In case this is the last Good Tokens of the year, have a great holiday season and end of 2025. See you in 2026!
A message from my sponsor
Christmas is just 7 days away. If you’re here, you already know about my dear friend Uri’s hit new game Person Do Thing, but out of love for the game and it’s creator, I have to say one final time, this is a perfect stocking stuffer and a great way to spend time with your friends and family without a screen. Highly recommended!
The Lost Generation. This one is controversial because it deals with race and DEI, but if you can distance yourself from that a little bit, it’s really informative. It made me believe more in the Elite Overproduction Hypothesis.
The story of the fight over Romansch. Particularly enjoyable for me because the Engadin is among my favorite places in the world.
Things I learned
The average boomer will get paid out significantly more in medicare and social security than they paid in taxes — Russ Greene. Soon we’ll need a Boomer Corner.
The EU makes more from fines on US tech companies than it does from taxes on all EU tech companies — David Fant
Lebron James has played against 35% of players in NBA history — CBS Sports. To be fair, he has played in 28% of the league’s seasons. I think this makes him the Queen Elizabeth of athletes.
Musings
I feel like the Grinch saying this, but we’ve got to cut down on the number of special clothing days (e.g., pajama day) that are happening in schools or daycares. All it does is create stress for me as a parent and I don’t get the sense that my kids actually enjoy these. Who is this for?
LLM corner
Some shameless self promotion: The latest episode of —dangerously-skip-permissions: How Penny Schiffer works. Penny is another technical product manager turned AI software developer who I think has really mastered creating with AI.
GenAI created ads outperform human created ads by 19%… unless they are disclosed as created by AI, in which case the performance goes down by 32% — Eric Seufert
In a previous post, I mused: “You’re not avoiding failure, you’re avoidng the feeling of failure.”
KL asks: "Can we unpack this into some actionable life hacks?"
When I was in 8th grade, I decided not to tryout for the middle school basketball team because I didn't think I'd make it and I didn’t want to get cut.
A couple of weeks later, I saw the group of guys that made the team. The best few were obviously better than me, but I would’ve been competitive, if not better, than the rest of the ones who made it.
By not trying out, I avoided the feeling of failure, but I got the same result: I didn't get to play on the team. I didn't avoid failure, I avoided the feeling of failure.
Noah Smith on housing: “The true homeownership rate for Millennials at age 30 is less than 35%; for Gen X it was around 45%, and for Boomers it was almost 50%.” Also Noah on drones and the future of war. Perhaps I need a Noah Smith Corner.
There’s less pushback on the building of new housing when it’s beautiful. I definitely see this in Roswell where there is intense, almost blind opposition to building apartments but strong support for mixed use development from the people that are opposing the building of apartments. This paper helps me understand those people better and more graciously.
How penicillin was discovered. It’s more complicated than the story that you’ve heard and yet still somehow increased my belief in the value of unguided experiments (play).
Extinction rates seem to be slowing across plant and animal groups — University of Arizona
New York, LA, Chicago, and Boston have all seen a more than 30% decline in the number of children under 5 living there in the past 20 years — Bobby Fijan
33% of Oregon public school students are chronically absent (missing more than 17 days in a school year) — Oregon Live. What are we doing here people?
Girls are now less likely than boys to say that they want to get married; the percentage of girls who say they want to get married has fallen from 83% to 61% since 1993 — American Storylines. Tons of other interesting information in here about the perceptions and realities of marriage. Also this anecdata:
To start off our conversation, I asked participants to raise their hands if their parents had ever talked with them about the importance of getting a good education and pursuing a rewarding career. Every single hand shot up. The response was identical in both the male and female groups. I then asked whether their families had stressed the importance of finding a partner or starting a family. No one raised their hand.
In response to my 2025 Things I learned post, my friend Mark tells me “You should do a meta post on how you come up with this list.”
Frequent readers of this blog probably know the answer to this already, but I’ll spell it out in more detail here. I’ve been very influenced by my friend / mentor Alex Komoroske who has an essential google doc called Bits & Bobs.
I more or less have copied what he does but adapted it for who I am and what I’m interested in.
Thought the week each week I keep a running note in Bear called Good Tokens YYYY-MM-DD.
I throw things in here throughout my day: links I like, observations, ideas baked and unbaked.
On Thursdays or Fridays, I go through and I process through that list. About 75% of it ends up as my weekly Good Tokens post and the rest of it gets sorted somewhere else or thrown out and then I post it to my blog here.
Whenever I post something, I have OpenAI tag it for me. Then starting about November 1st, I start going back through and looking at the posts tagged things I learned.
I dump all of these into a doc in chronological order and then start cleaning up the formatting and reading through them. As I do that, I start to see themes and then group and regroup them until I’ve got the post. I am to put it out more or less on December 1st.
Perhaps a better question would be why I do this. One answer is that I enjoy it. Another is that I really do find that it builds a habit for me of looking out into the world and considering it. A third is that it has helped me crystalize what I’m uniquely interested in and where I want to spend my time — which is a funny thing to say considering how weird and wide ranging these posts are, but the act of reflecting on it on a weekly basis does help me see patterns. A final reason is that I do think that the creative act is contagious. Like running, the hardest step is the first one and so having a habit of creation keeps me in the flow.
The U.S. Mint estimates that there are 300 billion pennies in circulation, about 3 times more than the number stars in the Milky Way Galaxy — The Atlantic
Coca Cola didn’t became cocaine free until 1929 — the Associated Press via Stan Veuger. No wonder the market crashed!
There are more people under the age of 25 today in Africa than there are in all of Europe — Stephen Kotkin
Shows like MTV’s 16 and pregnant led to a 5.7 percent decrease in teen births, 1/3 of the decline in teen births during the period — Liam Delaney
International adoptions in the US are down 94% since the peak in 2004 — Pew
Japan now produces more diapers for incontinent adults than for infants — London Review of Books
There are more senior citizens than children in 11 states and half of the counties in the US — US Census
The under 20 population in the United States is 20% smaller than it was in 1990 — Aaron Becker via Cremiux
For the first time in 35 years, there are no rap songs are in the top 40 — Rolling Stone
“In 2022, adults spent an additional 99 minutes at home on any given day compared with 2003.” —Derek Thompson via Bucco Capital
Monarch butterflies produce a super generation that live 8 times as long as the other generations and allow them to complete their migratory cycle — Country Living. Could you imagine if once every four generations, you had a set of humans that lived more than 500 years??
Brand Mascots can measurably influence the eating behavior of children — Obesity Review
The more males and females of a bird species look alike (e.g. cranes), the more likely they are to mate for life. The more males and females of a bird species look dissimilar (e.g. mallards), the more likely they are to be promiscuous — my friend Oriana
A group of kangaroos is called a mob. A group of jaguars is a shadow — Brevard Zoo via ChatGPT
Costco’s Kirkland Brand drives more revenue than all of Procter and Gamble combined — Eric Ries
Silicon Valley companies will cross reference each other’s patents more when their employees frequent the same coffee shops — National Bureau of Economic Research. See also Austin’s 3 types of luck.
Non-linear ethnic niches: 90% of grocery stores in Detroit are owned by Chaldeans; 95% of Dunkin Donuts stores in the Midwest are owned by Indians; 90% of the liquor stores in Baltimore are owned by Koreans; 60% of Dunkin’ Donuts stores in New England and New York are operated by Portuguese immigrants — Aporia Magazine. I guess you file this under the importance of networks, tacit knowledge, and the availability bias?
The only right protected in the main body of the US Constitution is the right to intellectual property — ChinaTalk. Bonus: The first patent examiner for the United States was Thomas Jefferson.
Peacock is the name of the males only; the female are peahens. The species is called peafowl— The Animal Book
We call them piggy banks because of the type of clay (pygg) that was used to make jars for holding coins. Shaping them like pigs was a visual pun (probably) — BBC
The air that the dinosaurs breathed had substantially more oxygen in it than the air we breathe. Jurassic Park couldn’t happen because the dinosaurs would asphyxiate — John Cramer
Saturn’s rings are younger than the dinosaurs — Rohit
Squirrels in Berkeley and Oakland are becoming carnivorous — Smithsonian Magazine
In Switzerland, you are never more than 16km from a lake — About Switzerland
The English Monarchy asserted a claim to the French Monarchy until 1801, only releasing it after Napoleon had become dictator — The Rest Is History. Some would say it’s been all downhill for France since then 🤣.
12.3M hectares of US cropland was abandoned between 1986 and 2018 — Environmental Research Letters. Note that this figure does not include cropland taken out of use via urbanization or development.
More than 98% of new vehicle sales in Norway this September were EVs — Elective via Anton
79% of American adults report making at least one drunk purchase in the past year; the average amount of drunk spending was $444 per year — The Hustle
The value of returned purchases in the United States would make it the 16th largest economy in the world — Rohit
D.A.R.E. anti-drug interventions in schools seem to have have increased drug use among suburban students — Drug Library via Atoms vs. Bits
Holding back students in the 3rd grade improves long term performance for the students who were held back — The 74 million
More Romans were killed at Cannae than Americans in the entire Vietnam War — The Rest is History
The distance elasticity of trade (the rate at which trade between two cities drops off as they get farther away from each other) seems to be the same today as it was in ancient Assyria — Maximum Progress
The oldest bond in the world dates from December 10, 1624; pays €13.61 of interest a year — the Financial Times via The Browser
Pine needle tea has more vitamin C in it than orange juice — Nautilus
All of the world’s gold is estimated to fit in one 20 meter cube — BBC
Eyes have evolved more than 50 times — Salon via Rohit
The largest newspaper in California by subscribers is the New York Times —Ezra Klein
Walmart takes 25% of all SNAP dollars — Kyla Scanlon
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Most of my professional energy right now is spent on how AI changes creative work and the electric tech stack. If either of these is of interest to you or if you just think we’d have a good conversation, drop me a note (hello @ jdilla.xyz) or put time on my calendar).