fujimotos

The "Diners' Club" story is fun to tell, but it's really a fictional story created for advertisement.

* Actually, there were a lot of "credit cards" when Diners Club started the business. One of the oldest such cards is one issued by Shell (oil company) circa 1920, predating more than a decade.

* The real innovation of Diners Club's card was that it was general purpose. It could be used for multiple merchandises, while other cards were very purpose-specific (e.g. Mobil card for purchasing gas from the store, Western Union card for its telegraph service).

A good resource to read about the origin of credit cards is "The credit card industry: A History" By Lewis Mandell.

> My theory is that those early adopters signed up because the card gave the illusion of status or eliteness

The primary motivation to own diners cards was post-pay. To put it simply: you can eat a dish without paying for it now. That was appealing for people who just started to enjoy consuming stuffs. Yes, you still need to pay the full amount every month, but minimum monthly payment (a.k.a. revolving credit) was an innovation yet to be conceived...

Indeed. Even within a single economy, plotting a scatter plot for enough data points (e.g. 25 years) makes Philips curves just broken.

It was a gong moment for me when I came across a short passage discussing its foundedness.

* Freedman, Pisani and Purves Statistics, 4th edition (p153)

I'm seeing this right now. Worse, he is doing a minimum thing so he won't get fired outright (e.g. responding to internal chat many many hours late with a single word "yup").

This article is a good introduction to Xenophon.

The major thing that's missing here is that his writings were actually very influential among ancient philosophers, especially ones of the Stoic school.

For example, Zeno of Citium, who had found the Stoic school, decided to become a philosopher after reading Xenophon's Memorabilia. Epictetus, a prominent philosopher of Roman era, references Xenophon's writing as much as Plato.

I wonder since when philosophy became all about Plato.

> The one time he tried running a hedge fund, it failed ruinously.

Source? Taleb AFAIK does not publish his track record in a verifiable manner, so we're left to wondering if his bragging about himself really matches his record.

IMHO, the author tries to argue that we can get a better understanding by thinking in term of the structure of the payoff function, rather than focusing on the input itself.

Yes, the try-and-error process and chance are important, but the convexity of the output function is exactly what makes them so rewarding.

The basic point of this article seems valid to me.

The point the author is trying to make is that the structure of the payoff function matters a lot. Specifically, you need it to be convex for a try-and-error (or random walk) process to become very rewarding.

For example, think about fuzzing C programs, which has been proven to be very productive in terms of software security. But why is it so productive? This is essentially because a bug in a C program can have a quite significant implication (e.g. remote code execution), thus its payoff function is extremely convex. If there was no such property, fuzzing just wouldn't be so much rewarding (This explains why fuzz tests are less used for programs written in memory-safe languages).

The author believes this idea of "convexity" can explain a broad range of phenomena in the human world. I'm not so sure about its applicability, though.

This kind of scam is actually a minor issue and also a pretty moronic thing to do.

You're destined to be doomed once you fake your parent's death.

Three facts.

1. Most of Japanese people have exactly zero interest about whaling.

2. Nor they do not understand why western people get so upset about it. ("What's so different with, say, tuna fishing?")

3. Anti-whaling protesters (e.g. Sea Shepherd) are really worsening the situation. Their "activism" (like stealing whale meats) is perceived as, at best, stupid.

This is really a communication problem, guys. Whaling could have been ended many years ago, if no one made such a big deal out of it.

> I couldn't finish any of his books because every sentence reads like "I'm smarter than anyone else, and I need to remind you as much as I can"

You'll probably like the digest summary of "Skin in the Game" by Guardian.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/25/skin-in-the-ga...

While skimming the record of the questioned company, I noticed that several names listed there are actually the ones of other (existing) companies. For example, "中電光谷聯合控股有限公司" ("China Electronics Optics Valley Union Holding Company Limited") is a public company listed on HKEx.

So, my guess is that something is wrong with the data scraping?

----

Note: Some googling reveals that the company ("PREMIER DRAGON DEVELOPMENT LIMITED") is a manufacturer / exporter of women's underwear, with 1-5 employees.

The funny thing here is that Taleb dismisses Nate Silver as a wanker, calling him "does not know how math works"...

> Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg

I also really enjoyed this book. It was a bitter story of an idealistic Open Source project failing miserably.

I once saw a CEO who wrote his own Web Framework and forced the entire company to use it.

At the time, under the influence of React, the idea was to "build web application sorely based on Functional Programming". Since after years of trying no one could figure out what that meant, the company ditched the CEO and ended up wasting a couple years of work.

> Melted down our university computer labs

How did admins manage to disinfect servers? It should have been a hell of fun for them, provided it was the first pandemic ever.

> I would be very very nervous just dumping my billions in a S&P 500 ETF. At that level of wealth, you really ought to have a portfolio manager who can slice and dice your exposure in advantageous ways.

Why? A couple of billions should still be a tiny drop if compared to the market cap of S&P 500. What do those active portfolio managers provide to you?

> ag futures are insurance for farmers

I know nothing about futures, but how does it work?

Insurance works because a loss happens to some individual, not to all members of the class of people at all once. So insurers can cover the specific loss with pooled money.

But if ag price falls, every farmer (that is, all members of the insurance buyers) suffers loss, right? Won't it just bankrupt the insurance providers?

I've recently read Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".

IMHO, this novel does a very good job at capturing one key aspect of gulag; It was not just all about "oppressor vs oppressed", but was a complex society with a particular set of rules.

If you likes the works of Primo Levi, I'd highly recommend you to take a copy.

You need to consider inflation. In 1970, the inflation rate was 7-8%/y on average, so the "growth" these numbers imply did not exist in reality.