Monthly Archives: December 2018

My favorite links from this week:

• Semil Shah on Opportunity amid Volatility
• Highly recommended: Ray Dalio’s excellent post on what’s happening in the markets right now and how it’s related to politics
• This made my eyebrows go up but it makes sense: Why the Democrats Should Offer Trump a full pardon
• Populism is not good for democracy
• Turns out Columbus, OH is firing on all cylinders
• How meritocracy and populism reinforce each other’s faults
• A profile of Donald Knuth: The Yoda of Silicon Valley

Have a great weekend!

In November, NASA announced it would be conducting a “cultural assessment study” of SpaceX and Boeing to ensure the companies were meeting NASA’s requirements of “adherence to a drug-free environment.” The Washington Post reported that officials had indicated “the review was prompted by the recent behavior of SpaceX’s founder, Elon Musk.”

Boeing is good at hewing to bureaucratic edicts issued by bureaucratic organizations but is bad at recovering rocket stages and decreasing the price of space launch. SpaceX is great at, you know, putting shit into space, which is what both companies are putatively supposed to be doing. For Boeing, compliance with infinite rules and regulations takes precedence over lowering the cost of space access.

From The most despicable sentences I’ve read recently