#betel-nut — Wealth & Means

Episodes tagged #betel-nut on Wealth & Means.

The Money Value of Time — 2026-09-12
There's a moment when something becomes true, and a later moment when the world finally acts on it, and we spend almost all our attention on the first one. Which is strange, because the second is where people actually live. Everything worth arguing about has a lag built into it — the interval between a fact existing and anybody being able to see it, price it, or act on it. That interval isn't a rounding error. It's frequently the entire investment, the entire career, the entire political crisis. Two opposite errors grow in that gap, and this week produced both. There's the market that refuses to price a thing until it's been proven, which is why four out of five dealers in the world's largest electric-car market turn away a perfectly healthy vehicle nobody can inspect. And there's the market that prices the destination on day one, which is why incumbents get declared obsolete roughly thirty years before their customers agree to leave. Steam power reached commercial service in 1807 and steam-powered ships are still running today — two centuries of cash flow the obituary writers missed. In The Greater Debate, two men argue about whether a government can freeze the price of bread and slowly discover they're arguing about time instead. And in Let's Invent Again, a country doctor notices that the gap between a good medicine and a working medicine is, in fact, the whole business. Knowing what wins is the easy half. The hard half is knowing how long, and who's standing in between.

#betel-nut — Wealth & Means

Episodes tagged #betel-nut on Wealth & Means.

The Money Value of Time — 2026-09-12
There's a moment when something becomes true, and a later moment when the world finally acts on it, and we spend almost all our attention on the first one. Which is strange, because the second is where people actually live. Everything worth arguing about has a lag built into it — the interval between a fact existing and anybody being able to see it, price it, or act on it. That interval isn't a rounding error. It's frequently the entire investment, the entire career, the entire political crisis. Two opposite errors grow in that gap, and this week produced both. There's the market that refuses to price a thing until it's been proven, which is why four out of five dealers in the world's largest electric-car market turn away a perfectly healthy vehicle nobody can inspect. And there's the market that prices the destination on day one, which is why incumbents get declared obsolete roughly thirty years before their customers agree to leave. Steam power reached commercial service in 1807 and steam-powered ships are still running today — two centuries of cash flow the obituary writers missed. In The Greater Debate, two men argue about whether a government can freeze the price of bread and slowly discover they're arguing about time instead. And in Let's Invent Again, a country doctor notices that the gap between a good medicine and a working medicine is, in fact, the whole business. Knowing what wins is the easy half. The hard half is knowing how long, and who's standing in between.