killer of cities and forests (more)

expected/predicted length-of-life (more)

when various institutions expect a person to stop working at a DayJob (more)

Gitcoin: Announcing Grants Round 12! Over $1.5M in total matching funds committed so far, expected to break all previous records (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #5: April 2023. As AI eats the world and my time and news feeds, it is always good to know other things also happen (more)

Mark Gorton (2008) concept for a Real Time AutoMobile/Van/Taxi/Car Pool/Ride Sharing Market/dispatching system. New form of Mass Transit? (more)

Ash Maurya: How To Turn Your Limiting Constraints Into Seeds For Breakthrough Innovation. *The basic idea is using a systems approach to (more)

Instacart is the Best and Worst Grocery Business Imaginable (grocery store). Growth investors are rarely excited to underwrite a business that hires 600,000 people to perform a repetitive task like picking items off grocery store shelves and delivering them (more)

Kevin Roose is an American author and journalist. He is the author of three books and a technology columnist for The New York Times. He wrote a book about Liberty University, an evangelical Christian university known for strict rules imposed on students. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Roose

The Other "MoviePass Economy". Back in 2018, Kevin Roose wrote a wonderful short piece: "The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now. Enjoy It While You Can." The main thrust was that the US economy—especially the economy as it's experienced by young people with pretty good jobs in big cities—was increasingly full of unsustainably cheap consumer products financed by VC largesse (Edit: a reader notes that MoviePass is a bad example of this because it wasn’t VC-financed). (more)

MoviePass, Inc. is an American subscription-based movie ticketing service[2][3] owned by co-founder Stacy Spikes.[4] The service was launched in 2011 and allowed subscribers to purchase up to a movie ticket a day for a monthly fee... MoviePass was founded in 2011 by technology and entertainment entrepreneurs Stacy Spikes and Hamet Watt.[8][9] It was backed by major investors including True Ventures, AOL Ventures, Lambert Media, Moxie Pictures and other investors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MoviePass

The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly referred to as COP26, was the 26th United Nations Climate Change conference, held at the SEC Centre in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom, from 31 October to 13 November 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_Nations_Climate_Change_Conference

Government subsidy of fossil fuels continue, despite accelerating climate change.

Jeffrey Leonard: Energy subsidies (Subsidy) are the sordid legacy of more than sixty years of politics as usual in Washington, and they cost us somewhere around $20 billion a year... Energy subsidies take many forms. Some of them are direct outlays of taxpayer dollars, like payments to corn producers for Ethanol. Most are in the form of tax benefits, such as the deduction for “intangible drilling costs” (labor, repairs, hauling, you name it) in oil exploration—a notoriously abused provision of the tax code. The sheer number of subsidies is part of what makes them so hard to track. (more)

Combining a number of offerings/features that could be sold separately into a single purchase. e.g. CableCo. cf UnBundling

dismantling a collection/entity (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Junk Fees, Bundling and Unbundling. Joe Biden harped on junk fees during the State of the Union. While I do not think it is the problem of our time, I take things in the reference class of resort fees, or fees to have adjacent seats on an airplane, and other such unbundling (and bundling) surprisingly seriously. I am putting up my thoughts here so I have a reference to fall back upon. (more)

Made-For-Advertising Websites Are Still Harming Advertisers (Exclude These 280+ Sites Now). the focus of a Made-For-Advertising website is to get the user to click or view as many ads as possible on their page. (more)

iCloud sucks and it really shouldn’t. iCloud is great when it works. Seamless. You don’t notice it’s there. But it’s dire when it fails (more)

Gordon Brander: Tools for thought should evolve building blocks. Goldberg’s paper is about designing genetic algorithms (GAs), but the patterns he identifies reveal deep insights about innovation in general. They also suggest new ways of thinking about tools for thought. Let's unpack! (more)