PayPal was one of the few financial innovators to dodge animal control. They were first and they were fast.
And they were compliant. Their business model was not "you can use this new form of money to mail order cocaine".
Too Clever by Half
51–60 of 261 posts
Re: Too Clever by Half
#52The State still cannot tell the Coyotes from Raccoons. Especially so because neither of them show there form truly until the deed is done. Thus the Coyote population control. The utopia of a Coyote population playing the meta game will indeed happen some day - just that the time isn't right. Yet! So the same Animal Control that goes around looking for masked men with rifles, also chases those who leak the rightful in…
I think because the raccoons are in the government. If Bear Stearns is a coyote, Goldman Sachs is a raccoon. They don't mind breaking stuff for profit, and yet they always get some people in every single US government.
Re: Too Clever by Half
#53I really enjoyed this article. Summary Coyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can’t hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don’t shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote. Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t sca…
>> But at some point I realized that most of the time you aren’t getting in trouble because you are breaking the rules. You are getting in trouble because you are making the rule makers unhappy. Once I had that realization I was able to focus on relationships with the rule makers and figure out what they actually cared about. This allowed me to break the rules just as much but without getting in trouble.
Tangentially related, I also read once that the main determinant in whether a doctor got sued for malpractise is not the actual blunder itself, but the doctors bedside manner and relationship with the patient and their family. (Obviously this relates to honest mistakes, more than extreme negligence) As a result, on any project I am on now (as a PM) I make it my practise to befriend as far as possible all the stakeholders in the project.
The other advantage is it also makes your time at work more enjoyable.
Re: Too Clever by Half
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also realized this which made me game the whole schooling system. I didn't study and had a poor attendance but still got an award for the being the school's best student. Pretty crazy when I think about it. Suffice to say, my strategy didn't work very well in university.
High-five, fellow "burned by needing to do real work in university" high schooler :(
I'm quite proud of the range of results I got in maths at University - I tried the "no study" approach in first year and got burned badly.
Fortunately we didn't have the uncivilized GPA system here so my first year indiscretions had no impact on my final degree.
Re: Too Clever by Half
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also realized this which made me game the whole schooling system. I didn't study and had a poor attendance but still got an award for the being the school's best student. Pretty crazy when I think about it. Suffice to say, my strategy didn't work very well in university.
High-five, fellow "burned by needing to do real work in university" high schooler :(
I don't know if we need a club or a support group, but I'm in.
Re: Too Clever by Half
#56The only issue with his metaphor is that coyotes have been doing very well at the meta game. At the time of European contact there were no coyotes anywhere near Connecticut. Lewis and Clark didn't encounter them until they hit the great plains. Actually only a few decades ago there were no coyotes near the eastern US. But coyotes are clever and they've learned to adapt and live in close proximity to humans. And as we…
Something similar is happening in Europe. The golden jackal [1], a close relative to the coyote, is expanding its range northward and westward from the Eastern Mediterranean [2]. They are breeding now in Austria [3] and recently an animal was spotted by a camera trap in the Netherlands [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_jackal
[2] https://phys.org/news/2015-07-expansion-golden-jackal-europe...
[3] https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/ANNA_109B_0073-0076.pdf
[4] https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/First-golden-jackal-spotte...
Re: Too Clever by Half
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also realized this which made me game the whole schooling system. I didn't study and had a poor attendance but still got an award for the being the school's best student. Pretty crazy when I think about it. Suffice to say, my strategy didn't work very well in university.
High-five, fellow "burned by needing to do real work in university" high schooler :(
One more...
It didn't help that I went to uni to study Physics, either.
Re: Too Clever by Half
#58Appropriately, this article is a slightly-too-clever way of talking about three things at the same time.
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Re: Too Clever by Half
#59The most relevant take away from this article (for me) is how the coyotes (crypto and currency experts) invented Bitcoins, raccoons over leveraged it out of dumb greed (investors) and the state took notice and acted out of sheer desperation to not lose control and once again rendered the invention useless by gaining more control than before (the part that is currently in its early stages right now).
Update:
I think the article insinuates an interesting take on the invention of cryptocurrencies (by coyotes), their bubble (by raccoons) and their suppression (by the state). But IMO in this case, the state suppressed the invention not just because they fear what the coyotes have produced but also what raccoons have done with it (with the whole ICO bubble, etc.).
Re: Too Clever by Half
#60I really enjoyed this article. Summary Coyotes are too clever because they know that people shaking jars full of coins can’t hurt them. Thus the animal control patrol has to get called and when they don’t shoo, the animal control person who loves animals has to shoot the coyote. Coyotes are winning the mini-game of each human interaction, but they are losing the meta-game of what society will do if coyotes aren’t sca…
The problem is that the rule makers in high schools are sometimes (often?) incredibly petty people with a very poor understanding of human psychology and communication, not tremendously much empathy for the students, and very little personal consequence when they make a mistake even if that has drastic consequences for the student (and as a result little time spent introspecting about their mistakes). I never got in…
I had a teacher in high school tell a student to go home, after a disagreement.
The kid didn't show up for two days.
On the third day, my teacher went to the kid's house, and asked him to come back. The kid said he dropped out of school. He told my teacher it wasen't his fault, he was planning too.
Well, my teacher was never the same. He went from a enthusiast guy to someone who didn't say too much. He talked about the kid the entire semester. He claimed he went to the kids house, and begged him to give school another chance.
To this day, I think about how one, usually ego driven comment/directive, can affect a person's life. I'm talking about the teacher's life.
I don't know what happened to the student, but I think about the guilt of that teacher, and how he carried it around.