#0 - Preview
An introduction to what you would see in The Curious Cat every Saturday in your email inbox
Every show starts with a pilot.
Every book starts with a prologue.
Every movie has a teaser and a trailer.
This newsletter starts with the preview edition on what subscribers would get in their inbox every week on Saturday.
Welcome to the zeroth edition of The Curious Cat - a weekly newsletter on interesting ideas and articles in business, finance, technology and psychology.
Our aim is to filter out the noise and bring to you the best ideas, opinions and interesting articles that we read in the week, which we believe are worthy of your time.
Social Distancing Is Not Enough
Derek Thompson gives us a SAFE playbook for the COVID pandemic which stands for - Social Distancing, Airflow Awareness, Face Masks and Expectoration. Social distancing (though the word has seen enough criticism) is keeping a healthy distance between yourself and others. Airflow awareness means that the odds of transmission in a closed indoor space are several orders of magnitude higher than open air environments. Face masks are the latest style accessories which make the environment safer for you as well as everyone around you. Expectoration (spit) indicates that virus transmission happens through large droplet transmission from sneezing and through airborne transmission of small droplets that spray out of the mouths of talkers.
Our nature of understanding this disease is dynamic - today’s conventional wisdom becomes tomorrow’s busted myth.
Read the entire article here
The Great Refactoring: How Crisis Unlocks Productivity
Scott Belsky writes that there is a long lag between implementing new practices in organizations and harvesting the benefits of the resulting productivity gains. The ability to refactor our resources is limited which leaves with a productivity realization gap. Belsky argues that having this gap is a good thing as brutal rapid optimization can damage the culture of an organization and impact psychological safety. The accelerated refactoring has resulted in serious concerns of unemployment. As the virus has increased productivity, this increased productivity should be used to enhance and implement a creativity-driven economy.
Read the entire article here
Office Work Will Never Be The Same
Mandatory work from home have led many people to embrace apps and navigate an entire workday full of video conferences, digital chats and after-hours correspondence. This working style will not disappear when offices open up. The transition to remote work has also led to surveillance tech for employees. For employers of knowledge work, it could mean less upward pressure on salaries and access to a wider talent pool. For employees, it would mean better work-life balance.
Read the entire article here
Cloud Gaming
Cloud game streaming brings majority of the gameplay processing in a data center outside the player’s home as opposed to conventional online gaming. Cloud gaming moves processing to remote computers and every player runs a distinct version of the shared simulation. The challenges are increased internet sensitivity, data center costs and inefficiencies, enormous bandwidth costs and operational burden, last mile consumer-side obstacles and costs. As internet speeds, reliability and data caps have improved over past few years, the perks of cloud gaming vs the trade-offs is something that needs exploration.
Read the entire article here
The Three Sides Of Risk
In the post, Morgan Housel takes us back to his late teens and shares a tragic skiing incident that took away the lives of two of his best friends and ski partners, and how he survived by way of a fluke decision he had put no thought into.
There are three distinct sides of risk:
The odds you will get hit.
The average consequences of getting hit.
The tail-end consequences of getting hit.
The first two are easy to grasp. It’s the third that’s hardest to learn, and can often only be learned through experience.
The lesson being tail-end consequences are all that matter.
Read the entire article here
Valuing Stocks When Earnings Plummet To Zero
Barry Ritholtz writes that markets are forward looking and do a great job of making probabilistic assessments of likely outcomes. Markets sniff out shifts in economic data and corporate profits long before official news is released. Stocks fell before most people had an idea on the seriousness of the pandemic, they are recovering because the probabilities of getting through this sooner rather than later is higher than most believe. A setback in medical, economic or consumer psychology - will first be shown in the markets. Your investing stance will be determined by the answer to whether the post recovery profit environment will justify currently lofty but temporary stock valuations.
Read the entire article here
Mental Model For The Week - Opportunity Cost
When you explicitly choose to do one thing, you implicitly choose not to do another thing. Not every action or choice has monetary costs. Some have other costs like time and attention. Every decision we make has an opportunity cost associated with it. Doing one thing requires giving up another.
Reading this newsletter means you are choosing not to read something else.
The objective of The Curious Cat is to maximize your opportunity cost in time by ensuring you read quality and gain value from this newsletter.
Book Recommendation For The Week
Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling is a brilliant book packed with amazing tools on how to think better and make informed decisions.
You can view a short summary here
An Interesting Quote
Remember:
Matter. How tiny your share of it. Time. How brief and fleeting your allotment of it. Fate. How small a role you play in it
- Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
That is all from our desk for the week.
If you find this newsletter interesting and worth your time, please do subscribe and share the link.
Stay safe, wash your hands regularly and wear your masks in public.
Regards,
The Curious Cat Team