Amazon employs 1.3 million people. Using the 57% US workforce participation rate that is very close to all jobs in America’s 4th largest city Houston Texas.
Walmart is bigger, scaling its 2.2 million employees gets you to the size of LA. Walmart is also the company with the largest revenue: 524 billion dollars, or $1600 per person in the US. (I lived in the US for 23 years and have been to a Walmart once, saw one from the outside maybe 3 or 4 times) The GDP of Sweden is 542 billion US. 10 million Swedes create around 3% more value than Walmart has in total sales.
Tesla market cap is 777 billion right now. 90% more than Walmart.
Apples market cap is 2.27 trillion dollars. If the Steve Jobs would return from the dead and distribute all of Apple evenly to all people in the US then everybody would get 7000 US dollars. And since returning from the dead is a rather special and unique thing he might as well pull that one off too.
Robinhood, Schwab and other entities that normal people have their stock portfolio (euphemism) with get billions of dollars annually from market makers like Citadel or Virtu for bringing them our business.
They pay for our trades. And we don’t pay Schwab & Co. How make those market makers make money then?
Specially if you consider that it would be illegal if they would not give our trades the best price.
How does it even work?
It probably does not. We probably get skimmed when we trade. In the maelstrom of high speed trading this might be rather tedious to fully investigate. It is fractions of % anyway. Somehow I personally feel that the SEC is not actually eager to rock the boat that much these days.
First time I heard about Clubhouse was when Ramelow mentioned that he plays Candycrush while being in a BLK Corona Schalte. Basically a glorified zoom call where Merkel tries to get the Ministerpräsidenten on board for the next anti Covid measures. A year ago Ramelow was already in den news since he didn’t get elected. Instead some hapless dude from the FDP felt it would be OK if he would form a government by getting tolerated by the right wing populist AfD.
Back to Clubhouse. Invite only. IOS only. 500 people per room only. No ability to record audio. Except via the analog loophole I would think. It is audio based, and audio still gets into our brains via pressure waives. Which can be recorded since more than 150 years.
Do I care about CH? No. Do I like to join? Fuck no.
But Elon spoke there? Really. They even had 2 overflow rooms. A total audience of 1500 random people on the Internet? Well. OK, the people are not entirely random. Right now it is Silicon Valley heavy, then there is the press. Those who also stare at twitter and other news outlets. But Musk on CH is similar to Lee Iacocca using a CB radio.
Still not sure what CH differentiates from CB in the first place.
I wonder what the endgame is for something like Clubhouse. I don’t see it. If you talk, and a couple of hundred people can listen, what is it that is worth saying? Multi level marketing promotions and religious gatherings aside there is not anything in our culture that would benefit from the unique features of Clubhouse.
If you have something to communicate to a small(ish) audience, then you might as well record a youtube video. Where people can find it. Where you can have links, calls to action etc. And a picture along your words. You can prepare the message you have to all you like. Doing it live is not making it better in most cases.
Once the influencers all want to (and can) talk on Clubhouse there will be simply not enough people that care enough to listen. Sure many people have they mom who would chime up. But what if you happened to sired multiple influences? Sophies Choice all over again.
Think a Sahara filled with lots and lots of Stylites.
There are earnings calls and similar communications where Clubhouse could be used. Maybe if Clubhouse would have unique benefits over a phone number one can call, then it could be used here. There still would be the chicken and egg to get over though. If your simple and working call-in method gets you a more reliable audience, why should you venture into Clubhouse? Having a phone that you can dial into something is a given. Clubhouse membership not.
I personally can not imagine how Clubhouse could scale. One would need a large number of people who can talk in a way that it is worth listening live to. Yes, in theory, everybody could talk. But in reality there are only weird areas and clubs where this would make sense. The bottom feeders of the Internet will like it. Racists, Flatearthers and the like. But you can’t make money with those. Chat Roulette had content problems too.
Once CH wants to go wider, what kind of thing do they want to be associated with? I am tempted to hide the telegram icon on my phone. Not that I would use it in disgusting ways, but others don’t know that.
Clubhouse might look like a real world real estate based gathering place. After the ‘party’ is over and before those responsible for cleaning up arrived and did what they do. Not a very inviting place.
I will write in six months again here how CH is doing. My guess it will be a hot mess.
In two years somebody might bought it and/or less relevant than SNAP. Another communication concept based on a restriction. Or it will have quibied. Much as there are dog and human years, there are Internet and Media years: Andreesen and Horowitz are only 16 years younger than Katzenberg and Whitman.
Bitcoin came into being since it was supposed to take on credit cards as the default payment system of the Internet. Of course technically / conceptually it is impossible that it could. It is one big bottleneck.
But such simple facts don’t deter people to fall for a narrative. Both in 2011 and in 2021. Looking up when exactly the whole thing started I learned that both the EFF and Wikileaks were among the first organizations to accept Bitcoin. In 2011 when its price was both $1 and $32. 2009 somebody bought 2 Pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins. It is not known if Papa John still has those which would be worth 47 million US$. A Fiat Currency.
Roman Opałka started painting numbers in 1965. Starting from 1 he counted upwards. Three years later he started recording himself saying the numbers he painted out loud. The numbers had the same size, which all canvases had as well. He finished 2011 with 5607249.
One idea. Sticking to it. For your entire life.
It is interesting to think about him in the context of Instagram.
It is interesting to think about him in the context of Bitcoin.
Manchmal ist es schon absurd wie die Nachrichten sich scheinbar in eine Narration einzufügen scheinen. Dem ist natürlich nicht so. Aber kein Drehbuchautor würde mit dem folgenden durchkommen: Produktionsengpässe bei den beiden mRNA basierten Moderna und Pfizer Impfstoffe. In Deutschland läuft die Impfung der über 80 jährigen ungemein schleppend an. Mit viel Gezicke besorgt man AstraZeneca Impfstoff. Einigen deutschen genemigern ist das n der Studien bei den über 80 jährigen zu niedrig. Also deklarieren sie ihn als zu unsicher in der Altersgruppe. Weiter der Filmscript Logik folgend will man ihn dann an die Krankenpflege Kräfte verimpfen. Die heulen auf weil es nun eine 2 Klassen Impfung gäbe. Vor haben auch welche die Impfung ganz abgelehnt. Zu allem Überfluss gibt es angeblich Nachrichten über Probleme von AstraZeneva mit der Südafrika Variante. Ich hoffe dass dem nicht so ist. Darüberhinaus wurden in einem Altenheim 14 (Pfizer/Moderna) geimpfte Mensch positiv auf die britische Variation getestet worden. Es wird von milden Verläufen gesprochen, und niemand weiss ob diese Menschen andere anstecken könnten. Ein positiver PCR Test heisst ja in diesem Bezug erstmal noch nichts. Aber für Menschen die allgemein eher auf der Nachrichtenoberfläche herum schwimmen ist das schon alles eher aufregend. Und wenn man aufregen kann dann druckt die Bild es bestimmt auch bald. Sind ja nicht blöd – die Bild Schreiber jedenfalls.
I like feedbin. Pay for it. I read that Thunderbird is a RSS feeder as well. Easy and free download. Not setting it up for email – of course. But the RSS part is intuitive enough. I can export my feedbin feed collection as a file called:
subscriptions.xml
Before I spent money the service I made sure that I would be able to export what I had put into it. Services exist, and then they don’t. Good not to rely on it. Out of the box Thunderbird did not want to import the xml file. Simply changing the extension to .opml did fix this hick up. Now I see 272 of my 600+ streams. I have no information why that difference exists. I don’t really care either. Having an XML file gives me the opportunity to drill into things if I would want to. Right now I don’t. I will poke at this for a little bit, but overall do not see a reason why I should switch away from feedbin. Also since it allows me to subscribe to newsletters and show them in the same screen. A smart move by feedbin: I get something easily. Worth the annual payments not having to manage this part myself. Not sure if those subsrciptions get exported as well. One has to learn with to live with loss eventually.
Michael Beckwith writes about why he uses RSS. I am with him. For me another use is helpful though: I use RSS to manage my news intake. I can curate perfectly what I want to know about. Often in the raw form. Without a commentary track or context of the news outlet. RSS feeds don’t cary branding naturally. Which I appreciate. I can read the words for what they are: Words. This allows me to subscribe to sources that I tend to whole heartily disagree with. I also have the added benefit that they can not monetize my eyeballs. Actually they can not even measure my engagement. No Ad peddling AI has any insight in what kind of interest I am following. In 2021 this is in stark contrast to the simple act of googling a topic and reading up about it in Wikipedia.
RSS is obscure, but costs almost nothing to implement and run. Many sites don’t even know they have it. Nobody seems to use it. Which is fine for me: As long as it works I am fine. And working it does. Since it is a simple and clearly defined concept. And it is obscurity it creates great value: It maintains the serendipity concept that was one of the major attractions of the early Internet.
It exists outside the realms of the attention economy. Where your mind is being prodded and sold like a bovine about to be getting converted into calories.
Superbowl. A game of American Football. So called to differentiate it from soccer, which the rest of the worlds plays. Actually mostly watches. Comparing the numbers of people that play a sport and those who watch it shows that most people watch.
Play is for the young anyway. Animals that survive by means of their physical skills (think lions) have a play phase in their development. It is just better to create these much needed skills in the practice of game play rather than to put this information into genes.
Football has its roots in such play. It features specifically human additions: Rules and a roundish object. Humans act as groups. Thats when we are strongest. Coordination of a band of people is something all cultures train. Regardless if it is dance or hunt. People need to learn how to coordinate.
A round object like a ball seems to be an ideal proxy to coalesce the objectives towards a common goal of action. Usually to drive the roundish object to a specific target on the edge of a defined field.
A field that is equally divided among two defined teams. In meat space there are not really any games with 3 teams or multiple balls. Virtually all team sports adhere to this simple pattern. Chess or Golf are different. So are athletic competitions. In the later ones one measures how well a human completes a specific task. Which can be as ‘natural’ as running or as arbitrary as triple jump or falling from a tall tower into water while moving the body controlled in mid air.
Measuring these tasks is either scientifically precise, or utterly subjective. Which does not get questioned: Enough people adjust their entire life around the world of, lets say, figure skating. Among them you’ll find no longer any children who call the emperor naked. They are still there, but nobody listens to them. What is your future if you are a figure skater? Become a judge at figure skating competitions of course. So why would you question the system that will keep you somewhat involved and relevant in the future? And for us who look at it from the outside it seems logical and relevant enough. We don’t understand all the nuances, so we assume that there are valid rules and logic at force.
If you’d filter belly smacks and other apparent failures then 99% of the audiences watching olympic diving competitions would not be able to discern the performances that got their athletes the first or last place in the performance. Fit bodies they all have. Fast they all move. Gravity pulls them in the same direction.
That is easier with team sports. Over a given time both teams try to bring the round object into a specific place. If they did they get what is called a point. Basically those events get counted, and compared in the end. The side who has more wins.
Sports are also defined by their rules. Rules in sport are a proxy to laws in life. While there are judges applying the rules there are referees in team sports. Judges have, luckily, a higher standing in real live. Referees often are identified by the fans of a loosing team as the real culprit and the actual cause for how things unfolded earlier. They are often the most hated person in a given town. For a day, since such fan wrath towards these individuals luckily lasts not for long. In contrast to Fan Feuds than can sometimes span over generations in European soccer.
Teams sports are a proxy for war. War was the business of men, young strong man were most helpful when war still meant direct physical contact. Tools were always part of the story. Even Chimpanzees already hurl stuff. Monkey warfare is too gruesome to write about. Certainly no rules or honor there. War and rules are a strange story anyway: On one side both parties are out for maximum harm, on the other they try to do so within some constraints. WW2 did not see any gas use on the battle field like WW1 did. All sides had the capability. Germany used it in factories built to kill millions of civilians people of all ages, men and women alike. Yet, even as the cause of the Reichswehr became desperate they did not make any attempts to use gas as a defense against the winning US and soviet armies. The US killed more people in Hiroshima with one device than perished over 4 gruesome years of fighting from gas during WW1. There are no rules for nuclear war. Because you can’t do that one right.
Team sports has its roots in war. Yet it is very far away from it. Yes, fans sport colors. There are martial male rituals around the whole affair. But in comparison it is tame. One could consider the roman Circus as a stepping stone: A mix of reality TV, celebrity cult and snuff film. Some say we simply replaced Panem et Circenses with stimulus checks and Netflix.
