This week’s highlights: Inflation, Magic and Broken Toasters
Issue 425
Happy Friday!
Regards,
David
Food for Thought
- NPR – Goodwill Doesn’t Want Your Broken Toaster One cause of this growing trash problem is a phenomenon called wish-cycling, “where people are hoping that something is recyclable and therefore they put it in with their recycling.”
- UCLA – Is the $1 Trillion Coastal Housing Market a Future Financial Crisis? Homebuyers ignore warnings of rising seas; lenders keep lending
- Politico – Amazon knew seller data was used to boost company sales Internal report flagged lack of controls over access to seller data.
- Fortune – GoodRx helps people afford drugs. But is it improving health care or profiting off a broken system?
- ProPublica – A Crisis of Undiagnosed Cancers Is Emerging in the Pandemic’s Second Year A factory worker didn’t want to call in sick or catch COVID-19, so she tried to ignore the pain. Now she has stage 4 cancer.
Business
- II – Keeping Active Managers From Underperforming May Be This Simple Stock pickers who received “nudges” to reduce the behavioral biases hardwired into their brains left their benchmarks in the dust.
- TII – Inflation is Here. But is it Here to Stay?
- DM – Why Institutional Investors Should Double Down on VC
- Yale – ‘Self-confident yet selfless’: Yale’s David Swensen dies at 67 This is not ‘new’ news but this was a thoughtful in memoriam for David Swensen. It is hard to understate the impact he had at Yale, or on the investing community more broadly.
- Vanity Fair – “The Truth Turns Out to Be Ugly”: How Paul, Weiss Tried to Thwart Reporting on the Caesars Palace Collapse The authors of a new book accuse the prestigious law firm of making unreasonable demands—“things no journalist could or would or should ever do,” says one—and even threatened a lawsuit as they dug into the Caesars mess.
Culture / Tech / Science
- Wired – The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped Covid Kill All pandemic long, scientists brawled over how the virus spreads. Droplets! No, aerosols! At the heart of the fight was a teensy error with huge consequences.
- NYP – Virgin Hyperloop shows off the future: mass transport in floating magnetic pods
- SNL – Gen Z Hospital
- Smithsonian – Teller Reveals His Secrets The smaller, quieter half of the magician duo Penn & Teller writes about how magicians manipulate the human mind
My Book:
When Anything is Possible – Wealth and the Art of Strategic Living
I wrote the book because of a problem I saw and experienced personally. As we pursue our dreams and achieve success, financial wealth is often a natural result.
Yet, the first steps we take to manage this wealth are focused on avoiding negative outcomes (unnecessary taxes, estate issues, losses in the stock market), rather than articulating what we actually want to do with our wealth.
The book is about how we shift from focusing on the things we want to avoid, to the things we want to accomplish with our wealth. Doing so requires a person to articulate 3 key items – Wealth Structure, Wealth Identity and ultimately a Wealth Strategy. The book walks through each of these items in great depth, and guides the reader through a process to develop each.
If you are interested in learning more, visit here and download a free chapter.