Linkdump 20221222: “I’ll be darned, who ever thought that such a domain existed?”
Snippets of ideas that lead nowhere at the moment, but could down the road; and that I want to save somewhere that I won't lose track of
It seems like more and more people prescribe (or cheer on) some form or another of net de-growth as a solution to modern problems: “Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help”, “The End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy”, “Meet The People Cheering For Humanity’s End”; I suspect a level of schadenfreude is a play as well from those who feel like they didn’t benefit enough from the era of growth and “excess” they are now tut-tutting the end of. IMO, the solution to poor resource management is not to stop using resources —that just sounds like caveman thinking: “Get burned by fire, thus never mess with fire.” Harald Malmgren’s vision of a 4th industrial revolution1 and innovating our way out present-day problems seems like more like the right direction —though innovation is not simply guaranteed and progress is not inherent, especially if ESG zealotry continues to be so energetically accommodated by the Western world2.
We are becoming a country of scientists, but however much we become a country of scientists, we will always remain first of all that same group of adventurous transcontinental explorers pushing our way from wherever it is comfortable into some more inviting, unknown and dangerous region. Now those regions today are not geographic, they are not the gold mines of the west; they are the gold mines of the intellect. And when the great scientists, and the innumerable scientists of today, respond to that ancient American urge for adventure, then the form that adventure takes is the form of invention; and when an invention is made by this new tribe of highly literate, highly scientific people, new things open up. . . . Always those scientific adventurers have the characteristic, no matter how much you know, no matter how educated you are in science, no matter how imaginative you are, of leading you to say, “I’ll be darned, who ever thought that such a domain existed?” — Edwin Land (founder of Polaroid Corporation)
Holography and its applications for industry 4.0: An overview: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667345222000141
(Tangentially, this was also interesting: https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/universe-hologram/, though I think this may be a better layman’s explanation (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/information-in-the-holographic-univ/))
In the spirit of using resources smarter, we have “Capital Allocation Results, Analysis, and Assessment”, Mauboussin and Callahan: https://www.morganstanley.com/im/publication/insights/articles/article_capitalallocation.pdf?1671107508410
(From the tweet thread here that contains some other interesting links)
Mauboussin also recently released an updated version of the quasi-famous “Measuring the Moat”: https://www.safalniveshak.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Measuring-The-Moat-CSFB.pdf
(Anyone who liked Chris Mayer’s “100-Baggers” or Richard Rumelt’s “Good Stretegy, Bad Strategy” will certainly like this)
10 shipping charts in 10 minutes, “Maritime Trade | Containers & Bulk | Ship Build, Own, Register & Recycle | Bunker Prices | Ukraine - What's Going on With Shipping?”:
“Eliminate Strategic Overload”, Felix Oberholzer-Gee goes over the elements of value-based strategy and the idea of the “Value Stick” (as described in his “Better, Simpler Strategy”, recommended by Mauboussin): https://hbr.org/2021/05/eliminate-strategic-overload, https://www.monkhouseandcompany.com/podcast/how-to-create-value-based-strategy-with-felix-oberholzer-gee/
Interesting rebuttal to the ominously-titled “Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help” op-ed that recently appeared in nature magazine, by the David Deutsch-inspired ToKast:
In light of the above, this was also very interesting… “Why Won't Energy Companies Drill?”3, The most pressing question facing oil markets is why US shale drilling remains so muted despite high prices: https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/why-wont-energy-companies-drill
Tying back to the first link —on the subject of questioning the nature of reality— this was a very interesting video (and they have many more good ones as well), “Twelve Lies about Reality”:
By the way, I believe that psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s unabridged “Man's Search for Meaning” is free on audible if you already have a membership.
An interesting theory on the evolution of creativity from David Deutsche contends that, despite the presumption of creativity evolving in early humans (excluding the possibility of having been at some point in time gifted a divine spark somehow), there are palaeontological records of periods where societal innovation stagnated. This is thought to be due to people essentially directing creativity towards innovating on conformism and slowing progress to a crawl. See https://publicism.info/science/infinity/17.html
[I]t was only recently in the history of our species that creativity has had any of those effects [of innovation]. In prehistoric times it would not have been obvious to a casual observer (say, an explorer from an extraterrestrial civilization) that humans were capable of creative thought at all.
[…] Even in a static society, memes still evolve, due to imperceptible errors of replication. They just evolve more slowly than anyone can notice: imperceptible errors cannot be suppressed. They would generally evolve towards greater fidelity of replication, as usual with evolution, and hence to greater staticity of the society.
Status in such a society is reduced by transgressing people’s expectations of proper behaviour, and is improved by meeting them. There would have been the expectations of parents, priests, chiefs and potential mates (or whoever controlled mating in that society) - who were themselves conforming to the wishes and expectations of the society at large. Those people’s opinions would determine one’s ability to eat, thrive and reproduce, and hence the fate of one’s genes.
[…] Hence, paradoxically, it requires creativity to thrive in a static society - creativity that enables one to be less innovative than other people. And that is how primitive, static societies, which contained pitifully little knowledge and existed only by suppressing innovation, constituted environments that strongly favoured the evolution of an ever-greater ability to innovate.
One thing I will say is that, while the article often mentions the dwindling inventory of drilled-but-uncompleted (DUC) wells, Murray Stahl had this interesting observation during the Q1FY2022 HK commentary:
So, I don’t pay that much attention to DUCs. The statistic I pay attention to is what’s called miles of lateral. You see, fracking is horizontal, not vertical. Miles of lateral tells you how much underground rock is exposed, and therefore gives you a much better predictive view of how much production there’s going to be.
The miles of lateral is up, like, 35 percent. Going back to the so-called DUCs that are placed in production, how do you know how much they’re going to produce? Well, it’s a question of how far out you can go, and that’s miles of lateral. So, since miles of lateral are up roughly 35 percent, I’m looking for something like a 35 percent increase in production. Incidentally, you can follow this month by month if you want, because if you go to the Texas Railroad Commission website, there are all kinds of statistics on monthly production, for gas and oil and various other activities. If you’re interested in Texas Pacific, or TPL, you want to look at District 8, because that’s where almost all their land is. Look there, and you’ll see what’s happening month by month.
[…] And there are other considerations, now, too, because now they have something called pads. It’s really the equivalent of drilling several wells simultaneously using one rig. It’s a way of saying the rigs themselves are more productive.