It’s time, WFH tomorrow so it’s basically WFH from now. How do I lob as many things as I can into other people’s courts so I can chill tomorrow and turn up on Monday talking like I got sh*t done?

Instead, here’s four things worth knowing, none of which will help you at work.

Silicon Valley Bank was reportedly dreamed up over a poker game.

• How would you feel about a $10k buy-in to start a company with the people you’ve just lost money to around a poker table? Welcome to SVB in 1983.
• Now imagine building it for forty years only to have it killed in 36 hours by depositors coordinating in group chats.
• Started at a poker table, ended in a Slack channel. There’s a whole thesis in there and I’m not going to write it.

In 2017 Austria sold a bond that matures in 2117.

• Yielding at 2.1% btw.
• They were absolutely snapped up at the time then collapsed 55–65% from peaks, proving that you can lose more money in a AAA government bond than in a bad tech stock if you’re patient enough.
• FYI, they saw this and introduced an even lower-yielding (0.85%) century bond in 2020. Lesson learned?

Some large employers have taken out life insurance on rank-and-file staff and collected the payout themselves.

• “Dead peasant” insurance (serious ring to it) was taken out mainly by retail chains in the 80s and 90s.
• Imagine being the family of a shelf stacker who gets nothing after the employer is done.
• Worth remembering next time your employer describes itself as a family.

Tulip mania basically didn’t happen.

• Maybe one of the first recorded instances of fake news — the thriving Dutch economy was completely unfazed by the adjustment in tulip bulb prices.
• The version everyone knows — a nation ruined, merchants leaping into canals — comes from a sensationalist book published in 1841, nearly two centuries after the fact.
• The most famous bubble in history is mostly a bloke selling books.

The longer one

Why the scam emails are so badly written

You open your inbox and see Nigerian prince right there in the subject line, delete it and pat yourself on the back for being a good corporate robot. Then you think, how does anyone fall for it?

These things seem like they’re designed to fail.

A Microsoft researcher worked through the economics of it about a decade ago and found that the expensive part of the scam isn’t sending emails, but rather the weeks of back-and-forth with someone who eventually wakes up and stops replying.

So the opening email isn’t advertising. It’s a filter. Make it as ludicrous as possible and everyone who bins it would have wasted the scammer’s next three weeks anyway. What’s left is a tiny group of people who read Nigerian prince and thought seems plausible. A self-excluding marketing ploy — maybe these guys are smarter than I thought.

Once you see that terrible wording IS the play, you start noticing the same move everywhere: the deliberately weird job ad, the aggressively niche landing page, the founder whose pitch is so strange it either lands instantly or not at all.

Filtering hard at the top is cheaper than being polite in the middle.

Course materials

That’s it. Go home.

Professional Development  ·  sent Thursdays, when it stops mattering
Issue 01