#SQUAD

I missed this Rembert Browne deep read of this photo of Nicki Minaj at a bar mitzvah when it came out in April, but it is truly a timeless work that deserves to be memorialized one more time here.

Even after reading Rembert Browne's piece, I'm filled with questions. What is going on here?

When you’re this age, and a boy, you have no idea what to do. In any situation. At any given moment, you could curse or cry. It’s a wild time to be alive. Your body is constantly betraying you, causing your mind to do backflips — typically as a failed attempt in calming yourself down — further causing your body to betray you.
 
This picture is all about dreams coming true, excitement, and then panic. It’s a moment that was never supposed to happen, a moment you’ve long been waiting to have happen, a moment in which you have no idea what to do. This picture should not confuse you. Because every single thing happening makes perfect sense.
 
First off, Nicki. Look at Nicki. There are three 13-year-old boy #SQUAD hands on her body, while she holds one #SQUAD boy’s face and daintily holds the hand of a cool eighth-grader.
 
Just hands everywhere. And interestingly enough, it’s extremely confusing to determine whose hand belongs to which member of the #SQUAD. You think you know at first, but you quickly realize you have no idea.

Education is the not the same as schooling

There has arisen a kind of parallel network – a lot of it is on the Internet, a lot of it is free – where people teach themselves things, often very effectively. But there is a kind of elitist bias: people who are good at using this content are people who are already self-motivated. 
 
The better technology gets, the more human imperfections matter. Think about medicine: the better pharmaceuticals get, the more it matters which people neglect to actually take them in the right doses. Education is entering the same kind of world. There’s so much out there, on the Internet and elsewhere. It’s great; but that means that human imperfections, like just not giving a damn, will matter more and more.
 
What concrete changes would I make in schools? The idea that you need to take a whole class to learn some topic is absurd. Whatever you’ve learned is probably going to be obsolete. A class is to spur your interest, to expose you to a new role model, a new professor, to a new set of students. We should have way more classes which are way shorter. It should be much more about learning, more about variety, give up the myth that you’re teaching people how to master some topic; you’re not! You want to inspire them; it’s much more about persuasion, soft skills. 
 

Short and sweet from Tyler Cowen.

Related, competency-based education:

For the most part, colleges and universities have changed very little since the University of Bologna gave the first college lectures in 1088. With the exception of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs—free lectures and courses on the Internet—most university learning still requires students to put their butts in seats for a certain number of hours, complete a list of courses, and pass tests demonstrating that they learned from those courses (or were able to successfully cram for over the course of a few days).
 
But a new model is upending the traditional college experience, and has the potential to change the way universities—both new and old—think about learning.
 
Called competency-based education, this new model looks at what students should know when they complete a certain degree, and allows them to acquire that knowledge by independently making their way through lessons. It also allows students who come into school with knowledge in a certain area to pass tests to prove it, rather than forcing them to take classes and pay for credits on information they already know.
 

A model that focuses horizontally on the accreditation function of schools, rather than competing with the full vertical stack offered by a university. Seems like a model that could be useful in companies, or to companies, as well. Today, for many job functions, say product management, a college resume only obliquely hints at competencies, it functions more as some signal of one's generalized learning ability and willpower.

Software engineering interviews have a version of competency tests in the form of coding questions or challenges, but lots of business competencies aren't really tested optimally with a live interview. The ideal interview is over a longer period of time, goes into more depth, and in its most optimal form may be just an internship, but not all candidates are willing or able to do an internship, especially those who aren't in college or just graduating.

Face-to-face interviews are good for testing chemistry (which makes it a reasonable method for job roles where that's a key attribute, like sales), but they are susceptible to all sorts of unconscious biases and often just flatter the interviewers into believing in their powers of observation. It would be interesting to compare face-to-face interviews to a competency-based interviewing method that eschews in-person exchanges altogether. As radical as that might sound, I'm confident it would lower many types of discrimination.

Age of abundance, #hashtag edition

People are appending anything up to 50 hashtags to their Instagram posts, carefully researching the most popular hashtags, or formulating individual strategies (here’s a travel blogger explaining hers).
 
Hashtags are a search tool, providing a way to make your content discoverable by people who don’t already know or follow you. In this way, they’re a means of getting attention – and therefore status – in the endless popularity contest that’s metric-driven social media. Excessive hashtag use may be a bid for Instacelebrity, and the ensuing Instacash – with reports of top style bloggers earning $1m per year, and an estimated $1 billion sponsored Instagram post economy - or a sheer addiction to the dopamine hit of the ‘like’ count ticking upward.
 
But as a matter of taste, it all looks… a little grasping.
 

Anyone well versed in social media understands hacks like these to gain distribution for their content. This piece, whose opening is cited above, is much more interesting for its analysis of hashtag use in conveying and reinforcing status.

Let’s start from the principle that hashtag usage is often a bid for attention – you want your content to be discoverable, for more people to see it (and hopefully like it). But visibly betraying a desire for attention is a sign of neediness – and neediness is low status (you are dependent on other people’s behaviour to define your self worth). Therefore:
 
Hypothesis: High status brands don’t use hashtags extensively
 
Evidence:  We find @ChanelOfficial using hashtags, but with two constraints:
 
· A maximum of three per post, often only one
· Almost entirely ‘owned’ hashtags based on their campaign names
 

Whole thing isn't that long, all worth a read.

I recall being a kid in school, struggling to learn, often painfully, about how my words and clothing and haircut and actions affected how people perceived me, what circles I could enter and which were closed off. A terrifying crucible.

What must it be like to grow up today, not only having to learn the real world signaling prices but also the values of strategies and cultural assets and selfie poses in the social media market? I've heard from many people that if they post something to social media and if it doesn't garner a certain volume of likes within some period of time, they pull it down immediately. Oh the horror of changing your Facebook profile photo and not getting enough likes within the first hour. Every one of these kids a William Masters or Virginia Johnson of social media, exploring the boundaries of what is or isn't acceptable to local and global tribes.

From my limited sample set of observation (yep, it's still a sample set of one), a lot of social media usage cuts along a generational line demarcated by whether you grew up in the age of scarcity or in the internet-driven age of abundance. I don't have data to back this up, but if someone out there does, please let me know.

Older people, who largely grew up in an age of scarcity, publish content to social media and interact or affirm such content carefully. A like from such a person is difficult to earn because they treat it as something that must be earned. The act of giving out such a like also conveys something about the giver, so it is a considered action.

Younger people seem to be more generous and prolific with content, likes, etc. They've grown up in an age where everything digitizable is available on demand, from TV shows and movies to music to photos to articles. Their likes are freely given, and plentiful, often used more as a read receipt than a standing ovation.

It makes sense if viewed from an abundance economic framework. Likes are an infinitely replenishable virtual good, and if it adds some happiness to the recipient, what's the harm? Perhaps everyone would be happier if we all liked and favorited more frequently, more generously. Social media need not be a zero sum game.

The other view, that of scarcity, is that we'd just be reinforcing coddled millennials who, in receiving affirmation for everything, receive it for nothing. Damn these sensitive unemployed self-promoting kids with their need for trigger warnings and their impulse to take offense at even the most harmless of jokes!

The piece quoted up top comes full circle by the end.

High status social media usage often demands that the labour of working at one’s social media persona be concealed. As with beauty, status is something one is supposed to attain effortlessly – and should the frantic paddling below the surface be revealed, that is vulgar, a faux pas.
 
This is why Kim Kardashian is so interesting – because she, almost uniquely, does not pretend she #wokeuplikethis, but instead makes the artifice of her social media persona not only evident but into a published art photography book, the brilliantly entitled ‘Selfish‘. In this way, Kardashian (and also Amalia Ulman,) make the ‘Oh me? I’m not self-promoting’ hashtaglessness of Chiara Ferragni et al. look like the studied pose it really is.
 
Hyperproliferating hashtag useage is thus interesting as one potential tactic to invert social media ‘good taste’.
 

What more suitable patron saint of the age of abundance than Kim Kardashian, who finds every opportunity to shove her ample, or shall we say abundant, derriere in the public's face through all possible social media channels.

The most scarce play she's made is releasing an actual physical coffee table book that costs $9.97, at last count, on Amazon, and includes photos not released on Instagram before. I suspect these first several customer reviews are from the scarcity school of thought.

COCOM Limits

In GPS technology, the term "COCOM Limits" also refers to a limit placed on GPS tracking devices that disables tracking when the device calculates that it is moving faster than 1,000 knots (1,900 km/h; 1,200 mph) at an altitude higher than 60,000 feet (18,000 m).[2] This was intended to prevent the use of GPS in intercontinental ballistic missile-like applications.
 
Some manufacturers apply this limit only when both speed and altitude limits are reached, while other manufacturers disable tracking when either limit is reached. In the latter case, this causes some devices to refuse to operate in very high altitude balloons.[3]
 

Next time you bring your GPS into outer space and wonder why it isn't working, you'll know why.

Via reddit, which, after all the recent outcry and pronunciations of doom, seems to be trucking along the same as usual, for all its good and bad (and awful, hiding in plain sight). It strengthens my suspicion that most of the people predicting its doom weren't regular users of the service. It may not be a great business, or maybe it chooses not to be, but it still commands a whole lot of eyeballs.

That's why they call it Gawker

While it is de rigueur among observers of Silicon Valley’s Game of Thrones to dismiss questions of profitability as short-sighted hand-wringing, the detailed documents obtained by Gawker demonstrate conclusively for the first time that Uber has been financing its astronomic growth by taking staggering losses.
 
This unaudited revenue and expense breakdown for 2013 and 2014 shows that, though Uber’s net revenue has grown substantially, the company lost more than $56 million in 2013. By the first half of 2014 alone, that number had leapt to more than $160 million. 
 
Another document, laying out quarterly profits and losses in 2012 and part of 2013, shows the same dynamic: healthy growth in revenue coupled with steadily deepening losses. In 2012, Uber’s losses totaled $20.4 million; from the first quarter of 2012 until mid-2013, quarterly losses more than doubled from $3.5 million to $8.1 million.
 

Juicy get by Gawker on Uber's financials, but the financial analysis is about the quality you'd expect. The original version of the article included this line:

“Net revenue” typically refers to the money you have left after the cost of doing business—profit.
 

Yikes. I give lots of tech journalists grief for not knowing the subjects they're covering, but I'd venture to say most anyone with the a basic finance or econ course under their belts knows the difference between net revenue and profit. This hilariously defiant correction was later added:

Correction: Although net revenue is sometimes used as a synonym for profit, in accounting terms it means simply gross revenue minus the cost of sales. Two sentences that confused this meaning have been removed.
 

If I were an investor, I think I'd be ecstatic to see these internal financials. In a commodity market where the last company standing will be incredibly valuable, Uber is subsidizing a price war that favors the company with the scale advantage (i.e., Uber). Try calling an Uber Pool and compare it to calling a Lyft Line and you'll get a sense of how much thicker the Uber market is, on both the driver and rider side.

The subsidized pricing in a variety of cities are a worthwhile customer acquisition cost for what might be a lifetime rider. The last time I was in Los Angeles, riding Uber all over town was so cheap it fell into the category of no-brainer, and I contemplated not renting a car next time in town. I was in New York City recently and whereas a year ago a lot of Manhattanites still took cabs most of the time, now most of them are Uber converts. Once the introductory rates and subsidies go away, I suspect most of them will still be customers. That's when the profits come.

And yes, someday one of Uber's chief costs, the drivers, may be replaced by driverless cars, adding to their gross margins, and also their profits.

No moral judgments here, just some impressed gawking at Uber's flawless execution. That wouldn't have made for a Gawker-worthy story, but that should've been the headline.