Fonts in use.
And drops gems like, “At the Arnault family, apparently, we don’t argue, we conspire. We don’t deliberate, we plot. It’s novelistic… What, in an ordinary family, is simply called Sunday lunch becomes, in our case, an intrigue. It’s a matter of vocabulary.”
We study human capital in venture capital (VC) using a new dataset covering over 100,000 professionals affiliated with U.S. VC firms. Investment success is extremely concentrated: fewer than 40% of VCs with any investments are ever credited with a successful investment, and 90% of investment profits are generated by 5% of VCs. Differences in education, prior work experience, and demographics predict career progression and investment outcomes, consistent with persistent investor-specific skills. Quasi-experimental variation from marginal inclusions on the Forbes Midas List shows that achieving superstar status increases access to highly-valued startups, complementing other human capital and contributing to concentration.
Last week, a Europe-based firm, The Exploration Company, hosted an office-opening celebration in Webster, Texas. At the facility, located just a couple of miles from Johnson Space Center, founder Hélène Huby said her company was considering making Houston the base of its operations to develop a crewed spacecraft.
Among the most central of the less-famous people, for most of Ghibli’s existence, was Michiyo Yasuda. She’s far from a household name. Yet the one-of-a-kind colors of Ghibli’s animation, which shape the whole look and feel of its films, were selected mainly by her. Miyazaki once called Yasuda “three times sharper and more particular than me.”1Takahata, who worked with her on Grave of the Fireflies (1988), said glowing things about her abilities. He pointed to the worn-out pants of one character in that film:
[S]he chose a color that looked faded from many washings. Although I say ‘chose a color,’ in reality, she was choosing texture. Whether the fabric is thick or flimsy depends on the color chosen. Yasuda-san has a subtle perception that allows her to grasp such things.2
America’s Christian tradition can likewise help navigate central challenges of the digital age. As AI raises questions about the distinction between humanity and machines, Christian anthropology provides a strong foundation for understanding both our particular nature and God-given role as rulers of technology rather than passive subjects of change. As some legacy institutions and norms are disrupted, Christian ethics offer timeless principles to shape digital age successors. While Christianity has declined markedly in recent decades, this may reverse as many recognize the inability of secular norms to answer questions raised by emerging technologies.
To understand the financial impact of listing on Zillow, Compass Chief Economist Mike Simonsen and Chief Data Officer Dave Crosby analyzed the performance of listings that did not appear on Zillow, and compared them to nearly 300,000 listings that did. The analysis proved that homes listed on Zillow sell for 1.3% less, on average, than homes that were not on Zillow. The Zillow Tax on the U.S. median existing-home sale price of $430,000 translates to a $5,590 loss. Zillow wasn’t created to protect homeowner value – it is a lead-generation website built to make Zillow money at the expense of sellers. Zillow sells leads, not homes.
Banning surveillance pricing would be good for consumers. The FTC has found that companies will set higher prices based on personal information. “For instance,” the FTC found last year, “if a consumer is profiled as a new parent, the consumer may intentionally be shown higher-priced baby thermometers on the first page of their in-app search results, based on their residential zip code and time of purchase.” Let’s say that again: the U.S. government has found that companies may seek to use surveillance pricing to charge parents searching for a thermometer in the middle of the night more money in a time of need.
National Security Determination on the Threat Posed by Foreign-Produced Advanced Robotic Devices.
If you want to build something truly new, it requires a fight. You have to push against entrenched dogmas, and accept friction. But fighting is an asymmetric bet – pushing very hard requires having very little to lose.
VW had a vision for a battery-powered airborne vehicle. To turn it into reality, the then-82-year-old manufacturer sought Chinese design and technology that was beginning to outpace its own. The German automaker’s goal was to move fast with an in-house startup team in Beijing to produce a flying car — a moonshot challenge that had stumped its Porsche and Audi divisions. In China, for China, VW would deliver what it described internally as a “luxury futuristic” drone that would convey four wealthy passengers in style. The aim was to sell them a vehicle to fly between cities like Beijing and Tianjin in a quiet craft with noise levels half those of a helicopter.
Your personal health information is easier to share than ever. That can help save lives when seconds count, but it also means more people can peek at your detail-rich medical records. KFF Health News investigates how the Trump administration, with the help of little-known private entities, has sought unprecedented access to Americans’ health data — an effort that is reshaping health information privacy and profitability.
…Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands that bundle unofficial versions of Google’s Android operating system and are frequently marketed (via online influencers) as a way to access a broad array of streaming services and live broadcasts without a subscription.
…Complaints? The RAV4 is to modern suburbia what porkpie hats were to ’50s dads. Everybody’s got one. Few really look cool wearing them. I tried counting all the RAV4s I saw on the way to the park, about 15 minutes away. I gave up when I hit 50 and I was nowhere near the park.
I can hardly believe one of the most popular vehicles in America is so dumb looking. The Woodland grade comes with the Split Hammerhead Grille. Grrr! says the Woodland. I’m a bear. I’m a shark. I’m a shark-bear.
The smart money is on SCOTUS siding with the DC Circuit, finding the rules aren’t “ripe” for review yet, and letting the USPS move ahead for now. Come back when you know what to actually complain about. The complication is that the 23 states are crying about having to completely “rebuild” their systems less than three months from a federal election— even though 15 red states filed briefs saying it would be no problem at all. So SCOTUS could find that we are just too close now to the midterms and it’s better to keep the status quo for now— which they often say in election-related cases. That’s what makes this so hard to handicap. “We want to have honest voting in our country,” President Trump said when he signed the Executive Order in March, “because if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t really have a nation.” Unsurprisingly, Democrats really disagreed.
What should you do if you’re young and ambitious but don’t know what to work on? What you should not do is drift along passively, assuming the problem will solve itself. You need to take action. But there is no systematic procedure you can follow. When you read biographies of people who’ve done great work, it’s remarkable how much luck is involved. They discover what to work on as a result of a chance meeting, or by reading a book they happen to pick up. So you need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions. [5]. When in doubt, optimize for interestingness. Fields change as you learn more about them. What mathematicians do, for example, is very different from what you do in high school math classes. So you need to give different types of work a chance to show you what they’re like. But a field should become increasinglyinteresting as you learn more about it. If it doesn’t, it’s probably not for you.