Monday morning news drop
Inflation in the 21st Century Taking Down the Inflationary Straw Man of the 1970s Four decades of relative fiscal austerity in the United States, coupled with accelerating globalization and technological development, have produced a disinflationary-to-deflationary tendency – extending from prices to labor incomes – that only substantial amounts of targeted federal spending can restore to equilibrium. With sustained levels of accelerating inflation being very unlikely. (Cornell Research Academy of Development, Law, and Economics)
Five Traders Tell Us How to Survive a World of Disrupted Markets Trading requires constant vigilance and the ability to adapt and profit from disruptions. But what happens when the act of trading itself is disrupted? To get a glimpse of the life of a trader in 2021, Bloomberg Markets interviewed traders, quizzed them about how they got into the business, what their typical day is like, how their market and investing strategy is changing, and what advice they’d give to budding traders. (Bloomberg)
Amazon copied products and rigged search results to promote its own brands, documents show A trove of internal Amazon documents reveals how the e-commerce giant ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoff goods and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India – practices it has denied engaging in. And at least two top Amazon executives reviewed the strategy. (Reuters)
When Nike released this shoe last year, it sold out online within minutes. How did it get so hard to buy sneakers? Welcome to the bot wars. The sneaker craze began nearly four decades ago, with the debut of the first Air Jordan. Back then, sneakerheads who wanted to get their hands on the latest styles had to do so in person. Limited-edition shoes, many of them designed in collaboration with statusy street wear brands, would command long lines outside shops.As the value of these rare sneakers rose, high-profile releases became more chaotic at stores, and sales began to move online. (New York Times)
Homeopathy Doesn’t Work. So Why Do So Many Germans Believe in It? How Natalie Grams, who once abandoned her medical education to study alternative therapies, became Germany’s most prominent homeopathy skeptic. (Businessweek)
Slackers of the World, Unite! Why employees love the software, and bosses don’t Thanks in large part to the coronavirus pandemic, Slack has now seeped out of start-up land and into all corners of corporate America, with more than 169,000 organizations—including 65 of the Fortune 100—paying for its services. It has spawned competitors from Facebook, Microsoft, and Google; all told, chat is now the second-most-common computer activity, after email, according to RescueTime, productivity software that tracks users’ screen time. (The Atlantic)
An Empire of Dying Wells: Old oil and gas sites are a climate menace. Meet the company that owns more of America’s decaying wells than any other. We found methane leaks at most of the places we visited. Some sites showed signs of maintenance in recent months, but others looked more or less abandoned. We saw access roads choked by vegetation, machinery buried under vines and weeds, oil dripping onto the ground, and steel doors rusted off their hinges. That’s not to say the wells were unattended. Mud wasps, spiders, mice, snails, and bees made their homes in them, and a porcupine napped under a brine tank. (Bloomberg Green)
A half-mile installation just took 20,000 pounds of plastic out of the Pacific — proof that ocean garbage can be cleaned The installation is essentially an artificial floating coastline that catches plastic in its fold like a giant arm, then funnels the garbage into a woven funnel-shaped net. Two vessels tow it through the water at about 1.5 knots (slower than normal walking speed), and the ocean current pushes floating garbage toward the giant net. (Business Insider)
Life in the New American Suburbs: A vision of how we’ll live in an age of moderately higher density The suburban model we created was fundamentally unsustainable. The upkeep on the vast sprawl of roads and other infrastructure was hellishly expensive, especially given the country’s excessive construction costs. New knowledge industries created clustering economies that made density more important for productivity, even as social media and a decline in crime made urban life more enjoyable. These pressures have created both a rental crisis for renters and an affordability crisis for first-time homebuyers. (Noahpinion)
Greg LeMond and the Amazing Candy-Colored Dream Bike: The Tour de France legend and anti-doping crusader is building an ultralight ebike that he hopes will be fun as hell to ride—and jumpstart a US carbon-fiber boom. CRAAAACK. The supercore snaps in two. I stare wide-eyed at him before he laughs, gamely. In fairness to the supercore, LeMond does have enormous hands. It occurs to me then that, of all the bike materials that LeMond has chosen to become obsessed with, it’s not surprising he has fixated on carbon fiber. It’s a high-performance material, strong and versatile, but it can be surprisingly vulnerable. A lot like LeMond himself, actually. (Wired)
12 Predictions for the Future of Music Let me peer into my crystal ball, and predict the next decade in music. I’m brave (or foolhardy) enough to tell you what I see—but you may want to sit down first. If you earn your living from music, some of these changes might come as a shock. (Ted Gioia)
New Bond Can’t Take On Beijing’s Supervillains A whole genre of geopolitical spy thrillers is now off limits. (Foreign Policy)