Antwerp, containerships, lotteries, Christianity, Zynbabwe, AGI, and more. Enjoy!
(1) What It’s Like to Retire in Belgium
“Antwerp has been my home for almost three years. It is a vibrant, multicultural city famous for its busy port, its fashion and design scenes, the local diamond industry, and Flemish art masters. […] For roughly the same amount of space as I had in California, I pay 75% less in rent. Spacious one-bedroom apartments aren’t difficult to find here and rarely exceed 1,200 euros (equivalent to $1,320). There is a lot to see and do […] Neighborhood-scale parties and fairs happen every month, as do major music festivals, bike races and international events. […] Happily, I no longer have a car […] I can take a day trip [by train] to Leuven, Brussels, or Bruges and return home by midnight for less than $25. As for flights, Brussels Airport is a $20 train ticket from Antwerp. […] I have no complaints about Belgian healthcare […] The cost of every health procedure I’ve had in Belgium has added up to less than my annual copay and $2,000 deductible of my U.S. policy.”
(2) How the World’s Top Shipping Company Became a Hub for Drug Trafficking
The world's largest shipping company has an unlikely second business line: cocaine smuggling. The Mediterranean Shipping Company (MSC), founded by secretive Swiss billionaire Gianluigi Aponte, handles 20% of global cargo (even larger than Maersk). Aponte built his empire from scratch in 1970, buying secondhand ships and focusing on underserved routes with a business model that prioritized price over punctuality (in the early days, MSC jokingly meant "maybe ship comes”). While Aponte was building his legitimate enterprise, the Balkan Cartel was establishing a parallel operation within it. A network of Balkan gangs, offshoots from the 1990s Balkan wars, infiltrated MSC's operations by recruiting company employees, particularly on South America to Antwerp routes. It’s a great article about the history of MSC, the logistics of drug trafficking with mid-sea drug transfers, and the DEA’s methods of tracking and busting those drug shipments.
(3) Book Review of “Believe” by Ross Douthat
Book review with a defense of Christianity. Amusing questions to consider: “There are people who will tell you that Jesus did not rise from the dead, but that He was a great moral teacher with a lot of good advice. But if He didn’t rise from the dead, then wasn’t it actually the worst advice ever? The example Jesus provides is an example of how to get killed: first you make people jealous, then you make them mad, then you confuse and demoralize your followers, then you refuse to speak in your own defense. If the real story ended with the Crucifixion, then surely it’s a story about what not to do. The lesson we would draw from it would be, “Don’t imitate Jesus, imitate the worldliness and adaptability of the Jewish elders, imitate the power and cruelty of Rome.” The whole question then, the one on which our interpretation of this very strange story ought to hang, is what really happened on the third day after the execution.”
(4) How a Secretive Gambler Called ‘The Joker’ Took Down the Texas Lottery
The secretive gambler Zeljko Ranogajec turned 25.8 million $1 lottery tickets into a $57.8 million jackpot by purchasing nearly every possible combo in the Texas state lottery. His (entirely legal!) scheme exploited a loophole in Texas' lottery system, which allowed online vendors to establish ticket-printing operations rather than requiring retail in-store purchases. He enlisted struggling startup Lottery.com, who convinced the Texas Lottery Commission to deliver dozens of ticket-printing terminals directly to four workshops he established for the operation. The math itself was straightforward (buy all combinations when the jackpot exceeds the cost). Ranogajec’s genius is in finding the regulatory loopholes and coordinating the logistics to exploit them.
(5) 50 Things I Now Know About Investing Because I Am 50
Great words of wisdom: (1) “Nothing else has cost me more money than speaking to CEOs;” (2) “[An] inconvenient truth of the stock market is that very few people get rich investing. You have a much higher likelihood of getting rich from starting and building a business. Trying to get rich in the stock market is tempting for all sorts of reasons, but it is insanely difficult;” (3) “Alpha is earned where no one else is looking […] if placing the buy order doesn't make you break out in a cold sweat, it's probably not a real contrarian investment;” (4) “I can directly trace back quite a few of my bad decisions to my lack of focus at the time […] there is no such thing as a day off;” (5) “Read OLD books […] I’ve generated outstanding investment ideas by reading out-of-print books that others had long forgotten about. You could even go as far as calling this approach one of my secret weapons – not just with regard to investing, but life generally.” I could quote every single piece of advice in this article. Timeless wisdom from a lifetime in public markets.
(6) 50 Things I’ve Learned Writing Construction Physics
Everyone is writing 50 things posts this month… some great takeaways on construction, energy, logistics, and more: (1) there is no easy explanation for why construction isn’t getting cheaper—common theories like design variety, regulations, a lack of innovation, etc., all fall short, and the best explanation is that (for good reasons) on-site construction is hard to automate; (2) “A key bottleneck in semiconductor manufacturing is high-purity quartz, most of which comes from a single town in North Carolina: Spruce Pine;” (3) “AT&T spent substantially more on telephone infrastructure in the 1960s than NASA spent on the Apollo Program;” and a great conclusion from his writing: (4) “Things that seem like recent developments often have key predecessors going back decades or even centuries. What seem like historical inevitabilities are often highly contingent products of chance and circumstance. Intuitive explanations [are] often wrong, and even when they’re right, the full story is often much deeper and more interesting. Causes are often complex, and what seem like simple problems often tenaciously resist solutions.”
(7) Apple and the Ghost of Companies Past
Microsoft and Intel lost out on the mobile era (relative to their market position in the 1990s) because they attempted to apply the PC paradigm to mobile, rather than rethinking the user interface. Apple risks the same mistake with trying to pigeonhole AI into an “app” paradigm, which undergirds the iPhone’s dominance. The iPhone could be an open platform for others’ models, rather than just Siri, but Apple’s focus on privacy (and ecosystem control) could cede market share to Android: “If a similar story [to Microsoft] unfolds for Apple, it might look like this: (1) Apple misses AI because it is focused on the wrong thing (privacy). (2) Apple fails to leverage its greatest strength (the iPhone platform) into a [platform] position in AI (being the platform for the best model makers). (3) Apple’s platform falls behind the industry’s champion (Android or perhaps TBD), which [threatens] Apple’s core business (AI is so important that the iPhone has a worse user experience).” Whatever happens will be obvious in hindsight!
(8) Zyn and the New Nicotine Gold Rush
The Swedes have transformed snus nicotine delivery with their little white pouches. Zyn came from efforts to enhance the effectiveness of nicotine gum, like Nicorette, while minimizing side effects like hiccups and stomach discomfort. Zyn is a life saver for tobacco companies (unclear about consumers) that want to capitalize on the demand for nicotine while shedding the stigma and health concerns linked to cigarettes. What are the risks? Nobody really knows… although the consensus seems to be that they are “less bad?” Regardless, as one snus user summarized, “You take risks every day—by driving, what you eat, and so on,” he said. “I am a proud nicotinist.”
(9) AGI Will Not Make Labor Worthless
Some counterarguments to the concerns about AI taking our jobs: (1) labor has maintained a relatively constant share of global income at ~50% of GDP since the Industrial Revolution; (2) automation will increase the productivity of workers in ways that increase the demand for their work (i.e., spreadsheets did not eliminate accountants); (3) AI automation will create new jobs that do not currently exist; and (4) energy is not infinite, so there might still be constraints on AI automating everything—the law of comparative advantage ensures that humans still have some role in the world. But if every unit of energy will more efficiently increase production when it is powering a datacenter instead of powering a human… what happens next? Paperclips?
The current methods of training AI models rely on more data to scale (data being, loosely, “info about the world”). Some believe that these models could create synthetic data to bootstrap the learning process. But consider how humans create more data to generate novel insights. Lots of data comes from physical interaction with the world, not just passively, but from experiments. In science, for example, we build particle accelerators to measure quantum mechanics, telescopes to observe the universe, drug trials to determine their impact on humans, etc. In this sense, new knowledge comes from new info, and new info comes from new experiments (e.g., interactions) with the world. Experiments to gather data require a lot of money and time—could AI accelerate the process of how novel chemicals affect humans in drug trials? It is hard to predict how AI will develop, but maybe Asimov was right: “There is insufficient data for a meaningful answer.”
(0) Miscellaneous
Jensen Huang’s hobbies are “work, email, and work.” Lots of interesting NYC quality of life statistics. The White House theory of tariffs. Original Microsoft Altair BASIC source code. How Marine Le Pen embezzled EU party funds. Elon Musk is a unicorn. Netanyahu’s march to the sea. Little Diomede Island on the front lines with Russia. Design principles for AI-first apps. De Beers crisis in the diamond market. Some comparisons between EU and US cities. Importance of corporate planning. Trump’s hardball negotiations with big law. Shopify expects all employees to use AI. Behind the scenes of Elon Musk’s harem. The financial history of Seville. Good travel post on Antwerp. Economic collapse in Cuba. Ecotourism vacation to São Tomé and Príncipe. Public ownership of US airports. Nashville church hostile takeover.