Ben hunt:

In 2018, the American Medical Association made $158.6 million in 100% gross margin revenues by licensing its name and logo and membership lists to everyone from its own insurance brokerage subsidiary – the AMA Insurance Agency – to every pharma co or medical device co or whatever co that was willing to pay for that stamp of approval and halo of authority.

That’s how the AMA makes its money. Not so much by selling TO you – the doctors of America – with membership dues and overpriced PPE and merch, but by selling YOU – the doctors of America – to anyone who wants to buy your name and your reputation.

Applied Divinity Studies:

Many good points have been made on both sides, I’m compiling this writing here. If you’re aware of other examples, please send them over.

Against Substack

Packy McCormick (#11 Free): Personal Email

their product velocity is dog shit… don’t do anything for discovery… it crashes all the time… It absolutely blows my mind that they’ve raised as much as they have and have improved the product as little as they have.

Gwern: Comment on Reddit

One additional aspect of this is that Substack, technically, [is] just not very good. When I moved over, I ran immediately into multiple problems: the tracking links are so long that my newsletters get cut off, subscripts/superscripts just don’t work, etc. (Other problems have come up: AlwaysKillSticky is broken on Substack because they do really abominable things with comments, and we never did figure out why a Substack page is constantly firing off requests to the server.) I don’t aspire to make my newsletters as awesome as my website, but I expected Substack to at least be as decent as your raw dumped-HTML Mailchimp newsletter.

The Scholar’s Stage: Why I am Bearish on Substack

This is a recipe for intellectual sterility. A media ecosystem composed of the New York Times, a few other large newspapers, and a swarm of hungry Substackerati will starve itself out. The big Substack names will continue to rake in subscriptions, of course, but what will they have to talk about? Only the same old ideas they had been playing with for decades.

Cosmin:

Now, all this is nice, but how do you fit this into your own app? The answer, unfortunately, is that it’s still being worked out. But given that it will probably be in the same language as your application, it makes sense to keep everything in the same repo. It still requires a separate tool to run (Pulumi), but you can think of this like just another tool in the toolchain. If that is the case, other than using the same language for building my app and the cloud infrastructure that it uses, what’s the point? If I have to use a separate tool just for this, then it’s not all that different than using Terraform, for example. This is where the Pulumi automation api comes into place.

I remember a client strongly advocating for “self describing xml” years ago.

Judy Records

Supreme court justice Samuel Alito😕

Just as the COVID restrictions have highlighted the movement toward rule by experts, litigation about those restrictions, has pointed up emerging trends in the assessment of individual rights. This is especially evident with respect to religious liberty. It pains me to say this, but in certain quarters, religious liberty is fast becoming a disfavored, right. And that marks a surprising turn of events. Consider where things stood in the 1990s. And to me, at least that does not seem like the Jurassic age. When a Supreme Court decision called employment division versus Smith, cut back sharply on the protection provided by the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Congress was quick to respond. It passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). To ensure broad protection for religious liberty. The law had almost universal support. In the house, the vote was unanimous. In the Senate, it was merely 97 to three, and the bill was enthusiastically signed by President Clinton today that widespread support has vanished. When states have considered or gone ahead and adopted their own versions of reference. They have been threatened with punishing economic boycotts.

Eighth, he discussed the Little Sisters of the Poor case.

Some of our cases illustrate this same trend. Take the protracted campaign against the Little Sisters of the Poor in order of Catholic nuns, the Little Sisters or women who have dedicated their lives to caring for the elderly, poor, regardless of religion. They run homes that have one high praise. Here’s some of the testimonials filed in our court by residents of their homes. The Little Sisters, quote, do everything to make us happy. I feel I’m part of the family and that’s a great feeling. They will keep you alive 10 years longer than anyplace else because they love you. Carol hassel in a nutshell, I would say this about the Little Sisters, a little bit of heaven fell from the sky one day and landed in my apartment.

Despite this inspiring work, the little sisters have been under unrelenting attack for the better part of a decade. Why because they refused to allow their health insurance plan to provide contraceptives to their employees. For that they were targeted by the prior administration. If they did not knuckle under and violate a tenet of their faith. They face crippling fines, fines that would likely have forced them to shut down their homes.

Katherine Boyle:

It’s time to build, yes. But it’s also time to leave.

The battle over tech’s supremacy has been waged and all of our premonitions came true: We wanted flying cars and got vertical take-off innovation hubs from every car maker in America. Software has not only eaten the world, but feasted on your screen-weary eyes. It has swallowed your children, your church, your bank, and your politics, and somehow it all feels inevitable. That these feats of human progress—of instant connectivity in a now homebound world—became the scapegoat of our time is another symptom of the era’s end, cueing the quiet exodus of builders who had bigger aspirations than the same-day shipping that keeps our households afloat.

Now, Silicon Valley is witnessing a reckoning, but it’s not the long-awaited one predicted by the New York press, or the antitrust bonanza that Washington longs for because too many people seem satisfied getting their news from Facebook. The reckoning is more of a realization that tech exceeded expectations and somehow squandered the fruit of its own garden, and that a city on a hill that could have supported so much innovation was not Florence in the Renaissance nor the Athenian Academy with MacBooks. Rather, it became a government-sponsored needle exchange, a haven for the homeless and forgotten that put government’s paralysis on display downtown on Market Street.

2020 is not the great reckoning predicted in the book of Revelation, despite the fires, the plagues, and the wailing on Twitter. It is the resignation and determination of Exodus, of a dogged people packing up U-Hauls and fleeing this frontier state to seek an even newer, more eternal world.

San Francisco had four times as many deaths from overdose this year as it did from the COVID-19 virus.

Jacques Corby-Tuech:

Modern marketing is all about data and however hard you might try, you can’t spend any time around marketers online without being subjected to endless thinkpieces, how-to guides, ebooks or other dreck about how we need to track and measure and count every little thing.

We’ve got click rates, impressions, conversion rates, open rates, ROAS, pageviews, bounces rates, ROI, CPM, CPC, impression share, average position, sessions, channels, landing pages, KPI after never ending KPI.

That’d be fine if all this shit meant something and we knew how to interpret it. But it doesn’t and we don’t. 

The reality is much simpler, and therefore much more complex. Most of us don’t understand how data is collected, how these mechanisms work and most importantly where and how they don’twork.

• 36% percent of people in the UK use an adblocker, which means your javascript based website tracking is meaningless

• Email open rates don’t actuallyindicate that an email was opened, merely that a request was made to a server

• The black boxes inside Facebook and other ad exchanges give you flat out wrong data about how your ads are performing

• The audiences you’re targeting on Google, Bing, etc are fraudulent and don’t even exist

• The exchanges you’re purchasing media space from are cheating you

And even if we know how the data is collected, what it means and what it’s actually tracking, most of us don’t have the technical chops to analyse the data we’ve collected¹. I don’t mean to rag on anyone by saying this, but we do need a reality check.

Alana Abramson:

The litigation landscape

To the extent that it can be simplified, this year’s election-related legal brawls can be distilled into two groups: a push to eliminate expanded mail-in voting policies on the basis that they would produce unprecedented fraud, and a push to ease the restrictions already in place.

The first battle, waged by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, has largely failed. Lawsuits on this theme filed in Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were all dismissed because of a lack of evidence. In Pennsylvania, federal Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan, who was appointed by Trump, dismissed the Trump campaign’s case on the grounds that their allegations of fraud were “speculative”—the same word invoked by federal district Judge James C. Mahan, who was nominated by George W. Bush, in dismissing a similar case in Nevada. In Montana, federal district judge Dana Christensen described the Trump campaign’s fraud allegations as “a fiction.”

The second battle—the fight over the weedy regulations governing voting by mail—has had more grist. Democrats have banked key victories in lower courts, while Republicans have gotten at least half a dozen of these decisions either reversed on appeals or put on hold pending further consideration. “It’s not the score at the end of the first quarter that counts, and there is a lot of game left in most of these cases,” says an aide at the Republican National Committee.

David Roberts:

Geothermal power is the perpetual also-ran of renewable energy, chugging along in the background for decades, never quite breaking out of its little niche, forever causing energy experts to say, “Oh, yeah, geothermal … what’s up with that?”

Well, after approximately 15 years of reporting on energy, I finally took the time to do a deep dive into geothermal and I am here to report: This is a great time to start paying attention!

After many years of failure to launch, new companies and technologies have brought geothermal out of its doldrums, to the point that it may finally be ready to scale up and become a major player in clean energy. In fact, if its more enthusiastic backers are correct, geothermal may hold the key to making 100 percent clean electricity available to everyone in the world. And as a bonus, it’s an opportunity for the struggling oil and gas industry to put its capital and skills to work on something that won’t degrade the planet.

The Diff:

WeWork is an ideal company for a business book. Per my general theory of business books, the ideal recipe for a satisfying narrative about business is:

1. A classic Greek tragedy, where the hero is undone by his own hubris, and

2. Lots of people with free time to talk to an author, who have a vested interest in telling their side of the story.

WeWork has both. The company’s financial history sounds like an extended roulette session: every year, the company doubled in size, until 2019, when it shrank to almost zero. And the story is tied to the ambition of a single founder, Adam Neumann, whose sales ability and indifference to risk propelled the company to a $47bn valuation and then led to its near-collapse.

WeWork got a lot of media coverage, slowly on the way up and then much more frequently on the way down, and now the story has been told in the just-published Billion Dollar Loser.

One thing the book’s narrative makes clear is that WeWork was not just a creation of the venture capital market of the late 2010s. It was also a creation of the labor and real estate markets of the early 2010s. WeWork’s founders, Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey, started a predecessor company called Green Desk in early 2008, leasing office space in a building in Brooklyn and subleasing smaller units. (In a memorable exchange, Neumann pitched this idea as a way for his landlord to get some use out of vacant space. The landlord said “You know nothing about real estate,” and Neumann replied “Your building is empty. What do you know about real estate.”)