6/3/2024 Newsletter
🕵️ Special edition: Mexico's elections - This year will see a mind boggling number of elections across the world. As US relations with China deteriorate, it will pay to understand Mexican politics more. I love this newsletter for their local perspectives, giving you a first person peek into different countries.
The second big question is that we're electing 20,262 positions all over the country. This means we're not just getting 500 new congressmembers, but also 128 new senators, nine new governors, and tens of thousands of new regional and municipal representatives. It’s going to be the largest election we’ve ever had, and we’re really switching over to a whole new political class.
[best of benkuhn.net] You don't need to work on hard problems - I found this article on the nose for me. My driving force has been “finding interesting problems” thus far in my career. My perspective has always felt incomplete, but this article named the fuzzy feelings I could not put my finger on. Well put and well worth the read for anyone in tech or curious about it.
Frequently, we’ll find them by making easy problems hard, with hilarious/depressing results. The upper ranks of Big Tech are filled with people who made their careers writing bizarre custom databases, or building Big Data infrastructure that could be replaced with a laptop.
cheese or woodstain? - The hype around AI is fuzzy. Here Don clears up at least one swath of use cases: search. I will be using this framework to think about what tools I use for search going forward.
A search quality is something you can check before buying the product, like tasting a sample of cheese. An experience quality is something you have to spend more time figuring out, like seeing if your woodstain dries in the time printed on the tin.
Crocs: A Deep Dive - I freaking love an underdog. I am not a Crocs fan myself, but their brand fascinates me. Their deft use of social and partnerships did not register at first because of their strange visual style. Surely an ugly shoe company can’t have social chops? Turns out I was wrong.
Our analysis finds that Crocs is the most profitable of its largest shoe and apparel retail competition… by some distance.
Why Does This Ice Cost $32? - I’ve not ever given much thought to ice, but I will never see it quite the same after reading this. Will I be buying $32 ice? No. But am I better for knowing the backstory? Yes.
It takes anywhere from three to five days to freeze 300-pound blocks, and then we cut them down by hand and distribute them all over Southern California. It’s a very time consuming, labor intensive, and also dangerous process that a lot of people either take for granted or don’t have much forethought or concern about.
