Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Alexa, Are You Still There?

Who wasn’t astonished when Amazon revealed that Alexa is hemorrhaging money? According to Arstechnica, the ten-year-old technology is “a colossal failure on pace to lose $10 billion this year.” The authors ask a question no device can answer:

Chinese politics is a knife fight, but it's not typical for the leader to act in a way that more obviously contravenes norms than is really useful...Although Leninist leaders are not usually purged at formal meetings (with the exception of Beria), they have gotten very sick...So, it's always possible Hu Jintao wanted to act like Chen Shaomin, the only person that did not raise their hand at the 12th Plenum of the 8th Party Congress when Liu Shaoqi was condemned. If so, that would be truly stunning given historical continuities.

Is time running out for Big Tech voice assistants? Everyone seems to be struggling with them. Google expressed basically identical problems with the Google Assistant business model last month. There's an inability to monetize the simple voice commands most consumers actually want to make, and all of Google's attempts to monetize assistants with display ads and company partnerships haven't worked. With the product sucking up server time and being a big money loser, Google responded just like Amazon by cutting resources to the division.

2. How Sam Bankman-Fried Snookered the Business Press

New York Magazine has committed itself to saturation coverage of the FTX implosion. One of its best articles scrutinizes the legion of journalists who swooned before Bankman-Fried’s klutzy charm:

Fortune magazine put SBF on its cover this year asking, “The Next Warren Buffett?” Now the author of that story, Jeff John Roberts, confesses, “I was charmed by his nerdy affect as SBF, unkempt in a T-shirt and bushy hair, as he twirled a fidget spinner and rattled off tidbits about everything from M&A strategy to the macroeconomy to the importance of trust in business deals. It was all bull****, of course, and I didn’t see through it.”

3. Department of Homeland Incompetence

Amanda Chicago Lewis offers a public service in her scathing assessment of the Department of Homeland Security. Writing in The Verge, Lewis tries to get her arms around twenty-year-old sprawling bureaucracy only to realize that “by taking on the responsibility of preventing bad things from happening in a world where plenty of bad things happen, DHS seems to do nothing right.” Lewis avoids the tendency of the typical Washington narrative to find a villain:

This is a boondoggle spanning four presidencies, 11 Congresses, seven secretaries, and seven acting secretaries in a department with very high turnover that oversees 212,000 employees and hundreds of thousands of private contractors at any given moment. It’s not just one person’s fault or a handful of bad apples.

4. Brand New University

In his formidable exploration of how academic publishing has declined, Ted Gioa points out that universities have fallen prey to the myth that a brand refresh is the solution to real business problems. He offers a memorable anecdote:

Back in the 1980s, I was called in as adviser to a $100 million business that was shrinking. The bosses laughed at my analysis of chronic problems in the business and instead decided to change the company’s name and logo. A year later, the business was losing customers at an even faster pace, so they changed the name and logo again. By the time the execs embarked on a third name change, some months later, there wasn’t much left to salvage.

Gioa has plenty of evidence to show how academic publishing has made the same mistake:

5. A Middle Path on Guns?

Is there an alternative to the polarizing debate over guns in the United States? 97Percent, a centrist group trying to redefine the debate, recently released a detailed, heavily researched report and road map that lays out policies that could, as their name suggests, win near-universal approval:

We believe that the polarization that has been perceived as precluding a widely supported response to the problem of gun violence is largely a myth. This myth can be overcome by including gun owners in the process of fashioning an effective policy approach, shedding light on the truth of what the majority of gun owners support.

The key tenant of their proposal – keeping guns out of the hands of people who are at a high risk for violence – marks a too-rarely seen effort at policy entrepreneurship.

6. Deck the Halls Already

Bill Black has written the definitive history of when and how the Christmas season started to creep into November. Turns out, “muttering” about "Christmas creep" stretches back to the 1800s. But there was a single political moment in America when Saint Nick was no longer welcome in the fall:

In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up a week, from November 30 to November 23, to prolong the Christmas shopping season and boost retail sales. He did the same in 1940 and 1941. The new, earlier Thanksgiving was derisively called “Franksgiving,” and many states chose to observe the “Republican” Thanksgiving instead. A compromise was reached in 1941, when Congress fixed Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. (Beforehand it had traditionally been the last Thursday of November, which made the holiday fall rather late in Novembers with five Thursdays.) But in one sense, the Franksgiving experiment succeeded: the Christmas shopping season was lengthened, permanently.

Websites Worth Reading

Amazon’s Rivian Van: A review by Car and Driver

Low Tech Magazine: Progress skeptic

Construction Physics: How buildings are built

Feeds We Follow

@WilliamYang120: On-the-scene reports from China protests

@danwwang: Veteran China observer

@yangxifan: Photographing the street in China