Tuesday morning news drop
The Towers and the Ticking Clock Pull up a map of the Florida coast, drop your finger onto the surface and you’ll almost certainly land on a town or city with its own disaster in the making. According to one recent study, 918,000 of Florida’s condo units are, like the ones in Champlain Towers South, more than 30 years old; many towers were thrown up during the boom years, when oversight was lax, developers were incentivized to prize speed over attention to detail and every permit was a rubber stamp away. Even in the most rigorously built structures, secured to the face of the earth by heavy pylons driven through yards of shifting sand, the coastal environment has inevitably taken its toll. (New York Times)
8 Of The Biggest Investing Myths When you boil it down, there are really only two options for investors: (1) Take more risk (2) Lower your expectations The financial markets are a complex adaptive system but you don’t need to fight complex with complex to succeed. (Wealth of Common Sense)
Don’t Listen to the Matt Damon Crypto Ad What makes it work? Money. The same thing that always makes it work: money, real money. You have PR firms who reach out to agents and reps and money gets negotiated, and we’re talking big money. I mean, a $100 million ad campaign for Crypto.com. I don’t know what Damon got paid, but it’s obviously millions of dollars. (Slate)
It’s Hard to Tell When the Crypto Bubble Will Burst, or If There Is One Crypto prices are highly volatile, as this week’s sell-off showed. But die-hard enthusiasts believe prices will keep soaring in a world where traditional notions of value don’t apply. (New York Times)
I’m an Influencer, and I Think Social Media Is Toxic Teen girls experience an increase in suicidal thoughts after using Instagram. Other studies focused on Instagram’s detrimental effect on eating disorders and body image issues. Seventeen percent of teen girls said that their eating disorders worsened after Instagram use, and 32 percent reported that the app made them feel worse about their bodies. (Slate)
Is this the beginning of Facebook’s downfall? If there’s a single immutable law in human biology, it’s that no one lives forever. The same goes for corporations. The latest big company to confront the fact that the Grim Reaper spares no one and no thing is Meta Platforms, formerly known as Facebook. (Los Angeles Times)
Metaverse real estate sales top $500 million, and are projected to double this year Sales of real estate in the metaverse topped $500 million last year and could double this year, according to investors and analytics firms. “There are big risks, but potentially big rewards,” said Janine Yorio, CEO of Republic Realm, a metaverse real estate investor and advisory firm. So far, real estate sales have been concentrated on the “Big Four” — Sandbox, Decentraland, Cryptovoxels and Somnium. (CNBC)
The Joe Rogan Controversy Has a Deeper Cause Recording artists are angry at Spotify because, in music streaming, there isn’t enough money to go around. (The Atlantic)
Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S. Challenges to books about sexual and racial identity are nothing new in American schools, but the tactics and politicization are. (New York Times)
The Supreme Court is leading a Christian conservative revolution Almost as soon as Justice Barrett was confirmed, the Court handed down a revolutionary “religious liberty” decision. It hasn’t slowed down since. (Vox)
The Betrayal: It took four presidencies for America to finish abandoning Afghanistan. George W. Bush’s attention wandered off soon after American Special Forces rode horseback through the northern mountains and the first schoolgirls gathered in freezing classrooms. Barack Obama, after studying the problem for months, poured in troops and pulled them out in a single ambivalent gesture whose goal was to keep the war on page A13. Donald Trump cut a deal with the Taliban that left the future of the Afghan government, Afghan women, and al Qaeda to fate. It fell to Joe Biden to complete the task. America’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan added moral injury to military failure. But a group of soldiers, veterans, and ordinary citizens came together to try to save Afghan lives and salvage some American honor. (The Atlantic)