late as 2005, a study showed that 27 percent of African Americans still believed that HIV was created in a government lab. We now know that these claims were part of a massive Soviet disinformation campaign. (more)

Vanessa Molter, Renee DiResta, and Alex Stamos - Opinion | As Chinese propaganda on covid-19 grows, U.S. social media must act. According to official infection figures, China’s battle with the novel coronavirus appears to be slowing, though there is skepticism on the reliability of those numbers. But the struggle to control the global narrative is just beginning. A key battlefield in that campaign will be the platforms operated by America’s still-dominant Internet companies. (more)

Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election. Russian military intelligence executed a cyberattack on at least one U.S. voting machine software supplier and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials just days before last November’s presidential election, according to a highly classified intelligence report obtained by The Intercept. (This led to Reality Winner arrest.) (more)

The Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election with the goals of harming the campaign of Hillary Clinton, boosting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and increasing political and social discord in the United States. According to U.S. intelligence agencies, the operation—code named Project Lakhta—was ordered directly by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Special Counsel's report, made public in April 2019, examined numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian officials but concluded that there was insufficient evidence to bring any conspiracy or coordination charges against Trump or his associates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_United_States_elections (more)

for the Presidential Election (more)