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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

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Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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      wish there was a way to see financial damage the way you can see maps of forest fires or bomb damage from wars... covid is such a physically bloodless catastrophe it's really hard to see the extreme invisible damage

      10 replies 28 retweets 236 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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      stuff like this is the financial equivalent of bombs dropping randomly... a bad formula cripples large busy airports with high capex/debt on the books, and randomly drops way too much money on little airportshttps://www.wmcactionnews5.com/2020/04/20/windfall-funding-formula-allows-some-small-airports-cash-big-stimulus-money/ …

      1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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      I have pretty good instincts around how organizations are managed and how they do/should do their actual work (like airports running airline ops), but I have a big blindspot when it comes to understanding the financial engineering structure of the world

      2 replies 0 retweets 20 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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      every org/institution in the world has a financial shape/size based on its funding sources, capital reserves, debt on the books, stock or bond instruments modeling ownership, etc. The landscape of these shapes and sizes has been simply blown up catastrophically

      1 reply 1 retweet 27 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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      when I was younger and more naive, I'd ask dumb questions like why, when there is no material damage, and when the financial stuff is essentially arbitrary fiat fictions, you couldn't just "fix" the shape/size of an org in financial terms after a blindside catastrophe

      2 replies 0 retweets 18 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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      it feels weird to see perfectly fine undamaged capital assets like buildings and equipment undergoing the financial equivalent of being rained on with bombs

      1 reply 0 retweets 27 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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      But this is a dumb way to look at it. A better way to think of it is like this: the financial architecture of an organization is very much like the software architecture on a hardware device. Most of the value is in that intangible architecture in either case.

      1 reply 3 retweets 22 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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      Without s/w that can run on it, a hardware device like an iPhone is worth no more than its weight in physical raw materials -- some aluminum and sand and copper basically. It's worth like maybe $10 in raw materials. This is why open/unlocked/non-proprietary is such a big deal.

      11:23 AM - 21 Dec 2020
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      1 reply 1 retweet 17 likes
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Financial architecture is like that for institutions. It may seem like an impressive building full of nice standing desks and multi-monitor workstations and aeron chairs etc is "undamaged" by a financial crisis, but if you added up all the value, I bet it would be minimal.

          3 replies 0 retweets 19 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Like, even the fanciest business that is primarily information/culture based, I suspect the material value of the atoms would not exceed say 10-15% of the value of the institution, and the bulk of it would probably be real estate/lease value, not furniture etc.

          2 replies 1 retweet 14 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Even something like a modern restaurant is primarily a financial beast, not a physical beast. McDonald's is financial software running on real estate, with the actual capital backing it in heartland feedlots and flour mills.

          2 replies 0 retweets 26 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          "Financialization" is about 50% evil shit done by people with operating under severe moral hazard, and 50% legit effects of where value actually lives in a complex globalized industry. It is NOT distributed in proportion to the atoms making up the physical "plant" of the thing

          1 reply 2 retweets 24 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Like the bulk of the value of Apple right now is probably in the designs of M1/A13 chips and CAD files for say a half-dozen key physical devices that would fit on a small rack of servers at most. Not counting value in people's heads, which Apple can't claim. The rest is filler.

          1 reply 0 retweets 15 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          The diff between Apple and seemingly more physical businesses like McDonalds etc. is one of degree, not kind. The real estate and physical WIP stocks account for only a small value of the companies, and most of the financial bombing damage happens in the information structure.

          2 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Even heavy manufacturing... Tesla's Fremont factory was an old GM/Toyota joint venture factory. The new operator of the facility is financially worth way more than the old ones. It's all in the financial architecture and software now.

          1 reply 2 retweets 16 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          The "commodity atom" fraction value of all businesses is headed straight to zero. Almost all the value will be in a) software b) financial architecture. a) is vulnerable to viruses, malware, hacks etc. b) is vulnerable to financial disasters.

          3 replies 1 retweet 12 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          I've used private industry examples, but the same thing applies to public agencies (EPA, FBI, State Department...) that have been relentlessly bombed by Trump for 4 years. And now city/state orgs that are being thrown under the bus with new stimulus bill.

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Socialists get mad because they *wish* valuation worked differently: start with uniquely high and fixed valuation of each human being, then value all the capital assets in proportion to proximity to the human element in the system, since that's what makes for stable human lives.

          3 replies 1 retweet 10 likes
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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          By this logic, McDonald's should be valued as follows: $X per employee, then $Y for the value of the equipment and furniture etc. in the branches the humans work in, etc. etc. Automated, distant things would be worth $0, as would any cloudy automated software.

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Humans out of sight in hinterland feedlot operations for beef raising would be worth less than restaurant service workers with faces, names, badges. And people in other countries would be worth even less. Nowhere in this socialist valuation is the logic of the org factored in

          1 reply 0 retweets 8 likes
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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          By which I mean -- valuing an org based on how it creates value, which means mapping structure of technology use, intellectual property production and obsolescence, info flows, and so on. Financial architecture is about an uneasy mix of factoring in both kinds of valuation.

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          "Culture eats strategy for lunch" is pure wishful thinking. It is the belief that the system works for the humans that are part of it, and that those humans are self-evidently the most valuable part of the system. This is unfortunately simply not true. It's just nice to have.

          1 reply 0 retweets 21 likes
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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          It feels like the noble humanist thing to do to come up with a human-centric valuation and calculus for the nature of things, but that's... not how the world works. Things have a nature of their own. You may ignore that nature, but it won't ignore you.

          3 replies 0 retweets 14 likes
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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Covid is ultimately a huge shock to the last bastion of anthropocentric conceit -- that the way the artificial, human-built work somehow revolves around the humans in it. No it does not, and there's no known way to make it work in a way that does at the scale of 8b humans.

          1 reply 3 retweets 19 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          I am deeply suspicious of "human-centric" anything because the phrase is anthropocentric conceit wrapped in humanist-values posturing. It leads to the deepest sorts of inhumanity to NOT acknowledge when emergent systems have reached escape velocity from human-centeredness

          1 reply 3 retweets 31 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          There is a deep sort of self-absorbed arrogance to acting like it's self-evidently true that large, globe-spanning complex systems should somehow revolve around the humans you see closest to you and care about.

          1 reply 2 retweets 20 likes
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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          The result is a spectrum of different flavors of human-centric bullshit that leads to completely whacko shape/size of even non-corrupt attempts at responding financially to crises. No matter who is in charge, so long as they think in human-centric ways, they get it wrong.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Idiots on the left want free money rain. Idiots on the right want to sermonize about "personal responsibility." Idiots on the top want to gleefully hand money to each other imagining cronyism is sustainable in a vacuum. Idiots on the bottom want to burn everything down.

          2 replies 5 retweets 30 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Every one of these responses fails through human-centricity. The machine/set of machines must first be in working order creating a surplus in parameter space to allow you to center human concerns.

          1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          This is one reason I detest the techlash, despite some justice in their criticisms of tech. The techlash is a bad-faith worldview rooted in a willful ignorance of how the world works, and an arrogant presumption that of course it should work in a human-centric way.

          2 replies 1 retweet 12 likes
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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Sometimes I think we need a proper new religion based on unironically and genuinely sacralizing "tech." It is insane that we think people who uncritically worship rocket launches are somehow lesser humans than ones who worship mythical memories of long-ago fake news pseudoevents.

          4 replies 0 retweets 9 likes
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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Even if you understand nothing about a thing, worship is a way of centering it and ridding yourself of the assumption that you are at the center when you are not. That's epistemic progress. Even if your mental model of the thing you're centering is completely wrong and childish.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Even if you think rockets work on the principle of dragons hidden in the fuselage breathing fire out the bottom, that's better, tbh, than thinking the world was created in 7 days in 6000 BC by some dude with a white beard who still interferes with "miracles" to guide events.

          2 replies 0 retweets 5 likes
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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Yet, which belief gets ridiculed, and which ones gets deeply centered in everything from the social calendar to tax policy to social-distancing exemption policy? Merry covid-spreading Christmas.

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          I'm not saying ignore human concerns and save the system. I'm saying don't forget that the option of paying attention to human concerns only exists if you pay adequate attention to the workings of world machinery first.

          1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          The world today is in a financially bombed out state. If balance sheets and budgets were buildings, it would look like Dresden or Tokyo after the firebombing attacks. Utter gutting and devastation of large sections of the financial built environment.

          1 reply 1 retweet 9 likes
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        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          We don't see this because we never admitted to ourselves that the way the world works, the financial software is in fact the center. We tagged it the preserve of sociopaths, and guess what, system adversely selected precisely the people who had no problems being viewed as such.

          2 replies 1 retweet 9 likes
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        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Dec 21
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          Our world works as well as it does, feeding and provisioning 7.8B people with food, water, antibiotics, vaccines, smartphones, roads, transportation, etc. because it does NOT center humans the way a small 30-person hunter-gatherercommunity did when world-pop was 100,000.

          2 replies 0 retweets 7 likes
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