Friday morning articles
Wall Street’s 2023 Outlook for Stocks: There’s hundreds of pages of research and analysis that come with these strategists’ forecast. The general themes: Most Wall Street firms expect the U.S. economy to go into recession some time in 2023. Many believe forecasts for 2023 earnings have more room to get cut, and some believe those downward revisions mean lots of volatility for stocks in the early part of 2023. (TKer)
Cutting-edge tech made this tiny country a major exporter of food: The Netherlands has used advances in vertical farming, seed technology and robotics to become a global model. (Washington Post)
The dirty road to clean energy: how China’s electric vehicle boom is ravaging the environment (Rest Of World)
Green Factories Are Changing Minds in More Conservative US States: At least $25.7 billion of clean-energy factories are in the works, and the jobs they generate are winning over more Americans to solar, batteries and EVs. (Bloomberg)
How can you tell if the company you’re interviewing with is rotten on the inside? How can you tell the companies who are earnestly trying to improve apart from the ones who sound all polished and healthy from the outside, whilst rotting on the inside? (Charity WTF)
Where Does All the Cardboard Come From? I Had to Know: I Had to Know. Entire forests and enormous factories running 24/7 can barely keep up with demand. This is how the cardboard economy works. (New York Times Magazine)
The Myth of the 25-Year-Old Brain: A powerful idea about human development stormed pop culture and changed how we see one another. It’s mostly bunk. (Slate)
The Sunset: There are plenty of reasons to see nursing homes as sad, neglectful places. There are also reasons to see them as something else entirely. (Longreads)
How centuries-old whaling logs are filling gaps in our climate knowledge: Whalers from the 18th and 19th centuries are helping 21st Century scientists on climate change. (Grist)
A Bestiary of Loss: According to many ecologists, we are in the midst of a new mass extinction event. And unlike any other in the Earth’s 4.54 billion year history, this one is caused by a single species of primate: humans. (Public Domain Review)
It’s Public Land. But the Public Can’t Reach It. A navigation app that illuminates public land within privately held property has supercharged the question of who gets to go where. (New York Times)
An engineering marvel just saved Venice from a flood. What about when seas rise? Three years ago, a historic rush of water surged into this city, inundating restaurants and churches, tossing boats onto streets, and leaving Venetians distressed about a future with ever more extreme events. But this past week, one of those events arrived — a tide nearly as large as 2019’s — and residents barely noticed. The city was spared from disaster because of a $6 billion engineering project designed to protect Venice from mass flooding and the exhausting cycle of cleanup and recovery. (Washington Post)
Building Fast and Slow: The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center (Part I) The Empire State Building was completed in 1931. At a height of 1250 feet, it was the world’s tallest building, exceeding the recently completed Chrysler building by 202 feet. It would hold that title for the next 39 years, until 1970 when it was surpassed in height by another New York skyscraper, the under-construction World Trade Center, which would reach a height of 1368 feet on the North Tower. (Construction Physics)
The dirty road to clean energy: how China’s electric vehicle boom is ravaging the environment: In neighboring Indonesia, nickel extraction is causing environmental and social devastation. (Rest Of World)
Fossil fuel industry dupes media, quietly funds non-profits to block renewable energy: Its not wealthy residents blocking clean energy development, its groups funded by a far-right think tank that receives funding from fossil fuel companies and billionaires. (Popular Information)
Here Come the Crypto Hypocrites: Don’t believe anyone who says the FTX crash was the regulators’ fault. (The Atlantic)
Let crypto burn: Just say no to legitimacy-inferring regulation. (Financial Times Alphaville)
Elon Musk gambled big on Twitter. Tesla is going to pay the price. So now the question becomes: How does Musk keep his new purchase afloat? Having observed Musk in action for years there is one troubling option I suspect he may pursue: raid Tesla. But siphoning cash from Tesla, Musk’s only profitable company, just as serious competition is toppling its dominance, should concern Tesla’s investors. And given his obsession with Twitter, they may well ask: How far will Elon go to save Twitter at Tesla’s expense? (Business Insider)
The (American) age of ETFs: Rocky markets have meant that this is a bad year for fund launches in general, with only 576 open-ended funds inaugurated in 2022, according to Morningstar. That is the lowest in at least a decade. But the ETF keeps gobbling up market share. So far this year there have been 407 ETFs launched in the US compared just 169 other types of open-ended funds — smashing past the previous record. (Financial Times Alphaville) see also How a Basket of ETFs Mimicked the Performance of Top Hedge Funds: Research shows how allocators can benefit from the thinking of top managers, without the high costs and other downsides. (Institutional Investor)
The best financial strategies for surviving a recession in 2023 from 3 top advisers: The past 12 months featured some relatively grim milestones—including the highest inflation in four decades and the first truly durable bear market since the Great Recession. That concatenation of bad news poses two challenges for investing pros. (Fortune)
11 Hours With Sam Bankman-Fried: Inside the Bahamian Penthouse After FTX’s Fall Billions of dollars of customer money is missing, investigators are circling, and the 30-year-old ex-CEO admits his company broke its own rules. (Businessweek)
A forgotten banking scandal suggests FTX is the tip of the crypto iceberg: Fraud, money laundering, and corruption on a global scale, yet regulators seem asleep at the wheel. This has happened before… (Dirty Bubble Media)
‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’ at 35: An Oral History of One of the Most Beloved Road Movies Ever Made. Starring Steve Martin and John Candy, the John Hughes road trip comedy had a nearly four-hour runtime at one point. Hear from cast, crew, and Hughes’ family about the classic. (Vanity Fair)
Arrives late, pours your wine and eats onions – 56 dating red flags that should send you running: Our guide to the bad signs you can’t afford to ignore. (The Guardian)
Who Could Have Possibly Predicted The Liver King Guy Was Juicing? Having read all that, would you be surprised to learn that this guy is extremely lying about the source of his pneumatic physique? Johnson has defended his nattyness on a bunch of the aforementioned dumb-guy podcasts, joking, “I’ll be honest, I take PEDs: I prioritize, execute and dominate every fucking morning.” (Defector)