Remember how early in pandemic many restaurants were selling their own inventory as groceries? That should become a routine habit to some extent. Retargeting inventory from any WIP state from inputs to outputs as a core competency.
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Another angle: neoliberalism got asymmetrically better at thawing frozen assets into on-average more liquid ones than freezing liquid ones into frozen ones. Frozen assets (rightly) became a slur pointing to old-money rents captured and held with regulatory cronyism.
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“Frozen assets” is a misnomer.
“Frozen” = on average more liquid in a larger set of futures
“Liquid” = on average more liquid in a narrower set of futures
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My much less developed thinking on this from pre-Covid times:
From 2016, when I started thinking about this: Fat Thinking and Economies of Variety
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Feb 2018, this is sort of my rough synthesis GUTS: The Grand Unified Theory of Striving (or Slacking )
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I did try to market it a bit back then, but few bites. I got one short corporate talk out of it, and I attribute one fun new gig to it. But fat thinking just wasn’t a popular line of thought until last year.
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Even where people did seem interested it was mostly financial fatness. As in hold a lot more cash on the books, take more investment than you need if you can do it in no/low dilution ways and retain control.
“Deep fatness” was an unpopular idea.
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Angke I need to think through. There’s a deeply held almost theological belief especially in America that money is in fact the most resilient form of wealth in some absolute sense. That under any stressor the wise markets optimally redeploy capital best at the macro level.
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You may think you are smart to hold on to a few more GPUs and N95s and ventilators and storage tanks of water, but you cannot know better than the omniscient market. All is for the best in this most financialized of all worlds. Trust the global superintelligent market.
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It’s an unquestioning sacred belief that attributes magical properties to money flows and assumes no matter what happens it was for the best. Even if it seems awful, you assume you’re merely too dumb to see what the omniscient eye of the market sees.
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And you can’t compare to what *could* have happened. Like ok, you can argue that “free” markets cost 500k lives in the US but also delivered the innovation of mRNA vaccine tech that may save billions of lives in the future, while totalitarian lockdowns save more lives now. But...
Replying to
... can you imagine a scenario where we got both? Very few lives lost now, AND breakthrough vaccine tech?
I think so.
But not if you think the only scenarios are a) USA! USA! b) Chinese concentration camps lockdown in Xinjiang c) Fauciocracy
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Money is not special. It’s not magically the best economic computation substrate for all scenarios anymore than totalitarian central planning bureaucracies are. Both are bunches of flawed, limited people making decisions with information not phlogiston or ley lines. No free lunch
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“Red plenty” was a false utopia based on the omniscience of central planning bureaucracies
“Blue plenty” (as in the economic omniscience of blue-chip financialized assets) is also a false utopia. One based on the omniscience of superfluid capital.
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The one kind of illiquid fat the US encourages as a matter of tax policy, home ownership, is probably the worst of both worlds. Locks up capital and immobilizes people, but doesn’t add significant resilience to anything.
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Degeneracy in biology
Quote Tweet
Oh, what a great
Afterwards, go read the definition of 'degeneracy' in biology, and then go stare at all the work on building resilient systems. I'll wait right here...
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerac
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