Synthesis

By Andrew Savikas

Synthesis #3: 💯 interesting stuff on leading, learning, and living better

#3・ Jun 5, 2020

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Synthesis #3: 💯 interesting stuff on leading, learning, and living better

By Andrew Savikas • Issue #3 • View online

It’s Time We Dealt With White Supremacy in Tech

I admit that if I’d seen this headline 2 weeks ago I wouldn’t have thought it directly applied to me or anyone I knew directly. But all of it does.

If you have the means, have you considered becoming a limited partner in a Black-led VC fund? This is a powerful way to fund Black entrepreneurs even if you don’t know many yourself. If you run an accelerator or incubator, what are you willing to do to further the success of more Black founders? If you hold demo days, that doesn’t mean an event just for Black founders. This separate event is going to be anything but equal. And stop with the basic classes for underrepresented founders. The bar for white entrepreneurs isn’t that high.

marker.medium.com • Share

Steven Levitt's advice for making big life decisions

A while back I heard a nifty heuristic for making decisions: If a decision feels really difficult, it’s probably because deep down you know both options are OK, so it doesn’t actually matter all that much which one you choose. Steve Levitt offers a tiebreaker here:

Whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change.

(Given current events it’s hard not to now view the 2016 election through that lens, but I still think it’s a useful heuristic for lots of life decisions.)

qz.com • Share

How Domino’s Won the Pandemic

I try not to link to the same source multiple times in one newsletter, but I’m going to make an exception for Marker here (they’re really putting out some amazing content lately) for the discovery that Domino’s stock has outperformed Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google since 2004!

marker.medium.com • Share

What I learned by chatting with Chinese robocallers

I’ve been getting them. You’ve been getting them. But why? How could it possibly make sense to spam everyone’s cell phone in the hopes the person who answers happens to speak Chinese and is susceptible to a scam? Turns out it does (same rules apply as email spam–marginal cost of a call is $0):

So far, these scams have duped victims out of a lot of money. In New York, more than 20 Chinese immigrants reported losing a total of $2.5 million from the scam in early 2018, according to the New York Police Department. Nationally, more than 350 victims reported a combined loss of more than $40 million between December 2017 and February 2019, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported, noting the average loss was more than $164,000.

www.marketplace.org • Share

A startup wants to turn your garage into a tiny home and give you $500 a month to help quell a crushing housing shortage. Here's what the homes look like.

A few years ago, I thought that autonomous cars would obviate the garage, rather than “global pandemic,” but either way, this is a fantastic idea for what to do with them.

Homeowners working with United Dwelling would be able to choose who lives in the home, and rent for tenants would be $1,300 to $2,100 a month.

www.businessinsider.com • Share

Here’s How America Uses Its Land

This is such a wonderful infographic to play with, and I guarantee you will learn something surprising.

Even though urban areas make up just 3.6 percent of the total size of the 48 contiguous states, four in five Americans live, work and play there. With so much of the U.S. population in urban areas, it’s little surprise that these areas contribute an outsize amount to the economy. The 10 most productive metropolitan areas alone contributed to about 40 percent of U.S. GDP in 2016.

www.bloomberg.com • Share

How Cars Transformed Policing

The pandemic is (finally!) forcing some serious rethinking of how much time we spend in cars and how much space we give them on our streets. It turns out they also play a starring role in our current, um, re-examination of policing:

Before the mass adoption of the car, most communities barely had a police force and citizens shared responsibility for enforcing laws. Then the car changed everything.

bostonreview.net • Share

A Vision of Our Post-Lockdown Future -Reopening

Our re-opening will not be like China’s. But there’s still lessons to learn from understanding how life looks in a country further along the path of balancing the restoration of economic activity with keeping the virus at bay:

This shows the difficulty of the road ahead for Western governments who are now starting to open their economies. Many of the measures employed in China are unthinkable in Western democracies, such as forcible government quarantine or the kind of intense surveillance embedded in the health code. The New York Times, for example, discovered sections of code in the app that suggest that data is directly shared with the police.

nautil.us • Share

This week's highlight from my bookshelf

Relevant to the widespread confusion about virus testing data, this snippet from Steven Pinker shows how it’s quite possible to explain things like false positive rates in a much more digestible way.

Thanks for reading this far! If you enjoyed this, please share it. Have a great weekend.

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By Andrew Savikas

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