Jake Russo

Hi! I have been writing a lot for school lately, which made me remember that I actually enjoy doing this sometimes. When it’s marginally enjoyable to write about things about which I have no interest, it must be truly enjoyable to write about things that do interest me. That’s the theory anyway.

Both this website and my main one are out of date, and I would like to get around to merging them into one. I finally stopped paying $7/month to host a one-episode (two-, if you count the “trailer” one) podcast. I found out that it broke for some reason, so I was quite literally paying for nothing for some period of time. I guess it doesn’t make that much of a difference, since, while it was working, I was paying for practically nothing. Anyway, the podcast is on Acast now, and it took practically no time to transfer.

I’m still young, and I have no idea how change works. I’m going to college soon and am in my last few months of high school. It’s incredibly boring, and I do a horrible job staying motivated and getting work done. I’m looking forward to being interested in school once college comes around. We’ll see if that (school being interesting—I think the antecedent might’ve been unclear) prospect just keeps receding into the horizon…

I know that my life will change a lot and that this part is almost over, but I don’t know it yet. I guess I’ll have to realize it sooner or later.

I was recording some voiceovers (for personal use, nothing particularly interesting) the other day using my podcasting setup, and it reminded me that I like talking and listening to myself talk while editing that audio. I might get around to recording another episode of something.

Publishing things online is always fun, even though ~no one reads this. I’ll probably think of more random things to type.

• The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s) by Randal C. Picker :: SSRN
  • This one was recommended by Byrne in TheDiff.
  • An interesting “well, actually” story about the origin of the “razors and blades” model
    • Gillette didn’t sell razors at a loss and make up for it with the blades!
    • They actually charged a premium for both their razors and their blades, both during and after the life of their first patents.
    • They invented cheaper, disposable razor blades
  • I shave with a safety razor now, both because I find it easier and because the blades are cheap enough that I don’t have re-use them, and its blades are the thinner ones that Gillette pioneered.
  • Interesting parallels to razor-and-blades lock-in with HP printers — Gillette warned customers against using genuine blades in third-party razors; HP warns about the inverse.
  • The paper probably could’ve been much shorter; 30 pages seemed a little excessive.
• Charter-Disney Winners and Losers – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • Disney caved to Spectrum!
  • A look at the future of video entertainment
  • Ben’s prediction about re-bundling might be coming true.
  • “The Arc of Video — Winner: Consumers” seems like a stereotypical economist’s faith in the system, but it’s true nonetheless.
• Office of Public Affairs | Justice Department Sues Google for Monopolizing Digital Advertising Technologies | United States Department of Justice
  • Straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say
• U.S. v. Google: What to Know About the Biggest Antitrust Trial in 20 Years – WSJ
  • I’m biased towards thinking antitrust lawsuits against tech companies are frivolous and annoying.
    • I like many of the big tech companies — many consumers do? — and government hearings have been total jokes.
  • I’ve heard Sherman Antitrust doesn’t work well for tech companies who control demand, not supply.
    • Consumers are free to choose competitors; they don’t because the dominant player is just better.
      • But maybe the dominant players wielded their superior product to effect unfair market conditions where competitors couldn’t compete effectively.
  • Google’s adtech business seems a little shady, and I don’t know enough about it.
  • I’ll keep following this case!
• A Beginners Guide to Generalized Second-Price Auctions
  • I became really annoyed because I forgot what a second-price auction was when reading about the Google case. This reminded me.
• The Lindy Effect
  • The effect makes sense intuitively (though might not be applicable in some of the ways in which it seems to be intuitively), and I had been thinking about it sometime during the week or two before I happened upon this link in The Browser.
  • I didn’t understand much of this paper.
    • Most of the math — outside the sliver I remembered from AP Statistics — lost me completely.
    • I circled some things to google.
  • It was fun to read though.
• How not to be fooled by viral charts – by Noah Smith (noahpinion.blog)
  • I appreciated “not to” as opposed to “to not”.
  • An interesting tour of some stupidly misleading charts, loose heuristics on identifying such charts (though he notes that more concrete rules are difficult to define), gives advice on finding real data (e.g., FRED)
  • Lots of pictures
• The Trouble with the View from Above | Cato Unbound (cato-unbound.org)
  • I’m impressed with The Browser‘s ability to include things in their newsletters that I’ve thought about lately.
  • The discussion of how governments understand things narrowly and quantifiably, then forcing that view into reality was really cool.
  • I found the writing to be excellent and very engaging.
  • I finally purchased the book!
• Apple’s iPhone Event; Innovation and Iteration; Pricing, Inflation, and Services – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • We’ve reached peak iPhone, at least for the time being.
    • “Boring” Apple keynotes are only boring because the products are so good.
    • Innovation compounds
  • This was probably going to be the year the iPhone switched to USB-C, regardless of the EU’s stupid regulations.
  • The skit about environmental friendliness was really dumb and unfunny.
    • Climate change, to the extent we can or will alleviate it, will be alleviated through technology and innovation.
• Prologue–Chapter 2 of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – arrested development | Biography books | The Guardian
  • I read this the day after receiving and starting the book, just to hear it called an “dull, insight-free doorstop”.
  • “Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI.”
    • LOL
      • It could probably be shorter and better written, but I’m hardly 3% through, so what do I know.
      • Maybe clever prose is difficult in a non-fiction piece of this length and scope?

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I may have read some other things this week and forgotten about them. I’m working on being better at including things in this list, but sometimes I fold up the printout, put it in my backpack, and neglect to look through my bag for several days after.

I drew a few things a couple months ago.

What types of things?

I drew two people: a man and a woman, based on a coloring page and the first ‘beginner drawing’ technique I found¹ on YouTube.

I drew a mushroom and some spheres.

It was actually quite nice: I like to multitask, to feel like I’m completely engaged. I’ve struggled with this, though, because there’s a hard limit (at least for most of us) at one stream² of language. I’ve tried to surf the internet while listening to a podcast or an audiobook, or even do homework or write while receiving another stream — it doesn’t work! I switch back and forth and have no idea what’s going on with either language stream; it decreases productivity and confuses me.

Drawing, though, does not stress my ability to process only one stream of language; it uses a different part of the brain!

Maybe it’s total placebo, but I felt like I was using a region of my brain that I usually hadn’t. And it was satisfying, also, to feel completely engaged while drawing and listening to a podcast.

So what happened? Why did I stop³ in June? Maybe, by now, I could’ve managed some passable sketching ability.

This is a flaw of mine, one of which this blog might be evidence: commitment. And not to people; I can stay highly committed to friends, relationships, other things that involve people. For example, I couldn’t stay committed to the gym to save my life, but I can stay committed to a personal trainer; I quit drawing after a week max, but maybe I would stay committed to in-person⁴ art lessons.

I don’t know exactly why. There are even activities to which I am, when you zoom out, quite committed: walking, for example. But even with walking, I go through cycles of walking four miles per day to four days per month.

Maybe it’s a time management thing, and maybe I should structure my time better.

This post doesn’t have much of a moral, but I imagine this plight is nowhere near unique to me. No one trick will work for everyone, and probably not even in isolation for many people; productivity gurus are con artists, and Atomic Habits is dull.⁵

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¹which consists of copying a coloring page upside-down so that you don’t think as much about the object you’re supposed to be drawing as you do about the lines, etc. I didn’t find this particularly convincing, but I did it anyway.

²I heard it phrased this way somewhere and now can’t find where.

³I just remembered I’ve managed to make this into an activity for which my progress is graded in school… because I need more busywork, apparently.

⁴I’ve been warned against these.

⁵I read it, thought it was dumb, and felt validated when a favorite podcast of mine, If Books Could Kill, came out with an episode on it.

I didn’t read as much this week: I do most of my article reading during school via print-outs¹ I bring from home². It works out because it’s nowhere near as obvious as a book but still gives me back some of the time that’s being absolutely destroyed by whichever class I’m required to attend. Also, we had Monday off for Labor Day, and I have been super tired.

• Instacart is the Best and Worst Grocery Business Imaginable (thediff.co)
  • I’ve been passively curious about Instacart and was excited when I saw the email from TheDiff.
    • I’ve never used it, but I think it’s cool to understand a little more about the business.
  • Byrne’s writing — at least for me — is tough to read the first time you pick it up. I’ve been reading him since early this year, though, and I’m finally able to be confident in my ability to follow his thoughts. He posts consistently, and those posts are consistently super interesting.
    • Sidenote to the sidenote — I once pasted an article of his into a writing help tool, and it said the sentences were likely too complex for a general audience.
      • This helped my ego. 😉
• Hey tech folks: Vivek Ramaswamy is not the one (noahpinion.blog)
  • I already was not a fan of Ramaswamey because most of what I’ve heard him say is a little crazy, and I’m not a fan of right-wing ideas generally, but this was a good takedown of just a few of his incoherent ideas.
  • His speech is also annoying; Chris Christie was right.
    • Also, it looks like YouTube is now tracking individual shares with a new “si” parameter. This must be pretty new because I’ve never seen it before, and I didn’t see much mention of it after some quick (admittedly imprecise) googling.
• The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • I’ve never watched sports, and have only tuned into ESPN a handful of times — most of which were five–seven years ago when I was testing connecting my TV directly to the coax outlet in the wall because my cable provider at the time didn’t encrypt the channels or require a set-top box — but I enjoyed this article and have found Ben’s continuing coverage of the collapse of ESPN on Sharp Tech and in his updates quite interesting.
  • The quotes from Those Guys Have All the Fun worked well.
    • According to Ben on a recent Sharp Tech podcast, he’s been wanting to quote this book in an article for a while.
• The prologue to Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller
  • I finish very few of the books I start, which is something I’m working on. That said, I don’t know if I’ll finish this book — one difficulty is that I have too many books, both printed and digital, and I subscribe to Kindle Unlimited — but I enjoyed the discussion of life as being a fight against entropy, disorder.
  • The opening lines were captivating: > “Picture the person you love most […] eating cereal. […] Entropy will get them.”
• Our climate change debates are out of date – by Noah Smith (noahpinion.blog)
  • My current biology teacher is more hopeless about climate change than I’d like, and this was a nice, interesting update to my (limited!) knowledge on climate change.
  • I didn’t know how cheap solar and wind were getting!
• Amazon and Shopify, Shopify and Its Merchants, The Payments Question – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • The AWS model for Amazon distribution!
    • Ben has covered this on Sharp Tech.
    • One of the many differences between the two, though, is that AWS is not branded; Buy with Prime is.
  • This was a good update, but it left me curious about how exactly Amazon Pay is integrated with Shopify Checkout such that Shopify processes the payments.
    • Maybe this was a bit of a miscommunication because the press release seems to imply that Amazon Pay is/will be a payment option but not a required one for Buy with Prime.
  • I enjoyed the nuances about e.g., how Amazon might have wanted the deal with Shopify more than Shopify did.
• Credit card debt collection (bitsaboutmoney.com)
  • I read this about a month ago when it came out, but it was featured in The Browser today, which, to me, was a validation both of the article — reading this very blog a few years ago sparked my (casual) interest in finance and economics! — and of The Browser, the editors of which consistently find excellent reads.

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¹four pages per sheet, double sided, flipped on the long edge!

²or, sometimes, when I’m desperate, print in the school library for $0.10/page

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I wrote many of the entries in this post at once, but the goal is to write my reactions soon after I read an article — which is something I often do anyway, just on the paper on which I’ve printed the piece.

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Week numbers! What’s the Current Week Number? (epochconverter.com)