Gas Cars --> Electric

Someone said that "switching vehicles to electric, when the plant generating that electricity is an old-school coal-fired power plant, isn't a win."

My response:

Yes, but that's the way it realistically has to be done, in steps.

1. Switching a car to electric (even if, for now, the source is coal) is a partial win, one step in the right direction. Now, that car is no longer dependent on gas or diesel.

2. As cars get switched over to electricity, the electrical demand will skyrocket. So, you need, in the interim, combinations of power plants (some more green than others) to prevent outages.

3. At the next phase, you can systematically work on replacing the worst sources with better sources. As you do that, as long as you keep supply constant, electric car owners don't have to do anything, because the source of power is abstracted away from them.

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Opportunistic Innovation And Migrants

My mentor, famed consultant Alan Weiss, has written about the three types of innovation (opportunistic, conformist, non-conformist).

I've recently read a couple of articles about how opportunistic innovation is causing a "capitalist ecosystem" to sprout around migrants:

1. At a migrant shelter in NY, the migrants want to work but don't have work permits.  Opportunity: Some people rent them bikes and others set up fake delivery accounts on Uber Eats, etc. and "rent" them to migrants for, say 6 weeks. (After the time, they delete the account. On that last day, the migrants tend not to deliver the last order of the day and keep it for themselves 🙂 ).

2. I was reading today about a scuffle at a Chicago Home Depot (which ended up with the security guard shooting the suspect and wounding him).  The interesting thing was that the suspect wasn't one of the laborers that crowd the parking lot hoping to get picked for a job.  He was there to offer haircuts to the migrants who gather there.

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Why the Tech Slowdown?

I think pure technology companies (those that make products or marketplaces, like Ebay or Uber) are more insular. They listen to the same venture capitalists, and watch the FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, google).  They all overreacted to the pandemic, and hired like crazy from 2020-2022. Now, they are focused on being defensive and cutting costs.  They're acting like lemmings.

With companies that use tech (such as financial or insurance services), I'm not seeing this kind of behavior. 

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Glasses Visual Humor

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Worldwide Windows / CrowdStrike Outage

Systems have been down all over the world, including airports because of Microsoft Windows systems being shut down.  A lot of businesses use Windows with CrowdStrike for cybersecurity, and CrowdStrike pushed out an automatic update that crashed Windows machines.

My nephew was supposed to fly in from CA today, but it looks like his flight was cancelled.

This shows the danger and fragility when companies rely on a small handful of providers.

It also shows the downside of frequent, automatic software releases.

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Gen Z's Wikipedia

The Economist recently had an interesting article about a site called Famous Birthdays. They called it "Gen Z's Wikipedia." The founder found a niche in that, besides just listing conventional celebrities, the site lists influencers.

It's success shows how the nature of fame is no splintered. In fact, marketers are now using this site as a tool to identify influencers for ad campaigns.

© 2024 Praveen Puri

Scary News About China and AI

This is one of the scariest things I've read recently (June 15, 2024 Economist):


"At the start of 2023 experts reckoned that the Chinese LLMs that did exist were a decade behind the American cutting edge. Now the same experts reckon that the transpacific model gap has shrunk to a year or less."

© 2024 Praveen Puri