Monday morning news drop
Underestimating the Red Queen Organisms allocate energy between growth and maintenance and repair. They stop growing when maintenance requires all of the energy. Substitute capital for energy and companies appear to follow a similar trajectory. This is important because you can anticipate a company’s growth only if you understand how much capital it spends on growth versus maintenance. (Morgan Stanley)
Some Things I Remind Myself During Market Corrections It’s intellectually stimulating to work through these reasons if you like talking about the markets (like I do). But the reasons for the correction doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes stocks go down. It happens. You don’t know when and you don’t know why but you know it’s going to happen. Plan accordingly. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
An Anatomy of Bitcoin Price Manipulation While cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity and market capitalization, the volatility of the price has not diminished. One recurrent feature of crypto price is the BART pattern, where periods of low volatility are punctuated by spikes of extreme volatility. The name comes from the resemblance to Bart Simpson’s head: (Single Lunch)
Cryptocurrency Is a Giant Ponzi Scheme Cryptocurrency is not merely a bad investment or speculative bubble. It’s worse than that: it’s a full-on fraud. (Jacobin)
Biden’s offshore wind plan is also a jobs plan Europe has already invested in offshore wind power. Now the US is getting onboard. (Vox)
Green Jobs Have a Nice Future … But Fossil Fuel Work Will Persist While oil and gas workforces are projected to shrink, they aren’t expected to vanish for some time. (Chief Investment Officer)
Why more Americans than ever are starting their own businesses Workers are quitting their jobs to become their own bosses. (Vox)
Fake vaccine cards are everywhere. It’s a public health nightmare. Thousands of fake vaccine card vendors threaten to gut the effectiveness of U.S. vaccine mandates, a Grid investigation reveals. Major platforms and app stores aren’t stopping them, law enforcement isn’t catching them, and political leaders are AWOL. (Grid)
Big Hot Sauce Wants More Hot Sauce Spice king McCormick’s acquisitions of Frank’s RedHot and Cholula give it the edge to own “the next ketchup.” McCormick has a way to go before it can make hot sauce as big as ketchup. The latter market is nearly $2 billion larger worldwide, according to Euromonitor. Whereas Heinz faces relatively little competition for its flagship product, the hot sauce business is full of small-batch sellers, private labels marketed by grocery stores, and family-led brands with loyal followings such as McIlhenny’s Tabasco, Huy Fong sriracha, Baumer’s Crystal, and Tapatío, all of which seem to have the same objective as McCormick. (Businessweek)
Microsoft avoided the latest round of Big Tech antitrust scrutiny. Then it bought a company for $69 billion. Microsoft has had a relatively smooth ride through the scrutiny and criticism that has plagued its four Big Tech rivals — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google — over the last few years, even though it’s worth more than most of them. This conspicuous merger threatens to upend that. How Microsoft’s 20-year-old antitrust battle prepared it for today’s techlash. (Vox)
Was Larry Summers Right All Along? How the ultimate Establishment figure became the preeminent critic of the Biden era’s economic consensus. (New York Magazine)
Plastic-Free Shopping Is Going Mainstream A partnership between America’s largest supermarket chain and a reusable packaging company is the latest sign that no-waste shopping is catching on. (Reasons To Be Cheerful)
Why oil and gas heating bans for new homes are a growing trend With growing push toward electric heating, gas industry touts carbon-neutral gas (CBC)
Led Zeppelin Gets Into Your Soul The musicians were diabolically bad as people, and satanically good as performers. Led Zeppelin’s talent and daring went way beyond the capabilities of the headbanging deadweights who hung off the group’s example in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Yes, Led Zeppelin was “heavy”—to hear “Communication Breakdown” or “Good Times Bad Times” or “Rock and Roll” or “Black Dog” or “Dazed and Confused” for the first time was to hear danger, perilous boundaries, the dirty roar on the other side of music. Page got extraordinary kinds of distortion and fuzz from his guitar, and Bonham hit his snare and his gigantic bass drum killingly. But I liked the fact that Led Zeppelin’s members were, above all, heavy musicians; their talents as virtuoso performers made sense in the largely classical musical world that had shaped me. (NewYorker)