BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-05-11 Th
Is Silicon Valley vc still a societal asset?; investment in the green energy transition; Nvidia has fallen into the AI gold mine; Last is fed up with Douthat, Zitron on the death of the metaverse...
MUST-READ: Is Silicon Valley VC Still a Societal Asset?:
(1) Focus on running a grift, (2) focus on funding a company and then helping it build an enormous moat, or (3) focus on pushing technology forward and making useful things and capabilities? Those are the things that “VC”, broadly understood, can do. It feels to me like sometime around 2005, the center of gravity of Silicon Vally VC shifted from (3) to (2). And then sometime around 2015, the center of gravity of Silicon Vally VC shifted from (2) to (1):
Shauna GM: ‘Reading Molly White’s latest which casually includes the fact that Andreessen-Horowitz has invested over $7.5 *billion *in crypto in the last five years. I knew that a lot of VCs were pouring money into crypto, but *jeez*. The opportunity cost! Imagine what the Fediverse could do with that kind of support. Or the platform cooperative movement, or workplace democracy. Of course VCs would never actually invest in those spaces, because they're so much harder to exploit… <https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/11034> <https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/andreessen-horowitzs-state-of-crypto>…
To some degree this was a consequence of secular stagnation and very low interest rates. But to some degree it was a genuine change in the kind of people who went into VC—and I think the failure of Silicon Valley to rescue its own SVB is just one more marginal effect of this shift.
ONE IMAGE: Investment in the green energy transition
ONE VIDEO: Þere Were People Seriously Worried Þat þe Coming of Crypto Winter Would Devastate NVidia:
Very Briefly Noted:
Dan Davies: ‘The fact that it's a bit of a gimmick is the *good* thing about the platinum coin…. If someone tries to mug you with one of those clown guns that go "bang", the appropriate response is to… pour custard down their… not [to] call up your lawyer to get a restraining order…
James Robinson & Daron Acemoğlu (2017): The economic impact of colonialism: ‘The immense economic inequality we observe in the world today is the path-dependent outcome of a multitude of historical processes, one of the most important of which has been European colonialism…
Brian Klaas: Will Republicans Defy Trump’s Authoritarian Cult of Personality?: The pundits are going to tell you that Trump is now toast. Don't listen to them.To understand Trump’s grip on the Republican base, you need to look not to American history or US political science, but to authoritarian politics…
Daniel W. Drezner: Can a Decent Republican Win in 2024?: ‘Or is the choice between Trump and a Republican worse than Trump?… It sure seems like the latest CBS poll of Republican voters suggests that “being an asshole to others” is a desirable quality…
Parker Molloy: A WaPo Poll Found That Significant Majorities Support Pro-Trans Policies, But Reported the Exact Opposite: ‘Putting a giant "Most in U.S. back GOP's anti-trans policies" headline on the front page when describing a poll that found that to be false is journalistic malpractice…
Sheila Bair: Congress must act to protect smaller banks from investor nerves”
‘Measures to shield operational business accounts, introduced during Covid, should be triggered urgently…
Frances Coppola: Bank failures: it's all about liquidity: ‘Although banks create deposits when they lend, they can nevertheless run out of money…
Casey Newton: Bluesky's big moment: A new Twitter clone is surging in popularity. Could it have legs?…
Matt Yglesias: ‘One “benefit” of Twitter Blue is your replies get algorithmically boosted so for the sake of good hygiene I have to have an even lower bar for blocking Twitter Blue subscribers than my usual (very low) bar…
mmhmm: Blog…
¶s:
Nathan Nunn (2017): Understanding the long-run effects of Africa’s slave trades: ‘The difference in ethnic fractionalisation between Africa and the rest of the world can be explained by its experience with the slave trades…. A strong negative relationship between the intensity of the slave trade among one’s ethnic ancestors and an individual’s trust in others today…. A long-term increase in the prevalence of polygyny…. Interestingly, Dalton and Leung (2014) found that there is no evidence of such an impact for the Indian Ocean slave trade, where there was not a strong preference for male slaves…
Ed Zitron: RIP Metaverse: ‘The Metaverse, Zuckerberg's tech obsession, is officially dead. ChatGPT killed it…. Grandiose promises heaped sky-high expectations on the Metaverse. The media swooned over the newborn concept: The Verge published a nearly 5,000-word-long interview with Zuckerberg immediately following the announcement…. The inability to define the Metaverse in any meaningful way didn't get in the way of its ascension…. Of course, the cryptocurrency industry took the ball and ran with it…. But the Metaverse was officially pulled off life support when it became clear that Zuckerberg and the company that launched the craze had moved on to greener financial pastures. Zuckerberg declared in a March update that Meta's "single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products." Meta's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, told CNBC in April that he, along with Mark Zuckerberg and the company's chief product officer, Chris Cox, were now spending most of their time on AI. The company has even stopped pitching the Metaverse to advertisers…
Jonathan V. Last: If DeSantis Can’t Beat Trump, It’s YOUR Fault: ‘You have been warned: I know. He should probably take out a restraining order on me. But I just can’t quit Ross Douthat.\ When last we talked about Douthat, he was explaining that Kevin McCarthy’s election to the speakership meant that the pre-Trump Republican party was back. Today he’s warning that Donald Trump could win the Republican nomination and that if he does, it’s kind of the The Media’s fault…. Douthat: “The media still wants Trump. This is not offered as an excuse for G.O.P. primary voters…. But I still feel a certain vibe… that at some half-conscious level the mainstream press really wants the Trump return. They want to enjoy the Trump Show’s ratings, they want the G.O.P. defined by Trumpism while they define themselves as democracy’s defenders…. An impulse already apparent [is] to call the race for Trump before a single vote is cast.” The italics are in the original, but the bold was added by me to highlight the trick Douthat is pulling. Oh, yes, sure, if Trump is the nominee that’s on R voters. BUT probably it’ll only be because the media was so mean to DeSantis and the poor fellow just couldn’t fight both Trump and the woke, socialist MSM at the same time. Before we get to how stupid this analysis is, let’s take a little journey through Douthat’s . . . evolving analysis of the 2024 race over the last year…
It would be interesting to extend that analysis of Silicon Valley back to the transition of tech from Route 128 to Silicon Valley. When there was a lot less money involved, people got into the business for the hack value in the old fashioned sense of the word.
Re: Nunn and the slave trade: Could slavery be the reason that so many Slavic states have failed? For centuries, the whole region was slave raiding turf for Constantinople, later the Ottomans and other powers of the Eastern Mediterranean. They raided for male and female slaves, so it had that in common with the African slave trade.