Wednesday morning news drop
Doing Paid Sick Leave Right It’s not just about the number of days. BC should set the highest standard for workers’ rights. (Tyee)
How tropical storms and hurricanes have hit U.S. shores with unparalleled frequency A record 18 storms and hurricanes have made landfall in the past two years; climate change could increase these stormy stretches in coming decades (Washington Post)
Will TikTok Make You Buy It? In three short years, TikTok has grown in the public imagination from an app for dancing teens into an all-purpose cultural powerhouse, driving trends in music, food, news and politics, and changing the way people communicate online. In the process, it’s also become something else: a place where people buy things. Lots of them. Give any social media platform long enough, and it turns into a mall. (New York Times)
Private Equity is Notoriously Opaque. Researchers and Investors Say This is No Longer OK. Without true transparency, it’s hard to prove definitively that private equity works and to make the economic case for it. (Institutional Investor)
I Collect Cashflows I collect shares of businesses. Been doing it since my late teens. Not always successfully. I use a certain type of non fungible token called a stock certificate for this. I never lay hands on the certificate, it’s in digital form, living somewhere in the multiverse. A company called DTC makes sure the shares I’ve bought are the shares I get. And then I hold them. Sometimes I will trade them for digital dollars that I also don’t ever see or touch, but then soon after I am trading those dollars for another pile of virtual stock certificates. People will say “You’re crazy, why would you want to buy a fraction of a company you will never touch and hold in your hands?” And I’m like “You just don’t understand.” (Reformed Broker)
The fractionalization of everything: Sophisticated Wall Street investors have been using fractionalization for years to mix and match intricate securities from commercial real estate to agriculture futures. Now, fractionalization is making its way to the general public in just about every way imaginable. One interesting caveat to most fractional investments aimed at retail investors is that buyers don’t actually own the things they buy. They’re simply buying a stake in the asset, betting that it will rise in value and they’ll be able to sell their portion at a higher price than what they paid. (Vox)
We have no theory of inflation Inflation is the biggest debate in macro. The models don’t work. Forecasting is hard. Forecasting inflation is especially tricky. And economists are, in the main, bad at it. This is, as one might expect, an especially unhappy problem for the economists working in central banks who are guiding policy which is itself targeting a given rate of inflation. (Value Added)
After OnlyFans: Sex Workers Search for a Safe Online Platform How the site’s ban on adult work, followed by a backlash-induced reversal, highlights the precarious, stigmatized nature of sex work. (Tyee)
‘A magic world’: An oral history of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ ‘Blood Sugar Sex Magik’ “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” featuring “Under the Bridge,” “Breaking the Girl” and “Give It Away,” was released on Sept. 24, 1991, the same day as Nirvana’s “Nevermind.” It would become the Chili Peppers’ critical and commercial breakthrough, eventually selling more than 7 million copies. “Before ‘Blood Sugar,’” says Kiedis, “we were relatively unknown.” After, he continues, “I remember walking down my street in the Hills and cars driving by and hearing our songs coming out of the radio.” (Los Angeles Times)