https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/public/ recent bookmarks from jerryking 2026-07-04T07:10:14+00:00 https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/07/02/america-should-not-imprison-frontier-ai jerryking>New rules<< often come out of >>disasters<<. America’s Federal Reserve was founded following the Panic of 1907, when stock prices fell by half. Pressure from muckrakers such as Upton Sinclair brought about the Food and Drug Administration. The Securities and Exchange Commission was founded during the Great Depression. >>Artificial intelligence<< has not yet caused a calamity, but it might. Models like **Anthropic’s Mythos** and **Openai’s gpt-5.6 Sol** are extraordinarily good hackers and could become capable advisers to bioterrorists. Understandably, the Trump administration is trying to regulate the technology before >>catastrophe<< strikes. It is working with ai companies on voluntary standards that could soon be released. Unfortunately, its efforts so far have been a mess. Anthropic was its first victim, slapped with export controls in mid-June after the release of Fable, a guardrailed version of Mythos. That came not long after a row between the company and the Pentagon. Fears of a grudge were allayed when the administration appeared to compel Openai to limit access to its Sol model. Then, on June 30th, the Commerce Department abruptly lifted the ban on Fable after Anthropic fiddled with its safety protections. Throughout, the government has seemed to make up rules on the fly. Its decisions have also had an unpleasant >>nationalistic<< tinge. At first it restricted Fable only for non-Americans; Anthropic decided that a wholesale block was the only way to comply. It looks as if the administration pulled the only lever available, knowing that it was a de facto ban. But throughout the past month’s brouhaha, the government has made clear that Americans’ ai access takes precedence over foreigners’. Now that America has started licensing ai releases, it is unlikely to stop. But >>regulating<< **frontier ai** is tricky. >>China’s<< top models are only months behind America’s, and most are >>open-weight<<, meaning anyone can run or tinker with them. One recent release, glm 5.2 from z.ai, already matches the best of the last generation of American models. Chinese labs may take longer to catch up with Mythos, since they have fewer chips and American labs are cracking down on distillation, when competitors use the outputs of the best models to train their own. But that buys months, or a year at most. America could ban Chinese >>open-weight<< models and punish foreigners who use them. But even if it managed to enforce its ban, a vast home market would keep China’s model-makers going. So a permanent block is unworkable. It is also undesirable. Many American ai firms and researchers rely on Chinese models, which are cheap and malleable. The intelligence that makes new models dangerous also makes them tremendously useful. Worries about China aside, a gulf between publicly available and restricted models is a problem. Societies adapt to ai best when improvements arrive gradually, not in a great lurch. Imagine the mess if >>regulators<< bottled up several generations of Mythos-style advances. The few with access would acquire great power. The sudden jump in capability whenever the models did get released would unleash chaos. How then can models like Mythos and Sol be safely set free? The emerging norm provides for an evaluation period and a staggered release to trusted institutions. That is a good start, but it needs formalizing. Some choices, such as **how much risk to tolerate**, belong to elected leaders. But politicians should not be micromanaging the process or horse-trading with ai companies, as they do today. Once those goals are set, politicians should stand back. Evaluating a model is a technical problem. Governments have some expertise, for example in America’s Centre for ai Standards and Innovation or Britain’s ai Security Institute (aisi). But the >>private sector<< has more. The finance and electric-power industries offer structures where oversight is **carried out by industry bodies** [i.e. = "self-regulation"], overseen by government. Something similar might help amalgamate knowledge from the ai labs, research groups and foreign bodies such as aisi. Ideally, America would work with its allies on >>ai regulation<<. Alas, it is hard to imagine >>Donald Trump<< giving up the immense >>sovereign power<< that stems from control of >>frontier models<<. Locking others out of ai is not in America’s economic or strategic interest, but neither were indiscriminate tariffs or threats to Greenland. So other countries must build leverage with their own ai sectors and regulations, and find fail-safes for American >>export controls<<. They could, for instance, ensure that businesses can easily switch to non-American models that run on non-American data centres. It is far wiser to depend on America than on China, but they would be mad to ignore the risks.]]> Anthropic artificial_intelligence China Claude_Fable Claude_Mythos disasters Donald_Trump frontier_models nationalism natural_calamities new_rules OpenAI policymaking regulations risk-tolerance risks sovereign_power export_controls institutions open-weight private_sector regulators self-regulation AI_regulation https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:ab560bd3313b/ 2026-07-03T23:42:33+00:00 https://archive.is/20260703044447/https://www.ft.com/content/94aa54f6-7fe0-4829-8877-d6408ffe3d0f#selection-1445.0-1459.12 jerryking corruption cronyism Donald_Trump elitism Gillian_Tett investing investors lawlessness risks White_House 10x books capriciousness clans democratic backsliding guanxi political_elites rules-based strongmen tribalism self-dealing crony_capitalism nepotism Age_of_Capacity https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:5861cec0cc7c/ 2026-07-03T15:59:06+00:00 https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-blood-sweat-tears-singer-was-famous-for-his-gravelly-evocative/ jerryking>jazz-rock<< pioneers Blood, Sweat & Tears, which topped the charts in 1969 with >>horn-driven<< hits such as And When I Die, You’ve Made Me So Very Happy and his own Spinning Wheel, the singer lived a charmed life, winning awards, adulation and a king’s ransom of earnings that allowed him to indulge his taste for luxury cars and sprawling, palatial homes in coveted locations like the Catskill Mountains. But Mr. Clayton-Thomas, who died in Toronto on June 24 at 84, was also cursed with a past that haunted him for much of his life. The victim of a physically abusive father, Mr. Clayton-Thomas fled the family home at 15, lived on the streets, became a petty criminal, spent time in prison and for many years expressed anger with his fists. His reputation as a brawler with a temper dogged him, as stories about his early days – leaping off stages to flatten a heckling spectator with one punch or jumping into the boxing ring to spar with heavyweight champion George Chuvalo – were all woven into the Clayton-Thomas legend. “David was certainly known to be difficult before he softened and became more sophisticated in his later years,” admitted producer-keyboardist Lou Pomanti, who worked with Mr. Clayton-Thomas periodically after first being recruited to join BS&T in 1980. “When you saw him in his prime, dressed from head to toe in black leather with fringes on his jacket sleeves, he was the definition of a badass. Don’t mess with him – on stage or off.” Devoted to his craft, Mr. Clayton-Thomas remained prolific throughout his career. After spending over three decades off and on with BS&T and releasing recordings under his own name while living in the United States, he finally left the often-fractious band for good in 2004 and returned to his hometown of Toronto. There, he settled into being a father to his daughter Ashleigh, championing new artists, singing jazz and blues in the intimate clubs of Toronto where he started out and recording a steady stream of solo albums with producers such as Mr. Pomanti, Doug Riley and George Koller. He also made peace with his past. In 2010, the self-educated Mr. Clayton-Thomas published his autobiography, Blood, Sweat and Tears, which critics praised as an inspirational story of redemption. “His author’s voice,” The Globe and Mail reviewer wrote, “is much like the lyrics to his songs – intuitive, direct and genuine.” Frank Davies, founder of the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, which inducted Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s Spinning Wheel in 2007, agreed. “Spinning Wheel is very autobiographical,” Mr. Davies said. “David had a tough adolescence in rough circumstances and his lyrics touch on not giving up hope despite such problems.” He added: “That song has really stood the test of time, helped by recordings by over 200 others artists, and the original sounds as soulful and edgy today as it did all those years ago.” When Mr. Clayton-Thomas died peacefully at Toronto’s St. Michael’s Hospital, friends, family and fans mourned the loss of an exceptional musician and a compassionate man with deep convictions who, under that rugged exterior, had a big heart. “David had the strongest willpower of anyone I’ve ever met,” Mr. Koller said. “If he wanted something to happen, it got done. And it made everyone around him better.” Singer Dione Taylor called Mr. Clayton-Thomas “delightfully salty, deliciously sweet, smart as a whip and passionate about life, love, equality and truth.” Jazz-FM broadcaster and impresario Jaymz Bee noted that Mr. Clayton-Thomas, strongly opinionated and staunchly Canadian, was “never a fan of Donald Trump and often railed at the American President on CNN.” Added Mr. Bee: “David wrote a few politically charged songs in his later years and enthusiastically embraced Mark Carney’s elbows-up stance.” David Henry Thomsett was born on Sept. 13, 1941 in Kingston upon Thames, near London, England. He was the elder of two sons of Fred Thomsett, a Toronto hydro lineman who was serving overseas as a motorcycle dispatch rider in the Royal Canadian Signals Corps during the Second World War, and Freda Thomsett (née Smith), an English pianist-entertainer. After the war, the family settled in the Toronto suburb of Willowdale, where the six-foot-tall, 200-pound veteran, a violent alcoholic, beat his sons with fists, boots and razor straps, according to Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s memoir. “I hated this man with a passion and would often cry myself to sleep at night wishing he were dead. I took my suppressed rage out at school,” he wrote. Arrests for assault and car theft led the teenage Mr. Clayton-Thomas to incarcerations at Guelph Reformatory and the notorious Burwash Industrial Farm in northern Ontario, including a brutal stint in solitary confinement. When he stepped out of Millbrook Reformatory, near Peterborough, Ont., Mr. Clayton-Thomas left with a cheap guitar from a fellow inmate and some old blues songs he had learned, and headed straight for Yonge Street. Wanting to distance himself from his criminal past, he changed his name first to Sonny Thomas and then to David Clayton-Thomas and showed up at Le Coq D’Or, where Ronnie Hawkins was drawing lineups with his band the Hawks. The young singer sat in for a song or two and immediately impressed the rockabilly star from Arkansas. “He’s tough and mean and sings the blues like he comes from Mississippi,” said Mr. Hawkins, who promptly began mentoring the young singer. Before long, Mr. Clayton-Thomas had a manager, CHUM radio deejay Duff Roman, and one of the best bands on the Yonge Street Strip, the Shays. He recorded his first hit, a cover of John Lee Hooker’s bluesy Boom Boom. After scoring again with Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s own Walk That Walk, the Shays became the first Canadian band to appear on American network television’s Hullabaloo – surrounded by dancers dressed as hockey players. Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s next band, the jazz-flavoured Bossmen, enjoyed even greater success with Brainwashed, a song he called an “anti-war primal scream of refusal and outrage.” And Mr. Clayton-Thomas started hanging out in the city’s hippie district of Yorkville, soaking up the songwriting influence of Joni Mitchell and John Kay, future leader of Steppenwolf. While living in Yorkville, Mr. Clayton-Thomas wrote both Spinning Wheel, borrowing carousel imagery from Ms. Mitchell’s The Circle Game, and another future BS&T hit song, Lucretia MacEvil. “Musically, I went to high school on Yonge Street and college in Yorkville,” he told this writer in 1996. “I learned everything I know about music thanks to my association with Toronto musicians.” Ultimately, music saved him from a life in prison. As he wrote in his memoir: “In my mind, it was the only thing standing between me and where I came from, and I wasn’t going back.” Tagging along with the visiting Mr. Hooker in early 1967, Mr. Clayton-Thomas followed the veteran bluesman down to New York and started gigging around Greenwich Village himself. There, one night, folk singer Judy Collins heard him and tipped off BS&T founder Bobby Colomby, who was looking for a new vocalist for his band. A Clayton-Thomas performance caused a shocked Mr. Colomby to declare: “He sings just like Ray Charles.” Thus began Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s long, celebrated role in BS&T. With the gritty, charismatic Toronto man out front, the band became an instant sensation, knocking the Beatles’ Abbey Road out of the top of the album charts. The Globe and Mail’s Ritchie Yorke raved about the “big, ballsy bull of a lead singer,” while New York Times critic John Rockwell called Mr. Clayton-Thomas the group’s “greatest strength, one of the best [voices] in pop music – gravelly and strong for upbeat numbers, huskily evocative for more lyrical material.” Forging a jazz-rock fusion, Mr. Clayton-Thomas and BS&T inspired other horn-powered bands, including Chicago and Toronto’s Lighthouse, to follow suit. But infighting within BS&T, along with fallout from several ill-advised bookings, tarnished the glow around the group. First, it undertook a tour behind the Iron Curtain – to Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland – as part of U.S. president Richard Nixon’s State Department-sponsored visit to promote cultural exchange. Fans of the band called them sellouts. As the 2023 documentary What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears made clear, the Nixon administration essentially blackmailed the group to do the tour, otherwise Mr. Clayton-Thomas would be deported for his criminal record. After the tour, when BS&T performed at Madison Square Garden, activist Abbie Hoffman and his Yippie followers carried signs denouncing the band and others threw dog feces at them onstage. Then, BS&T took a residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where Mr. Clayton-Thomas met Sammy Davis Jr., a huge fan of the Canadian singer, whom many saw as a fiery alternative to Welsh powerhouse Tom Jones. This led to the band sharing a bill with the Rat Pack veteran at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles – hardly cool in the minds of Rolling Stone magazine’s editors and readers. Mr. Clayton-Thomas lacked control of BS&T (Mr. Colomby owned the name), which led him to repeatedly quit the band, only to return when his solo endeavours failed to measure up. He needed BS&T and BS&T needed him. Said Mr. Pomanti, who produced Mr. Clayton-Thomas’s 2010 album Soul Ballads and last year’s tribute concert for him at Toronto’s Redwood Theatre: “It plagued David that he couldn’t have the same success under his own name.” But once back in Toronto, the habitually driven Mr. Clayton-Thomas mellowed and accepted a more moderate career and pace of life. Single after four failed marriages that produced two children, he settled into a penthouse suite in a downtown condominium overlooking Lake Ontario.]]> '70s obituaries singers singer-songwriters horn-powered_bands jazz-rock music_bands pop_music https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:6199583d3cff/ 2026-07-03T03:54:46+00:00 https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/management/article-five-confidence-boosting-strategies-to-build-your-mental-strength-at/#google_vignette jerrykingHarvey_Schachter https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0fd3e0330f75/ 2026-07-03T03:47:13+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-canadians-should-aspire-to-greatness/ jerryking Canada Canadian consequential editorials greatness imperfections political_capital prime_ministers statesmen transformational https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:5d7ecbd61958/ 2026-07-02T18:52:53+00:00 https://byebyepaywall.com/en/ jerryking paywalls https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4599e81f362f/ 2026-07-01T20:09:34+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-anthropic-mythos-ai-canada-evan-solomon/ jerryking>digital sovereignty<<. Minister Solomon confirms Canada now part of Anthropic’s Mythos AI preview program Digital sovereignty is about a country controlling its own data, the processing of that data and the resulting knowledge that it produces. It means securing our individual privacy and property, including the intellectual property we have developed. Every Canadian has personal data that should be secured in Canada, away from the legal authority of other nations with potentially conflicting political values and commercial interests. Canadians expect that their medical records are secured locally; that public education institutions run safe online spaces where the digital identities of students, faculty and staff are not mined for commercial exploitation or social abuse; and that transportation networks, pipelines, electrical grids and other infrastructure are secured against cyberthreats. AI models will increasingly be used to address a range of challenges, such as managing weather-related supply disruptions, reducing internal trade barriers and increasing our capacity to import and export with a greater diversity of countries. These models and the cloud from which they emanate should be controlled by Canadians, subject to Canadian law and the political forces that shape it. The good news is that organizations are taking steps toward independent control of AI models, the data they use and the resulting knowledge. Some universities have their own limited AI platforms based on open-source models. While much has been written about the massive data centres built to power AI, newer models are becoming increasingly compact, requiring less hardware. For example, an open-source model such as Google’s Gemma 4 E4B can be loaded and run on the average smartphone, yet it is more capable than the earlier version of OpenAI’s GPT-4, which required a data centre to run. The capability density of AI models, a metric measuring a model’s efficiency, doubles every three to four months. That also means less hardware and energy consumption. Canada leads the G7 in its working-age population with college or university credentials. Both of us are educators running university programs whose graduates can help supply the manpower Canada needs to achieve digital sovereignty. It’s important to keep those educated individuals in Canada once they graduate. They should be employed in new or existing Canadian organizations that can buy or develop digital services locally, rather than only facilitating the purchase of those products and services from international providers. Canada can, and should, have its own Mythos and the infrastructure to run it.]]> artificial_intelligence Canada Claude Claude_Mythos digital_sovereignty frontier_models https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:52494f77fa84/ 2026-07-01T18:34:54+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-canadas-electronic-spy-agency-conducted-cyberattacks-on-criminals/ jerryking>cyberattacks<< to disrupt the activities of online foreign criminals who were brokering the purchase and sale of precursor chemicals used to make the opioid fentanyl, according to its latest annual report. It’s part of an increased workload at the rapidly growing >>Communications Security Establishment<<, which collects foreign intelligence, safeguards federal government infrastructure from cyberattacks and uses technology to disrupt adversaries, when authorized. CSE chief Caroline Xavier in the 2025-26 annual report, released Monday, said her organization, one of Canada’s main spy agencies, is entering a period of “sustained expansion and transformation” and that its work force grew by more than 8 per cent last year to 4,178 people. The agency’s budget will surpass $2-billion in 2026–27, according to the Main Estimates tabled in Parliament in February, up from just over $1-billion in 202425. The CSE’s latest report said it also stepped up its intelligence and >>cyberdefence<< work in the >>Arctic<< this year, citing growing interest in the region from Russia and China, “extending beyond traditional military and cyberthreats to include economic and influence-related activities that seek to shape access, infrastructure, and decision-making in the region.” It said >>sensors<< it had previously installed in government computer infrastructure in Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in 2024–25 are helping “detect malicious cyber activity in devices.” Bill Robinson, an expert on Canadian signals intelligence and a research fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, said that, during the Cold War, the CSE specialized in intercepting communication signals in the Arctic, through >>listening posts<< in Masset on Haida Gwaii; Gander, N.L.; Canadian Forces Station Leitrim outside Ottawa; and Canadian Forces Station Alert on Ellesmere Island. Those are still active today. He said the CSE, like the Department of National Defence, the RCMP and the Canada Border Services Agency, was mostly shielded from Ottawa’s 2025 spending reduction exercise where federal departments had to cut 15 per cent of their budget over three years. Instead, it was required to cut 2 per cent. “As with military spending, the Carney government has turned its budget fire hose on the Communications Security Establishment and is drenching the agency in money,” Mr. Robinson said. Over the years, Ottawa has formally granted the CSE more authority. Its original task was foreign signals intelligence – intercepting others’ conversations or data – and later it was tasked with protecting Ottawa’s communications through cryptography and cybersecurity. In 2001, its ability to provide assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies was formalized in law, and in 2019, it was given authority to conduct defensive and active, or offensive, cyberoperations – including going into foreign computer systems to disrupt threats to Canada or advance Canadian interests. “CSE is seen as the darling of the national-security community because of its capabilities,” Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor and national-security expert at Carleton University, said. “We don’t often think of Canada as having powerful foreign intelligence capabilities, but the CSE is extremely capable and a well-respected organization.” The CSE annual report said the agency’s >>intelligence gathering<< in 2025-26 supported Canada and allies “to list and enforce sanctions against Russia, including identifying entities that the Russian government is using to circumvent international sanctions.” It also backed efforts by Canada and partners to “identify and counter People’s Republic of China state-sponsored cyberespionage.” On the fentanyl brokers, the CSE said it collected foreign intelligence on the criminals involved and then conducted an active cyberoperation – disruptive hacking – against them that the agency says, “disrupted and diminished their ability to operate.” The CSE says it also supported law enforcement as part of the effort. The CSE’s active cyberoperations must be authorized by the Minister of National Defence. The Minister of Foreign Affairs must also consent. The report said the CSE had three authorizations to conduct active cyberoperations in 2025–26, the same number as the year prior. The annual report does not identify the fentanyl brokers, their country of origin or the specific techniques that the CSE used to disrupt their activities. Prof. Carvin said the CSE’s attack on the fentanyl brokers could have targeted their ability to pay – including seizing or locking their digital assets such as cryptocurrency wallets – or hacked the fentanyl brokers’ communications, among other disruptive actions. Canada has been under pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration since early 2025 to crack down on fentanyl production and distribution. Mr. Trump used fentanyl as justification for tariffs on Canada that started at 25 per cent and rose to 35 per cent, before the U.S. Supreme Court struck them down in February as exceeding presidential authority. It is the first time the CSE has publicly described a completed offensive cyberoperation targeting the fentanyl supply chain in its annual report. The agency’s annual report for 2024-25 had said the CSE had “developed new campaigns” to identify and disrupt transnational criminal networks responsible for fentanyl and synthetic opioid supply chains, but stopped short of describing any executed operation. The CSE also says in its latest annual report that it took concurrent action against 10 of the most significant ransomware groups causing harm to Canada and its allies. And working with >>Five Eyes<< security and intelligence partners and law enforcement, it conducted an active >>cyberoperation<< against a specific ransomware-asa-service group responsible for more than 25 incidents against Canadian organizations in the transportation, health care, pharmaceutical and business sectors. The CSE said the operation rendered the group’s infrastructure inoperable and deleted a large amount of stolen data the group had advertised for sale on the dark web. The expansion of the CSE is not just in budget and personnel. Defence Construction Canada, a Crown corporation that builds defence infrastructure, last fall issued a procurement notice for a new building at the CSE’s Ottawa headquarters – designated “CSE New Building 8” – estimated to cost between $150-million and $300-million. It would be a “self-contained, purpose-built extension, which will be physically integrated” into the existing building infrastructure, DCC said. “This building will serve as an extension of current operations, providing additional space to support business growth and specialized functions.” ]]> CSE cyberattacks cyberoperations Arctic Five_Eyes intelligence-gathering listening_posts ransomeware sensors SIGINT cyberdefenses https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a3aa46086841/ 2026-07-01T09:29:21+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/29/dining/america-250-years-of-food.html jerryking food innovation inventions U.S. https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:3c259df2284b/ 2026-07-01T08:35:19+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/30/us/politics/cia-reorganization-cyber-ai.html jerryking>reorganizing<< to ensure that it can adopt technology faster and further develop offensive >>cyberoperations<< division. He promised that the agency would use new technology more aggressively and take “smart risks,” even as it prioritized human decision making and oversight of artificial intelligence and other innovations. The changes are intended to strengthen the C.I.A.’s ability to **collect intelligence** by gaining access to additional computer networks or communications, or even just locating additional potential human sources. The overhaul, Mr. Ratcliffe said, is an acknowledgment that in the modern world, digital borders are as important as physical borders. In his first major address as C.I.A. director, Mr. Ratcliffe said >>artificial intelligence<< is raising the stakes in America’s competition with its adversaries, since the new technology is itself a transformative weapon........ we’re talking about the impact of these **frontier A.I. models**,” he said. “It would be, as we’ve talked about, not misplaced to refer to their capabilities as akin to digital nuclear weapons.”.........To improve its collection, both through human spies and >>eavesdropping<< on communication networks, “more C.I.A. officers are going to have to become just as comfortable with handling lines of code as they are with handling human assets and sources,”........ the capabilities of the new generation of artificial intelligence model had promoted **hard thinking** about >>cyberdefenses<< and >>cyberoffensive<< operations......despite the focus on artificial intelligence and other new technologies, Mr. Ratcliffe said human beings, not computer models, would remain the decision makers.....drone technology and other advances had transformed how armies fight, and described the new dangers on the battlefield.....Ratcliffe announced a broad reorganization of another technology-focused arm of C.I.A., the Directorate of Digital Innovation. The organization, which has been renamed the Directorate of Mission Systems, will focus on defensive cybersecurity and data infrastructure. C.I.A. officers specializing in offensive >>cyberoperations<< are now part of a new mission center, the Center for Cyber Intelligence. The center has been in operation since last year and has allowed the agency to deploy new offensive cybertools.........Ratcliffe said the agency would also work to improve how it teams up with private industry, which was also a priority of his predecessor, William J. Burns. But in recent months, Mr. Ratcliffe said the agency has more **rapidly adopted new technologies** developed by the >>private sector<<. “The whole process often took three years or even more,” he said in the speech. “By that time, that technology had become outdated.” The C.I.A., he said, was now **adopting new technology** within six months......Mr. Ratcliffe made his remarks at a summit hosted by Amazon Web Services, which is the biggest provider of the classified cloud computing networks that are used by the C.I.A. and many other spy agencies for data-intensive analysis. Shortly before Mr. Ratcliffe spoke, senior officials from Amazon Web Services announced that it was making new investments that would make it easier for government contractors to develop classified applications and help intelligence agencies move more work to classified cloud....AWS said it would invest to create new computing centers for private companies that are as secure as the government’s classified cloud. The new data centers will allow military contractors and others to develop software and systems that can be smoothly adapted for classified government work. Dave Levy, a vice president at Amazon Web Services, also announced that the company would invest $1 billion to help the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies move older systems to a modern, high-speed cloud. ]]> artificial_intelligence AWS calculated_risks CIA cloud_computing cyberdefenses cyber_security cyber_warfare humans_in_the_loop HUMINT intelligence-collection John_Ratcliffe offensive_tactics priorities reorganizations security_&_intelligence cyberoperations private_sector cyberoffensive eavesdropping rapid_technology_adoption/deployment frontier_models https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:3e3988a622f1/ 2026-07-01T00:34:08+00:00 https://tim.blog/2011/09/24/how-to-create-a-million-dollar-business-this-weekend-examples-appsumo-mint-chihuahuas/#more-5754 jerryking howto Tim_Ferriss https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:f963e46ee7da/ 2026-07-01T00:32:13+00:00 https://archive.is/20260623041826/https://www.ft.com/content/3d0842dd-a8f4-435d-b888-5587b4b9eeda#selection-1487.0-1811.8 jerryking Citadel hedge_funds Ken_Griffin https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:f6f6dd6c064a/ 2026-07-01T00:30:53+00:00 https://archive.is/20260618131032/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/18/ai-has-granted-america-vast-new-power#selection-1081.0-1126.0 jerryking>frontier models<< — and most compute Share illustration: the economist/peter crowther Jun 18th 2026 ]]> artificial_intelligence U.S. frontier_models https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:1763e70d2202/ 2026-07-01T00:29:21+00:00 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kelli-steckler_the-first-2-steps-of-building-a-personal-share-7384604361882165248-iEqX/ jerrykingpersonal_branding https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:71e678d7b736/ 2026-07-01T00:28:42+00:00 https://ca.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/building-a-personal-brand jerrykinghowto personal_branding https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:61b699d6366b/ 2026-07-01T00:25:02+00:00 https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-ai-design-aesthetic-thats-taking-over-the-internet jerryking Anthropic Claude Claude_Design https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:b30bb99b5d83/ 2026-07-01T00:23:24+00:00 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/us-limits-on-anthropic-fable-ai-could-hurt-cybersecurity/ jerryking Anthropic https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:6b80f7c25c01/ 2026-07-01T00:23:06+00:00 https://fortune.com/2026/06/09/ai-agents-flattening-corporate-hierarchies-companies-managers-develop-new-playbook/ jerryking artificial_intelligence https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:6dcff87833ee/ 2026-07-01T00:21:59+00:00 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-30/mark-carney-defense-strategy-fuels-canada-s-dominion-dynamics-funding-record?srnd=homepage-canada&embedded-checkout=true jerrykingdefense https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c5a3d52c9934/ 2026-06-30T14:49:11+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/article-the-ai-economy-is-redrawing-canadas-startup-map/ jerryking artificial_intelligence Canada start_ups https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c9a08b68e820/ 2026-06-30T11:11:42+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/first-person/article-i-still-lift-heavy-but-metastatic-breast-cancer-took-away-my-ability/ jerryking>long-lived<< MBC patient, you may think they don’t look sick. In fact, they look great! Maybe don’t say that to them? Because the reason they’re still walking around like a normal person, looking great, is that they’re taking drugs that target cell metabolism and hormone production. Brilliant drugs that mess with the evil buggers. But those drugs don’t work forever. It’s like what Keith Richards sang about cocaine: “They say it’ll kill you / but they don’t say when.” Treatments stop working, new treatments come along – it’s amazing and it’s terrifying. And like cocaine, the drugs for MBC are a mixed bag. At 70, I’m kept alive by a >>medication<< that gives me, once again, a monthly cycle. Hurray. In week four of that cycle, there’s fatigue, irritability and those old cravings for ice cream. My whole premenopausal life taught me how to plan around that unpleasantness. It’s fine. Many other MBC patients find the drugs harder to bear than I do (so far): Side effects can include depression, joint pain, gut issues and more. All the miseries of old age amplified, if you’re already old. Young women who get this horrible thing can find themselves feeling like 90 at 35. Most weirdly, at 70, my relationship to time and planning has changed. My “hockey coach” personality flails around, bewildered. During my working life, I used to have 10-year plans. Now, my oncologist can’t promise that I’ll be fit to travel in six months. (I likely will be, but there are no certainties.) I read and hear coping advice of various kinds: Be here now. (Sure.) At 70, we’re all living on >>borrowed time<<. (Of course.) But I miss my 10-year plans and the kind of project that bears fruit on that time scale. >>Aging<< means loss. I knew that long ago and (as much as possible) I planned for it. I have been lifting weights since 2010 or thereabouts. **The idea was to delay the loss of strength and mobility that inevitably comes to all of us, whether in our 60s or our 90s.** And yet. I didn’t know that I could keep all that >>fitness<< and still lose reasonable expectations of a long future. Without a time frame, I don’t quite know how to plan longer-term things like money and housing. Should I even try to look two years ahead? Or not? It’s confusing. Except in week four, I feel great. I’m pretty good at not peeking over the cliff edge. But I’m fundamentally – and uncomfortably – >>uncertain<<. And whatever that looks like, that’s how I look.]]> aging anti-aging cancers disease fitness long-lived medications metastatic terminal_illnesses treatment_plans uncertainty women borrowed_time dying https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:82853b273732/ 2026-06-30T03:31:46+00:00 https://archive.is/20260628101734/https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/ai-open-ai-anthropic/687689/#selection-615.0-647.14 jerryking>mental effort<<. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy >>thinking hard<<. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to >>think hard<< and take any opportunity not to do it. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really care about something, but they don’t intrinsically enjoy it. Need for cognition correlates with intelligence but is not the same thing. We all know a lot of really smart people who don’t like to work hard. Here are the three groups: (1) The Productive Passengers. People with a low need for cognition will tend to use AI to think less. Their great gain is that AI will make them more productive because it makes tasks so easy. Their great loss will be that AI will diminish their mental capacities because it makes tasks so easy. (2) The Reluctant Optimizers. People with a medium need for cognition will understand that AI might hollow them out. That prospect will really bother them. They will resolve, earnestly and with good intentions, to not let themselves fall victim. But in the crowded and stressful rush of everyday life, they will get sucked in. Their resolve will fail and they’ll become overreliant on the bots.....People with a cultivation mindset seek friction; people with an optimization mindset want their life to be frictionless. Modern technology wants to turn you from a mental muscle builder into a mental couch potato. If you’re going for optimization, you’re looking to maximize output, not excellence......Pretty soon, people in this optimizer group are going to suffer from the same sort of hollowing-out process as the low-cognition folks. Curiosity will gradually decline.......He argues that a student who has “wrestled with a hard text, revised an argument under pressure, and failed and tried again is more than informed. He is more solid.” As our friend Kierkegaard would have said, it is only by making passionate commitments that a person builds herself into a self. (3) The Mental Marathoners. Now we get to the high-need-for-cognition people and how they will fare in the coming age: kind of like marathoners, I suspect. The automobile is a perfectly good technology for traveling 26.2 miles. There is no practical reason that any person should train themselves to run that distance. But some people do. They want to put in the effort because they want to accomplish [hard] things—they want to expand their capacities.[i.e. = and "self-signal"] High-need-for-cognition people are like this when it comes to thinking. You’re probably among them if you enjoy the following kind of situation: You’ve been working on a project for a while. You have no idea how you’re going to complete it. The deadline is looming and the anxiety is high. Yet you have utter confidence that you are going to figure this out. Intellectually, you know you have failed in the past and you may in fact fail this time. But simultaneously, you know deep in your bones that you will figure it out. You search and brainstorm and then, as if by magic, one day the answer pops into your mind, and at this point, the learning curve turns exponential. Some people hate the stress stirred up by that situation, but it’s what mental marathoners live for.....people with a high need for cognition tend to have a lot of task-related thoughts. They engage in stimulating conversations. They tend to have a high need for closure and control. Once they arrive at a conclusion, it can be very hard to push them off of it, even as counterevidence builds. In the age of AI, I suspect that the mental marathoners are going to work really hard to resist AI entropy. They are going to feel a strong desire to be original. In this age, cultural output will feel ever more familiar, as writing, songs, and movies become syntheses of what has already been produced. Marathoners are going to want to produce work, by contrast, that feels personal, that reflects their unique self. They’re going to want to find ways to use AI to increase their agency, rather than diminish it. Already, techniques have been discovered to help people do that: ##Ask for hints, not answers: People who ask AI to directly answer their questions suffer severe declines in motivation and ability. But people who ask AI for background thinking or clarifications do not. ##Start with a blank page: Before you go to the bot, start with a blank piece of paper and write up your own analysis and conclusions. Then ask AI to challenge your thinking, not produce it. ##Rotate tasks: Every time you do a task with AI, follow it with a task that doesn’t involve AI. That will keep your creative-effort muscles alive. ##Redesign the bots: General chatbot use undermines learning. But as the writer Alberto Romero notes, AI tutors actually improve learning and motivation. That’s because although chatbots mostly answer questions, tutors lead students on structured learning journeys. It should be possible to redesign the normal bots so that they function less like encyclopedias and more like personal trainers whose jobs are designed to build mental muscles, rather than replace them. ##Make a sharp distinction between rote work and creative work: Let AI write functional emails. Don’t let it write your essays or your memos. Shame people who do. ##Ask for thinkers, not thinking: My favorite trick when using >>Claude<< is to never ask it to think through a problem for me. I ask it to summarize the thinkers who have already addressed a given problem. If I’m trying to understand child development, I ask it to imagine a debate between Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. What would these two great psychologists say to each other about the problem I’m wrestling with? Then I ask it what books by these thinkers I should read if I want to understand their work. I get much better results from AI when I treat it as a brilliant librarian rather than as an oracle. ......Some people will use AI to think more. Other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less. If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like two different species. The high-need-for-cognition people will get more and more productive, happier and happier; the rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass.........Not to go all Joseph Campbell on you, but the essential challenge is: How do we train people to see their life as a >>hero’s journey<< in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?........... .......Despite what the rationalists used to tell us, life is not mostly about solving problems. Any computer can do that. Life is a pilgrimage, a journey—it’s going somewhere, growing from experience, expanding yourself, reaching for some possibility that you do not yet possess. The defining human features therefore are propulsions — the drives that push us to take on >>mental effort<< and overcome difficulty — and aspirations: knowing where you want to go, what purpose you serve, what kind of person you’d like to be.........If we can help people learn to want more, hunger more, they’ll be willing to undertake the >>mental effort<< to do >>hard things<<, and we’ll avoid the cognitive polarization that is staring us in the face. If we can educate people to be clear and wholehearted about what they truly love, then AI will do the calculating and the synthesizing, but humans will still define what matters, what is worth exploring, what missions we go on, and where we end up........ ]]> artificial_intelligence David_Brooks brainpower Claude cognitive_endurance hard_work Joseph_Campbell mental_effort metacognition thinking_hard thought_partnerships virtual_scaffolding hard_things thinking_threes bots chatbots self-signalling Hero's_Journey tough-mindedness marathons https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d0d6de3dfe6e/ 2026-06-29T21:31:08+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/well/eat/fermented-food-health-benefits.html jerryking fermentation yogurts health_benefits kimchi https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:b3abe0f64a07/ 2026-06-29T21:15:05+00:00 https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1024120-limonada-brazilian-lemonade jerryking Brazilian citrus drinks recipes beverages juices https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a8930d6ff7a5/ 2026-06-29T12:54:46+00:00 https://archive.is/20260628144514/https://www.ft.com/content/794aa75d-5188-4036-91ca-7fc70b61faf8#selection-1447.0-1461.10 jerryking>physical AI<< can have the larger long-run productivity upside because it targets physical bottlenecks,” says Daniela Rus, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “After all, most working hours are still spent moving atoms, not bits.” Developed nations in Europe and Asia have already made strides integrating robots into assembly lines to drive higher growth. But AI enables robots to also learn and adapt in complex production, construction and logistics environments, which can boost efficiency and quality, and slash changeover times between different products. Early deployments illustrate the potential. >>Foxconn<<, which produces intricate electronics including iPhones, found that vision-guided, self-adjusting robotic arms improved its assembly cycle times by up to 30%, while reducing error rates by 25%. Adoption by Amazon in a US warehouse found that package-carrying robot fleets fitted with AI have learned to navigate around moving humans and obstacles, cutting their travel time by 10%. (This video demonstrates how physical AI works in industrial settings.) Next, AI-powered robotics could alleviate labour shortages in rich nations. University-educated talent is in ample supply for knowledge-intensive services jobs, which now appear to be on the frontline of LLM disruption. But manufacturers frequently cite a lack of workers as a constraint in production. In a 2026 survey by consultancy Capgemini, more than 50% of industrial executives said labour shortages, costs and regulation would be among their top five reasons for adopting physical AI. (Autonomous machines can also conduct bespoke repairs in environments and conditions that are hazardous to humans.) Political tensions over immigration policy, ageing demographics and shifting attitudes towards physical work raise the long-term case for investing in AI-enhanced robotics. Though the technology will displace some jobs, it will also create higher value-added roles on the factory floor, where knowledge of manufacturing processes is still needed to supervise, reconfigure and train robots. (In rich nations, where anxiety about AI’s impact on jobs is rising in dominant white-collar work, a shift towards embedding the tech into manufacturing might be relatively less politically disruptive.) Finally, physical AI complements efforts by governments to boost domestic supply-chain resilience in critical industries. Indeed, multitasking machines could reduce the need for large assembly lines, which means production can take place at home at a lower marginal cost. There is, then, a clear economic and political case for rich-world policymakers to place greater emphasis in supporting the adoption of physical AI in industry. China has made significant advances in applying the technology to the real world and Beijing’s latest five-year plan includes a strategic pivot towards “embodied AI”. The transition will take time in the west. Capital, further developments in world models and vast quantities of training data are required. The necessary supply chains to build robotics hardware are essential, too. And factories and warehouses need redesigning. But venture capitalists are increasingly seeking out investments in robotics. There are, of course, broader applications of embodied AI. Use of autonomous vehicles, such as robotaxis, is growing. Humanoids are often touted as the future of social care and household chores. And use cases in surgical robotics look promising. Yet manufacturing is likely to offer the fastest route to scale. Relative to roads, homes or hospitals, factories are more contained areas that can be designed around machines. Rather than building technology that mimics humans, firms can create specialised robots to achieve levels of speed, precision and endurance well beyond human limits. LLMs have demonstrated AI’s ability to process information. But for rich nations seeking greater growth and economic resilience, the bigger opportunity lies in applying that intelligence to production. After all, the greatest technological transformations tend not to replicate what humans can already do, but enable what they cannot.]]> physical_AI robotics AI-augmented artificial_intelligence atoms_&_bits automation blue-collar ChatGPT China components Foxconn high-wage industrial_policies industrial_robots large_language_models manufacturers physical_world self-perception specialized_component_suppliers supply_chains trends white-collar factory_floors https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:f66267002ae0/ 2026-06-29T12:34:20+00:00 https://archive.is/20260629045042/https://www.ft.com/content/ce505663-9567-40a1-ab9d-91b6bdb90a17#selection-1447.0-1783.13 jerryking>single storyline<<. The AI boom is now so powerful and widespread in nature that it is overwhelming all other drivers of returns and shaping a new AI-based world order. The relative performance of the world’s major stock markets over the past year can be explained by how much exposure they have to AI. Nations with a large foothold in the “stack” of industries developing AI >>infrastructure<< and services are massively outperforming, while those without are lagging by record margins. The winners include the US and China, thanks above all to their foundational AI models; Taiwan and South Korea on the strength of chip manufacturers; Japan and Israel on a broad array of AI skills. The partial winners are secondary suppliers. They include nations that are exporters of circuits, servers and other AI-related electronic hardware — such as Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam — or that play a role in the >>AI stack<< as both exporters and sizeable bases for >>data centres<<, such as Malaysia and Singapore. The losers include much of >>Europe<<, with the odd exception (the Netherlands is a major supplier of advanced chips from one big company). Worst off are those countries that lack “AI plays” and rely heavily on the industries most exposed to disruption, including IT services. In the US, AI plays constitute more than 40% of the market cap and have accounted for more than 80% of the returns this year. The return and concentration profile is similar in Japan and even more extreme in South Korea and Taiwan. In China, all the action is taking place in newer growth-oriented segments of the market, while the old-economy sectors struggle. Meanwhile, the likes of India and the Philippines, which are perceived to be at the wrong end of the AI-wrecking ball, are well in the red this year. While the internet frenzy of the late 1990s was also an overpowering global phenomenon, it was not so narrowly focused. The leading tech subsectors back then were communications equipment, semiconductors and wireless telecom services, which accounted for 60% of global market gains at the dotcom peak in early 2000. So far this year, the three leading tech subsectors (semiconductors, hardware and electronic equipment) have contributed a significantly larger share of global market gains, over 70%. Also, unlike the dotcom peak, when tech-fuelled returns were spilling across industries and markets, today they are sucking money away from non-AI industries and nations. Even in the US, investment outside of the tech sector is declining in real terms. Meanwhile, foreigners keep pulling money out of countries seen as peripheral to the AI boom, from the UK to Indonesia. Global investors may be focused almost exclusively on AI, but they are not choosing winners at random. The leading AI nations are long-established tech powers with a deep commitment to R&D, spending more than 3% of GDP on average — over three times the level of lagging countries. They also invest heavily in technology, with tech spending averaging 3.7% of GDP among AI winners, compared with 2.7% for partial winners and 1.6% for losers. To be sure, no leader’s position is secure. In the US, the performance of the dominant Mag 7 tech stocks is increasingly diverging, with three up, three down and one flat for the year, while all face some form of foreign competition, often from China. In China, giants such as Alibaba and Tencent are still trying to determine how to profit from AI and are down around 30% this year. The real AI momentum in China is with newer tech companies, often listed on secondary boards that are much better known to local than to foreign investors, such as ChiNext; it is up 35% for the year. In Japan, market leadership has shifted sharply towards tech over the past year, with semiconductors up 200% and computer memory pioneer Kioxia rising by 3,500% to become the nation’s single largest stock. The AI booster effect continues to help power many economies through one crisis after another, from the tariff war to the Iran oil shock. Expectations for GDP growth have risen by nearly a full percentage point for the AI winners since the start of the year, while falling significantly for the losers. In countries like the US, Taiwan and Korea, the large gains in advanced manufacturing, the associated surge in profits and the wealth effect from the AI-led stock market gains keep lifting economic growth. In countries like China, Thailand and Mexico, tech exports are rising rapidly enough to offset weakness in other parts of their economies, including domestic demand. In short, it’s an AI-driven world. Of course, this >>monomania<< will not last for ever. The speculative enthusiasm will fade even as the technological revolution endures and expands in scope. As was the case following the railroad boom of the 19th century and the internet craze at the turn of this century, a more balanced global market will eventually re-emerge. But so long as investors continue to see AI as the sole foundation of the next world order, they will keep ranking nations based on their tech prowess. ]]> artificial_intelligence hierarchies new_world_order AI_stack Alibaba China competitiveness_of_nations data_centers Europe infrastructure Israel Japan monomania Ruchir_Sharma semiconductors single_storyism South_Korea sub-assemblies Tencent U.S. https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:7324cea46e9b/ 2026-06-29T12:31:22+00:00 https://financialintel.live.ft.com/?segmentId=670a71df-8084-ecde-e790-63bb7341b637 jerryking>financial services<< to professional services, technology, healthcare and energy, companies are under growing pressure to make faster, more informed decisions. This half-day >>financial intelligence<< event, hosted by the Financial Times in partnership with S&P Global Market Intelligence, will bring together the industry's sharpest minds to share their expertise on data innovation. Across a half day of keynote interviews, panel discussions and networking opportunities, attendees from all sectors will explore how to get the most out of data in an interactive and innovative way – with speakers and attendees bringing >>financial data<< to life through case studies and real-life examples as they reveal where the next >>breakthroughs<< are likely to emerge. ]]> conferences decision_velocity financial_data financial_services market_intelligence professional_services_firms breakthroughs financial_intelligence https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0a19acd7b518/ 2026-06-28T14:59:14+00:00 https://archive.is/20260626181710/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/article-america-concert-review-dewey-bunnell/#selection-2586.0-2595.12 jerryking>soft-rock<< scene in the early 1970s, when some of the audience came of the age. The trio’s type of serenely groovy music served as an excuse for slow dancing and as a soundtrack to puppy love. It was a time when hair, bell bottoms and Boone’s Farm products flowed freely. Presenting its jukebox of hits such as Tin Man and Lonely People, America mellowed down easy at Massey. Where do they fit among others of the genre? Imagine CSNY, but with the “S” and “C” standing for “Seals” and “Crofts.”......Seventies >>soft rock<<, particularly the breezy SoCal style practised by >>America<<, >>Eagles<< and Bread, was a reaction to the turbulence of the late 1960s. The middle-of-the-road fare didn’t so much scratch an itch as provide a balm for cuts and abrasions. The music was also an invitation to the land of warmth, tan lines and freedom: “Ventura highway in the sunshine, where the days are longer, the nights are stronger than moonshine,” Bunnell sang in Toronto. “You’re gonna go, I know.” The short-lived era was mostly over by 1976, when >>Don Henley<< blew up the >>myth<< with the dark >>Eagles<< hits >>Hotel California<< and Life in the Fast Lane. But at an >>America<< concert in 2026, the promise of escape and tequila sunrises are still alive. The group covered California Dreamin’ (and Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl) and closed with A Horse with No Name, about journeys and solitude...... #1 hits by America: Pop: “A Horse With No Name” (1972) “Sister Golden Hair” (1975) Top 10 hits by America: Pop: “I Need You” (1972) “Ventura Highway” (1972) “Tin Man” (1974) “Lonely People” (1974) “You Can Do Magic” (1982) #1 albums by America:]]> '70s America Brad_Wheeler concerts folk-rock hits live_performances music musicians music_bands soft-rock Don_Henley Hotel_California the_Eagles myths nostalgia https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:2a7d2228b405/ 2026-06-27T14:14:43+00:00 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lifes-purpose-ikigai-just-lucky-guy-girish-kamplimath-afzgc/ jerryking life's_purpose purpose Venn_diagrams https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:841b1df527f8/ 2026-06-25T20:37:58+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/sports/soccer/matt-freese-goalkeeper-usa-world-cup-495d3f0a?mod=hp_listb_pos3 jerryking>penalty kicks<< — and to this day he considers the results proprietary. “I like to keep that one private,” he says. “But I”ll be able to talk about it in 15 years when I’m done playing.” Then during his senior year, Freese coded an expected goals model for an independent research project........His breakout moment came in the quarterfinals against Costa Rica, when the match went to a penalty shootout. Freese saved the day by stopping three of the Costa Rican attempts. His secret was spending the previous week, including the flight to the game, studying the shooters’ tendencies. “Penalties are my thing,” he said afterward. ]]> data data_driven FIFA Harvard hyper-analytical Ivy_League Moneyball nerds soccer sports athletes_&_athletics controlling_space World_Cup_2026 geeks penalty_kicks https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:7062d81e4252/ 2026-06-25T15:52:00+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/passive-income-dreams-2e67ee5c?mod=hp_lead_pos8 jerryking dropshipping e-commerce entrepreneur Etsy job_dissatisfaction passive_income personal_finance scams side_hustles social_media solopreneur Tim_Ferriss the_American_Dream ideas money-making https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:e9aa790969c1/ 2026-06-25T10:49:42+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/scott-bessent-hamilton-inspires-trumps-economic-statecraft-4a2786dd?mod=opinion_trendingnow_article_pos5 jerryking Alexander_Hamilton Donald_Trump economic_nationalism economic_statecraft Scott_Bessent https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:7b4a98f7f3fd/ 2026-06-25T10:40:02+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/09/well/move/shoulder-pain-exercises.html jerryking exercise fitness howto injuries pain prevention shoulder_exercises strength_training https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:20519a0b0ddd/ 2026-06-25T05:07:26+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/well/move/exercise-stress-cortisol-levels.html jerryking cortisol HIIT sleep stressful https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:fc7d333f3bf7/ 2026-06-24T18:13:30+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/articles/baldmaxxing-men-embrace-baldness-ef765d0c?mod=hp_featst_pos3 jerryking baldness genetics mens'_health personal_grooming https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4bfa047ffd95/ 2026-06-24T10:59:19+00:00 https://archive.is/20260622204312/https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/trump-bunch-smithsonian/687660/#selection-615.0-647.1 jerryking African-Americans cultural_institutions Donald_Trump exhibitions history leaders museums Smithsonian white_fragility white_grievances https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:672605a9bd6c/ 2026-06-23T21:44:58+00:00 https://archive.is/20260619113550/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/06/19/trump-vs-anthropic-dangerous-fight-over-ai-rules/#selection-255.0-255.58 jerryking AI_governance_&_ethics Anthropic artificial_intelligence Fareed_Zakaria https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c68c15a0ad5b/ 2026-06-23T20:09:32+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/21/business/signal-tech-silicon-valley.html jerryking anti-signal high-signal opinion_makers Silicon_Valley status https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0bcd627ea283/ 2026-06-23T14:15:33+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/well/eat/fiber-protein-foods.html jerryking beans fibre lentils nuts pulses seeds soybeans one-two_punch proteins https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:29bd664969c8/ 2026-06-22T10:19:09+00:00 https://archive.is/20260528013531/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/economy/article-ottawa-defence-champions-rebuild-sector-carney-joly/#selection-2587.0-2587.12 jerryking Pippa_Norman https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:397ba4b812dd/ 2026-06-22T10:07:20+00:00 https://archive.is/20260618091804/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-canadian-smes-defence-contract-revenues-survey/#selection-2591.0-2597.19 jerryking BDC Canada Canadian defence_spending Pippa_Norman small_business SMEs https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:75aba997ca80/ 2026-06-22T09:55:09+00:00 https://archive.is/20260619102052/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-canadians-did-not-vote-for-such-high-defence-spending-how-to-get-them/#selection-2779.0-2779.92 jerryking>buying Canadian<< defence technologies, and thereby building a much larger, sovereign Canadian >>defence industrial base<< — with a target of 125,000 new jobs over 10 years — one explicit aim of the strategy is to significantly reduce Canada’s long-standing dependency on American military equipment. Broadly speaking the plan is an exercise in >>economic nationalism<< the likes of which few would have expected from a government led by a former Goldman Sachs executive and central banker. It is also, however, an exercise in pragmatism. The Prime Minister knows better than most that Canada’s economy suffers long-term >>productivity<< weakness. He might also be aware that the defence industry is a productive part of the economy — according to Statistics Canada, it is three times more research-and-development intensive than the broader manufacturing-sector average, for example. Consequently, if historically large >>defence spending<< increases can be deployed intelligently into the economy, perhaps the productivity problem can be chipped away at to some degree over time. More fundamentally, demonstrable economic impact, including meaningful job gains, might confer the social licence for the level of fiscal reprioritization the government’s defence agenda requires. The purists in the defence establishment don’t like, and tend to resist, domestic economic objectives getting mixed in with military equipment acquisitions, though that mix happens in virtually every advanced country. What needs to be better appreciated, however, is that the economics are essential to ensuring Canada’s newfound defence consensus survives the inevitable political headwinds coming at it.]]> Canada Canadian defence_industrial_base defence_spending Mark_Carney productivity buy_Canadian economic_nationalism NATO https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:8528989d15c3/ 2026-06-21T18:25:48+00:00 https://archive.is/20260621053755/https://www.ft.com/content/8fcd0d88-cee9-43e0-9af8-addd250edd4c#selection-1473.0-1473.92 jerryking apprenticeships artificial_intelligence Big_Tech Black_Death BLS bottlenecks data_centers Google labour_shortages Meta Micron rate-limiting_steps semiconductors shortfalls short_supply skilled_trades trade_unions https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:baa57e92e46b/ 2026-06-21T09:57:38+00:00 https://archive.is/20260620052702/https://www.ft.com/content/e7e22922-b13e-4979-8c2d-e60268e0d745 jerrykingBlack_British https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:f5f6097cae74/ 2026-06-21T03:00:20+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/world/ai-warfare-ukraine-russia-anthropic-29945df9?mod=hp_featst_pos4 jerryking Anthropic arms_race artificial_intelligence https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a2b981c32357/ 2026-06-20T20:43:38+00:00 https://archive.is/20260613071835/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/conditions/cancer/five-prostate-cancer-myths-according-to-oncologist/#selection-2245.4-2245.141 jerryking cancers misconceptions myths oncology prostate radiation_therapy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:079901c99b86/ 2026-06-20T20:32:36+00:00 https://archive.is/20260618131032/https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/18/ai-has-granted-america-vast-new-power#selection-1123.1-1123.14 jerryking Anthropic Anthropic_Mythos artificial_intelligence Donald_Trump export_controls self-defeating throttling Washington_D.C. AI_governance_&_ethics https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4c3791933bb0/ 2026-06-20T18:36:57+00:00 https://archive.is/20260527184901/https://www.ft.com/content/ef72d7cc-11ac-4f48-8788-f17ef62f8c0f#selection-1457.0-1471.13 jerryking books judges lessons_learned literary Man_Booker reading https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:fe34ea5abe8b/ 2026-06-19T07:08:04+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/10/well/eat/health-benefits-cortisol-cocktails.html jerryking cortisol hormones https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:ebb4728391fb/ 2026-06-19T04:00:33+00:00 https://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/20400301508/cs183class1 jerryking>thinking hard<< about. Path’s limiting its users to 150 “friends” is illustrative of this point. And ancient tribes apparently had a natural size limit that didn’t much exceed that number. Startups are important because they are small; if the size and complexity of a business is something like the square of the number of people in it, then startups are in a unique position to lower interpersonal or internal costs and thus to get stuff done. The familiar Austrian critique dovetails here as well. Even if a computer could model all the narrowly economic problems a company faces (and, to be clear, none can), it wouldn’t be enough. To model all costs, it would have to model human irrationalities, emotions, feelings, and interactions. Computers help, but we still don’t have all the info. And if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do with it. So, in practice, we end up having companies of a certain size. B. Why Do a Startup? The easiest answer to “why startups?” is negative: because you can’t develop new technology in existing entities. There’s something wrong with big companies, governments, and non-profits. Perhaps they can’t recognize financial needs; the federal government, hamstrung by its own bureaucracy, obviously overcompensates some while grossly undercompensating others in its employ. Or maybe these entities can’t handle personal needs; you can’t always get recognition, respect, or fame from a huge bureaucracy. Anyone on a mission tends to want to go from 0 to 1. You can only do that if you’re surrounded by others to want to go from 0 to 1. That happens in startups, not huge companies or government. Doing startups for the money is not a great idea. Research shows that people get happier as they make more and more money, but only up to about $70,000 per year. After that, marginal improvements brought by higher income are more or less offset by other factors (stress, more hours, etc. Plus there is obviously diminishing marginal utility of money even absent offsetting factors). Perhaps doing startups to be remembered or become famous is a better motive. Perhaps not. Whether being famous or infamous should be as important as most people seem to think it is highly questionable. A better motive still would be a desire to change the world. The U.S. in 1776-79 was a startup of sorts. What were the Founders motivations? There is a large cultural component to the motivation question, too. In Japan, entrepreneurs are seen as reckless risk-takers. The respectable thing to do is become a lifelong employee somewhere. The literary version of this sentiment is “behind every fortune lies a great crime.” Were the Founding Fathers criminals? Are all founders criminals of one sort or another? C. The >>Costs of Failure<< Startups pay less than bigger companies. So founding or joining one involves some financial loss. These losses are generally thought to be high. In reality, they aren’t that high. The non-financial costs are actually higher. If you do a failed startup, you may not have learned anything useful. You may actually have learned how to fail again. You may become more risk-averse. You aren’t a lottery ticket, so you shouldn’t think of failure as just 1 of n times that you’re going to start a company. The stakes are a bit bigger than that. A 0 to 1 startup involves low financial costs but low non-financial costs too. You’ll at least learn a lot and probably will be better for the effort. A 1 to n startup, though, has especially low financial costs, but higher non-financial costs. If you try to do Groupon for Madagascar and it fails, it’s not clear where exactly you are. But it’s not good. VI. Where to Start? The path from 0 to 1 might start with asking and answering three questions. First, what is valuable? Second, what can I do? And third, what is nobody else doing? The questions themselves are straightforward. Question one illustrates the difference between business and academia; in academia, the number one sin is plagiarism, not triviality. So much of the innovation is esoteric and not at all useful. No one cares about a firm’s eccentric, non-valuable output. The second question ensures that you can actually execute on a problem; if not, talk is just that. Finally, and often overlooked, is the importance of being novel. Forget that and we’re just copying. The intellectual rephrasing of these questions is: What important truth do very few people agree with you on? The business version is: What valuable company is nobody building? These are tough questions. But you can test your answers; if, as so many people do, one says something like “our educational system is broken and urgently requires repair,” you know that that answer is wrong (it may be a truth, but lots of people agree with it). This may explain why we see so many education non-profits and startups. But query whether most of those are operating in technology mode or globalization mode. You know you’re on the right track when your answer takes the following form: “Most people believe in X. But the truth is !X.“ Make no mistake; it’s a hard question. Knowing what >>0 to 1<< endeavor is worth pursuing is incredibly rare, unique, and tricky. But the process, if not the result, can also be richly rewarding.]]> Blake_Masters Peter_Thiel start_ups Zero_to_One cost_of_failure thinking_hard https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:6d6fb633137e/ 2026-06-19T03:54:53+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/how-hackers-found-a-back-door-into-the-american-living-room-c117cb9f?mod=hp_lead_pos7 jerryking cyberattacks masking residential_proxy_networks back_doors vulnerabilities https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4a95740750d3/ 2026-06-18T20:37:43+00:00 https://archive.is/20260618115447/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-leaving-startups-behind-canada-national-security-risk/#selection-2593.0-2795.49 jerryking>defence spending<<. We reached NATO’s 2-per-cent benchmark, and the federal government has committed to spending $81.8-billion on defence over the next five years. More spending, however, is not a strategy. >>Canada<< needs to convert that investment into >>homegrown<< technology that’s deployed and strengthens our national defence. If we don’t, we risk the opportunity to advance our own >>national security<< or, worse, subsidize someone else’s. As a country, we have the foundation to do this well; we have strong public funding, world-class research institutions and global leadership in areas such as >>artificial intelligence<<, >>cybersecurity<< and >>quantum<<. And Canada is starting to move in the right direction. Last month at CANSEC, the country’s largest defence show, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced new initiatives within the Defence Industrial Strategy meant to help build domestic capacity by streamlining defence >>procurement<<. This is extremely promising and points to a growing recognition that our >>procurement<< system needs to move faster and favour Canadian innovation. The Saab GlobalEye deal is also a promising step forward and shows Canada can use defence spending to create local jobs and support local industry, especially since it’s built on Bombardier’s Global 6500 jet. But funding and policy reforms are only the beginning, and we risk taking our foot off the gas prematurely. Where we fall behind is in buying quickly and using >>buying power<< to scale our own technology. We’re producing the inputs by supporting >>startups<< to build >>prototypes<<, but struggle with delivering the outcomes by failing to buy at the pace modern threats demand. The Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security, or IDEaS, for example, is a useful program for prototyping defence solutions, but there’s no contracting mechanism to acquire the capabilities we funded. If you were to think of the defence ecosystem as a pipeline, Canada is well-funded at the start and well-resourced at the end. We’re >>underinvesting<< in the middle, where companies have to navigate long procurement cycles to land contracts. That’s where Canadian startups die, and where foreign – mostly American – defence companies win. Mr. Carney has admitted that 70 cents of every defence capital dollar has gone south of the border. Traditionally, we have viewed this reality as an economic problem. But in the modern threat environment, it’s also a national-security risk. r The main flaw at the heart of Canada’s procurement system is moving too slowly. It was engineered for caution and built to be rigourous and thorough. Speed was never part of its mandate, meaning our legacy procurement systems produce lengthy cycles. As the conflict in Ukraine has shown, the biggest risk to Canada’s national security is our >>sclerotic<< >>procurement<< system. Buying systems that were optimized for past wars, delivered a decade late, is inefficient and irrelevant. Under our system, Canadian startups building modern solutions are locked out before they can compete. The average small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) waits 18 months to receive security clearance to be able to even bid on a defence contract and that doesn’t include the time it takes for bids to be evaluated. Add to that how a request for proposal requires years of >>historical data<< no startup can provide and multiple departmental approvals, and it becomes clear why it’s nearly impossible for startups to break in. While it’s easy to dismiss our startup procurement challenges as the reality of being diligent, countries around the world have solved for this. The United States has organizations such as the Defense Innovation Unit, which connects startups directly to military buyers and moves them quickly from prototype to contract. And in the United Kingdom, the Defence and Security Accelerator funds initiatives based on what’s pressing at a given time, creating faster ways to test and adopt promising technologies. In both countries, >>prototypes<< aren’t treated as the finish line; they’re treated as the first step toward actually getting solutions deployed. By overlooking >>homegrown<< solutions, we’re forced to rely on foreign suppliers even when the talent and technology exist right here in Canada. What matters most is whether startups can access faster contract vehicles, shorter timelines and real opportunities to scale. Without that, their technology will never make it into the field. ]]> accelerated_lifecycles artificial_intelligence Canadian-owned_innovation cyber_security defence_contractors defence_industrial_base made-in-Canada national_security procurement purchase_decisions quantum_computing risks sclerotic security_&_intelligence slowly_moving SMEs sovereignty prototyping government_procurement underinvestments buying_power Canada historical_data homegrown Mark_Carney national_strategies https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a613b7e30800/ 2026-06-18T12:41:03+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/bushwa-about-balzac-wealth-capitalism-crime-quote-fortune-7e6ba4ac jerryking>French<< >>novelist<< >>Honoré de Balzac<< (1799-1850), and it seems to come up whenever a prestige journalist wants to express disdain for >>capitalism<<: • A 2007 Bloomberg article on then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s tax proposals recalled that “French suspicion of wealth runs deep. Sarkozy’s Finance Minister Christine Lagarde . . . traces it to French aristocrats who turned up their noses at people who earned their fortunes. . . . Balzac famously said, ‘Behind every great fortune lies a crime.’ ” • A 2011 New York Times book review asserted that “Balzac observed that ‘the secret of great fortunes . . . is a forgotten crime’ ” and that the maxim has been “recast in the English-speaking world as ‘Behind every great fortune lies a great crime,’ ” which the author called a “truism.” • An August 2023 Financial Times review of a new French novel said the book explores “the excesses of capitalism in the aftermath of the second world war” and “abides by the Balzacian dictum that ‘behind every great fortune is an equally great crime.’ ” But Balzac didn’t write that. The quote comes from his novel “Père Goriot” (1835), a chronicle of indolent and scheming Paris boarding-house residents. Goriot had been a successful vermicelli merchant who profited from shortages during the French Revolution. But this isn’t a story of the unseemly origins of Big Pasta. For the aristocrats of his day, his chief moral failing was his “uncouth” manner; he would even “fall asleep at the theater.” The novel is a portrait of thrusting social climbers insatiably pursuing dowries as their means of income, and among whom no trace of labor or commerce is ever evident. The most compelling character is a fugitive criminal mastermind, nicknamed the “Death Dodger,” who hatches a plot to instigate a duel that would leave him a beneficiary of an heiress’s inheritance. Triumphantly summarizing the elegance of his plan, this grifter explains (quoting fully from the Oxford University Press edition’s translation): “The secret of great wealth with no obvious source is some forgotten crime, forgotten because it was done neatly.” Most who cite Balzac delete the words “with no obvious source.” But that’s a crucial qualifier. This con artist isn’t referring to all great fortunes, only to those with no evident commercial explanation, which are the product of diabolically executed conspiracies such as his own. One can only speculate if this perennial blatant misquotation is a result of laziness or conscious distortion. Some are more ambiguous in their allusions. The New Yorker profiled an oil heiress who feels guilty about the environmentally unfriendly source of her wealth. That’s understandable, author Andrew Marantz explains, because “behind every great fortune is a great crime, according to an adage attributed to Balzac.” Does such passive obfuscation, though literally truthful, allow for blameless repetition of a counterfeit aphorism? As in analyzing the basis of sudden fortunes, certain behavior is suspicious: Reviewing “The Wolf of Wall Street” in 2014, the New York Times’s A.O. Scott wrote: “Balzac said that behind every great fortune lay a great crime.” In a 2020 review, Mr. Scott equivocated: “Behind every great fortune, someone once said—not quite Balzac, though he often gets the credit—lies a great >>crime<<.” Who is this “someone,” Keyser Söze? Others who use Balzac as a moral touchstone are more conscientious. In “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” (2013), the left-wing French economist >>Thomas Piketty<< juxtaposed his condemnation of modern **economic inequality** with extensive references to Balzac. Yet he avoids mythical quotes and makes a startling acknowledgment for someone who advocates extreme >>wealth redistribution<<: >>Steve Jobs<<, he offers, “is the epitome of the admired and talented >>entrepreneur<< who fully deserves his fortune.” For some Balzac fans, not every great fortune starts with a crime. ]]> capitalism entrepreneur fiction France French misquotations novelists novels quotes Steve_Jobs Thomas_Piketty unbridled_capitalism crime income_inequality wealth_redistribution Honoré_de_Balzac cheating https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:004fb1ec643c/ 2026-06-18T00:33:22+00:00 https://archive.is/20260616222612/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-we-must-rebuild-canada-for-the-new-technological-order/#selection-2593.0-2597.13 jerryking AI-first_strategy artificial_intelligence Canada Canadian digital-first Don_Tapscott kill_switch moonshots national_strategies new_world_order rebuilding sovereignty https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:652be32dd4c8/ 2026-06-17T22:29:56+00:00 https://paulgraham.com/earn.html jerryking>politicians<< understood: I'm going to tell you how people become billionaires. I hope this will be useful to you even if you don't plan to go into politics. Those of you who don't become prime minister can become billionaires instead. The reason I know about this topic is that 21 years ago Jessica and I started something called >>Y Combinator<<. If you haven't heard of >>Y Combinator<<, it's a cross between an investment firm and a school for >>startup<< >>founders<<. Since we started it in 2005 we've funded about 6500 companies. Starting a successful >>startup<< is the most common way to become a billionaire, so in effect I've spent the last 21 years **training people** to become billionaires. So far about 30 of them have, but there are many more in the pipeline. So you can imagine how astonished I was last month when an American politician said that it was impossible to earn a billion dollars. I felt like a skating coach hearing someone say that it's impossible to do a triple axel. Of course it's possible. **It's hard**, but it's possible. She wasn't saying, of course, that it's impossible to become a billionaire. Obviously that's possible. Nor was she talking about the distinction between income and >>capital gains<<. She wasn't making a point about accounting. What she meant was that it's impossible to get that rich without doing something bad — without >>cheating<< in some way. A couple days later I was talking to the >>founder<< of a >>startup<< I'd funded. I began by asking, as I usually do when I meet a >>founder<<, what her >>growth rate<< was. 93% last month, she said. I pointed out that this meant her net worth was also growing at 93% a month. She was getting richer at a stupendously rapid rate. And yet she hadn't been doing anything bad. The reason her startup was growing so fast was simply that users loved what she'd built. So she could feel from her own experience how wrong that politician was. She wasn't exploiting anyone. Exactly the opposite in fact. The reason her >>startup<< was growing so fast was that she and her cofounder had been **working their asses off** to make their users happy, and as a result the users had been telling their friends. And that gets you >>exponential<< growth. Later that day I was talking about her case online, and someone replied that having a few million and growing at 93% a month was radically different from being a billionaire. I suspect many people would agree with this statement. But it turns out not merely to be false, but false in a very illuminating way. So I would like you all to do me a favor please. I would like you to take out your phones and calculate a number. I know this may seem contrived, but I promise it will be useful for you. I'm going to have you do the most common kind of calculation I do as an >>investor<<, and the experience will bring home to you what >>startups<< are all about. If we interpret his statement in the most conservative way and assume that a few means 2, her company has to grow 500x for her to become a billionaire. So we are going to calculate how many months of 93% growth it takes for something to grow 500x. To do this we want to calculate the log base 1.93 of 500. The easiest way to do that is to go to Google search, which lets you do calculations right in the search box. So go to Google search and type log(500, 1.93). If you typed that right, the answer you get is about 9.45. That is how many months of 93% growth it takes to become a billionaire, starting from 2 million. A couple million and 93% growth are not, in fact, radically different from a billion. They're nine and a half months apart. Now you see why, when I meet a founder, the first thing I ask about is their >>growth rate<<. But I don't want anyone to accuse me of using unrealistic numbers, so let's take a more conservative >>growth rate<<. Let's see what happens at 15% a month. That's not rare at all. I constantly encounter startups growing at 15% a month. If your revenues grow at 15% a month, how much more will you be making 5 years from now? To calculate that, we need to find 1.15 to the 60th power (since 5 years is 60 months). So go to Google again and this time type 1.15^60. The answer should be about 4384. Meaning in 5 years your startup will be making 4384 times as much. If you're currently making ten thousand a month, in five years you'll be making about 44 million a month, or 526 million a year. And at that point, if you own as much of the company as founders typically do, you will be a billionaire. In the real world, growth rates tend to slow down a bit. A very successful startup will probably be growing faster than 15% a month in year 1 and slower than 15% a month in year 4. But you end up in about the same place. If you start a >>startup<< in your early twenties, it's definitely possible to be a billionare by the time you're thirty. Hard, but possible. I wanted you to feel this by doing the calculation yourselves, because now you understand one of the reasons people start startups. >>Exponential<< growth is like magic. It generates outcomes that seem impossible. And that's why some politicians distrust it. They don't understand the math of exponential growth, so when they see people becoming what seems to them impossibly rich, they assume they must have >>cheated<<. But now you at least understand, from having done the math yourselves, that you don't have to >>cheat<< to become a billionaire. You've seen for yourselves that there are only two numbers in the calculation, the >>growth rate<< and how long it continues. If it's impossible to make a billion dollars without >>cheating<<, which of those two numbers is impossible? It's certainly not impossible to grow at 15% a month without >>cheating<<. Startups do that all the time. And how long you can continue to grow at that rate depends on the size of the market. Obviously for you to grow 4000x, there has to be at least 4000x more demand. But that's all you need. And how could you possibly >>cheat<< to increase the market size? If you're only planning to become prime minister, you can stop paying attention now. We've proved that it is in fact possible to earn a billion dollars, because it only depends on two numbers, one of which startups routinely hit without >>cheating<<, and another that cheating couldn't possibly affect. But if you actually want to become a billionaire, we should go into more detail. Especially about that first number, the >>growth rate<<. To grow at a consistent rate every month, you have to make something so good that people tell their friends about it. And in fact that's the other reason I always begin by asking >>founders<< their growth rate. It shows whether they've built the right thing. So how, exactly, do you make something people like so much that they tell their friends about it? The problem with market economies, and also the great thing about market economies, is that it's hard to **make something customers want*** that they don't already have. As soon as a new, satisfiable need is discovered, people rush to satisfy it. So you're going to have to discover a need that no one else knows about yet. How do you do that? By feeling the need yourself. You're young, and usually young founders should make something that they themselves want. You don't have enough experience yet to know what other people need. But at the same time your own needs are uniquely valuable, because your needs predict future demand. You're the age when people start using new things. Whatever you and your friends start using now, everyone is going to be using in ten years. Since your intuitions about other people's needs are usually a crap signal, and your own needs are an especially valuable one, you should usually listen to the second signal; ++you should make something you and your friends want++. Making something you and your friends want doesn't mean you have to build a consumer product. Maybe you and your friends are molecular biologists, and there's something cool that could be done now to DNA that everyone else has overlooked. Maybe you and your friends are into drones. The idea doesn't have to have a wide appeal. It literally just has to appeal to you and your friends. Don't worry about the second number, the >>market size<<. Since you predict future demand, the market will grow. And it's always possible to expand into adjacent markets. All you need is a beachhead in the territory of unsatisfied need that you can expand from. How do you get an idea like that? The answer is one of the most counterintuitive things about startups — which is saying something, because there are a lot of counterintuitive things about startups. But the way to get the very best startup ideas is not to look for startup ideas. If you're consciously looking for startup ideas, it will make you too conservative. You'll lop off the outliers. Because the very best startup ideas tend to sound so lame, at first, that you'd reject them if you were consciously looking for startup ideas. That's what has prevented them from being discovered. Imagine what a bad idea Apple or Facebook or Airbnb seemed at first. How many people are going to want their own computers? How is a company going to make money from undergrads stalking one another online? Who's going to pay to sleep on an airbed on someone's floor? We know how these ideas turned out, so it's easy to rewrite history, but I remember very well how bad Facebook and Airbnb sounded at first. We funded Airbnb, and we thought the idea was bad. The reason we funded them was just that we liked the founders. So how do you find startup ideas without looking for them? By working on projects with your friends. That's where the very best startups come from. Initially they're not even meant to be companies. They're just something people built because they thought it would be cool. That's how Apple and Google and Facebook all started. None of them were meant to be companies at first. The reason this works is what I told you earlier: you predict future demand. So if you just build random stuff you think would be cool, the things you build will actually be far from random. This is one of those cases where your unconscious mind knows more than your conscious mind does. Anything that genuinely seems to you like it would be a cool thing to build has a high probability of leading to a good startup idea, no matter how preposterous it sounds. Whatever you build couldn't possibly sound more preposterous than a startup we funded in 2006 called Justin.TV. It consisted of one guy, Justin Kan, walking around with a camera on the side of his head, live streaming everything that happened to him. But this company ended up doing quite well. In fact you've probably heard of it, but under its new name, Twitch. The key to starting a successful startup is to understand some group of users so well that you can make exactly what they want. If you're young you can, and should, use the hack of making something for yourself. You understand yourself. But this is just an instance of the more general rule. Only by understanding users very deeply can you make something they love so much that they tell their friends about it, and only that can get you the exponential growth you need to make a startup really successful. There are other ways to get rich than by starting startups. Some of those do require you to exploit people. But startups are the most common way to become really rich, and if you want to start a successful startup, the key is not exploitation but empathy. What do users really want? What could you do for them that would make their lives dramatically better? That kind of empathy is what we look for in founders, and what we cultivate in the ones we accept. How people become rich in your society is one of the most important things to understand about it. You can't let your beliefs about this be determined by ideology, or movies, or historical examples that are centuries old. You must look at the world around you and see how it's actually done. If you want to do it yourself, obviously you'll be forced to understand how it's done. So I don't worry too much about you. The ones I worry about are the future prime ministers. You need to remember this talk. So for you I'm going to summarize the key ideas. There are two numbers that determine how big a startup gets, and thus how rich its founders become: the >>growth rate<< and how long it continues. You get the first by making something users like so much they tell their friends. You get the second by **being in a big market**. If you grow >>exponentially<< into a **big market**, your >>startup<< will become valuable, and you, as a shareholder, will become rich. You not only don't have to cheat to make this happen, it will happen automatically if you just keep **making customers happy**. **************************************************** The famous quote "Behind every great fortune there is a crime" is widely attributed to French realist author Honoré de Balzac. However, the exact phrasing is a paraphrased summary of a passage from his 1834 novel Le Père Goriot, which actually translates to: "The secret of a great fortune without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, because it was properly done." ]]> entrepreneur howto moguls Paul_Graham personal_enrichment Y_Combinator growth_rates make_something_people_want market_sizing capital_gains cheating exponential founders large_markets Oxford start_ups training_programs crime hard_work Honoré_de_Balzac investors politicians https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:1043920f494d/ 2026-06-17T15:26:46+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/wirecutter-show-podcast-20260608-headphones-recommendations/ jerryking best_of earbuds headphones https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:68124a54fdd4/ 2026-06-17T14:56:20+00:00 https://archive.is/20260611160335/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/drive/culture/article-after-decades-of-innovation-brps-design-studio-continues-to-think/#selection-2597.0-2597.12 jerryking>Quebec<< brings to mind the more famous studios in the mobility business: Ferrari Centro Stile, Aston Martin at Gaydon, and BMW Group design headquarters in Munich. At the entrance is a giant glass wall **overflowing with awards** from around the world, the accumulated evidence of a company that has made design central to its identity. But design isn’t just about aesthetics, the main goal is to make products more practical and versatile. That’s how the global manufacturer has been able to create and >>reinvent<< products that have shaped the way people move across snow, water, dirt and pavement. However, as BRP continues to lead in so many areas of >>design<<, the combination of the electric transition and tariffs are putting its finances under strain. Ski-Doo was the original breakthrough, launched in 1959 and destined to become one of the defining Canadian products of the postwar era. Sea-Doo followed in 1968, initially ahead of its time, then later revived into a dominant force in personal watercraft. Can-Am arrived in the early 1970s and quickly made its name in motocross, where the Quebec company took on much larger rivals Honda, Suzuki and Husqvarna, and won. Different products, different decades, same instinct: BRP has long been at its best when it rethinks an existing category rather than joining it. “Design is not an afterthought,” said Denys Lapointe, BRP’s chief design officer, during a tour of the facility last year. He would know; he has deep roots in the company. His father, Sam, was the company’s original design chief. For all of its international reach, there is still something personal about the BRP culture in Valcourt. It’s as though ideas are passed from one generation to the next rather than shuffled through a corporate organizational chart. Lapointe described the company’s design philosophy in three parts: innovative >>product architecture<<, functionality and emotional appeal. The first point is the most revealing. BRP does not simply ask how to make a product better looking or easier to use. It asks whether the underlying architecture can be **rethought** altogether. “The best way to defend against a new paradigm that makes us obsolete is to create it ourselves,” he said. That helps explain why the firm’s recent products feel more considered than merely styled. It also helps explain why the company was named Red Dot Design Team of the Year 2025, the first Canadian company to receive the honour. It was a reminder that the awards wall is a work in progress. One of the clearest examples is the Sea-Doo Switch. Pontoon boats are practical, but are rarely accused of being inventive. BRP studied the segment and came at it from a different angle. “What inspired us was the >>Lego<< system,” Lapointe said. The Switch’s >>modular<< layout was the result: seating that can be moved around the deck, reconfigured for different uses and, in one neat flourish, lifted out and snapped onto a base on the dock. “The purpose of the seats as well is to be able to use it on your dock while you’re not using it on the boat.” That‘s classic BRP. The company did not simply design a better-looking pontoon. It looked at **how people actually use the boat** [i.e. = "reality mining"] – and the space around it – and built flexibility into the experience. The industry noticed. The Switch has already been part of BRP’s >>award-winning<< run, which is another way of saying the idea resonated beyond Valcourt. Just as telling, when BRP moved to sell parts of its broader marine business, it excluded Sea-Doo personal watercraft, Sea-Doo Switch pontoons and jet propulsion systems. The same thinking can be seen across Can-Am’s >>off-road<< lineup, where modular attachments and accessories have become an important part of the ownership experience. The design work is not just about appearance. It’s about usefulness: making the machine easier to load, easier to adapt and easier to live with. Electric >>motorcycles<< are a tougher situation, not because they lack design conviction, but because of other limitations. The Can-Am Pulse and Can-Am Origin are handsome, well-resolved machines; they, too, have won design awards. But the usual electric-motorcycle questions have not gone away. It is more challenging to put an expensive, heavy battery on a motorcycle, which already uses little fuel, than a car. And when you do, range is limited. The audience is still emerging. Lapointe was plainspoken about the brief. “We created something that’s for urban and maybe suburban use,” he said. That is the right answer and probably the only honest one. BRP was not trying to build a universal replacement for a gasoline motorcycle. It was designing a product for a rider with a shorter commute. Even so, the commercial headwinds are real. BRP’s recent results showed just how difficult the electric vehicle transition has been. The company reported a healthy fiscal year ending Jan. 31, 2026, with revenue up 6.8 per cent over the previous year (to $8.443-billion) and net income was up sharply to $340-million from $64.6-million. However, BRP also absorbed a roughly $230-million impairment charge related to its EV business and light mobility unit. Translation: The market didn’t develop as planned and those assets won’t generate the returns originally expected. Further headwinds were announced in mid April: BRP suspended its FY2027 guidance after U.S. tariff changes threatened at least a $500-million hit this year, sending its shares plummeting. It’s a major blow for a company that prides itself on smart business decisions and smart design. But this is part of what makes BRP worth watching. This is not a company trading on nostalgia or wrapping itself in the fleur-de-lis. It still competes the hard way – with ideas, discipline and with a willingness to question the template. From a small town in Quebec, BRP continues to act like the next good idea might start right here.]]> aesthetics award-winning design electric_cars emotional_connections functionality innovation mobility modularity motorcycles off-road out-of-the-box personal_mobility personal_watercraft perspective-taking product_architecture Quebec reality_mining reinvention rethinking transportation Lego product_design pleasure-craft_fabricators https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:734bae01332f/ 2026-06-17T07:07:59+00:00 https://www.propublica.org/article/how-covid-19-hollowed-out-a-generation-of-young-black-men#1018189 jerryking African-Americans black_men COVID-19 health hollowing_out mens'_health racial_disparities https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:eb5c9a8a2189/ 2026-06-17T06:51:03+00:00 https://www.mellon.org/article/rescuing-the-nations-stories-one-tape-at-a-time jerryking public_media television archives av_archives media_archaeology manuals via:shannon_mattern old_technologies backward_compatible digitalization digital_life tacit_knowledge https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:429c38b6cdc4/ 2026-06-16T20:16:53+00:00 https://idlewords.com/talks/fan_is_a_tool_using_animal.htm jerryking Talks > Fan is A Tool-Using Animal. https://x.com/ChrisCroy/status/2066912876221301090 ***************************************************** Fandoms will sometimes produce "google docs" or "masterdocs" collecting and **synthesizing information** on some fandom topic. How do I explain to them that these are memos. That is a memorandum. The corporate world calls out to you. You should be producing shareholder value. ***************************************************** ++@pinboard gave a talk about what happened when he asked fanfic writers to generate a spec document about what features they needed him to add to Pinboard.++ This is the written version of a talk I gave on September 6, 2013, at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, England.]]> bookmarks conferences Delicious online_communities fans fan_engagement fiction history Pinboard social_bookmarking Star_Trek information_synthesis Maciej_Cegłowski speeches https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:1ed951889180/ 2026-06-15T03:24:28+00:00 https://archive.is/20250328090759/https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-new-ai-billionaires-list/#selection-1185.0-1209.15 jerryking artificial_intelligence founders moguls personal_enrichment start_ups https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:e6e747612567/ 2026-06-14T07:56:42+00:00 https://archive.is/20260612115145/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/economy/article-how-saskatchewans-soft-power-laid-the-groundwork-for-canada-to/#selection-2591.0-2617.18 jerryking commodities Saskatchewan soft_power https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:64276c6198c3/ 2026-06-14T07:39:12+00:00 https://archive.is/20260613122206/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-how-do-you-keep-a-small-newspaper-going-in-the-21st-century-diversify/#selection-2595.0-2595.19 jerryking>new products<<, and >>new business<<, onto their **old presses**, making gift wrap, butcher paper, medical devices, educational materials and even components for ammunition, bolstered by bits of additional equipment they have **cobbled together** from across the country, some of it decades old. They’ve added **digital billboards**, too, and a small internet broadcast studio built on a shoestring. It’s all been enough to keep the business solvent, though just barely, with profit margins of 2 to 3%. “We need to get to 10%,” said Mr. Alford, the fourth generation in his family to oversee the paper. To do that, “we’ve got to look at the world a little bit differently, you know. We’ve got to have the >>founders<<’ mindset, and we got to >>hustle<<, man.” He has spent seven years hacking things together − add-ons for the presses, new real estate, >>new businesses<< − and, by the standards of the industry, has seen success. Slim profit counts as a great victory at a time when nearly 40% of American newspapers have closed over the past two decades and fewer than 15% of dailies remain independent. Even so, it may not be enough. Mr. Alford’s latest effort is a journalism foundation that will run, in part, on charitable donations. “We’ve got to realize that having the nonprofit aspect to what we do is going to be essential if we want to keep going into the fifth and sixth generations,” he said. But for now, he is making the economics of a small, >>family-owned<< newspaper work in 2026, three decades after big-city outlets such as The New York Times began to publish online. “We care for the mission − we really do. That’s why we’re here,” said his father, Butch Alford, an octogenarian who remains a regular around the Tribune’s offices. He joined the newspaper in 1961, eventually overseeing operations of a morning daily founded by his grandfather and great uncle, who came to Idaho from Texas. “Digital is the future,” he said. But he’s not yet ready to abandon the print edition, which he calls “a mainstay of good journalism. So we’re wedded to the idea of doing the best we can in print and maintaining that for − we don’t know how long.” The company’s successes have come, in part, from a decision that might have seemed foolhardy at the time. In 2008, the Tribune bought a German-made Manroland >>printing press<<. It was the “newest press west of the Mississippi,” Nathan Alford said. It didn’t take long for the US$8.5-million investment to look questionable, arriving as it did alongside a recession. Years later, “how fortunate are we now to have one of the finest pieces of printing equipment in the west side of the country,” Mr. Alford said. He’s added to it, too. “Every time a press goes down in the United States, we go through and grab spare parts [i.e. = "scavenging"]. Our plan is to be the last kingdom of printing in the Northwest,” he said. That expanding labyrinth of >>industrial-age<< machinery lies at the heart of the newspaper’s new lines of business, powering a commercial operation that prints medical instruction manuals and other regional weeklies and dailies, with annual gross revenue of nearly US$5-million. They print recyclable gift wrap for companies such as Walmart and The New York Times, cut to size by a machine made in 1964. They are handling food-grade material, with branded butcher paper for local meat-processing plants. They handle medical devices, printing on foil ECG leads used by hospitals. For that, they use a >>repurposed<< Webtron 8000 label press, originally used at the 1974 World’s Fair in Spokane, Wash. “We just >>repurpose<< it to figure out how to sustain journalism,” Mr. Alford said. He uses a used slitter rewinder that he acquired for free to create foil paper for a local ammunition company in the manufacture of bullets. That, too, is in service of funding a journalism staff that includes 10 reporters and two full-time photographers. “I don’t know any other way to move forward other than just keep believing in the mission and believing in our communities,” he said. Mr. Alford trained as a lawyer but left to manage the newspaper business. Law would have provided a more dependable income. Keeping a newspaper afloat, though, offers more of a challenge. What he took from law school was a foundational democratic principle: “Without the fourth estate, without shining a flashlight into the dusty, musky basement of city hall, it’s just proven that bad things happen.” The Tribune covers high school sports but also maintains a reporter at the state legislature. Without a unifying place to consume and discuss current events, Mr. Alford said, “we become more disconnected and less appreciative of our neighbours.” “How we disagree matters, being willing to remain civil − and do we dare keep a sense of humour and celebrate our differences? That would be so wonderful,” he said. The ubiquity of borderless digital media means “part of that is being lost. But it would only be exaggerated if there wasn’t a community newspaper.”]]> 21st._century abandoned_fields diversification industrial_age journalism local_journalism newspapers new_businesses nonprofit old_technologies one-of-a-kind print_journalism printing printing_press scavenging small_batch unscalability aging/old_equipment digital_media digital_signage family-owned_businesses founders hard_to_replicate hustle irreplaceability jury-rigged new_products repurposing physical_assets https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:2aa8b981cff6/ 2026-06-13T23:23:24+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/03/world/europe/alex-younger-dead.html jerryking espionage MI6 obituaries spymasters Alex_Younger https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:bd467fa6dfd4/ 2026-06-13T15:20:26+00:00 https://www.ashlinakaposta.com/blog/how-to-build-a-personal-brand jerryking howto personal_branding https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:b0db2d379d71/ 2026-06-13T05:08:16+00:00 https://www.eventbrite.com/o/brains-and-barstools-114602262361?fbclid=PAZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQPOTM2NjE5NzQzMzkyNDU5AAGnlqCSePW3ToNJL400YuQn6CFSsnb4SbxHHZqY7uzsWwAzlFISryOiQIci0q8_aem_-o_y1yEk2WPmxa76atWQ1A#events jerryking salons Toronto https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:2aa1bc1d9482/ 2026-06-13T04:44:17+00:00 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stop-deliberating-start-doing-alexander-geiser-ojxhf/ jerryking predictors quotes https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:bc5e449dc972/ 2026-06-12T19:41:04+00:00 https://github.com/vicgarcia/pinboard-mcp jerrykingGithub MCP MCPs pinboard https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:3f293b70edf4/ 2026-06-12T19:33:02+00:00 https://www.wired.com/story/how-ai-agents-plunged-tech-world-into-chaos/ jerryking Claude_Code https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:bff802cc00fd/ 2026-06-12T19:31:00+00:00 https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-new-ai-billionaires-list/?srnd=homepage-canada&embedded-checkout=true jerrykingCerebras https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:55e7876a0296/