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Platformonomics TGIF #137: August 7, 2026
Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads. Get Platformonomics Updates By Email Summer is flying by… News Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Oracle We’ve written at length about the financial risks of Oracle’s Hail Mary scramble…
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Taleb on Suckers
Extraordinarily timely Taleb essay on Edge.org: Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let’s face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system). He actually is turning his attention to generating constructive advice for…
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The Agony of Defeat
Forget reality game shows. Forget drinking games. Forget competitive spelunking. My new choice for choosing our political leaders is steer wrestling. You ride after a running steer (aka a cow with horns), leap off your horse, tackle the steer and pin it to the ground. Sometimes the steer wins.
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The Sign of a Great Statesman
From a Wall Street Journal article on otherwise nuanced diplomatic reactions to Russia recognizing Abkhazia (which I am pretty sure was in the title of one of the Harry Potter books) and South Ossetia as independent nations: “In South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, President Eduard Kokoity celebrated by drinking a three-liter bowl of wine on the…
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President Blowhard?
The Atlantic’s trove of internal memos from Hilary Clinton’s campaign is fascinating reading if you are interested in strategy, positioning and messaging. The accompanying analysis puts the documents into the context of events as they unfolded. It highlights the zero-sum nature of politics that magnifies errors due to the binary outcomes. Hilary explicitly ran on…
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Taleb’s Tips for Life
A nice Times of London profile of Nassim Nicholas Taleb from earlier in the summer including his top ten tips for life like be sure to dress up for your execution… My thoughts on his Black Swan book here (my most popular post).