Stop what you’re doing.

Read this, a powerful argument by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry for spreading risk intelligently by turning banks into partnerships and pursuing massive (by which he means MASSIVE) deregulation at the same time. One smart, challenging paragraph after another:

Let’s work through the main objections to the partnership model:
It’s antiquated. You say potato, I say potato. You say antiquated, I say resilient. The partnership model dominated the world of finance up until the 20th century. It financed the Age of Exploration and the Industrial Revolution. That ain’t too shabby. It’s like your Grandma’s old clunker: it doesn’t have air conditioning or power steering, but by God, it’ll get you from point A to point B whether rain, sleet or snow.
What’s more, it’s worth noting that Swiss banking is still dominated by the partnership model. Swiss private banks boast on their website that your money’s safe with them because their own money is on the line with yours. Not all of them: there’s UBS which tried to go the Goldman route and blew itself up in the process. The partnerships, meanwhile, did much better through the crisis. There are many words people use to describe Swiss finance, but "antiquated" is never one of them.

Or this:

I think it was The Epicurean Dealmaker who said on Twitter that the mandatory disclosure/warnings for anyone who signs a financial document should be a slap in the face and the phrase "CAVEAT EMPTOR!" shouted into their face drill instructor-style.

We don’t want retail investors to have trust into the system. Finance is like fire: it can be very useful, but it burns and can be very destructive. The last thing we want to do is give people the impression that we can somehow regulate away the bad consequences of fire.

Smart, intelligent, radical – and above all it puts responsibility on people, not on rules. Therefore highly unlikely to happen – too many people want to have rules as an end in themselves. But do also read the dynamic comment chain, with people arguing to and fro about these ideas from all sorts of points of view, many of them seemingly well informed.

By the way, when you’ve finished all that, swing by Epicurean Dealmaker’s fascinating piece on why books are quite different from e-readers:

His entire argument seems to boil down to the assertion that there is some sort of “pure text” at the base of every work of literature—words in inviolate sequence, to use his coinage—and that e-readers, by collapsing and standardizing our access to them, somehow make our experience of literature purer and more authentic. But this is just bullshit.

The experience of literature—and reading in general—is always and everywhere a solitary interpretative act on behalf of and by the reader. Readers read literature in time, in space, and through some sort of medium. Time spent reading—pace, duration, intervals when one puts down the book—directly and ineluctably affects the reader’s experience of the text…

… Font, line leading, margins, and even pagination affect a reader’s experience of a text, often subconsciously. No-one who has ever compared a cheap, cramped, badly-typeset version of a novel to a well-designed, spaciously laid out one can help but notice the difference. And noticing the difference in and of itself alters the experience of the work. Joyce may be as much Joyce in Baskerville as in Times New Roman, but I dare you to find him the same author in twelve point Comic Sans.

Isn’t the Internet wonderful?