 When McKinsey Comes to Town
By Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe Published in October 2022 624 Pages Thibault’s Score: 2/5 This book is a very mediocre leftist attack piece against a target that deserves much more serious criticism. The book jumps hastily from example to example about why McKinsey is evil. I agree with the authors and overall also think that McKinsey is probably evil. However, we have completely different reasons why. I’ve worked with companies very similar to McKinsey, and although I haven’t worked with McKinsey I’ve interacted with their people quite a few times. The authors blame McKinsey for behavior such as firing workers, offshoring, and high executive pay. However, all of these are natural results of market forces and government regulations outside of the control of McKinsey. Blaming individual companies for responding to government regulations is like blaming drug dealers for the war on drugs (when in fact drug dealers only exist because drugs are illegal in the first place). At the same time, the authors argue that McKinsey lobbies for Ayn Rand’s dog-eat-dog form of capitalism. Every McKinsey report that I have seen, every single LinkedIn post, and every employee suggests the opposite to me. As far as I can tell, they are all crypto-Marxists pushing for an economic system predicated on state control of industry. McKinsey’s front page is full of SDG language indicative of government regulations. The authors suggest that McKinsey makes companies more profitable, at least in the short term, but destroys them in the long term. I’ve come to the conclusion that McKinsey is a scam company that just takes money without doing anything. When my father worked at Apple, he came right after McKinsey had consulted. He, and other executives, discovered that McKinsey had been charging Apple high consulting fees for copy-pasted templates that they circulated at other Bay Area companies. He was ecstatic when Steve Jobs did not renew their contracts. I quit reading halfway through this book because it is clearly written by people who have not done any business at a high level. It is written by outsiders, rather than insiders. The authors don’t understand how McKinsey actually works, or how business works, and are trying to piece together a narrative based on sob stories and news reports.
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 The Blocksize War: The battle over who controls Bitcoin’s protocol rules
By Jonathan Bier Published in March 2021 228 Pages Thibault’s Score: 3/5 This book chronicles the history of the “blocksize wars,” an internecine conflict within the Bitcoin community over how Bitcoin should be updated. Bitcoin was designed with a 1 mb block size limit. This was suitable for a small number of transactions, where everything could be settled in minutes. As the number of transactions increased, a larger block size became necessary to settle the transactions. I remember that, around this time, I struggled to use Bitcoin because of the small block sizes. I remember needing to wait hours, or sometimes even days, to settle transactions and paying huge fees that effectively doubled the price of whatever I bought. The argument is a very strange one: on one side, the large blockers wanted to do the obvious and increase the block size. On the other side, the small blockers didn’t want to increase it or wanted to increase it slowly. Strangely, many small blockers admitted that the block size would eventually need to be increased. The arguments of the large blockers are very straightforward. Increase the block size to make Bitcoin more efficient. The arguments of the small blockers are complicated and diverse - their camp was much less unified. Some argued that Bitcoin should never be changed because it would undermine the stability of the system (future changes could lead to crazy things like hyperinflation). Others argued that Bitcoin wasn’t supposed to be a currency, and should just be a science project. Yet others agreed in principle with block size increase, but simply disagreed with every single specific proposal. Although economic self interest would predict that the big blockers should win, in the end, the small blockers won. As a result, Bitcoin is crippled and can only be practically used for large transactions today. The small blockers won by resorting to underhanded tactics. Most notably, they took control of all online Bitcoin discussion forums, and censored everyone who disagreed with them. They also worked with mainstream media journalists to write hit pieces personally attacking all large blockers on unrelated issues. The small backers enjoyed institutional, and government support. I can’t help but suspect that they enjoyed this support from people who did not want to see Bitcoin succeed. Some tech - like Segwit - functionally allowed less data to be transmitted allowing more data to be transmitted within the 1 mb, functionally increasing the maximum block size to 4 mb. However, this tech was too little too late to save Bitcoin. The book is mostly a collection of conference notes, discussions the author had, Reddit, and discord posts. The author does not seriously discuss the potential role of intelligence agencies in influencing the community in either way, or the interest that the government might have in crippling Bitcoin. This is to be expected from authors who haven’t studied intelligence agencies and psyops. However, in this case, his book is crippled by his lack of speculation. If you don’t know at least the basics of Bitcoin already, this book isn’t for you. But if you already know the basics, and want to learn about the niche topic of the blocksize wars, then this is a good book for you. The one thing that I would caution is that I think that although the author attempts to be unbiased, he is clearly a small blocker who discounts “conspiracy theories” out of hand. I wish that the author would take the time to interview ex-intelligence officers and insiders about black ops to familiarize himself with how the government operates in the shadows. |
Thibault SerletMost of my articles are book reviews, but I also write about many other topics. Archives
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