Join 📚 Hadar's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Hadar's read, .
The agricultural economist Ronald Herring noted that the most common defence for doing the minimum possible to enforce land redistribution – as has been the case throughout south-east Asia – is that one must be realistic about the difficulty of doing more. The counter to this argument, Herring pointed out, is that ‘the political realists seem to assume, rather curiously, that it is politically realistic to leave the status quo in place’.103 In south-east Asia, the agricultural status quo has proven to have very high costs. In the Philippines, the state has repeatedly been confronted by peasant-based revolutionary and terrorist groups. In Indonesia in the 1960s, Suharto suppressed a rural-based communist movement with the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. In Malaysia, the British fought a ruthless campaign in the countryside to suppress a communist insurgency in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And in Thailand, land policy failure is contributing to a state of near civil war even as this book is being written.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
Everyone benefits from each other:
Customers and Banks:
Customers want to have always-available credit
Banks want to provide credit with high fees and interest rates
Customers and Merchants:
Customers want to have a card that works everywhere
Merchants want to be able to accept payments from anyone
Merchants and Banks:
Merchants want to be able to sell on credit while still getting their money immediately
Banks want to collect a fee on every purchase in exchange for managing credit and pooling risk
Visa and Mastercard, the other major credit card network,1 sit in the middle of each of these relationships, across billions of customers, millions of merchants, and thousands of banks, collecting a network fee — on top of the interchange fee paid to banks — on every purchase (about 0.05%). The total revenue collected — $20.6 billion in 2018 — is rather small, particularly relative to Visa’s market cap of $420 billion, but that multiple is a testament to just how durable Visa’s position is in the network it created.
Visa, Plaid, Networks, and Jobs
Ben Thompson
“Your Imperial Majesty, you mentioned just now the defect in the Eastern mind when it comes to scientific thinking. This is because you have not realized that even the complicated objects of the universe are made from the simplest elements. I only need three.” Qin Shi Huang waved his hand and three soldiers came forward. They were all very young. Like other Qin soldiers, they moved like order-obeying machines. “I don’t know your names,” Von Neumann said, tapping the shoulders of two of the soldiers. “The two of you will be responsible for signal input, so I’ll call you ‘Input 1’ and ‘Input 2.’” He pointed to the last soldier. “You will be responsible for signal output, so I’ll call you ‘Output.’” He shoved the soldiers to where he wanted them to stand. “Form a triangle. Like this. Output is the apex. Input 1 and Input 2 form the base.” “You could have just told them to stand in the Wedge Attack Formation,” Qin Shi Huang said, glancing at Von Neumann contemptuously. Newton took out six small flags: three white, three black. Von Neumann handed them out to the three soldiers so that each held a black flag and a white flag. “White represents 0; black represents 1. Good. Now, listen to me. Output, you turn around and look at Input 1 and Input 2. If they both raise black flags, you raise a black flag as well. Under all other circumstances, you raise the white flag.” “I think you should use some other color,” Qin Shi Huang said. “White means surrender.” The excited Von Neumann ignored him. He shouted orders at the three soldiers. “Begin operation! Input 1 and Input 2, you can raise whichever flag you want. Good. Raise! Good. Raise again! Raise!” Input 1 and Input 2 raised their flags three times. The first time they were black-black, the second time white-black, and the third time black-white. Output reacted correctly each time, raising the black flag once and the white one twice. “Very good. Your Imperial Majesty, your soldiers are very smart.” “Even an idiot would be capable of that. Tell me, what are they really doing?” Qin Shi Huang looked baffled. “The three soldiers form a computing component. It’s a type of gate, an AND gate.”
The Three-Body Problem
Cixin Liu and Ken Liu
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise