The Internet was invented 30 years ago today.
Four years later we sold our print magazine business for a lot of money.
Three years later the business was dead, broke and closed.
We did not sell the business because we forecast the Internet to be the Black Swan event of the publishing business.
We were not that good at predicting or timing. Nobody was then. Nobody is today.
Which brings me to Friday’s Wall Street Journal:
It’s 80% empty but wouldn’t be if the Internet had not allowed us to work with our screaming babies and our barking dogs at home.
All the while investing in the one stock that made the work at home possible — Zoom Video:
Amazon benefited. And Bed Bath and Beyond went broke. Here’s Netflix over five years:
Its new streaming competition hasn’t done that well, either:
My first “internet” line was 300 bits per second. My present one is three thousand three hundred times faster.
With speed comes new opportunities and new disruptions.
If that $300 million San Francisco office building is going to sell for $60 million, that defines a whole new thinking:
+ Drop the rents by 50%.
+ Convert it to apartments.
+ Tear it down and get creative.
We’ll settle on a four day week. We’ll still need office space and lots of it, as new companies form, especially in technology-rich San Francisco.
3-month treasuries
They’re now paying 5.11%. Great place to park your money while you’re mulling the future of the world.
When you’ve finished mulling, let me know.
Everybody and their uncle is getting cataract surgery.
What’s funny: They’re all furious they didn’t get their new brighter, clearer eyes ten years ago.
Find my iPhone
There are real reasons to wear an Apple Watch, beyond telling the time. It could save your life.
+ “Alexa, find my phone.” Bingo, it rings.
+ Use your Apple Watch, scroll up, hit this button.
If you fall, you’ll get this:
If Apple Watch detects a hard fall and that you have been immobile for about a minute, it will tap your wrist, sound an alarm, and then call emergency services and your emergency contacts, like spouse and kids. You need to set up your iPhone so it knows who to call. Tell it your age. The older you are the faster it gets you help. Click here.
The best article about technology I’ve ever read
From Wired Magazine:
This is the story about a brilliant reporter visiting the main fab of Taiwan Semiconductor which makes an incredible 92% of the semiconductor processing chips in the entire world. I repeat 92%. Intel and others fit into the leftover 8%. The company also holds some 56,000 patents.
The long article ends with these two paragraphs:
On the Sacred Mountain, new forms of civic virtue and scientific ambition are taking shape. But even the most rarefied metaphysics at TSMC rest on a tangible substrate: silicon. Silicon is one of the few supremely un-rare objects of desire. It’s the second most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, after oxygen. Its versatility has defined an epochal cultural regime change, in which the passive starting-and-stopping of electric flow—electrical engineering—has given way to modern electronics, the dynamic and imaginative channeling of electrons. “God made silicon for us,” Liu told me.
And so we have invested our labor, treasure, and trust into silicon, and wrested from it new ways of experiencing, and thinking about, nearly everything. While humans have been busy over these six decades with our political anguish, and our wars, we have also created a universe inside our universe, one with its own infinite intelligence, composed of cryptic atomic switches, enlightened with ultraviolet and built on sand.
For the article, click here.
If you can’t get through Wired’s paywall, buy yourself a subscription. It’s worth every penny and more.
I’m in love
Unity Phelan
Tiler Peck
They both danced last Thursday night at the New York City Ballet. They’re really good. It was a pleasure.
Fun cartoon
I’m back on the court
Nine weeks after my emergency gallbladder removal operation, I’m back on the tennis court. Thank you to my wonderful surgeon, Dr. Kelvin Higa. I ran around and hit balls and did a handful of crosscourt forehands and backhands.
Some days my partner, Mark Johnson, brings me a bagel with cream cheese, which the locals love. The game is to schmear the cream cheese on their noses and watch them lick it off.
Please read the article on Taiwan Semiconductor. It’s really good. Give it to your kids and grandkids. They’ll learn the ultra hard work that does into making chips with circuits and transistors that are so small you can’t see them.
See you soon. — Harry Newton
