Greetings Friends,
Writing this letter to you from a crisp morning in Todos Santos, I can’t help but appreciate all the flexibility this digital nomad world provides us. Baja is an adventure playground; just this past weekend we were able to dive with bull sharks, attempt to surf (tiny) waves, kite 15+ knot winds, and mountain bike through the Cacachilas Mountains.
Here is some of the stuff we have been reading and listening to.
Cole
what we are listening to…
N. - Something In The Way (baez & Rhyes Club Edit)
Tina Turner - I Can´t Stand The Rain (Yusuf Lemone Edit)
what we are reading…
Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions? (Bloomberg Businessweek)
In July, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen summoned the chair of the Federal Reserve, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and six other top officials for a meeting to discuss Tether. The absurdity of the situation couldn’t have been lost on them: Inflation was spiking, a Covid surge threatened the economic recovery, and Yellen wanted to talk about a digital currency dreamed up by the former child actor who’d missed a penalty shot in The Mighty Ducks. But Tether had gotten so large that it threatened to put the U.S. financial system at risk. It was as if a playground snowball fight had escalated so wildly that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were being called in to avert a nuclear war. (more)
Crypto Cities (Vitalik.ca)
One interesting trend of the last year has been the growth of interest in local government, and in the idea of local governments that have wider variance and do more experimentation. Over the past year, Miami mayor Francis Suarez has pursued a Twitter-heavy tech-startup-like strategy of attracting interest in the city, frequently engaging with the mainstream tech industry and crypto community on Twitter. Wyoming now has a DAO-friendly legal structure, Colorado is experimenting with quadratic voting, and we're seeing more and more experiments making more pedestrian-friendly street environments for the offline world. We're even seeing projects with varying degrees of radicalness - Cul de sac, Telosa, CityDAO, Nkwashi, Prospera and many more - trying to create entire neighborhoods and cities from scratch. (more)
Digital Scarcity in web3 (EJorgensen.com)
Scarcity has existed from the first time two cavemen wanted to eat the same berry. For most of human history, the main cause of suffering has been “not enough.” Not enough food, not enough shelter, not enough water, not enough time. And I guess too many tigers. The internet and digital products enabled abundance we had never seen before. Copying and distributing something became ~costless. Digital Abundance was a huge boon, but caused some problems as well (Digital Rights Management, Piracy, Signal-to-noise ratio, Misinformation…). (more)
#coletakes
plane movies: there are certain movies that are only appropriate for airplanes. Qualifications for these films center around their mediocrity and amusement value. Some of my favorite plane movies include The Campaign and Notting Hill.
google maps: is the anyone out there that uses Apple maps? How did they get it so wrong? Even when the phone defaults to Apple maps, I always switch to Google. Good piece on this here.