Devin Baker

Analogizing the current era in tech with the recent, software-dominated era is a mistake.

A much better analogy would be the Second Industrial Revolution in America, the Gilded Age when entrepreneurs built businesses using every new technological tool at their disposal to pull humanity to a new level of prosperity and became unbelievably rich in... See more

Thinking back, a frustrating thing about living in an unconventional way was that we felt like we weren’t allowed to complain about our problems. Maybe this is a Swedish thing. But if you break the script and then run into problems, people (not all people, but many) take it as proof that you were wrong and they were right.

24) The world is in a constant state of decay. Reality keeps shifting, and everyone’s models drift out of date and out of calibration. That is why there will always be room for the young, the hungry, and the obsessed to make money. People are like exponential moving averages of their lives. Short windows catch new trends first, even if some of what... See more

This means that the dollar tends to be structurally overvalued on a trade balance basis. It trades based on all of the normal fundamentals that other currencies do, but then also has this extra layer of demand at all times, for all these various purposes. Most currencies are primarily used by the country that issues them, whereas the dollar is used... See more

“I wonder if choosing off-grid living implies an abandonment of our current world, instead of integrating with existing systems and trying to make them better,” she asks me. “The off-grid lifestyle seems to invite people to actively leave society with the assumption that since this is not working, there must be a better way out there .”

Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire, but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings.

It also follows, as noted, that duration and liquidity should typically correlate together: more liquidity forces investors into longer duration investments. Another irony in this story is that technology stocks are long duration i.e. high P/E investments and largely outside the ‘value’ framework. However, they are exactly the assets that gain most... See more

“In the past, jobs were about muscles. Now they’re about brains, but in the future, they’ll be about the heart.”

In 2021 the cryptoeconomy pulled forward expectations far greater than most people appreciated. In some ways it was obvious, like DeFi blue-chips trading at 500x price-to-sales multiples, or the fact that there were 8 smart contract platforms that eclipsed $100B valuations. Not to mention all the metaverse and NFT nonsense. But the chart that... See more