Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

> In business theres a term called “Total Adressable Market,” or TAM. This is basically everyone in the world who could buy a product in a given category. What’s the TAM for a product like fishing rods? Well, that would be everyone in the world who likes fishing...

> The reason we mention this is because when Pablo first started selling his art online, he created all his posts strictly in Spanish - his native language. Over time, he felt that this was limiting him, so he started making posts in both English and Spanish, and then eventually just English.

The bit about cutting out Spanish entirely suggests this is not a lesson in maximizing one’s TAM

I had one interesting thought while reading that section.

It seems that a lot of effort has been put into tooling for translating to and from English. It's probably much more effort invested than for other languages, so by using English he actually is increasing his TAM because the translation tools are better adapted to many other languages from English.

Or to put it another way:

Spanish can understand English.

English can't understand Spanish.

Speaking English you can communicate with English and Spanish without also speaking Spanish, kill two birds with one stone.

The virtues of a lingua franca.

Funny how dominant languages of the past have died but now the lingua angla feels forever. I wonder if that's how it feels to be at the height of some culture's age: it feels immortal. Then it falls and is only remembered as the past: either as humorous, or as sophisticated, but not meant for normal use. We shall cement this one by creating AIs in the American image.

The same can be said for empires in general. Dominance seems forever until it isn't, and often the "higher you go the faster you fall" idea plays out.

There are plenty of signs that the US could be in the midst of its own empire failing. Whether that actually plays out is something we wouldn't know for decades or centuries, but there sure are a lot of parallels to failed empires of the past.

The question we need to ask isn't whether Pax Americana is dying, but who is going to succeed it.

So far it seems like it'll be China on account of there being no other country or bloc able to compete at that level, but that would be very unpleasant for us westerners.

The view from Disunited Nations seems likely. There need be no successor peace. There could just be a broken ocean. Europe, in particular, has long failed to contribute to the peace it prospers in. The US periodically has to go and pacify the place since they are practically barbarians who will start killing each other in massive genocides given a few moments alone. When the US withdraws, weakened and bruised, no doubt they will turn on each other.

They already did, and the US had to blow up a pipeline to keep them in line. But that capability won't last forever.

There's a very real question hidden in there though, is it even the US's role to "pacify" the "barbarians"?

There's a lot rolled up in such a small idea. What makes another population barbarians, and how is it so different from the US? Assuming there are groups of adversarial barbarians around the world, why should the US step in to "fix" it and how can they even define what the fix is?