So I can't help but wonder with these weekly threads... Do you read (or at least finish) all these posts you mention during the preceding weekly interval, or do you mention books you read previously as conversation starters, possibly because of some timely element about them with recent news or writings?
It's hard not to see the ambitious job answer for 2025 as entrepreneur. There will be two tracks: the technical track and the creator track. There is so much infrastructure (and more coming) to support entrepreneurs I can't imagine founding a company being materially different than going through the Big Tech interview process. The comp won't be as deterministic (more winners and losers), but I suspect 4 years of entrepreneurship will be an accelerant to more senior positions at bigger companies (tech or media).
“The Box” by Mark Levinson is an in-depth look at the stuff Petersen talks about in the Future article. One interesting point Levinson raises is about how transportation costs in regions that have not invested in container infrastructure weaken their comparative advantages in labor costs.
Of course the natural comparison to containerization in shipping is the move towards containerization in software. There’s an interesting take somewhere in there between Belt and Road investments and AWS’s Elastic Container Service.
One job in the running for ambitious people in 2025 is biologist. The amazing effectiveness of mRNA vaccines are a big advertising pitch to young ambitious people who weren't considering biology. mRNA and adjacent technologies like genome editing have years of innovation and new discoveries ahead of them. The next mRNA vaccines are going to be much easier to sell to the public then they would have been in a non-covid alternate universe because a large percentage of the population is going to remember that time where they (or a family member) got a covid-19 mRNA vaccine and didn't have any major side effects.
This week, Amazon opened the first full-size (25k sq ft) Amazon grocery store with no checkout here near Seattle. If you read Amazon Unbound, it's worth a visit, just to see their original vision from the beginning of the book working in real life. I've been several times already and it seems to work just fine. You scan your palm, grab what you want, scan your palm, and walk out, and they charge your card correctly. The ceiling is a forest of cameras that record what you take off the shelves. Very cool. I know they have had smaller formats already but this is the real deal.
I think we are already seeing many ambitious people choosing cultural production (indie filmmaking/publishing, YouTube content creation, newsletter writing). I suspect this trend to continue and accelerate.
If budget deficits continue to stay elevated, l think they will flock to government jobs. 43% of graduates in China now want to work for SOEs and just 19% for the private sector. It also happened in Taiwan after the bubble burst in 1990: graduates flocked to safer government jobs.
“ if privacy is a feature that helps sell products, will the most effective way to monetize it involve selling a privacy-centric version of an existing product, or adding an anonymity/data-protection layer to a platform?”
I have to think the answer is “no”. Security is a marketing tool to the extent it is a “strategy credit” (in the Ben Thompson sense). Most consumers are not exposed to the true cost of more data privacy, and if they were I think they would be unlikely to pay for it. (e.g. for Facebook/Instagram true privacy would probably cost a US user something like $15/mo)
So I can't help but wonder with these weekly threads... Do you read (or at least finish) all these posts you mention during the preceding weekly interval, or do you mention books you read previously as conversation starters, possibly because of some timely element about them with recent news or writings?
It's hard not to see the ambitious job answer for 2025 as entrepreneur. There will be two tracks: the technical track and the creator track. There is so much infrastructure (and more coming) to support entrepreneurs I can't imagine founding a company being materially different than going through the Big Tech interview process. The comp won't be as deterministic (more winners and losers), but I suspect 4 years of entrepreneurship will be an accelerant to more senior positions at bigger companies (tech or media).
“The Box” by Mark Levinson is an in-depth look at the stuff Petersen talks about in the Future article. One interesting point Levinson raises is about how transportation costs in regions that have not invested in container infrastructure weaken their comparative advantages in labor costs.
Of course the natural comparison to containerization in shipping is the move towards containerization in software. There’s an interesting take somewhere in there between Belt and Road investments and AWS’s Elastic Container Service.
One job in the running for ambitious people in 2025 is biologist. The amazing effectiveness of mRNA vaccines are a big advertising pitch to young ambitious people who weren't considering biology. mRNA and adjacent technologies like genome editing have years of innovation and new discoveries ahead of them. The next mRNA vaccines are going to be much easier to sell to the public then they would have been in a non-covid alternate universe because a large percentage of the population is going to remember that time where they (or a family member) got a covid-19 mRNA vaccine and didn't have any major side effects.
This week, Amazon opened the first full-size (25k sq ft) Amazon grocery store with no checkout here near Seattle. If you read Amazon Unbound, it's worth a visit, just to see their original vision from the beginning of the book working in real life. I've been several times already and it seems to work just fine. You scan your palm, grab what you want, scan your palm, and walk out, and they charge your card correctly. The ceiling is a forest of cameras that record what you take off the shelves. Very cool. I know they have had smaller formats already but this is the real deal.
I think we are already seeing many ambitious people choosing cultural production (indie filmmaking/publishing, YouTube content creation, newsletter writing). I suspect this trend to continue and accelerate.
If budget deficits continue to stay elevated, l think they will flock to government jobs. 43% of graduates in China now want to work for SOEs and just 19% for the private sector. It also happened in Taiwan after the bubble burst in 1990: graduates flocked to safer government jobs.
“ if privacy is a feature that helps sell products, will the most effective way to monetize it involve selling a privacy-centric version of an existing product, or adding an anonymity/data-protection layer to a platform?”
I have to think the answer is “no”. Security is a marketing tool to the extent it is a “strategy credit” (in the Ben Thompson sense). Most consumers are not exposed to the true cost of more data privacy, and if they were I think they would be unlikely to pay for it. (e.g. for Facebook/Instagram true privacy would probably cost a US user something like $15/mo)