Luca Dellanna
@DellAnnaLuca
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13y+ experience growing & de-risking businesses and careers • Independent Consultant and Lecturer • Fluent EN, IT, FR, ES
Turin 🇮🇹 / Singapore 🇸🇬
Joined November 2009
WHY IS ERGODICITY IMPORTANT? AN EXAMPLE. My cousin was born in a mountain village in the French Alps. Like many there, he learned to ski before reading. I am a good skier, but I remember the humiliation when I was 14 and he was 6, seeing him surpass me, swift as a bullet.
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The recent wealth tax increase in Norway was expected to bring an additional $146M in yearly tax revenue. Instead, an estimated $54B-worth of ultra-rich left the country, leading to a lost $594M in yearly wealth tax revenue. A net decrease of $448M+. (sources and calculations ↓).
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@billybinion @paulg “Three of the involved officers remain employed with the department. One other officer has retired.”. I find this even scarier than the event itself.
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The fact that (almost) all degrees have the same duration regardless of the complexity of the underlying field is the best evidence that education has been built around the universities’ needs, not the students’.
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If you aren't able to do this, I won't be able to take you seriously, sorry
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A TIMELINE OF WHAT ITALY DID (and wasn't enough). D0 - 21 Feb - 20 cases - We notice the outbreak. D2 - 23 Feb - 150 cases - Closed schools, 11 cities in quarantine. D10 - 1 Mar - 1700 cases - First hospitals saturated - 1700 cases. (a thread, dates are approx, cases are rounded).
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@amelia_halls This is the equivalent of the awkward guy who does something creepy to get his crush’s attention, she reacts with “ewwww,” and he’s like “but I got her attention”.
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Plenty of replies who seem to think that leaving the country to keep one’s money is greed, but implementing a wealth tax to get someone else’s money isn’t.
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Ventilators inserting a 3d printed valve into a Decathlon snorkling mask. Patents are free to use 👏. (ht @itsgiangiacomo , cc @daveg)
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THOUGHTS ON CENSORSHIP . 1/ Censorship you don’t like always begins as censorship you like. 2/ Allowing censorship assumes that this power can be taken back and that it won't corrupt the censor. Two strong assumptions.
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@alex_avoigt Also, be careful with friends who recommend you buy a fire extinguisher – assuming your house doesn't burn, you would be richer if you don't buy one.
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“People are in debt because they bought an asset for more than it’s worth.”. “So, you’re going to fix the problem, right?”. “No, I’m going to subsidize demand for more bad assets then invite them to buy more of them (“go back to school.”)”.
The Biden administration just announced a plan for 30 MILLION student loan borrowers to receive debt relief. This would allow so many people with student debt to buy houses, start a family, go back to school, and so much more.
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If the virus were in charge of the government, it would:.- heavily regulate test kits production.- make sure that people have to crowd in clinics to be tested.- trick people into believing that mild lockdowns are sufficient (no testing, no isolation).- say face masks are useless.
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Most airlines went bankrupt, at some point in history. Delta did in 2005 for example. It lost 150 employees out of 55k. It didn't get any bailout. It now has 87k (after acquisitions). The idea that bankruptcies are bad for an industry is baseless. In fact, they are good.
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Probably the single most important headline this week:. - After just one week from the outbreak, Northern Italy is already considering expanding its hospital beds capacity because 1 in 11 patients goes in ICU.
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My grandma’s apartment is valued at 95k€ ($108k). The Italian government is paying for a 81k€ ($92k) intervention to improve its energetic efficiency. That’s 85% of the house value. Our cost: 650€ ($740). And it’s a nation-wide program. Good luck repaying this national debt.
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I’ve been asked if taxes are inherently greedy. I don’t think so. But I think it’s greedy to ask for more taxes before improving how already-existing public money is spent.
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The point of diversification is to increase the number of future parallel worlds where you’re happy, not to increase how happy you are in the future worlds where you’re lucky. The downside of diversification is that survivorship bias causes idiots to say you made a bad choice.
After Bill Gates became friends with Warren Buffett, he began to diversify his portfolio and sold Microsoft shares. Bill Gates' fortune today is 138 billion dollars, if he hadn't diversified it would be 1.33 trillion dollars. Be careful with diversification and with friends who
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This epidemic is a giant marshmallow test for countries. Close down for two weeks now or for two months later?.
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The Guardian estimates the wealth of the relocated millionaires at 600B NOK, or $54B. That would have been taxed at 1.1%, which means $594M in wealth tax lost. Norway raised NOK 16.1B = $1.46B in wealth taxes in 2019 (page 3 of the PDF below); increasing the wealth tax from 1% to.
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The Italian Ministry of Justice cites Rickrolling as a cybercrime, then provides a "source link" to what looks like a dictionary but is actually a video of Rick Astley's song. 50% of me is "well played," 50% of me is "this is supposed to be serious". Link:
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In an Orwellian turn of events, now Twitter decides what I can like. What's next, from "Thou shalt not like" to "thou shalt like?".
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WITTGENSTEIN’S RULER, P2. A Nobel prize can tell us two things: how good is the recipient or how bad is the committee. “Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler.” – @nntaleb.
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@amelia_halls It *antagonized* thousands of people. It didn’t merely capture their attention.
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@The_Law_Boy Also, when someone says you breached a contract and you start talking about how much money he or she already made, you 100% breached that contract.
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10 THESES ON EDUCATION:. 1/ Higher education has been built around the needs of the universities, not of the students. The fact that most bachelor/masters have the same duration regardless of the complexity of the underlying field is a demonstration of that.
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@Porkchop_EXP The day I moved out of Frankfurt, I got fined for parking over a hour under my apartment, when the max allowed was 1h. It didn’t matter that I did pay the Parkuhr for the second hour. It didn’t matter that the reason I was parked for so long was because I was moving the.
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Over the last year, the Italian government gifted Italians with:.- 200€ in free spa.- up to 500€ in free hotel/BnB.- free earthquake renovation works even in low-risk areas and even above building value.- discounts for new TVs and other houseware. It didn’t:.- ventilate schools.
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Attention is the new real estate. Demand is the new oil. The phone is the new pipeline.
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D21 - 12 Mar - 15000 cases - Most retail shops closed in all of Italy, enforced isolation, army given police powers. Things go fast, we've always been one step behind, it cost us so much. Unless your country beats this timeline, it'll end up the same. [3/4].
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6/ When people say “Twitter and Facebook are a private company, they can do what they like” they actually mean “they did what I like.”.
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@JamesTodaroMD I find suspicious that:.- patients going to ICU are removed from the sample (clearly a sign that the treatment didn’t work for them).- controls not randomly selected.- many controls treated in a different center (a possible factor). Claiming p < 0.001 in such conditions is wrong.
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WHY IS MORTALITY SO HIGH IN ITALY.and what does it mean for other countries.(thread). 1/ Mortality in Italy is one of the highest, hovering around 7%, while for other countries we see 0.5%-3.5%. 2/ Let's see the factors that contribute, to know which might apply to your country.
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@gpanterov For the guy interviewed by the Guardian, the 0.1% increase meant ~$17M a year; more if you consider the opportunity costs of not compounding wealth on the money lost. It's not little. That said, I agree that there must be something else. But perhaps it's just "the last straw.".
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Just a coincidence, obviously, but in 2021 the WHO wargamed a scenario with a MONKEYPOX outbreak occurring in June 2022. Let's see what were the learnings and red flags (thread)
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The worst about eating junk food today is that it makes you more likely to eat junk tomorrow. The worst about not exercising today is that it makes you less likely to exercise tomorrow. The worst about not doing what you need today, is that it makes you less likely to do it tmr.
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@wanyeburkett People who think this is a moral issue assume that the alternative to price gauging is “everyone gets what they need at a low price”. But in truth it’s “few people get what they need”.
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It sometimes seems that far-left politicians look at the Laffer curve and think, . "Yes, point B maximizes short-term tax revenue, but point C maximizes the dismantling of the current socio-economical system"
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I think I should share what I’ve been doing in Singapore for the last 6 weeks upon coming home. - Drop shoes outside.- Place bags near door.- Wash hands till elbows.- Disinfect phone.- Throw all clothes to wash.- Wash glasses.- Shower.- Disinfect laptop, mouse & chargers. 1/2.
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WHY HERD IMMUNITY IS A TERRIBLE IDEA. 1) We're not sure if getting sick provides long-lasting immunity. 2) We don't know which % of recovered has organ damage. 3) If the infection is fast, we cannot cure everyone as beds are limited ☠️. If we get wrong any of the 3, catastrophe.
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Today, for the n-th time, a covid denier sent me what he said was "evidence" but was just a doc's assertions. Then it hit me: to those unable to make sense of data who have to rely on people to tell them what the data means, there's no difference between evidence and assertions.
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No. You can protect employees and customers with a Chapter 11, after having zeroed the equity of the executives. Or you can ask the company to issue new shares. A bailout *before* doing either of the above is explicitly to protect the management of the company & its investors.
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@wanyeburkett Anecdotal, but when I visited my local shelter, for a few pitbulls, the answer was “because the owner got incarcerated”.
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3/ Censorship assumes that your party will stay in charge forever and won't turn against you. Strong assumptions. Rule of thumb: don't allow censorship if you're not willing to have your enemies as the censors.
Gatekeepers likes censorship because they assume they’ll be in charge. If intellectually honest, hand it over to your enemies for a dry run.
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7/ When people say that "it was right to censor Trump because he incited violence", they assume that censoring the President is a de-escalatory act. A very strong assumption.
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4/ The moment you withhold your enemies a right, you open the door from it being withhold from you. Rights are preserved by giving them to your enemies.
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@nikolaushaufler @Porkchop_EXP This reply is one more datapoint in favor of Porkchop’s thesis of Germans being sticklers for inconsequential rules.
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A visual metaphor for student debt. The fence being the loans. (image from @DrCirillo, originally used in the context of financial regulations & risk management)
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“We only use 10% of the brain, we could use more”. We also only use a fraction of the white space in a book, because if we used ink on 100% of it, it would be incomprehensible. We use the best trade-off for clarity and noise resistance. Have faith in our million-years evolution.
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MEGA-THREAD OF ALL THE TIMES VIRUS LABS "LOST" DANGEROUS PATHOGENS. 1/ SARS is documented to have escaped virus labs multiple times; twice from the same one. 2/ The Institut Pasteur lost 2349 vials of SARS and once transported vials on a regular plane breaking protocols. (thread).
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As a child, I thought that accumulation of knowledge was important. As I grow older, I realize that its distillation through action matters more. Theory that doesn't translate to action doesn't matter. Also, only action can determine whether knowledge is real or bullshit.
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I’m seeing lot of FALSE DICHOTOMIES been peddled:. - Bailout or liquidation (what about Chapter 11?). - Lockdown or reopening (what about red/yellow/green zones?). - Dead or recovered (what about lung damage?). - Growing / flattened (what about we don’t know).
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WHY DID TAIWAN RESIST SO WELL?. - They proactively tested people with severe respiratory symptoms . - Each city had a hotline (to avoid people going to the doctor / hospital). - They began tracking down people with travel history to Wuhan AS EARLY AS 5TH OF JANUARY. (thread, 1/3).
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D11 - 2 Mar - 2040 cases – 10% of Lombardy doctors are sick or in isolation. D17 - 8 Mar - 7400 cases - Lombardy + 14 provinces in lockdown, 12M people affected, first reports of patients who cannot get care, jail riots. D19 - 10 Mar - 10150 cases - All Italy in lockdown. 2/N.
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The political divide is increasingly: “I know what’s good for me” vs “I know what’s good for others”.
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FACE MASKS. Medical face masks are less useful then N95 respirators, but not very much less so and better than nothing. Even just cloth is better than nothing, if used properly. Priority should be given to healthcare workers. Info, references & disclaimer below. (thread). 1/N.
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@Altimor Breaking some EU states’ cybercrime regulations, btw 😆.
The Italian Ministry of Justice cites Rickrolling as a cybercrime, then provides a "source link" to what looks like a dictionary but is actually a video of Rick Astley's song. 50% of me is "well played," 50% of me is "this is supposed to be serious". Link:
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It's incredible how all of humanity is united in the fight against the virus and yet almost completely unwilling to learn from the mistakes of other countries. We saw what works, what doesn't, and are determined to try the latter first, one more time.
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The reason videogames are so addictive is that they give you feedback every other second. The reason jobs are so boring is that managers give you feedback every other month.
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Largest study of Bergamo province so far finds out that:.- 5400 people died this March.- 4500 of which suspected COVID deaths.- 2600 of which officially COVID.- Compared to 900 deaths only, average of last 3 years. (sampling cities representing >50% of local population).
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8/ When people say that "it was right to censor X because he incited violence", they assume they will never be ruled by a dictator who needs to be overthrown.
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9/ Banning dangerous speech on a ~bipartisan platform assumes that the censored won't move to a ~partisan platform. If he does, two echo chambers form, and instability increases.
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the battle of Karansebes, 1788
WITHOUT GOOGLING.Name a famous historic battle.
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“Neo-toddlerism” is a perfect term. The belief that every problem is only a problem of neglect, and we just need adults to divert their attention to us a bit more. Then, tantrum as THE problem-solving technique makes sense. But in the real world, problems are problems of.
@aziz0nomics Sadly, neo-toddlerism — the belief that utopia can be achieved by acting like a 3 year-old — is an increasingly influential ideology.
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Some numbers to back what @nntaleb has been saying for months: the economy tanking is in large measure a bottom-up process.
Taiwan has had 6 deaths from COVID-19 and no lockdowns. Consumption trends are tanking like everyone else's .
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5/ "There's no evidence I'm wrong", said every Censor ever.
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@drsimonegold @Altimor Pre-pandemic rates of pericarditis in children are ~5-35/100k. This means that the study was expected to record about 8-45 pericarditis in the control population. It recorded none. To me, that’s a major source of concern on the study design.
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@JustStop_Oil Civil disobedience requires the public feels bad when authorities punish you. If the public is happy you get punished, you didn’t do civil disobedience; you threw a tantrum.
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@blair_fix How to lose credibility in one tweet: publish a chart of a ~random distribution and plot a trendline.
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In Lombardy they're delaying non-urgent surgeries and are re-hiring retired nurses and doctors. Bergamo Lodi & Cremona are out of beds.
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First we had a problem. Then we addressed it with censorship. Now we have two problems.
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The Lombardy equiv. of the minister of Health, 5 days ago: ."in Lombardy no problem with the number of hospital beds". Today: "the hospital beds [in this hospital] are not enough anymore […] even the ICU beds are saturated […] we're working on expanding our capacity to react.".
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Most of the people who spend precious time every day reading newspapers or listening to TV news channels failed to prepare to the emergency of the decade – the single piece of news which materially affected the life of everyone. Can we finally call news outlets useless?.
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We don't use heuristics just because they are fast and efficient. We use them because they are less precise and thus less vulnerable to be misled by noise.
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Quick personal update: biopsies almost 2y after treatment show me as cancer free! I just finished a visit with a specialist who confirmed the exam results, I'm ecstatic. Thankfully it was caught and treated very early, but great to get the confirmation it worked well.
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@JustStop_Oil You’re so bad at doing activism that people show more outrage at your actions than at environmental disasters. Perhaps it’s an indication that it’s time to change strategy.
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On circularity, the NYT today
The best training you can offer yourself is detecting circularity. It teaches you to think not just forward in 2nd, 3rd steps, but backward in minus 1st, 2nd steps, etc. Modernity is full of circularities (education, citation rings, journalism, classifications, IQ, psychology. ).
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@jeffreyatucker Do people know how insulting it is to say masks are insulting?. It’s like saying: I don’t care about your health not about those of my close ones (which I might infect if I get infected).
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12/ Cognitive dissonances:.– to believe in the outcome of democratic elections AND censorship.– to believe in fairness AND selective censorship.– to believe of being oppressed AND having the power to censor.
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4/ In skiing, and life in general, it is not the best ones who succeed. It is the best ones of those who survive.
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The follow up question is why are studies produced with public funding non-public.
am I missing something or 35 years in prison is too much for a student stealing scientific journals?
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Hypothesis: living a diverse life increases happiness because it avoids addiction due to repetitively associating rewards to the same cues.
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HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE REALLY DYING IN ITALY?. Are people dying for the covid, or with the covid?.Is it comparable to a flu?. In Dalmine, 70 people died between March 1st and 21st (2 of which officially with coronavirus) vs 18 in the same period last year. (thread, 1/N).
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THE DYNAMICS OF THE ANTIFRAGILE.(thread). Where does the ability of the antifragile to benefit from volatility come from?. Can this ability be increased?. What policies increase it, and which decrease it?. 1/N.
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10 WAYS TO KILL MOTIVATION AS A MANAGER. 1. Ask your people to do things, then do not check whether they did them. 2. Ask your people to do things more carefully, then punish them for being slow.
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This timeline exercise was suggested by @shl 🙏 in a chat we had yesterday night, which you can watch at the link below. [4/4].
I believe what's happening in Italy is a harbinger for what will happen in the US (10 days delayed). And it so happens that Gumroad creator @DellAnnaLuca has been my best follow re: what's been happening over there, so I chatted with him about it!.
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It’s false that the costs of education have been skyrocketing. They’ve been plummeting, thanks to the internet. It’s the costs of certification that skyrocketed.
Still blows my mind that you can take ANY MIT COURSE you want, online, for free. Machine learning? Nuclear physics? Quantum computing? All there. Truly unreal.
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5/ In theory, performance determines success. The most performing employee becomes the most successful one. In practice, performance is subordinate to survival. It is the most performing employee who doesn’t burn out that becomes the most successful, and so on.
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18/ Lombardy's welfare minister: "every day we get 200 new people to the ER in critical conditions, which means every day we need to find 200 more hospital beds. […] the virus is spreading at an exceptional speed, faster than our predictions and than the data we got from China."
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We live in a MIMETIC SOCIETY, in which right and wrong are largely determined by what others do, can do, and are expected to do. Imitation is the norm. It seems irrational, but it increases survival, *under the right conditions*. (thread, 1/N)
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Exactly this. The most worrying thing of 2020-2021 hasn’t been the catastrophes and debacles. It’s been the structural problems it unveiled and the lack of focus on solving them, or even just talking about them. A dangerous lack of focus.
As of yesterday 70% of New Orleans does not have power. It’s been a week since hurricane ida. Fascinating how no one seems to care or see this as representative of greater system issues.
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