Friday, September 27, 2019

Weekend Reading: The Only a Few Links about Impeachment Edition

It was another wonderful rollerblading outing today. If it weren't for the fact that my allergies get off the charts terrible in September, I'd say that September is my favorite month in San Diego. Stupid allergies.

Anyway, let's have some links! I'm going to assume that you have all the impeachment-related reading you want and not share a bunch of that sort of link. However, I thought this profile of Nancy Pelosi and her impeachment thought process was really good.

I also agree with Josh Marshall's assessment that Trump's entire team is up to the eyeballs in this scandal. Sadly, I suspect a lot of them will weasel out of any consequences. We'll see.

In other politics news, this David Roberts piece about the clash between what must happen on climate and what can happen in our current political moment is really sobering, but I also like his point about how they way things are is quite brittle, and we might see things fracture unexpectedly.

A couple of weeks ago, I shared a couple of articles and said they explain a lot about why I'm back to full time employee status. Here's another along those same lines, about how Amazon is up-prioritizing ads. I've seen this behind the scenes, too - other ways of promoting my books are slowly going away, and I feel like I'm being funneled to use Amazon ads. I am increasingly of the opinion that the only people who reliably make money in the platform economy are the platform owners. There are some scammy bad actors who have figured out how to game algorithms, and they make money for awhile, until the platform owners catch on and change the rules. And there are a few honest folk who get lucky and hit on something the algorithms like and so do well. Mostly, though, the money flows to the platform owners.

If you want a little bit of insight into the frustrations of the drug discovery and development industry, Derek Lowe has an excellent post about a drug candidate that just failed.

Some recommended listening: I listened to both Ezra Klein's interview with Daniel Markovits about the problems with meritocracy and Matt Yglesias' interview with Binyamin Applebaum about the limitations of economics as the primary driver for policy. Those two interviews really got me thinking! I think some of my thoughts about them might show up in this month's Management Monthly. I'm not holding out on you - the thoughts aren't fully coherent yet! We'll see if I can get them to cohere this weekend in time to go in the newsletter.

I love this:

Here's your weekly bunny:


Happy weekend, everyone!

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