The Book of Five Rings, Miso Robotics, and Men in Tights

11/10/2019

The Book of Five Rings

I just finished Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning and was looking for my next book (I’m a quarter of the way through The Wealth of Nations, but that’s something I pick up when I’m between books). Kevin Smith was on Joe Rogan’s podcast a few weeks ago and in the episode Joe quotes Miyamoto Musashi, a legendary swordsman, which ultimately led me to The Book of Five Rings.

If you know the way broadly you will see it in everything.

Here’s another quote from the book that relates to my statement in last week’s newsletter about the historical context of decision making.

Do not just read, memorize or imitate, but so that you realize the principle from within your own heart study hard to absorb these things into your body.

Robinhood Infinite Leverage

Even with infinite leverage, these traders lost money. It goes to show you that money doesn’t automatically beget more money.

This is a nice segue into something that annoys the hell out of me. The U.S. has these arcane accreditation rules that disqualify average people from investing in start ups. The argument is that the accreditation rules are in place to protect people from losing all their money. The problem with this logic is we don’t stop people from crowdfunding projects they’re interested in or trading with infinite leverage. Explain to me how buying private equity is more risky than trading with infinite leverage.

Andreessen Horowitz Crypto Start Up School

I’m sure a large portion of my readers are interested in this. It looks like the lectures will be available online after the course is finished, so it’ll be interesting to see what kind of content is in the course.

Miso Robotics Crowdfunding

It’s interesting that a robotics company is going the crowdfunding route rather than traditional financing. I reserved a spot just in case, but I likely won’t invest because it makes me wary. Also, I already bought shares of Robinhood and that is enough private equity for one week.

Did someone say Robinhood?

Christian Catalini On Unchained

One of the Libra co-creators was on Unchained this week. With all the headlines surrounding Libra, it was refreshing to get some less sensationalized information on the project.

Aramco’s March Toward IPO Continues

It feels like this IPO has been in the headlines for months now. It’ll be interesting to see how the market reacts when the IPO finally happens, particularly given the current market sentiment toward oil.

One thing I hadn’t considered was the political ramifications of a particular country owning a large amount of the Aramco shares outlined in this Bloomberg article.

More info broke on this before I posted this newsletter. It looks like individual investors will be capped at 0.5% of the initial IPO. The IPO prospectus was also released right before this newsletter, which outlines the risks Aramco can see with the business.

Facebook’s New “Logo”

This is an obvious attempt at avoiding anti-trust scrutiny. Given it is so obvious to everyone, one can’t help but wonder, why bother?

This week’s newsletter not your cup of tea? Check out some of the more popular weeks below!

GitHub Acquires Semmle, Vitalik’s Time Machine, and Condolences to the Facebook Engineer

Get Paid Today, A $100k EOS Hack, and Tokenizing a Basketball Player

The $1 Billion Bitcoin Whale, A $243,000 Deepfake, Pre-Mature Optimization, and The Yandhi Leak

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