Category Archives: Tweetstorms

COVID, Medicine, Tweetstorms

COVID Insanity and Religion

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on February 20, 2021

Covid rules, beliefs, and passions are a 21st century religion, with orthodoxy, heretics, and apologists.

Religion once incorporated “all answers to the unknown.” Why does the sun rise? Where did we come from? What is right and wrong? What happens when we die?

Then came science, which is about falsifiable, testable, reproducible hypotheses. “I like the color blue” isn’t falsifiable/testable, nor are questions of morality. “The earth rotates due to preservation of angular momentum” is. So is “the earth is flat” (it was falsified).

“You can’t sit on a park bench” or “You can’t eat inside unless it’s at an airport” isn’t science without *setting and testing a hypothesis.* It’s an insult to science. Some follow these rules blindly. Some fight them blindly. Some make them blindly. It’s religion.

America is a land of many religions and levels of observance. It’s remarkable how these psychographic traits manifest in terms of calls for enforcement (“he’s not wearing a mask over his nose! Call the cops!”), calls for denial (“Bill Gates vaccine mind control”) etc

What I find fascinating is how many secular people have embraced orthodox Covid religion, whereas how many very religious people have wholly rejected it. What is the reason?

Conformists and skeptics are but two types — there are also those who craft the laws, those who hypocritically violate while endorsing them, those who pretend to believe out of fear, etc. All this has tons of past precedent through our millennia of experience with religion…

My biggest concern is that when “science” is thrown around without being science, it casts doubt on other things that emerge as part of the actual scientific method. Throw in probability and it gets even worse/easier for people to throw out anything coming from “science”

There ARE a lot of fake claims out there. Vaccines and autism. 5G and cancer. Those on the side of actual science should be offended — and fight hard! — against the bastardization of the term science and “Covid Religion”…because we are heading towards “boy who cried wolf”

Finance, M&A, Startups, Tweetstorms, VC

SPACs in 2021

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on February 14, 2021

Why are there so many SPACs?

Answer 1: Great economics for sponsor (average of 20% of money raised upon deSPAC / merging with a target, Eg $400M SPAC = $80M). It’s like a separate carried interest pool for each company and liquid since already public!

Answer 2: Great economics for investors assuming 0% interest rates (get 100% of your money back if you don’t like the deal! Get warrants just in case you do!). There is no reason NOT to invest in every SPAC at IPO if your alternative is a Bank of America checking account.

Answer 3: TINA (There Is No Alternative), especially given investor inability to access private companies.

However, it’s clear there are way more SPACs than targets (b/c answer #1 in particular). In which case the beneficiary will be…investment bankers who raise the SPACs 🙂

AI, Economics, Regulation, Tweetstorms

Bureaucracy is a Regressive Tax

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on February 11, 2021

Bureaucracy – in government, the medical system, and more – is a HIGHLY regressive tax in that rich people can pay to solve problems, and the poor must use their time, miss work and lose income…and more.
This is why I love @DoNotPayLaw + @jbrowder1

This is not hyperbole…

I had to go to the ER a few months ago. My bill didn’t match my insurance statement. Insurance company tells me not to pay. Provider threatens to report me to collections. This consumes HOURS of times and damages credit, making borrowing (and living!) more expensive

I am lucky to be able to say “it’s not worth my time” and do just fine — either pay it or deal with the consequences, which are insignificant to me. Millions cannot.

COVID, Education, Medicine, Tweetstorms

Why I don’t believe in conspiracy theories

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on January 19, 2021

Why I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, summarized in a Ben Franklin quote:
“Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

When talking about large scale hiding of ANYTHING + the auditability of electronic records + human stupidity, natural path is exposure

It’s why there are not aliens stored in Area 51, it’s why the election wasn’t stolen, and it’s why the idea that Florida is wholesale fabricating numbers is nuts. Occam’s Razor and Ben Franklin.

But a counterpoint to this is: can you trust “consensus but unfalsifiable” conclusions? I’m increasing a No. No experiments, not replicable, but social stigma and no funding to oppose:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z

Incentives matter, too.

Bureaucracy, Government, Tweetstorms

Old Soviet joke

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on January 18, 2021

Old Soviet joke:
-“Tell me, how many people work in that factory over there?”
-“About half”

Found the original (slightly different from the above) for fellow Russian speakers:

Проверяющий: – Скажите, сколько человек работает на вашем заводе?
Директор: – Если честно, то только половина…

Bureaucracy, Economics, Fintech, Government, Regulation, Tweetstorms

Directly Accessing Government: Fintech’s Final Frontier

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on January 15, 2021

The Internet has many legacies, but its greatest one is disintermediation — taking out the middleman. And the biggest ever disintermediation — of financial services — is coming to an app near you. This is where government should focus:
https://a16z.com/2021/01/15/fintechs-final-frontier/

Governments have monopolies on money and law-enforcement (only the gov’t can legally do those two things, crypto aside!). But there’s almost no way for consumers to interact with central banks! Just like there was no way for consumers to buy airplane tickets w/o travel agents

Want to send a wire? Get access to your PPP loan? Earn interest from the Fed (as banks do via “Interest on Excess Reserves”)? Got to be a bank. Consumers have to go through a travel agent, versus direct. Why can’t your SSN or FEIN be an “account” that can send/receive money?

This is not arguing for “postal banking” or any DMV-style nationalization of banking — which is a terrible idea. But monetary and fiscal policies that require intermediation are simply not as effective as “going direct” — which the internet and fintech allow.

Take interest rates and monetary policy in emerging markets. The Central Bank can/does hike rates to prevent capital flight. Doesn’t really work because banks “intermediate” and don’t provide that rate to consumers…who sell the depreciating currency in favor of USD/EUR.

In many emerging markets, banks hardly make unsecured loans to consumers. They just take deposits and loan to the government. Which is bad for the government, bad for their citizens, bad for their economy, bad for their currency.

More here. Fintech alone can’t solve this — but every single Central Bank should be thinking: how do I go direct? And I would love to see companies and tools (painful as the gov’t “sale” may be) that help facilitate this:
https://a16z.com/2021/01/15/fintechs-final-frontier/

Government, Regulation, Tweetstorms

Geopolitical Risk x Networks

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on January 10, 2021

The internet drove instant, rich, free communication in a form humans have never before seen. With that comes good and bad.

*Right or wrong*, when the leader of a country is kicked off a massive communication network, it creates a geopolitical risk that will…

…likely undo this trend and create many regional, more siloed networks. It has to. It’s simply too much risk for another country to allow a foreign private company (or the US Govt which controls this particular private company!) to “control” the means of communication.

I had previously written about this re: payment networks (when I was at Visa, we stopped payment processing in Crimea…per US law). Again, right or wrong, friend or foe, it is TOO MUCH GEOPOLITICAL RISK for countries to allow their networks to be domiciled elsewhere. Fin. https://x.com/arampell/status/1158952157137297410

COVID, Economics, Real Estate, Tweetstorms

High Salaries and Expensive Real Estate

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on December 02, 2020

Are high salaries the *cause* or *effect* of expensive housing? In NIMBY-prone areas (hello SF!) where supply is artificially constrained, companies anchored to the geography need to pay a high enough wage to attract talent, which then anchors rent/mortgage payments

Prediction: the current remote-work salary adjustment concept, the Marxian “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his location,” will not last. Why pay people more simply because they choose to live in a more expensive area? Pay them more if they are good!

So looking at lower-cost areas, and paying a discount to prevailing SF wages to get to “parity,” is a crutch of sorts to get to a more sensible end-state: pay a prevailing wage to get the talent. And then let’s see what happens to housing prices…

Home prices will always be based on supply and demand, of course – WFH doesn’t change economics. But “desired location to live” is going to drive that more than “high wage employers” — where those wages could conceptually plummet given increase in supply (global worker pool)

COVID, Tweetstorms

School Closures and Idiocy

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Originally posted as a Twitter thread on November 18, 2020

The absurdity of closing ALL SCHOOLS based on the positivity rate of a (presumably selection-biased sick?) less than 1% sample of the population should offend anyone who understands what a fraction is

NYC had 66K tests out of an 8M population. If you only test sick people, you will get a high positivity rate! If you over-test healthy people, you could make Ebola seem pleasant based on its “low positivity rate”
Positivity rate is garbage