Linked List: January 24, 2018

Wednesday, 24 January 2018

How to Write 

Michael Lopp:

Wait for time to pass and see if the bumping sound returns. Reread what you’ve written so far and find if it inspires you. Yes? Write as much as you can. No? Stop writing and wait for more bumping.

Repeat until it starts to feel done in your head. If it’s handwritten, type it into a computing device. When you are close to done, print it out on paper. Sit somewhere else with your favorite pen and edit your work harshly.

His title is “How to Write a Blog Post”, but I’d call it “How to Write”, full stop. When I’m serious about a piece, it always goes to paper at least once. I spent more time on my iPhone X review than anything I’ve written in years, and it went to paper twice. (Here’s a scan of my second printed draft, with handwritten revisions.) My thing is that I don’t use my favorite pen — which, of course, has black ink — but instead a pen with red ink. Editing is an angry, bloody act and therefore must be done in red.

There’s nothing magic about printing on paper and editing with a pen. To me it’s all about changing context, putting my brain in an at least slightly different mode. That’s why I love Lopp’s imperative to “Sit in a different place” — you need to see your own words in a different light.

‘Nobody Is Going to Buy It’ 

Keris Lahiff, writing for CNBC:

Fiercer competition and an inflated belief in its own products are among some of the challenges facing the world’s largest company, according to BK Asset Management’s Boris Schlossberg.

“I do think they’re in trouble. I think they’re making a huge mistake,” Schlossberg, managing director of FX strategy, told CNBC’s “Trading Nation” on Tuesday. “They’re basically betting on the fact that high expensive products can be sold at this point and it’s clearly becoming evident that everybody has caught up to them in the marketplace.”

Schlossberg’s concerns over Apple pricing resurfaced ahead of the launch of its Siri-connected artificial-intelligence home device, the HomePod. With a $349 price tag, its latest product is far more expensive than its major competitors, including Amazon’s Alexa-equipped Echo or Google’s Home Mini.

“Nobody is going to buy it at the price that they’re putting it out right now because the functionality of those products is just nowhere near as great as it needs to be relative to the price difference,” said Schlossberg.

Noted for future claim chowder.

HomePod is one of the most interesting new Apple products in years, insofar as I really don’t know how it’s going to sell. If most people see it as a direct competitor to Amazon Echos and Google Home dinguses, HomePod might be in trouble, because it’s a lot more expensive and has fewer features. But Apple has been positioning it as, first and foremost, a high-quality music player. The Siri-as-personal-assistant/smart-home-controller is secondary to audio quality. If there’s a market for that, HomePod could clean up. $350 is a low price in the audio world.

YouTube’s Support for Musicians Comes With a Catch 

Lucas Shaw, reporting for Bloomberg:

In recent months, YouTube has given a handful of musicians a couple hundred thousand dollars to produce videos and promoted their work on billboards, part of a larger campaign to improve the site’s relationship with the music industry.

Yet such support comes with a catch, with some musicians required to promise the won’t say negative things about YouTube, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private business transactions. Non-disparagement agreements are common in business, but YouTube’s biggest direct competitors in music don’t require them, the people said.

YouTube’s non-disparagement agreements go beyond a requirement not to criticize the video site, one of the people said, without going into detail. YouTube requires many partners to agree to such conditions, including creators who make original series for its paid service, the person said.

These agreements are common in business-to-business deals, but when dealing with artists they seem one-sided. This makes YouTube seem like they lack confidence in their own service. If criticism from musicians is apt, it’s wrong to suppress it. And if it’s not apt, why worry about it?

Oxfam’s Excellent Inequality Report 

Felix Salmon, writing for Cause and Effect:

Oxfam has also changed the main frame of the report: rather than concentrating on the total amount of wealth being held by the rich and the poor, they’re looking at the increase in the total amount of wealth held by the rich. I’ve always been OK with adding up the wealth of the rich, and looking at an annual increase is a great way of demonstrating just how enormous the returns to capital were in 2017. Of course, if stocks had gone down instead of up, those returns would have been negative, and Oxfam would have concentrated on something else. But at the end of this crazy bull market, it’s always worth remembering just how enormous the big winners’ gains have been.

Specifically, the world’s billionaires — the richest 2,000 people on the planet — saw their wealth increase by a staggering $762 billion in just one year. That’s an average of $381 million apiece. If those billionaires had simply been content with staying at their 2016 wealth, and had given their one-year gains to the world’s poorest people instead, then extreme poverty would have been eradicated. Hell, they could have eradicated extreme poverty, at least in theory, by giving up just one seventh of their annual gains.