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Competition, markets, and open source

On Wednesday, at WEA’s housing and transportation conference, I met an economist who’s studying competition and the shrinking number of small / medium-size businesses. New business formation isn’t behaving as most people would expect it to in a strong economy.

She thought open source, both software and methodology, might be a solution to make small and medium-size businesses more competitive. However, I argued the exact opposite: open source is a business strategy for an extreme form of taking the entire market.

I think one root cause of large companies growing larger is that technology lends itself to extreme operational efficiencies. With a technology company, the marginal cost of an additional customer is effectively zero. If Amazon can operate at 10x global scale with the same operational costs, it can take a smaller margin and still be very competitive. Traditional businesses can’t compete if they have a larger percentage of margin dedicated to operational costs.

So, if it’s true that more of the market is going to larger companies, is this worth solving for? And what are potential solutions? One result of current market dynamics is difficult to unwind: Amazon yields amazing customer value and worsening employment options (either by destroying jobs entirely or offering poorer wages).

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Gutenberg nightly build

If you’d like to run Gutenberg’s master branch without creating your own build, you can use this plugin ZIP I’m building on a six hour cron:

https://builds.danielbachhuber.com/gutenberg-nightly.zip

Install the Gutenberg nightly build via WP-CLI with:

wp plugin install https://builds.danielbachhuber.com/gutenberg-nightly.zip --force

Once you’ve installed the Gutenberg nightly build, you’ll notice the version includes -alpha- followed by a seven character alphanumeric hash (e.g. 610aa4e).

This is an abbreviation of the Git hash at the time of the build. It’ll help you keep track as to whether you’re truly running the latest commit on master.

If you’d like to replicate elsewhere, here’s the underlying build script:

From WordPress/gutenberg#6285.

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What we’re cookin’

Homemade food we’ve made in the last four days:

  • Smoked pork soup
  • Garlic brown sugar glazed salmon
  • Smoked tri-tip steak (omg so good)
  • Cinnamon raisin swirl walnut sourdough
  • Regular sourdough
  • Ugandan eggs bread with tomato chutney
  • Turkey meatballs with homemade pasta
  • Black bean brownies
  • Dried apples and pears from our trees

Great start to the fall! Cooking is the best form of humblebrag.

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Highlights from the American West

We spent two weeks this month on an awesome road trip through Eastern Oregon and Idaho.

Our first stop was Joseph, where we stayed for four nights (VRBO). If you’ve ever been to Jackson Hole, Joseph is a much earlier version of it: gorgeous mountains, one touristy main street, and a bunch of farmland otherwise.

Ava and Daniel in the back of the railrider.

One fun adventure was the Joseph Railriders. Invented by a bike shop in La Grande, they designed two- and four-seat pedal carts that sit on top of train tracks. It’s a great re-use of abandoned railroad. Ava and Charlie got a total kick out of our two hour trip to Enterprise and back.

Continue reading “Highlights from the American West”
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Four short links – September 27, 2018

Epic bootstrapping, sprawl repair, jq for HTML, and cryptocurrency pump and dump.

  1. How to Bootstrap Your Way to $250,000,000/year with JT Marino of Tuft & Needle (Indie Hackers) — Epic story of a superbly-executed startup. Underscores the value of studying existing tactical best practices to avoid learning lessons the hard way.
  2. Is Strong Towns the same as Sprawl Repair? (Chuck Marohn) — Canonical explanation of why suburban retrofit is an optimistic yet unobtainable goal. Best case scenario is that some subdivisions can incrementally transform towards more traditional, mixed-use neighborhoods.
  3. pup: Command Line HTML Parsing — Like jq, but for HTML. Query the DOM with CSS selectors. (via Joseph Scott)
  4. A glimpse into the dark underbelly of cryptocurrency markets (Nic Carter) — Guilty until proven innocent: cryptocurrencies are pump and dump schemes. If you don’t know what a pump and dump scheme is, you especially shouldn’t be buying cryptocurrencies.
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Quillette and Waking Up

Just signed up to support Quillette and Sam Harris’ Waking Up on a regular basis. Both are publishing important, intellectually demanding work, on par with or exceeding traditional news publications.

Most recently, I enjoyed “The Hysterical Campus” in Quillette and Sam Harris’ interview with Yuval Noah Harari. And, if you want more of the  backstory on Quillette, listen to Tyler Cohen’s interview with Quillette founder Claire Lehmann.

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Blogging’s missing piece

One core mechanic lacking in modern blogging: knowing who is reading your work.

With an email newsletter, the writer has reasonable confidence their work is delivered to a known audience. With a blog, the best the writer has are comments and Twitter, both which are totally broken.

There should be better tools for the writer to publish to a specific audience (say, <50 people), for the audience to receive the work through their preferred means (e.g. email at the end of the day vs. RSS), and for both to engage in a productive dialogue that evolves over time.

Oh, and one more important piece: a “Start Here” point of entry for those new to the conversation, so they can painlessly get up to speed. 

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“Growing Tualatin” housing presentation for Tualatin BAC

“Growing Tualatin” housing presentation for Tualatin BAC. Michael Andersen, now of the Sightline Institute, gave a great presentation to the Business Advocacy Council contextualizing our local housing shortages with the economic trends of Washington County, and then identifying the solutions other cities are already applying. Watch the video or, easier still, read the transcript I painstakingly edited this morning.