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writing · What is Freehold?

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This is a transcript of Patrick Stanley's overview of Freehold. It has been lightly edited and condensed.

It was created using Descript's excellent transcription service and listening to the audio at 0.5x to fix any errors.

Patrick Stanley: I'm Patrick Stanley, the founder of Freehold. You can follow me on Twitter @patrickwstanley.

So, proof of hodl communities is the big concept behind Freehold. The question is, is hodling an under explored use case for cryptocurrencies?

Current Landscape

Let's take a look at the current landscape to get a better picture. The current landscape is when folks start crypto projects, typically they do a large ICO. They're raising millions or tens of millions, sometimes even billions of dollars and they're creating a lot of people who are holding the token but not necessarily doing specific actions to further the mission and values of that token. You end up with a lot of freeriders who purchased and don't do much beyond that. Maybe trading, maybe hodling, not to be confused with freeloaders who would be like a couch surfer, and very few builders. I would've made that builder's circle a little smaller if it were a legible, the number of builders building on most of these projects is minuscule compared to the number of investors. That's the first snapshot of the current landscape.

Current landscape point number two: token volatility makes tokens an unnatural unit of exchange. Some tokens go up and down 30% in a given day. This makes them not useful as a unit of exchange. A lot of applications, especially in 2017 would say, okay, buy our token so you can use it like it's a currency in app. That's a very hamfisted way of trying to get people to use your cryptocurrency. The reality is that they’re not going to use it for that reason. People really only have enough cognitive overhead to make sense of one or two currencies. If you're living in the United States you're using USD every single day.

This chart, with the Y axis removed, is Bitcoin cash's volatility. I find that funny because a lot of the Bitcoin cash folks wanted it to be treated as cash – they're still suffering from volatility. The last point I'll make on this is: people are not spending cryptocurrency like it's money; they're holding on to it. Most of it is speculation; we're still in the cryptocurrency casino.

Point number three about the current landscape: the biggest winners, customer-wise are exchanges. Coinbase has over 35 million users who are buying and selling cryptocurrencies and not really doing much else other than that. You might get some staking but that's a very recursive sort of behavior where you're essentially running in place to escape inflation. That's very low grade “work” being done on behalf of a protocol.

Proof of hodl login

What if we were to acknowledge all these things and try to change the current landscape by leaning into hodling and bringing more utility to it. Enter proof of hodl login. The concept is: accessing applications or communities or experiences based on your holdings. Imagine you have a hundred dollars of Bitcoin and there's a suite of applications that allow you to access them only once you've had a hundred dollars of Bitcoin. That concept is generalizable to any token.

The way to enter in to an application experience is you'd either earn the currency, so you can become a part of the in group, or you'd purchase it, or you’d mine it. I think that mining is a pretty interesting one, consult your attorneys by the way, if one were to launch generalized mining where anyone can mine. I think that, in my opinion, would move the token further away from security status. Not to say it wouldn't be considered a security, but I think we're getting a little bit further away from that territory which is great for innovation and community growth.

Number two, it grows a new class of users called user-stakers. This is a fundamental breakthrough in business model generation. We'll discuss this in a bit, but it essentially collapses the notion of a stakeholder and a user. They are one in the same in this new model. Given a proof of hodl login function, you wouldn't necessarily want to hold tokens that are clearly marked for access control unless you we're satisfied with what's on the other side of that.

So you're not only a user, but you're a staker.

Number three, you're going to have a very low minimum balance. Or you can have a very high minimum balance. You can have $0.10 or $1 or $10 in crypto to get in. Or a $1,000,000 or $10,000. So as a community builder or founder you can modulate that to make it work for your application.

And the last thing, importantly, is no transaction fee is needed. You just sign in with your keys. There's no transactional blockchain, no blockchain bloat. You're being economical with your usage of the blockchain.

So proof of hodl login and user staking, specifically, as Joel Monegro, friend of the project, has stated it creates a kind of opt-in economic lock-in that benefits the user by turning them into stakeholders in the success of the service. How I interpret that section, from his thin protocols blog post, is that early users can also be treated as early employees, early founders, or early stakeholders, and they can not only use the app, but also do work for the app to grow the app. You could reward this collective or individual effort, this is what Freehold is doing, you could reward the effort for things like referrals to new Hodlers.

Imagine having a box score of new converts who are hodlers and giving an individual or a collective rewards for reaching certain milestones. That's an objective measure that you can measure pretty well and that is fairly hard to game.

Second thing is you can build more software for hodlers. Friedger, one of the members of the Blockstack Stacks ecosystem created an app called Speed Spend.

He has a proof of hodl function on it that he's demoing that requires you, and this is a demo, but essentially what you can do is you can flip a coin and bet against someone else who has also hodled a certain amount. It's nice because it puts a little bit of a governor on degenerate gambling by requiring you to have some funds up front.

The other thing you can reward is collective goals that are hit. In the case of Stacks, it may be the case that once we have over a hundred thousand dollars of Bitcoin going through and going through the proof of transfer mining function. Let's say like a 10 day trailing average of daily, a hundred thousand dollars of Bitcoin going through, that's worth celebrating, that's worth rewarding. The community may have had a large part in evangelizing that new security model and the people's willingness to participate in the mining.

$MARS

There's a bunch of other examples as well. Let's take a whimsical example: let's say we create a Mars token $MARS and the goal of the token is to terraform Mars and begin building a civilization there. With the Mars token you can pay evangelists for educating about terraforming Mars and improving sentiment around keywords to combat pessimism, because obviously there'll be some anti-Mars people that don't want to terraform and they may be adversarial to the notion. Those anti-Mars people presumably wouldn't buy the tokens because that would be to the benefit of the pro-Mars terraforming people.

So, if you're not hodling $MARS token then you can't get into that community, you can't be rewarded, you can't get the benefits. $MARS tokens can convert fellow Martians by giving them bonuses for converting. Community leaders in the ecosystem who have mined a lot of $MARS token and want to further advance the idea might put large tasks or challenges up that can be MapReduced or parallelized. Parallel tasks that lead up to a larger goal being completed and rewarding them. DARPA did this with the red balloon challenge. If you want to Google that, that's a good example there. Lastly, the folks who are bought in and have skin in the game and are economically aligned in addition to values aligned, might just collectively agree to use that token on Mars someday. That's a tongue in cheek example but I think that kind of gets the point across.

Other Proof of Hodl Communities

There's tons of other proof of hodl communities. I was just talking to a Stacks community member and friend named Jason who is thinking about creating a newsletter that's proof of hodl. Great idea to do that with a super simple business model. If people want to have access to your newsletter then they should hold a certain amount of your token.

I can imagine someone creating a chat room where you have to have a token to get in and then, boom, you're in a group of people who have the same values as you and have skin in the game. They're not just virtue signaling, they're also value signaling and they can do this with pseudonyms or real names.

A third category is regular services and apps. They might provide a discount if you have a really good referral mechanism in place. I keep using this example because I think it's very applicable, it might be in your best interest to actually try to convert more token holders as opposed to having them pay you in fiat because you can actually geometrically expand the value of the ecosystem through leveraging those new converts, those new hodlers.

For the example of gambling, we gave that example already.

Fifth example is something I find very interesting and I'm still trying to figure out how to brand this but effectively there are affinity groups and you can have $VEGAN or $CARNIVORE. That $MARS example earlier I mentioned earlier, really, what this is is values-constrained tokens. One of the outstanding problems to solve in that model of values-constrained tokens is attribution. How do you attribute that someone has furthered the vegan movement, et cetera. It's not an unsolvable problem though, I think we can work on it and hack it.

And then lastly, other open protocols, new and old alike, of tight knit hodlers can use this model to coordinate labor, communications, et cetera. I think the reality is when you look at say Bitcoin maximalists and even at Ethereum maximalists, those folks don't have that much Bitcoin and ether. They’re mostly virtue signaling and they're playing a status game, not a value game.

What this does, this forces people to put their money where their mouth is and play a value creation game as opposed to a status game. Folks using this model to earn and learn is highly potent. And I think generally, if the 2010s we're defined by engineers as founders and salespeople as founders, like Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin as engineers as founders and Mark Benioff and Steve jobs as sales folks. I think this next generation, this next decade is going to be marked by community builder as founder. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to validate within the crypto space first, the existing open protocol space first, and eventually expanding outwards toward other community groups, this new business model of user staking so that more community builders can create valuable experiences and products with their community.

So I think this is fundamental and I think we're at the early part of a massive wave of community builders as founders.

Cool, so I alluded to this: is there a smarter way to grow a community and fundraising? I would say it's to be determined, we'll see. Certainly, leveraging a community from the outset could be more beneficial than just doing a fundraise or having to worry about SEC compliance and things like that. I think there are ways to very neatly start new movements with a group of people where there's no primary issuer of the token. It's almost like a natural resource that everyone gravitates around.

Utility of Community and Fundraising

To give a good comparison of the utility of community and fundraising: on the way left, you have Kickstarter where you have consumers who have conceptual product market fit. You're buying something for which there's conceptual product market fit, where the builder has all of the onus of making it happen and then just delivering it to the consumer. After that, maybe they stay on their email list, but really the relationship is largely over.

Coinlist is in the middle of the spectrum where they're doing sales to large stakeholders but many of the stakeholders are not actually builders as I alluded to in one of the first slides. Many of them are not even users and I'm not counting staking as usage. I’m counting using applications on a daily or weekly basis, or being pseudo employed by or contracted by the token. On the far right is the Freehold model, this is a user stakeholder model. The user, stakeholder, and the builder are all one in the same. You can be a user and stakeholder and not a builder, but I think a lot of people will choose to be builders. I think a lot of community-builder-founders will choose to carve out that small section of people that hold a stake, and want to do work, and focus on growing that group. By focusing on growing that highly potent subset of stakeholders, what you're doing is you're creating a very robust movement of folks that are both pro-growth and pro-wealth.

For Future Consideration

One of the last things is for future consideration, making this concept live beyond our own lifetimes is the idea of pushing an application via smart contract that is a permanent freehold with proof of hodl access. It could be a simple chat room or just an app experience, but it would be a place for those folks who are economically and values aligned alone to occupy it. At the top of the slide, the old definition of a freehold is simply a permanent and absolute tenure of land or property with the freedom to dispose of it will. What that means is, folks in the physical world, but also in this new model, have the option to liquidate an exit whenever they want. That's a huge, huge benefit. You're not just voicing your frustration or your appreciation, you're choosing to vote with your feet and your dollars and this kind of expression to summarize that concept is capital flight at the speed of light.

Imagine thousands of freeholds competing over your attention and your willingness to have a symbiotic relationship with it as a user staker. I think that's a really great model and it recognizes the value of each human being and what they bring to the space and also recognizes the values of each individual.

And I think what it could potentially do is actually expand the amount of wealth that exists in the world. I don't think this is a zero-sum thing. I think this can be very positive-sum and I'm super excited to pull this into reality with everyone here.

In summary, the proof of hodl community signs in with their token key, no transaction needed. Tokens initial utility is for access control. You can earn, buy, or mine your way to access. I think a lot of folks will choose to do proprietary governance where you have a benevolent dictator and if you don't like it you move out very easily, just liquidate. They'll be some decentralized governance I'm sure but I have a feeling proprietary will win the day. Even if it's done via pseudonyms, creates stakeholders in the success of the community and thus bolstering this concept of community builder as founder which we're going to see as a big theme of the 2020s. And then lastly, there can be permanent freeholds for ideas and services that live on forever. and ideally all these are anchored in Bitcoin. These will be places that our grandchildren can live in occupy and have a stake in.

Thank you very much.

of note · № 18 · Week of July 27, 2020

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A few things of note from around the Internet this week:

Zoom

Professor David Malan transformed Harvard’s CS50 from an introductory computer science course into a cult and lifestyle brand. The course’s success and Malan’s methods provide a glimpse of where higher education and the future of learning might be headed in the time of COVID-19.

“I think giving David freedom to innovate is really in everybody’s best interest. You never know what’s going to come out of it.”

Election

This was obvious from the day he was elected. Masha Gessen reviews Lawrence Douglas’ book Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020.

Suppose Biden wins. “The best we can expect from President Donald Trump after an electoral defeat is self-pitying, peevish submission,” Douglas writes. If he goes—which will require an overwhelming electoral defeat—Trump is not only sure to play the victim, blaming the Deep State and undocumented immigrants for his loss, but also likely to linger and delay his departure. The ragged end of his Presidency, if it comes, will be full of conflict and resentment. There will be no orderly handover, no constructive transition—a disastrous prospect during a pandemic and a deep recession, and yet another blow to our perceptions of how elections and government operate.

This is the best-case scenario.

Day One

An incredible opening statement from Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary.

When I’m 80 and reflecting back, I want to have minimized the number of regrets that I have in my life. And most of our regrets are acts of omission—the things we didn’t try, the paths untraveled. Those are the things that haunt us. And I decided that if I didn’t at least give it my best shot, I was going to regret not trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a big deal.

Liar

I’m thankful for two things:

That Western Australia has done amazing job combatting COVID-19.
Our kids are two young to have serious questions about what’s going on.

Dan Sinker on many parent’s current reality:

My five-year-old understands the reality of our uniquely American failure in a way that the president does not: for him, this year is gone, lost in a way that no child should ever have to know, and yet an impossible number of them now do.

Race

Inside Sarah Gilbert’s race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine at the University of Oxford. Even after a viable vaccine has been created — the logistics of distributing it quickly and efficiently are mind-boggling.

Producing millions, if not billions, of doses of the vaccine may be the biggest challenge in the history of the pharmaceutical industry. AstraZeneca is signing production agreements with companies worldwide, including Oxford Biomedica Plc, a small gene and cell therapy company a 10-minute drive from the Jenner Institute. Oxford Biomedica has agreed to produce several million doses, with potential to scale up into the tens of millions if it works. James Miskin, the company’s chief technical officer, describes a multistep production process that sounds to my layperson’s ears like a cross between making a sourdough starter and boiling down sap to make maple syrup.

Failure

Surrounding yourself with yes men and women might not be the best idea as President of the United States. Inside the Trump administration’s failure to address COVID-19.

Dr. Birx’s belief that the United States would mirror Italy turned out to be disastrously wrong. The Italians had been almost entirely compliant with stay-at-home orders and social distancing, squelching new infections to negligible levels before the country slowly reopened. Americans, by contrast, began backing away by late April from what social distancing efforts they had been making, egged on by Mr. Trump.

The difference was critical. As communities across the United States raced to reopen, the daily number of new cases barely dropped below 20,000 in early May. The virus was still circulating across the country.

Italy’s recovery curve, it turned out, looked nothing like the American one.

Grief

That this essay was written in The New England Journal of Medicine is alarming.

The morning you die, I don’t want to be there — like most mornings now, when I rise against my whole will and crawl dejectedly into scrubs. I don’t want to be a plague doctor or a hero on TV. Now on the news, White men hold guns and signs that say “live free or die” to protest the lockdown. I imagine what they will look like dying on vents in ICUs staffed by doctors lacking sleep and proper training, soaked in moral fatigue. I imagine what their wives will sound like on the phone as they cry and say “Do everything.” I wonder if these wives will thank me or tell me to be safe.

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of note · № 17 · Week of July 20, 2020

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A few things of note from around the Internet this week:

Reparations

Nikole Hannah-Jones on giving black Americans what they’re owed. Frederick Douglass’ observation in the third paragraph is particularly damning.

It devastates black people that all the other black deaths before George Floyd did not get us here. It devastates black people to recall all the excuses that have come before. That big black boy, Michael Brown, must have charged the weapon-carrying officer. Eric Garner should have stopped struggling. Breonna Taylor’s boyfriend had a weapon in her home and shouldn’t have shot at the people who, without a knock or an announcement, burst through her door. We’re not sure what Ahmaud Arbery was doing in that predominantly white neighborhood. Rayshard Brooks, who in the midst of nationwide protests against police violence was shot in the back twice by a police officer, just shouldn’t have resisted.
It should devastate us all that in 2020 it took a cellphone video broadcast across the globe of a black man dying from the oldest and most terrifying tool in the white-supremacist arsenal to make a vast majority of white Americans decide that, well, this might be enough.
In 1881, Frederick Douglass, surveying the utter privation in which the federal government left the formerly enslaved, wrote: “When the Hebrews were emancipated, they were told to take spoil from the Egyptians. When the serfs of Russia were emancipated, they were given three acres of ground upon which they could live and make a living. But not so when our slaves were emancipated. They were sent away empty-handed, without money, without friends and without a foot of land on which they could live and make a living. Old and young, sick and well, were turned loose to the naked sky, naked to their enemies.”

Reverse

Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal on the current state of things in the United States.

🤦🏼‍♂️

Eventually, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas and Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona went even further, blocking cities and counties from implementing any pandemic-related restriction more stringent than that required by the state. This meant that when a video emerged of packed nightclubs in Phoenix, full of people who were not wearing masks, the mayor was unable to close or sanction the clubs—or even require them to force patrons to wear masks. Both governors finally reversed those policies last week. (“To state the obvious, COVID-19 is now spreading at an unacceptable rate in Texas, and it must be corralled,” Abbot said at a press conference on Monday. This had not been obvious to the governor less than a week earlier, when he told Texans that the state’s record-breaking number of new infections was “no reason today to be alarmed.”)

Pats!

A typical Patriots fan.

Sean Murphy seethed as he watched from his weed dealer’s couch. It was February 2008. Skinny, with deep-set brown eyes, Murphy was a typical Patriots fan. He pronounced “cars” as “cahs,” got his coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, and had a mullet and a horseshoe mustache, at least when his girlfriend didn’t make him clean up. He moved furniture for a living in Lynn, Mass., a down-and-out suburb on the North Shore, and on Sundays, when he could get tickets, he made the 40-mile drive south to Foxborough to root for the Pats.
But there was another side to Murph, as his friends called him. On Saturday nights he put on an all-black ninja suit and went out looking for things to steal. He was a cat burglar—the best in a town where burglary was still regarded as an art form.

Doorstep

Rashad West, a humble hero in the tragedy of George Floyd.

Today, it appears that West’s purpose wasn’t solely cooking up Asian cuisine and modeling a successful Black-owned business; it was assisting in the defanging of police departments whose practices so frequently devalue Black lives. The move made him the savior that Emmett Till, George Stinney Jr., Sandra Bland, and so many other African Americans did not have before their unjust and untimely deaths. “The only reason I put that video out was to preserve the truth,” says West. His voice lowers as if he’s thinking out loud. “I know how that can get twisted.” You can hear in his voice how much he hated being lied to about George Floyd’s death.

Freud

Alex Danco on Sigmund Freud and refusing to wear a mask.

The minute that wearing masks became about protecting other people, it was game over for America. Masks became a symbol of the superego; and as far as symbolism goes, it’s laid on pretty thick. (It’s literally something that you put on your face into order to stop yourself from spraying germs onto other people, and therefore suppress your own guilt of being part of a pandemic!) The minute masks became about suppressing yourself to protect others, the narrative became: The Elites want you to feel guilty about not wearing a mask, just like they want you to feel guilty about driving a car, or eating a burger, or anything else you love. Don’t let them!

Unfortunately, there is a right answer. Wear the stupid mask.

Plunder

There are so many incredible, genuine entrepreneurs and small business owners. Then there are the corrupt, worse-than-you-can-imagine plutocrats that Trump’s helping exploit the pandemic.

Mountaire’s official creed says, “Good stewards of all the assets that God has entrusted to us.” Cameron increasingly began using his share of the company’s assets to influence American policy and politics by funding socially conservative and business-friendly candidates and advocacy groups. Low-level poultry workers have been described as cogs in a perpetual-motion machine, but big-donor politics can also be a kind of perpetual-motion machine—one that recycles profits to perpetuate profits.

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writing · Kings

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/nbf-medal

of note · № 16 · Week of June 1, 2020

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Black Lives Matter

░ ░ CH A M E L E O N ░ ░ @Chameleon876

“Daddy changed the world.”

~Gianna Floyd ✊🏾

#JusticeForGeorgeFloyd

ment @mentnelson

The whole country needs to stop right now and listen to Killer Mike. He’s verbalizing what a lot of us don’t know how to express

Tyrone V. Ross Jr. @TR401

Samuel Sinyangwe @samswey

For those who are interested in research-based solutions to stop police violence, here’s what you need to know - based on the facts and data. A thread. (1/x)

Richard Grant @richardgrant88

This is probably the most impactful picture I have ever taken.

#JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #LongBeach #LongBeachProtest #BlackLivesMatter

Brett McGurk @brett_mcgurk

Here’s how this scene was viewed live in Australia. One of America’s closest and most dependable allies. Rendered speechless. Just watch.

David Chen @davechensky

Things spiraled out of control today in Seattle when police tussled w/ protestors over an umbrella.

I have synced up/edited together a FB live stream and an overhead shot from Reddit so you can see exactly how it went down.

Warning: it is upsetting.

LIL DIAMOND @EVK95

Niggas surprised about the govt planting bricks at protests wait till I tell y’all about the crack epidemic

Oski Isaiah @MoneyOsk

Y’all can understand a white kid shooting up a school cuz he was bullied after 4 months of school but don’t understand why an oppressed group is compelled to burn shit down after 400yrs

Mayor of Simp City @jusalotofpain

This video of Grand Rapids PD firing a tear gas canister at an unarmed man (right after they maced him) point blank to the face needs to VIRAL. what in the actual fuck are these pigs doing

adaliah 🇹🇬 @adxlls

in an attempt to disperse crowds, #DavidMcAtee, a louisville bbq chef known for serving cops free meals, was shot and killed by the police last night. he was unarmed. not only were the officers’ bodycams off, but they also left his body on the street for 12 hours. say his name.

Ajit Singh @ajitxsingh

"Can I ask you what's going to happen at 8, sir?"

"What's going to happen is we're going to start beating the fuck out of you."

free @sanweeoh

HE DIDNT STUTTER

Melany Centeno @_NotISaidTheCat

THIS! Literally just brought me to tears. This is so beautiful. Our Polynesian Brothers and Sisters doing their traditional Haka for Black Lives Matter in New Zealand. The world is coming together and it is so beautiful. #blacklivesmatter #georgefloyd #breonnataylor #ahmadarbery

Jake Morphonios 🔴 www.blackstoneintel.com @morphonios

This man isn't a protester. He was just a guy sitting at a traffic light when cops shot his car with a tear gas round. He got out to yell at them because his pregnant wife is in the vehicle. So they opened fire on them.

Josh Fox BlackLivesMatter @joshfoxfilm

People stuck in traffic are witnessing NYPD beat up folks on their way home.

T. Greg "Credulous Propagandist" Doucette @greg_doucette

Different angle on 1️⃣1️⃣1️⃣ out of Indianapolis

From this view you can see the cop grope the woman he's restraining, that's why she breaks away

Then of course a half dozen cops beat her for not wanting to be groped

Lawlessness

WBFO @WBFO

Just about an hour ago, police officers shove man in Niagara Square to the ground (WARNING: Graphic). Video from: @MikeDesmondWBFO

A few other things from around the Internet this week:

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This pretty closely mirrors our experience staying at The Westin Perth during our quarantine.

Packaged meals from a third-party catering company were dropped at the door three times a day. Breakfast was often yogurt and cereal, and lunch, a sandwich and a salad; dinner could be spaghetti or chicken curry. While both the cost of the room and the meals themselves were covered by the Australian government, Ailsa and her husband could pay out of pocket for wine, beer, and groceries, which could be delivered.
Security guards were stationed on every floor to make sure no one left their rooms for any reason. Government workers stood in for hotel employees, answering phones and fielding guest questions. A nurse called guests each morning to inquire after their health, and to ask whether they were experiencing any symptoms of the coronavirus.

Repeat

Kieran Healy on the enormity of the data available about COVID-19.

Every day begins in the same way. I get up. I make my coffee. I look at the data. Everything about this is absurd. To begin with, there’s the absurdity that everyone with a job like mine faces each day. Locked down at home with the kids, trying to get things done, unable to properly teach, write, or think. The household is like a little spacecraft, drifting in the void. Occasionally you venture outside to get supplies, or to check the shields. I find the days are speeding up now, because even though things drag from moment to moment, each twenty-four hour period is essentially identical. It reminds me of when my children were newborns. It’s a daily slog that, in retrospect, fuses into a gray blob almost impossible to recall in any sort of differentiated way.

Future

Om Malik with a little optimism about the future.

My bet is always-on broadband. Virtual worlds, digital entertainment, gaming …. None of it would be possible without broadband. Today, we have about 100-250 Mbps in most modern homes. In some places, you can get a gigabit per second. Now imagine what we could do if, in ten years, we all have 10 gigabits per second in our homes, and we have in-home networks that are fast and fat. What could apps do then? What would it mean for our AI-enhanced devices? In 2001, we imagined a 100 Mbps future — and we got Google, a nearly trillion-dollar company. We got Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. Fast forward 20 years from now, what do you think is possible? What do you want to be possible?

The Foster Portfolio

Elegant adaptation of a Kurt Vonnegut short story in which an investment banker learns that his working-class client is hiding a million dollar fortune for perplexing reasons. The ending is perfect.

All I Need

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writing · Quick Install Tailwind CSS

Wed, 27 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This is mostly a personal reference for the future – hopefully it will help a few other people too. My most common use case right now is vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS so that's what this is tailored towards.

Method 1: Install via CDN

Fastest but more downside

The fastest way to get started is to use Tailwind's CDN, avoiding any sort of involved installation process entirely. With a single <link> tag, you get the latest default configuration build.

<link
  href="https://unpkg.com/tailwindcss@^1.0/dist/tailwind.min.css"
  rel="stylesheet"
/>

Unfortunately, choosing this method will lock you out of certain functionality including:

Unable to customize the default theme
Unable to install third-party plugins
Unable to use directives
Unable to enable features (i.e. group-hover)

Method 2: Tailwind CLI

Fully featured, a bit more involved

Here's the whole process for using the Tailwind CLI to get started with your project:

*****Note:*** This is on mac OS with npm installed.

Create a new folder for your project.
cd into your project folder.
Initialize your project with npm by running:

npm init

This will take you through creating apackage.json filethat lives at the top level of your project folder.

Then, install Tailwind using npm:

npm install tailwindcss --save-dev

Tailwind is now installed, before we get it running, let's set up the basic folder structure first.

In the root of the project folder, create an index.html file (touch index.html from the command line) and a styles.css folder (mkdir styles). cd into the styles folder and create astyles.css file.

Next, add some basic structure to index.html:

.<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>✨Title ✨</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
    <meta name="author" content="Your name" />
    <meta name="description" content="A brief description" />
    <meta property="og:title" content="✨Title ✨" />
    <meta property="og:type" content="website" />
    <meta property="og:description" content="A brief description" />
    <meta property="og:image" content="/cool-image.png" />
    <meta property="og:url" content="/here.html" />
    <meta property="og:site_name" content="✨Title ✨" />
    <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
    <meta name="twitter:site" content="Twitter username" />
    <meta name="twitter:title" content="✨Title ✨" />
    <meta name="twitter:description" content="A brief description" />
    <meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="image description" />
    <link rel="canonical" href="/here.html" />
    <link href="styles/output.css" rel="stylesheet" />
    <link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/favicon.svg" />
    <title>✨Title ✨</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>⭐ Your amazing site here ⭐</h1>
    <script src="script.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

After that, add the following Tailwind directives to the top of styles.css:

<!-- Tailwind imports -->
@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

Now that we have a basic setup, we can use the Tailwind CLI to process styles.css and start using Tailwind to design.

cd into the styles folder and run the following command:

npx tailwind build styles.css -o output.css

styles.css is the current CSS file and output.css is whatever you want the processed CSS to be named. If run successfully,there should now be a file named output.css which means you have successfully installed Tailwind.

To test it out, copy and paste one of the numerous examples from the documentation into index.html.

<div class="w-full max-w-xs">
  <form class="bg-white shadow-md rounded px-8 pt-6 pb-8 mb-4">
    <div class="mb-4">
      <label class="block text-gray-700 text-sm font-bold mb-2" for="username">
        Username
      </label>
      <input
        class="shadow appearance-none border rounded w-full py-2 px-3 text-gray-700 leading-tight focus:outline-none focus:shadow-outline"
        id="username"
        type="text"
        placeholder="Username"
      />
    </div>
    <div class="mb-6">
      <label class="block text-gray-700 text-sm font-bold mb-2" for="password">
        Password
      </label>
      <input
        class="shadow appearance-none border border-red-500 rounded w-full py-2 px-3 text-gray-700 mb-3 leading-tight focus:outline-none focus:shadow-outline"
        id="password"
        type="password"
        placeholder="******************"
      />
      <p class="text-red-500 text-xs italic">Please choose a password.</p>
    </div>
    <div class="flex items-center justify-between">
      <button
        class="bg-blue-500 hover:bg-blue-700 text-white font-bold py-2 px-4 rounded focus:outline-none focus:shadow-outline"
        type="button"
      >
        Sign In
      </button>
      <a
        class="inline-block align-baseline font-bold text-sm text-blue-500 hover:text-blue-800"
        href="#"
      >
        Forgot Password?
      </a>
    </div>
  </form>
  <p class="text-center text-gray-500 text-xs">
    &copy;2020 Acme Corp. All rights reserved.
  </p>
</div>

If you’ve done everything right so far, running your index.html in your browser should produce an image like below. A login form using Tailwind. That’s it!

writing · The End of the Beginning

Fri, 22 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Demonetized writing at Epsilon Theory:

To be perfectly explicit, as things stand today:

Quantitative deep value (“owning really cheap things because they are really cheap”) is at best a tactical trade.

Economic policy will hamper mean reversion.

As investors, trends are our friends for the foreseeable future.

of note · № 15 · Week of May 18, 2020

Fri, 22 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A few things of note from around the Internet this week:

Travel

Laurel Chor is a photographer and journalist. She documented her airport transit from Paris to Hong Kong via London in this thread.

Laurel Chor @laurelchor

I’ve landed in Hong Kong after flying from Paris CDG, via London Heathrow. I now have to wait ~8 hours before I get my #COVID19 test results and thus have ample time to tweet about my experience.

Coincidentally, as she was flying to Hong Kong, my family was flying from Houston, Texas to Perth, Australia. Our experience had some similarities but on a much shorter time scale. From the time we stepped off the plane till we arrived in our quarantine hotel room: 3 hours.

Reopening

A clear-headed essay from Erin Bromage on the risks of reopening to quickly.

So now let’s get to the crux of it. Where are the personal dangers from reopening?
When you think of outbreak clusters, what are the big ones that come to mind? Most people would say cruise ships. But you would be wrong. Ship outbreaks don’t even land in the top 50 outbreaks to date.
Ignoring the terrible outbreaks in nursing homes, we find that the biggest outbreaks are in prisons, religious ceremonies, and workplaces, such as meat packing facilities and call centers. Any environment that is enclosed, with poor air circulation and high density of people, spells trouble.
Some of the biggest super-spreading events are:
Meat packing: In meat processing plants, densely packed workers must communicate to one another amidst the deafening drum of industrial machinery and a cold-room virus-preserving environment. There are now outbreaks in 115 facilities across 23 states, 5000+ workers infected, with 20 dead.
Weddings, funerals, birthdays: 10% of early spreading events
Business networking: Face-to-face business networking like the Biogen Conference in Boston in March.

Erin is Australian and flew there in early March, read about it here.

Weak

Peter Welch of Still Drinking with a few strong words.

It is not virus or the lockdown that has crushed my spirit. It isn’t even facing my worst fear every day, all day. Years ago, I wrote “We cannot dismiss everyone who supports Trump as stupid or evil.” Maybe it was true then, but I regret my words. We may now dismiss them. Personally, since the White House thinks we’re in a “war” against coronavirus, I would like to see a large portion this murder cult hanged for war crimes. I would go to that execution. I would cheer. I would shout for more.
Because I no longer believe I live in a country with greedy assholes, or ignorant people trying to get by the same way I do. I no longer believe that it is my task to better myself and find harmony with people I cannot understand. I believe I live in a country full of dangerously stupid monsters.
This is the only way I can make sense of the world anymore. I’m tired of trying to explain the simplest concepts to people who refuse to understand things like gravity, vaccination, carbon, and that hurting others is bad. If they’re monsters, I can stop trying. Doesn’t understand basic compassion? We don’t expect that from monsters. Tells doctors treating patients to go back China? I would definitely expect that from a monster. Holds up a sign reading “sacrifice the weak” for reasons I can barely fathom. But nobody knows what motivates monsters, and there’s no reason to ask.

Spray

This is from a month ago but the three paragraphs below were arresting. Nicholas Kristof brings the medical crisis to life in a very real way.

For health workers, intubation is nerve-racking because it causes the virus to spray out from the lungs into the air. In this case, the procedure was performed in a room on the edge of the hot zone with negative air pressure, so that the virus would remain in the room. A plastic box was placed over the patient’s head, and the nurse-anesthetist put her arms through holes in the box to perform the intubation.
The patient was put to sleep and paralyzed, and a device was inserted into her mouth to lift the epiglottis and make way for a tube that was passed through her vocal cords about 10 inches down to her lungs. The outside end was then connected to a ventilator, which pumped oxygen in.
Because it would be ghastly to wake up unable to speak with a tube down one’s throat, patients are sedated so that they do not rip out the tube; doctors say that for some reason, Covid-19 patients seem to require more sedation than other patients. To be safe, their hands are also tied down.

Response

Entrepreneur Matt Blumberg wrote a play-by-play of his time leading Colorado’s COVID-19 Innovation Response Team. Very interesting perspective as the crisis unfolded at the state level.

Imagination

Robin Sloan on the strangeness and beauty of using an AI language model as a writer.

He’s also making a video game and chronicling the process each week here.

Bread

Not a single person in the whole production line 🤖.

Risk

Morgan Housel wrote a very personal piece called “The Three Sides of Risk”. Take a little time to read it.

Tail-end events are all that matter.
Once you experience it, you’ll never think otherwise.

If you liked this post, why not share it? Everyone needs a few more interesting things to read.

writing · Basic HTML Skeleton

Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Copy-paste this into your favorite text expansion software.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>✨Title ✨</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
    <meta name="author" content="Your name" />
    <meta name="description" content="A brief description" />
    <meta property="og:title" content="✨Title ✨" />
    <meta property="og:type" content="website" />
    <meta property="og:description" content="A brief description" />
    <meta property="og:image" content="/cool-image.png" />
    <meta property="og:url" content="/here.html" />
    <meta property="og:site_name" content="✨Title ✨" />
    <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
    <meta name="twitter:site" content="Twitter username" />
    <meta name="twitter:title" content="✨Title ✨" />
    <meta name="twitter:description" content="A brief description" />
    <meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="image description" />
    <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" />
    <link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/favicon.svg" />
    <title>✨Title ✨</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>⭐ Your amazing site here ⭐</h1>
    <script src="script.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

Why

A quick and easy way to get started with a new static HTML project. Use it as a foundation for building a simple page with vanilla web technologies. Bonus: includes all the best practices for social media sharing too 💫

Explanation

<!--
  A long time ago, the DOCTYPE was needed to specify different HTML versions.
  However, as of HTML5, providing `html` is sufficient.
-->
<!DOCTYPE html>
<!-- Specifies the appropriate language for your site. In this case, english -->
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>✨Title ✨</title>
    <!--
    UTF-8 is a character set that includes all of the characters you could
  ever want in a website.
  -->
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <!--
    This critical tag ensures that items on the screen scale
    correctly on mobile devices. There will be problems if you don't include 	 it.
  -->
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
    <!--
    Set your name and a brief description to be displayed in search engines.
  -->
    <meta name="author" content="Your name" />
    <meta name="description" content="A brief description" />
    <!--
    `og` stands for Open Graph, enables any web page to become a rich object 	 in a social graph. These tags are essential for ensuring your site gains    	 an appropriate card when sharing on social media.
  -->
    <meta property="og:title" content="✨Title ✨" />
    <meta property="og:type" content="website" />
    <meta property="og:description" content="A brief description" />
    <meta property="og:image" content="/cool-image.png" />
    <meta property="og:url" content="/here.html" />
    <meta property="og:site_name" content="✨Title ✨" />
    <!--
    `twitter` is similar to Open Graph, but specific to Twitter.
    There are several different customizations to be found here:
    https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/tweets/optimize-with-cards/guides/getting-started
  -->
    <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" />
    <meta name="twitter:site" content="Twitter username" />
    <meta name="twitter:title" content="✨Title ✨" />
    <meta name="twitter:description" content="A brief description" />
    <meta name="twitter:image:alt" content="image description" />
    <!-- Include one or more CSS files to change the styling of the website. -->
    <link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" />
    <!--
    A favicon is the small image that appears in the browser tab. Use 			`image/svg+xml` to avoid having to provide multiple sizes of `.ico` 		images.
  -->
    <link rel="icon" type="image/svg+xml" href="/favicon.svg" />
    <!-- This title shows up in the page's tab, next to the favicon -->
    <title>✨Title ✨</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>⭐ Your amazing site here ⭐</h1>
    <!-- Include Javascript, if required. -->
    <script src="script.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>

of note · № 14 · Week of May 11, 2020

Fri, 15 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A few things of note from around the Internet this week:

Home Screens

Is life where anything can be delivered, work and school can be done from home, and entertainment delivered through the Internet really what we want?

When the formal quarantine came, it seemed like domestic cozy was fully coming into its own. Much of the necessary infrastructure was already in place. The world that tech companies had built and persistently tried to persuade us we wanted was waiting for us, ready to fully take over. It was consumer-facing disaster capitalism in action. […]
Pure economic exchanges can relocate to screen interactions with a minimal loss of fidelity, but encounters meant to be less instrumental are proving harder to sustain without the texture of physical space. Most of the apps we use for interaction simply unbundle an informational component from the scene of social contact. […]
“With people told to work from home and stay away from others, the pandemic has deepened reliance on services from the technology industry’s biggest companies while accelerating trends that were already benefiting them.” […]
Pandemics, beyond their direct consequences for those who get sick, heighten fear, paranoia, isolation, xenophobia, economic vulnerability, and depression. If some tech companies complement such a world well, we should ask why.

Wealth

Just keep scrolling…this is incredible.