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A thing which I unironically and enthusiastically believe which is unpopular among smart people of my acquaintance: financial engineering has in the recent past and present contributed substantially to human welfare. We should hope to see more of it.

Maybe more geeks need to meet someone who says “My job is teleporting value across time and space.”

Financial engineering is sort of a squishy term. I don’t primarily mean payments infrastructure or financial rails, although both of those involve substantial engineering.

I mean more “We took a thing and performed some alchemy, and now have a new thing.”

Except instead of alchemy it is generally quite a bit of math, a huge amount of contract law and due diligence, often an impressive amount of ops work, and a dusting of technology that web devs would recognize as such.

1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi

2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.

4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.

1/ Recently, I learned about the concept of ‘struggle porn’. This refers to the fetish of sacrificing nearly everything (health, relationships, time) for your startup. I fear that this label is creating more harm than good.

2/ @nateliason wrote a fabulous article about this topic, which first introduced me to this concept. Everyone should read it:

3/ @alexisohanian also recently spoke about struggle porn, though referring to it as ‘hustle porn.’ (as the co-founder of @hustlefundvc, obviously I take issue with this pejorative definition of ‘hustle’, but that’s another topic)

4/ Struggling in itself isn’t necessarily bad. Let’s be real here--if you’re going to start a startup, you will struggle. Founders should expect to work harder generally than employees. You will be challenged in many ways and also be super rewarded in others. This is normal.

5/ However, if you are over-indexing on hard work without clear purpose and degrading your mental health/relationships in the process--then this is very bad and we obviously should not celebrate this behavior.

Again, at such a key moment in UK and at such high political levels, evidence of deep misunderstanding of EU: The PM is under pressure in some quarters to delay #Brexit vote to allow her first to “improve” deal in Brussels BUT EU is determined not to budge at this stage

2) All EU leaders watching tomorrow’s vote. Of course they want to avoid a no deal #Brexit BUT they feel the deal - so painfully negotiated between EU and UK - is too fresh to re-open. Clarifications, yes but fundamental renegotiations, no.

3) The EU’s international reputation as a tough deal-maker is at stake here too. If Brussels now suddenly “gives in” to U.K. on EU red lines (eg backstop) then that would weaken the EU’s reputation in future trade negotiations with other non EU countries

4) Also on backstop the EU is unlikely to cave in to favour a relationship with a leaving member state (UK) against the explicit wishes and ignoring the deep concerns of a continuing member: Ireland.

5) Both the EU and the PM signed up to a guarantee to protect the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. If either the U.K. or EU can leave the backstop unilaterally then this clearly is no longer a guarantee.