What I wrote last week
I came across a couple of posts from Afghanistan veterans on their experience there
My notes from the 2021 Debit Issuer Study
My thoughts on recent developments from PayPal
Business
Inside HBO Max’s Scramble to Fix Its Glitchy App. In the streaming world, the user experience is critical in keeping customers engaged and the churn down. HBO Max fumbled the ball terribly with their confusing brands, products and messaging in the beginning. I don’t think I am a dumbass, but I didn’t even know the difference between HBO, HBO Max or HBO Now. Then, they out together an app that was littered with bugs as summarized in the article. The reason, as reported, is that they merged the two legacy apps that were built for different purposes. One was built to offer ad-free content while the other featured commercials. It is not a surprise that bugs happened. What is a surprise is that an institution like HBO or Warner Media let it happen in the first place.
Amazon Plans to Open Large Retail Locations Akin to Department Stores. This move may be Amazon’s attempt to copy what other retailers like Target do. They fulfill online orders from their network of stores. It takes a lot of stores to cover the country and logistics management to figure out the inventory and the actual shipping. We’ll see.
Walmart’s e-commerce business is set to hit $75B in sales this year
Paying With a Credit Card? That’s Going to Cost You. If this trend is legit and merchants continue with the surcharge (which is not an uncommon practice in Vietnam), it and the growing popularity of BNPL will have adverse effect on credit card spend. Remember: BNPL is mostly funded through debit cards
How the Apple lobbying machine took on Georgia, and won. Apple is my largest position. However, I found the whole lobbying issue troubling. It’s nothing different from companies writing bills and lawmakers enacting such bills.
What I found interesting
‘Likes’ and ‘shares’ teach people to express more outrage online
China Passes One of the World’s Strictest Data-Privacy Laws
Another excellent post by Morgan Housel. In light of what happened in Afghanistan today, I can’t help but think about what small events in the past could have prevented this war in the beginning and what would happen to the people of Afghanistan in the future after the U.S pulled out
One is to base your predictions on how people behave vs. specific events. Predicting what the world will look like in, say, 2050, is just impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.
Another – made so starkly in the last year and a half – is that no matter what the world looks like today, and what seems obvious today, everything can change tomorrow because of some tiny accident no one’s thinking about. Events, like money, compound. And the central feature of compounding is that it’s never intuitive how big something can grow from a small beginning.
Source: Collaborative Fund
Stats that may interest you
50% of surveyed Americans have no problem with false information online
Target’s Circle Rewards Program reaches 100 million subscribers
Minh Quang Duong 