How China’s Expanding Fishing Fleet Is Depleting the World’s Oceans

Notes:

• By some calculations, China has anywhere from 200,000 to 800,000 fishing boats,
• By comparison, the United States’ distant water fishing fleet has fewer than 300 vessels.
• China is not only the world’s biggest seafood exporter, the country’s population also accounts for more than a third of all fish consumption worldwide.
• Most Chinese distant-water ships are so large that they scoop up as many fish in one week as local boats from Senegal or Mexico might catch in a year.
• China’s global fishing fleet did not grow into a modern behemoth on its own. The government has robustly subsidized the industry, spending billions of yuan annually.
• The Chinese government supports the squid fleet in particular by providing it with an informational forecast of where to find the most lucrative squid stocks, using data gleaned from satellites and research vessels.
• “What China is doing is putting both hands behind its back and using its big belly to push you out, to dare you to hit first,” said Huang Jing, former director of the Center on Asia and Globalization at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.
• From the waters of North Korea to Mexico to Indonesia, incursions by Chinese fishing ships are becoming more frequent, brazen and aggressive.

Translation: China is fishing in places they shouldn’t be and it could be fucking up the environment later on if not now. 

The Founders and the Pursuit of Land

Notes:

• “when the Republic was young, all Americans knew what to do when they got real money: If you gave an American a dollar, he would buy something costing ten. This was only good sense, the American knew, because soon the ten would, by the sheer magic of America, became a hundred.
• “Between 1747 and 1799 Washington surveyed over two hundred tracts of land and held title to more than sixty-five thousand acres in thirty-seven different locations.”⁷
• Land was the future. “Land is the most permanent estate and the most likely to increase in value,” wrote a youthful Washington.⁸
• Before and after the Revolutionary War, land was the investment of choice for Americans once they arrived from Europe – a choice that signified their faith and optimism in America’s future.
• In Europe land was scarce in relation to people and therefore was expensive. Hence, unable to afford their own land to farm, Europeans were compelled to work for others, either by becoming laborers for landowners in the countryside or, more often, by migrating to the cities to engage in manufacturing goods in factories.
•  For the better part of two centuries, the vision of cheap land was the magnet that attracted millions of immigrants.
• “By the mid-1790s, he ranked with George Washington and the Lees as one of Virginia’s greatest landowners, with direct ownership in more than 100,000 acres and indirect ownership of 15 million more.
• George Washington had learned to accumulate land from a master, Lord Thomas Fairfax.

Translation: Buy land, and hold or sell at a good price.

A Guide to Reopening NYC’s $50,000-a-Year Elite Private Schools

Notes:

• New York City’s elite private schools can seem like a world apart in normal times, but in the age of Covid, those differences are all the more glaring. The public school system, the largest in the nation, is struggling to find a way to teach its 1.1 million students safely as it faces steep budget cuts and possible shortages of everything from teachers and nurses to protective equipment.
• These schools must contend with the demands and expectations that come with parents whose pockets are deep enough to pay the tuition.
• The school also hired Bank Street College to train its teachers in “trauma-responsive school routines and restorative practices” for its students.
• Every classroom will have a Meeting Owl camera, which provides a 360-degree view, reacts to sound and focuses on whoever is speaking, so remote learners can follow along.
• For safety, the school has created three isolation rooms, hired a second nurse and upgraded its ventilation systems.
• For safety, the school is putting a special antibacterial film on desks, handrails and doorknobs.
• Families have to sign a “community pledge” to follow safety protocols both in and out of school.

Translation: The education gap is serious.

Gold, Bitcoin & Markets

Notes:

• Gold and Bitcoin share many commonalities. In particular, they are similar in the fact that they incite very polarizing views on their value and utility.
• As long as there have been financial markets, there have been concerns that the government will bring ruin to the financial system and nation’s currency.
• For those worried that the Fed’s decisions will lead to hyperinflation, gold and Bitcoin both claim to act as the perfect hedge for such problematic policies.
• The argument goes that while inflationary government and central bank policies will weaken the dollar, gold and Bitcoin can protect investor’s wealth because of their finite supply.
• David Portnoy is the ultimate millennial day trader. Within the narrative of “Bitcoin is for Millennials and Gold is for Boomers”, it’s fairly clear which camps Portnoy and Buffett would fall into were they to purchase one of these two assets.
• Concern about the United States abandoning the gold standard, however, drove up the demand for gold, which drained the Treasury’s holdings and created strains on the financial system’s liquidity. News in April 1893 that the government was running low on gold was followed by the Panic in May and a severe depression involving widespread commercial and bank failures.”
• The Panic of 1893 was heavily influenced by issues with the gold standard, as a Federal Reserve article on banking panics during the Gilded Age describes.
• When it came time for the 1896 Presidential Election, the election was essentially a national referendum on the choice between a system based on Gold vs. Gold and Silver. This largely became known as “the currency question”.
• Can you imagine if one of your stocks paid out dividends in physical gold bars? Well that is exactly what happened with one company in the 1980s.
• Remember, this all stemmed from the earthquake in April 1906. What started as a national disaster in San Francisco led to an outflow of gold in London. This forced the BOE to raise rates, which reduced American firms’ access to credit and depleted their gold reserves. This sparked widespread selling of stocks to raise cash as ‘finance bills’ came due for payment, and could not be renewed because of the BOE’s new policy.
• Bitcoin is the best modern example of an alternative currency, but what have similar alternative currencies looked like over time? This article dives into the long history of alternative currencies, and the different categories that they fall into. Overall, the author argues that there are five different types of currency.

• Again, the concept of value proved to be far more significant than a stone’s intrinsic worth. In fact there is a rai stone lying on the ocean floor, after falling through a canoe, which continued to circulate in the economy. Even though the stone’s owner never physically saw their rai stone, it still carried value. In the same vein, just because Bitcoin is a digital currency that cannot be truly seen or held, the currency can still be valuable because of people’s belief in the system.”

Translation: Buy what’s true and long-lasting, that’s just me.

Reflecting on My Failure to Build a Billion-Dollar Company

Notes:

• Later that year, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to turn Gumroad into what I thought would become my life’s work.
• Almost immediately, I raised $1.1M from an all-star cast of angel investors and venture capital firms.
• We grew the team. We stayed focused on our product. The monthly numbers started to climb. And then, at some point, they didn’t.
• To keep the product alive, I laid off 75 percent of my company — including many of my best friends. It really sucked. But I told myself things would be fine: The product would continue to grow and no one far from the company would ever find out.
• But now, I realize: It doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is; we hit a peak in November 2014 and stalled. A lot of creators absolutely loved us, but there weren’t enough of them who needed our specific product offering. Product-market fit is great, but we needed to find a new, larger fit to justify raising more money (and then do it again and again, until acquisition or IPO).
• We launched a “Small Product Lab” to teach new creators how to grow and sell. We shipped a ton of features, including weekly payouts, payouts to debit cards, payouts to the U.K., Australia, and Canada, various additions to our email features, product recommendations and search, analytics to see how customers are reading/watching/downloading the products they’ve purchased, and add-to-cart functionality. And that was just between August and November.
• Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t hit those numbers. If we’d doubled down, raised more money, and appeared in the headlines again, there would have been a very real possibility of even more spectacular failure.
• Continue with a slimmed-down version of the company to aim for sustainability.
• Some of my investors wanted me to shut down the business. They tried to convince me that my time was worth more than trying to keep a small business like Gumroad afloat, and I should try to build another billion-dollar company armed with all of my learnings — and their money.
• We decided to become profitable at any cost. The next year was not fun: I shrunk the company from twenty employees to five. We struggled to find a new tenant for our $25,000/month office. We focused all of our remaining resources on launching a premium service.
• For years, my only metric of success was building a billion-dollar company. Now, I realize that was a terrible goal.
• The eight years I worked on Gumroad were full of personal ups and downs. There were months where I worked 16 hours a day, but there were also some months where I worked four hours a week. Here’s one way to picture that time.
• It doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, or how fast you ship features. The market you’re in will determine most of your growth. For better or worse, Gumroad grew at roughly the same rate almost every month because that’s how quickly the market determined we would grow.
• While Gumroad, Inc. may be small, our impact is large. There is, of course, the $178,000,000 we have sent to creators. But then there’s the impact of the impact, the opportunities that those creators have taken to create new opportunities for others.

Translation: “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” Winston Churchill

Successful Pitches shows freelancers the way

Notes:

• Tomky created a resource to demystify one of the biggest barriers to entry for freelance writers.
• Successful Pitches is as straightforward as it sounds: a database of pitches that have successfully led to stories at a variety of publications.
• “If you don’t know how to pitch, and you don’t know what a pitch looks like for a 500-word essay versus a 2,500-word feature, this is how you can go and find out,” Tomky explained.
• The skill of good pitching, while related to the skills of writing and reporting, is not quite the same.

Translation: Learn how to pitch/sell your ideas, writing, etc.