A commenter notes that "Trump managed to be both Hitler and Chamberlain in the same negotiation. An unprecedented feat." 😭

How does nonverbal expression affect success in crowdfunding pitches? Does this vary between men and women? Do these differences provide hints to why women do better in crowdfunding than in traditional entrepreneurial fundraising?

Finally, dungeon crawler Carl and Princess Donut get the @lauramille.bsky.social treatment in Slate. I resisted recommendations for this ridiculous "LitRPG" series for quite a while, and I'm still wrestling with why I love it so much. slate.com/culture/2026...

"And perhaps the greatest myth of all is that Greenland was ever truly conquered. It remains, even now, a place that humbles empires, silences explorers, and outlasts expectations. It is not a relic or a ruin. It is a force," Erik Mikkal Thorsen, Greenland Uncovered

The rate of global mean sea level rise has increased from ~2.1 mm/year in 1993 to ~4.5 mm/year in 2023. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

one of four in a week www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/n...

tldr: it all comes down to Baumol’s disease plus rising opportunity costs of family work. www.ft.com/content/3fa9... Why Americans are feeling poorer even though they’re not

Perfect, no notes 👇

I just finished Moby Dick. The last 25-30 chapters are a rip-roaring yarn. What elevates it to “classic” experience is the relief of getting through the first 100 chapters of whale trivia and ship gossip.

I just finished Moby Dick. The last 25-30 chapters are a rip-roaring yarn. What elevates it to classic is the sheer relief of getting through the first 100 chapters of whale trivia and ship gossip.

Fine for Harvard students though.

They should put in auctions where you bid to recline while the person behind bids to prevent reclining. To the winner go the spoils.

“We found over 35 cases in which the judges have specifically said what the government is providing…false information. It might be intentionally false information, including false sworn declarations time and again," says Ryan Goodman, law professor at New York University.

Oh, Europe. Self-parody is so 2018.

How causality ate the world. I don’t see how causality is the key issue in psychology research, most of which is based on RCTs. Replicability crisis, yes a big issue. Generalizability out of the lab, yes. But causality? That hardly seems to be the crux.

[writing the constitution] Benjamin Franklin: Write down "no dumb fucks as president" Alexander Hamilton: Stop saying that Benjamin Franklin: I'm tellin' you. You're gonna regret not writing that down

“Technology will just get better” idk but I liked the Internet better 25 years ago

The renewable energy transition goes very slowly, then all at once

How did the hype get so far ahead of reality?

It’s time for scientists to publicize the research that is being cancelled. Enough silence in hopes of evading the axe! Disease communities (and others) are organized & can be activated!

Large Language Models and their associated businesses are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar panacea for a tech industry that’s lost the plot. The tech and business media must change their ways, or risk repeating these cycles forever. www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

It is now actively illogical to act as if generative AI is a real movement. Analyst Josh Beck said last week that Amazon will only make *$5bn* from AI in 2025 - after spending $105bn in capex. And they're pulling back on data centers too. This isn't a revolution! www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Mark Halperin hasn't seen a "clever and invigorating joke" since the 2004 presidential election cycle.

We are definitely at peak market moment for “Andreesen seems brilliant for spending 20 hours a day on signal chats.” Gonna be a fast slide from here - joining Elon in the heap at the bottom.

This is a good rundown of some research about how AI thinks. Big bags of heuristics do not “generalize” to new problems very well. AGI may be much farther away than industry leaders claim. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-...

Cool graph. If you had asked me, I would not have correctly predicted that the slope was steepest for Latin America

Powerful. But not “intelligent.” A transformative technology. But not going to replace all human & organizational intelligence in a matter of years. We’re like the 18th C audiences mesmerized by batteries attached to twitching frog legs thinking the font of life had been discovered.

I had not seen the revelation last month that Daniel Kahneman ended his life with medical assistance in 2024. I wonder if it was at the same location in Switzerland where my mother ended her life this January. Reading the article I was back there, living her choice. www.wsj.com/arts-culture...

Not a lot of people know that manufacturing generates just 10% of U.S. GDP and employs 10% of workers. Ag + mining is about 2% of GDP. The rest comes from various services. The U.S. is a service economy like most other developed nations.

So much bravery. So much integrity.

That post is getting passed around a lot (as pics at the other place), so it's worth knowing it's probably wrong.

So I guess there is no such thing as "fuck you" money - more money just makes you more fucked. www.politico.com/news/magazin...

“Sinks in” - Could there be a funnier headline about “efficient” markets? Like the market is Homer Simpson slapping his forehead, “doh!”

Today in Milan, a student activist group hung a trash-filled effigy of Musk upside down on a gate outside of piazzale Loreto, where Mussolini's body was displayed in 1945. They left the message: "C'è sempre posto a piazzale Loreto, Elon" (There's always room in piazzale Loreto, Elon)

It’s because of the crackdown in New Jersey.

Alright, here's a more #strategy specific question. What do academic strategists think of Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy? I've just come across it and it seems like a pretty good synthesis of defensible sources of advantage, which he calls power. Your thoughts?

Actually, the interesting question is how the case of BlueSky fits or doesn't fit the analogies and models people are offering here. @kissane.bsky.social seems to be right that no amount of moderating tools or "federated" systems will keep a commuinity safe once it becomes popular. That tracks.

Is anybody else I know reading and thinking about this analogy of the social web as a dangerous "dark forest"? I do wonder where and how quality human interactions can be supported in digital societies. Anyone got a favorite "cozy web" corner we can spoil? (don't say BlueSky - too late!)

Guess who just edged Switzerland in an independent rating of train services in Europe? Way to go, Trenitalia. www.theguardian.com/world/2024/d...

How annoying that these announcements follow the cardinal sin of abstracts and pronounce the research as dealing with “important questions” without saying what they are or what has been found. Grrr

How about a reverse form of management consulting where workers hire consultants to "reorganize" the management?

This is an interesting idea that knowledge work spawned its own backlash.

Sci fi -> transformer models -> LLMs

Pinning for future me to wade through & think about whether this correlates with ambiguity avoidance.

Thanks for the idea, Charlie! I’ve put together a list of strategy academics on Bluesky: "Strategy #STRsky". Feel free to follow the list bsky.app/profile/nikl..., and do let me know about others who should be added!

Some news: amid rapid growth and some over-enforcement of its community guidelines, Bluesky trust and safety chief @aaron.bsky.team tells me the company will quadruple the size of its content moderation team www.platformer.news/bluesky-grow...

Bluesky really has an increasing scammer problem (mostly via replies and hashtags)—good thing is that it's because its becoming more popular. Extremely funny to me that the people running it initially (like in Q2/2023 and 50k users) truly believed they can just largely leave moderation to users.