Monday morning news drop
A new wave of buyers expected to hit B.C. real estate market Throughout the pandemic, home sales soared, and in some markets, set record prices. Industry insiders say that postpandemic, the B.C. housing market is expected to boom again – driven by Canadians returning home and the federal government’s plan to bring in more than 1.2 million immigrants by 2023. (Globe and Mail)
Farmland Investing: Impact Beyond Returns Farmland is the latest asset class to be revolutionized by the fintech wave. Whether it’s through REITs, commodity ETFs or crowdfunding platforms, farmland sticks out among investors, both in terms of its attractive return on investment and its potential to increase the sustainability of the agriculture sector. (Worth)
How Last Century’s Oil Wells Are Messing With Texas Right Now Ranchers and regulators are contending with uncontrolled leaks from thousands of abandoned oil and gas sites that could render some land “functionally uninhabitable.” (Bloomberg)
How big business exploits small business Companies like Facebook and Uber say they’re supporting small businesses while squashing them. But what can be less obvious is that these same entities are constantly finding new ways to stunt small-business growth to keep new entrants and potential competitors at bay. They also create roadblocks and find ways to extract money and power from small businesses in order to maintain their positions and increase profits. (Vox)
‘A Form of Brainwashing’: China Remakes Hong Kong Neighbors are urged to report on one another. Children are taught to look for traitors. Officials are pressed to pledge their loyalty. (NYT)
When the US risks being leapfrogged: Three decades ago many fretted that Japan was set to overwhelm America’s prowess; now it’s China and the fears are eerily similar (Asia Times)
Reddit Hates Short Sellers, But the Stock Market Needs Them Meme investors may like cutting shorts off at the knees, yet when the goal is setting accurate prices, people betting on shares to fall provide crucial information. (Businessweek)
“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” The distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable — and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. (Teaching American History)
The Forever Virus: A Strategy for the Long Fight Against COVID-19 The virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic is not going away. SARS-CoV-2 cannot be eradicated. Among humans, global herd immunity, once promoted as a singular solution, is unreachable. Most countries simply don’t have enough vaccines to go around, and even in the lucky few with an ample supply, too many people are refusing to get the shot. (Foreign Affairs)
America’s Pot Labs Have A THC Problem America’s legal weed industry sold over $17 billion of pot last year and the industry’s obsession with THC, pot’s most famous intoxicant, has created financial rewards for every marginal increase in THC potency. “THC inflation is pernicious, it’s easy to accomplish and there are strong financial incentives to do it.” (FiveThirtyEight)
Robbing the X-Box Vault - Inside a $10 million gift card cheat A junior Microsoft engineer figured out a nearly perfect Bitcoin generation scheme. (Bloomberg)
Why some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity Researchers who specialize in widely different fields, from climate science to philosophy, make the case that academics should treat the study of technology’s large-scale impact on society as a “crisis discipline.” A crisis discipline is a field in which scientists across different fields work quickly to address an urgent societal problem — like how conservation biology tries to protect endangered species or climate science research aims to stop global warming. (Vox)
The social media influencers are just getting started Don’t believe rumours of their decline and imminent extinction. A revolutionary new digital marketplace is emerging, which will be dominated by content “creators” defined by their authenticity, transparency and values (Tortoise)
The Internet Is Rotting: Too much has been lost already. Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. But the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. (The Atlantic)
Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare How the pop star’s father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life—and have held on to it for thirteen years. (New Yorker)