Inflation Pressure, Growth Slump, Dead Trees, ESG, and Conner McDavid

Wednesday morning news drop

• Inflation pressure hits consumers as firms pass along higher costs An increasing number of companies are passing along higher input costs to consumers, a sign of inflationary pressure as the economy recovers from the pandemic. (Globe and Mail)

• What’s behind the growth slump? Takeaways from census data Our past decade’s sluggish rate had similar beginnings in the long shadow of the Great Recession. The drawn-out recovery saw many young adults struggling to enter the job market, delaying marriage and starting a family. That dealt a blow to the nation’s birthrate. Then the pandemic hit last year and made matters worse. (AP)

• Why Dead Trees Are ‘the Hottest Commodity on the Planet’ Blame climate change, wildfires, hungry beetles … and Millennial home buyers. (The Atlantic)

• Is ESG Outperformance Just an Illusion? Research suggests the excess returns delivered by ESG funds come from a source other than companies’ environmental, social, and governance records. (Institutional Investor)

• Whose Decline is it Anyway? I recently read this Wall Street Journal article about three photographers in California who became day traders during the pandemic. Since photography work was so hard to come by, they thought they would have more luck if they teamed up and took on the stock market. Initially, their plan worked. Trading on Robinhood was making them more money than they ever earned as photographers. (Of Dollars and Data)

• Why Connor McDavid is in league of his own with career-best season The best player on the planet is having the best season of his career and he put on an absolute clinic Monday night in Winnipeg. (Sportsnet)

House Hunt Victoria, KPMG Tax Scheme, Bullish Markets, and Anthony Fauci

Tuesday morning news drop

• KPMG disputes leaked emails linking firm to offshore companies suspected in massive Ponzi scheme Isle of Man shell companies protecting identity of wealthy Canadians and KPMG is disputing emails from an offshore leak of financial data that say the accounting firm helped set up four companies in the Isle of Man that experts believe were later involved with a massive fraud operating out of Montreal (CBC)

• Now That Everyone Is Bullish, Be Cautious The economy and the stock market have churned out spectacular numbers, and investor optimism is high. But don’t forget to hedge your bets. (New York Times)

• The Woman Who Shattered the Myth of the Free Market Joan Robinson upended the misogynistic good-old-boys’ network of economists and devised theories around competition and labor vital to the antitrust debates of today. (New York Times)

• The Next Chapter of Money: The Greatest Story Ever Told In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari describes humans (aka homo sapiens) as being different from other animals in one very distinct way: We have the ability to create, tell, and remember stories. Money is also a story. Humans created currency. Gold was an abundant and malleable metal that could easily be forged into coins, which were easy to carry around and trade. But the glue that bound these monetary systems together was belief in a common story; that the coins had a specific value.(The Belle Curve)

• ‘Insanely cheap energy’: how solar power continues to shock the world Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might made solar power the cheapest power humanity has seen – and no one saw it coming (The Guardian)

• Rich Americans Face Biden Tax Hike With Anger, Denial and Grief Pressure has been building to raise levies on the wealthy after decades of tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the top 1%. Politicians at the national and state levels have recently proposed or passed higher rates, but the measures were largely focused on income taxes. (Bloomberg)

• Jack Ma Shows Why China’s Tycoons Keep Quiet High-profile business leaders have been detained, sidelined or silenced as the Communist Party moves forcefully to keep companies in line. Today, the best strategy is to lie low. (New York Times)

• Apple’s M1 Positioning Mocks the Entire x86 Business Model Apple is selling a single CPU across a wider range of products than any competing Intel or AMD CPU is ever sold. This speaks volumes as to what Apple believes it has its hands on, namely: 4+4 CPU architecture, with four high-performance CPU cores and four high-efficiency CPU cores; fast enough at the quad-core level while drawing so little power, it can also be sold in a laptop. (ExtremeTech)

• The secretary who turned Liquid Paper into a multimillion-dollar business Bette Nesmith Graham invented one of the most popular office supplies of the 20th century. Today, she’s largely been forgotten (The Hustle)

• Anthony Fauci Isn’t Perfect. He’s Closer Than Most of Us. Shocker of shockers: Fauci isn’t perfect. But he has been perfectly sincere, perfectly patient, a professional standing resolutely outside so many of the worst currents of American life. More than that, he has been essential. We owe him an immeasurable debt of gratitude, not the mind-boggling magnitude of grief that he gets. (New York Times Magazine)

• Posh French Winemakers Pounce on Big American Vineyard Selloff European vintners are finding toeholds in the U.S. just as some of America’s oldest wineries are ready to cash in. (Bloomberg)

• The death of family-affordable housing Single family houses aren’t affordable to the average family, that it hasn’t been that way for years or decades, and that there’s no reason to believe they will get anything but less affordable in the long term. That doesn’t mean that prices can’t come down or they can’t get more affordable in the short term – they can and have in the past – but on the order of decades they will get less and less affordable as they become a smaller and smaller proportion of the total housing stock. (House Hunt Victoria)

Robinhood Trading, Jet Blue, Climate Change, and McDavid's 100 Point Season

Monday morning news drop

• The prosecutors of Derek Chauvin Scott Pelley speaks with Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and the prosecutorial team that convicted Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. (60 Minutes)

• How Robinhood Made Trading Easy—and Maybe Even Too Hard to Resist The app popularized zero-commission brokerage, eventually forcing its major competitors to follow, and introduced millions of millennials and Gen Zers to the market. It’s also attracted critics, including U.S. lawmakers and a state securities regulator, who say Robinhood makes investing very real money feel too much like a game and encourages frequent trading by its novice users. Is the app that brought zero-commission trades and a mobile-first design to millions of investors too good at what it does? (Bloomberg)

• The 4 Types of Robinhood Traders It’s important to remember not every Robinhood trader is the same. This new hoard of active investors isn’t all YOLO-ing their entire paychecks or stimulus payments. I see 4 different types of Robinhood traders. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The Price of Nostalgia: America’s Self-Defeating Economic Retreat What the U.S. economy needs now is greater exposure to pressure from abroad, not protectionist barriers or attempts to rescue specific industries in specific places. Instead of demonizing the changes brought about by international competition, the U.S. government needs to enact domestic policies that credibly enable workers to believe in a future that is not tied to their local employment prospects. The safety net should be broader and apply to people regardless of whether they have a job and no matter where they live. It is the self-deluding withdrawal from the international economy over the last 20 years that has failed American workers, not globalization itself. (Foreign Affairs)

• JetBlue’s Founder Is Preparing to Launch a New Airline in a Global Pandemic In the present environment, comfort with upheaval is an asset. It would be wrong to call the airline industry stable, with its rich history of bankruptcies, takeovers, and ruinous price wars—but it’s very hard to break into. David Neeleman has made his career and fortune doing just that. “After deregulation, the failure rate of new airlines has been in the mid-90s or up. Most people have done one new entrant—and failed. A few have maybe tried another one. David has been involved in four successful startups. It’s unmatched.” (Businessweek)

• Cities Are Our Best Hope for Surviving Climate Change: Whatever Climate Change Does to the World, Cities Will Be Hit Hardest: Cities currently consume two-thirds of the global energy supply and generate three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Luckily for human civilization, they’re also extraordinarily motivated to minimize their cost to the climate—and quickly. Because cities are uniquely vulnerable to climate change, they’re also likely to be remade the fastest by the human need to survive and eventually thrive on a warmer planet. Cities are made of cement, glass, and steel. They absorb heat and repel water. That’s a big problem as the world warms and seas rise (CityLab)

• Liz Cheney vs. MAGA: The Wyoming congresswoman challenged Republicans to turn away from Trump after Jan. 6. Instead, they turned on her. (New York Times Magazine)

• The Men Who Turned Slavery Into Big Business The domestic slave trade was no sideshow in our history, and slave traders were not bit players on the stage. (The Atlantic)

• Can America’s Road Builders Break the Highway Habit? The Biden infrastructure plan pledges a rethink of federal transportation priorities. But the government agencies that build and maintain U.S. highways might not all be along for the ride. (Bloomberg)

• The Incredible Rise of North Korea’s Hacking Army The country’s cyber forces have raked in billions of dollars for the regime by pulling off schemes ranging from A.T.M. heists to cryptocurrency thefts. Can they be stopped? (New Yorker)

• Gretzky reflects on McDavid's quest to defy odds with 100-point season They told Wayne Gretzky it couldn’t be done, too. And then they gave up telling him anything. As we prepare to follow Connor McDavid’s quest for 100 points in a 56-game season — something many believed could not be done — we should be cautious when we say things like, “Well, how’s he going to average over two points per game in his final 11 games?” (Sportsnet)

Videos of the Week, Sooke Harbour House, TikTok, Covid, and Environmental Victories

Friday morning news drop and the videos of the week

• The Man Who Stole a Hotel A fugitive from the US started fresh on Vancouver Island—then bilked new victims out of millions of dollars while law enforcement refused to act. (Capital Daily)

• How TikTok Chooses Which Songs Go Viral The app’s hits seem to emerge organically, but the success of artists like Megan Thee Stallion reveals a highly managed curation process. (BusinessWeek)

• The cost of a single tulip bulb surged to the same price as a mansion 400 years ago: are NFTs the ‘tulipmania’ of the 21st century? Similarities between the new digital technology craze in the art world and the surge in value of tulips in 17th-century Holland suggest that it could all end in (real) tears (Art Newspaper)

• The Two Most Underappreciated Forces Driving Markets Today Target date retirement funds collectively manage roughly $3 trillion. These funds didn’t exist in the past. People were more or less flying blind when it came to retirement planning with their money. This same thing is happening to baby boomer portfolios that are self-managed or managed by financial advisors as well. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• Just because you can work from home doesn’t mean you’ll be allowed to This summer, offices are opening on an optional basis with expectations for workers to be present this fall. The most flexibility will go to high-skilled knowledge workers, whose jobs are mediated by computer. They will be much more likely than before the pandemic to be allowed to work from home at least some of the time in what’s called the hybrid work model. But everything from which employees can work from home to the number of days they can do so will depend on a number of factors, including their job, company, and industry. (Recode)

• Apple, Spotify and the New Battle Over Who Wins Podcasting Podcasts exploded in popularity during the lockdown and are on track to bring in more than $1 billion in U.S. ad revenue this year (Wall Street Journal)

• B.C.’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout not enough to bring back normal life by fall: report Only 51% of the population will be protected under B.C.’s current rollout, SFU professors say more vaccinations are needed to achieve herd immunity (Simon Fraser University)

• CR Engineers Show a Tesla Will Drive With No One in the Driver’s Seat Consumer Reports engineers easily tricked our Tesla Model Y this week so that it could drive on Autopilot, the automaker’s driver assistance feature, without anyone in the driver’s seat—a scenario that would present extreme danger if it were repeated on public roads. Over several trips across our half-mile closed test track, our Model Y automatically steered along painted lane lines, but the system did not send out a warning or indicate in any way that the driver’s seat was empty. (Consumer Reports)

• 51 years of environmental victories, in photos Clean skies the world experienced as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. As people holed up at home and vehicles vacated the roads, annual global energy-related emissions fell 5.8 percent, more than in any year since WWII, according to the International Energy Agency. The cleaner air was just one of the things about this strange and terrible year that made many people think harder about how humans manage the global environment—and about the possibility and urgent need of doing better (National Geographic)

KEVIN PERAZA IN BARCELONA!

Danny MacAskill: REAL MTB 2021 | World of X Games

Brandon Semenuk: REAL MTB 2021 | World of X Games

Brage Vestavik: REAL MTB 2021 | World of X Games

DYLAN STARK REAL HEAT 2021 VIDEO PART Mountain biking and bmx with a classic skate style. 9 minutes of heavy clips filmed over some time

Dakota Roche | Bay Roam To pedal about the greater San Francisco area in search of the spots less travelled in an unsystematic, but thorough way. And, if you’re Monster Energy’s Dakota Roche, you blast through every piece of spot gold with confidence, power, and speed…the way it should be done. Follow the one and only Dak as he cuts into the streets of SF in his newest edit, Bay Roam.

ABOVE BELOW | NATHAN WILLIAMS We are still very unsure as to which way Nathan Williams grinds and spins, this is in no way helped by his ground breaking ABOVE Section! You need to check this out now for a master class in BMX street riding.

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Investment Gambling, Kobe and Nike, Money Laundering, Super League and Steph Curry

Thursday morning news drop

• There’s Nothing to Do Except Gamble Welcome to the non-fungible, memeified, cryptodenominated, degenerate future of finance. (New Yorker)

• Kobe Bryant’s Nike Contract Expired. The Implications Are Complex. The end of the deal has no analogue in basketball or sneaker history, opening a hole in the market as Bryant’s shoes have been used heavily by N.B.A. athletes and have seen high demand among the public since his death. (New York Times)

• Dirty Dollars Accused money launderers left a path of bankrupt factories, unpaid taxes, shuttered buildings and hundreds of steelworkers out of jobs (News Interactive)

• How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact. (The Atlantic)

• Seth Rogen and the Secret to Happiness How the comedian (and director, writer, ceramist and weed entrepreneur) has made a career out of mining the pitfalls and possibilities of adolescence. (New York Times)

• The Importance of Seizing on the Post-Super League Moment The backlash to the Super League was definitive and demonstrable, but that doesn't mean all is well. What happens next will dictate the future of the sport. (Sports Illustrated)

• This Is the Hottest That Stephen Curry Has Ever Been Five years after he revolutionized basketball, the NBA’s best shooter is still getting better (Wall Street Journal)

• Federal budget gives money to all, without a path to real economic growth The great Paul Martin budget of 1995 took only 197 pages to rescue Canada’s finances from disaster, while the landmark tax reform budgets of the late 1980s averaged less than 120. By comparison, this budget takes more than 200 pages just to describe its impact on gender equality, inclusion and other “quality of life” measures. (Globe and Mail)

The B.C. government will go deep into the red again this year as it ramps up spending on health, seniors and businesses to help people survive the COVID-19 pandemic while laying the groundwork for economic recovery. Some say the plan lacks a long-term vision to support economic growth and stimulate innovation during and after the pandemic was lacking. While others say that the economy is already rebounding and does not need such large deficits.

The National Debt: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) The national debt has long been portrayed as a burden we’re placing on future generations. John Oliver discusses how national debt works, why people are so concerned about it, and why it might be more helpful that you think.

2021 BC Budget, Super League Soccer, Netflix, and Vans Sustainability Goals

Wednesday morning news drop

• B.C. budget projects billion dollar deficits in each of the next 3 years as part of COVID-19 Total debt to rise from $87 billion to $127 billion in the next 3 years (CBC)

• B.C. Budget 2021: The winners in government pandemic spending spree Construction and health workers to benefit from B.C. budget (Vancouver Sun)

• Bank of Canada Set to Dial Back Bond Buying: Decision-Day Guide The Bank of Canada is poised to pare back its asset purchases amid a stronger-than-expected economic recovery, taking one of the biggest steps yet by a developed country to reduce emergency levels of monetary stimulus. (Bloomberg)

• Companies can’t stop talking about higher costs Pent-up demand due to the pandemic and elevated household savings suggest price increases in certain end markets may be digested initially, but for how long? While it’s premature to draw conclusions around corporates’ ability to pass on costs into the reopening, we think this is a potential risk to margin expectations worth monitoring. (yahoo.finance)

• Why Should Equities Be Fairly Valued? Cheap or expensive: The underlying view seems to be ‘the market’ will identify this anomaly, creating the opportunity to profit from a revaluation. This presumes most investors are engaged in an effort to calculate the fair value of an asset, they are just coming up with different answers. This is some distance from reality. (Behavioural Investment)

• Super League on verge of extinction Atletico Madrid, Inter Milan, Juventus, and AC Milan all drop out on Wednesday (CBC)

• Battle Over Super League Begins With Letters, Threats and Banners The founding members of a league that would reshape soccer have warned the sport’s leaders that they will fight any effort to block their plans (New York Times)

• You Are In or You Are Out,’ FIFA Tells Super League Clubs As opposition mounts to a breakaway European league, Paris St.-Germain opted out and an Italian team president called a rival backing the plan “a Judas.” (New York Times)

• Boxing industry's issues will remain long after the novelty of Jake Paul wears off

  Popular novelty bouts don't affect boxing's entrenched self-sabotage habit (CBC)

• The state of the plant-based food industry Plant-based meat sales grew by 45 percent and plant-based milk sales were up 20 percent from 2019. We’re eating more meatless meat than ever, but it’s still not much. (Vox)

• Netflix Is Losing Market Share. But Is It Losing Customers? Netflix’s share of the online video market is shrinking. That’s the takeaway from two new reports out this past week, the first of which comes from Parrot Analytics, a startup that measures audience interest in online TV shows. According to Parrot, Netflix accounted for about half of the original series people around the world wanted to watch online in the first quarter of 2021. (Bloomberg)

• Vans Announces New Sustainability Goals and Initiatives Vans recently announced new global commitments to environmental sustainability and responsibility that will be achieved by 2030. Vans will move towards creating circular products and systems that use regenerative and recycled materials, designed to reduce waste and keep products in use and out of landfills. (Kicks on Fire)

Federal Budget, Tax Highlights, Stock Markets, McDonalds Ice Cream, and 420 Turns 50

Tuesday morning news drop

• Federal budget 2021 highlights: Child care, recovery benefits, OAS increases – everything you need to know The federal budget is targeting virtually every voting bloc, with billions of dollars in stimulus spending aimed at spurring economic growth (Globe and Mail)

• Federal Budget Tax Highlights On April 19, 2021, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland tabled Canada’s federal budget. Read CPA Canada’s Federal Budget Tax Highlights to learn about the most important tax changes announced this year. (CPABC)

• What's happening to Vancouver Island's local food supply? Rising land prices are keeping young people out of farming. Local groups, farmers and entrepreneurs are trying to change that (Capital Daily)

• The Craziest Market I’ve Ever Seen I was only 10 years old when the DotCom bubble was at its peak. Though I didn’t invest through that era, I feel like I finally understand it now. Not because I believe we are in a similar type of bubble today, but because I have now seen valuations that I cannot rationalize whatsoever. Let’s take a moment to review what I’m talking about. (Of Dollars and Data)

• Have Bear Markets Changed Forever? We’ve never seen a bear market like the one we just lived through. Nothing comes close in terms of how quickly it started and how quickly it ended. (Irrelevant Investor)

• They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out. (Wired)

• Ask an Expert: What’s the Future of Oil in Canada? The Keystone XL pipeline has been cancelled. What happens next? (Walrus)

• Marijuana by the numbers as 420, the unofficial high holiday, turns 50 As more states legalize recreational weed, 91% of U.S. adults say marijuana should be legal in some form; 60% approve of recreational use. One in four Americans used cannabis in some form during the past 12 months. Recreational marijuana use is now legal in 17 states and Washington D.C., with New Mexico, Virginia and New York the most recent to approve it. Legal U.S. weed sales will hit $28.3 billion in 2022, up from $22.8 billion this year, a 24% gain (Chicago Tribune)

• What Will Happen to All the Empty Office Buildings and Hotels? Commercial real estate has been hit hard by the pandemic, but there are plans to convert some of the now empty spaces into apartment buildings. In the development world, top-to-bottom makeovers can take years, and a robust recovery could make landlords think twice about reinventions. (New York Times)

• Half of US adults have received at least one COVID-19 shot Almost 130 million people 18 or older have received at least one dose of a vaccine, or 50.4% of the total adult population, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Almost 84 million adults, or about 32.5% of the population, have been fully vaccinated. (AP)’

• Least Vaccinated U.S. Counties Have Something in Common: Trump Voters The disparity in vaccination rates has so far mainly broken down along political lines. A willingness to receive a vaccine and actual vaccination rates to date were lower, on average, in counties where a majority of residents voted to re-elect former President Donald J. Trump in 2020. The phenomenon has left some places with a shortage of supply and others with a glut. (New York Times)

• Whistleblower Says Facebook Ignored Global Political Manipulation “I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions. I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count. I Have Blood on My Hands” (BuzzFeed)

House Hunt Victoria, Investing Fraud, VanVleet, Jake Paul, and John Madden

Monday morning news drop

• Shiller: Looking Back at the First Roaring Twenties To understand where the stock market may be heading, a Nobel laureate examines the pop culture of one of the greatest bull markets in history. (New York Times)

• “There Was No Money Machine That Could Pay These Returns.” The inside story of how Jim Vos and his team at Aksia helped unspool the mystery of Bernie Madoff. (Institutional Investor)

• Fraud, Short Sellers & Media Frauds and bad businesses usually aren’t exposed until markets fall and investors became more skeptical and conservative. When the returns are good and money is being made, there is less incentive for investors to scrutinize their holdings. If returns go south, and investors lose money, however, investors begin investigating their positions more thoroughly. The infamous Worldcom fiasco after the Dot Com crash, and Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme blowing up amid the Great Financial Crisis are prime examples. (Investor Amnesia)

• Feeding Hate With Video: A Former Alt-Right YouTuber Explains His Methods Focus on conflict. Feed the algorithm. Make sure whatever you produce reinforces a narrative. Don’t worry if it is true.(New York Times)

• What Octopus Dreams Tell Us About the Evolution of Sleep Understanding how other animals dream could help us figure out why it’s so important to the human brain, and why it may have been preserved throughout history. (Wired)

• Fred VanVleet still adjusting to impure Raptors season It’s been a trying season, to say the least, for just about every member of the Toronto Raptors. A poor start, bad play, awful injury luck, even worse COVID luck, you name it, the Raptors have likely experienced it this season, leading to a 23-34 record and cries for the team to tank the rest of the 16 games it has left from all over the fan base. (Sportsnet)

• Jake Paul’s responsible for the circus sideshow that boxing has become Jake Paul is a clown. I don’t think he’d mind me saying that, because it means I’m talking about him. He’s one of those internet celebrities who make their living being the sort of American people who don’t like Americans think Americans are like. (Globe and Mail)

• The Black Keys Detail Blues Covers Album, Share “Crawling Kingsnake” The duo’s Delta Kream features covers of John Lee Hooker, Fred McDowell, Robert Lee Burnside, and more (Pitchfork)

• Coach, broadcaster, esports icon: Inside the legacy of John Madden Right after the EA team met Madden for the first time, they all went back to their train cars in disbelief at Madden’s prolific deployment of swear words. “I’m not exaggerating, I think every third word out of his mouth is an F-bomb,” Hawkins says. “He is incredibly profane. That’s one of the signatures of how smart John is. To have the self-discipline to never do that on the air, it’s remarkable. He knows how to switch over to a completely different vocabulary.” (ESPN)

• Do bidding wars work? Bidding wars are endemic in the market these days. There’s always some percentage of homes that go over the asking price (in a slow market it’s about 5%) but recently more than half of houses and townhouses have gone over ask, and a third of condos have done the same. (House Hunt Victoria)

Videos of the Week, Business Outlook, Housing, Pandemic Recovery, and Amazon

Videos of the week and the Friday morning news drop

• Business Outlook Survey—Spring 2021 One of the partners at Method participated with the Bank of Canada on the spring Business Outlook Survey. It suggests that business sentiment continues to improve. Businesses reported less uncertainty related to the COVID‑19 pandemic and strengthening demand from weak levels. Still, the recovery remains uneven, with companies tied to high-contact services facing ongoing challenges. (Bank of Canada)

• U.S. housing starts near 15-year high; consumer sentiment rises moderately U.S. homebuilding surged to nearly a 15-year high in March, but soaring lumber prices amid supply constraints could limit builders' capacity to boost production and ease a shortage of homes that is threatening to slow housing market momentum. (Guardian)

• Canadian real-estate market better for foreign investors than locals, admits housing secretary Canada is “a very safe market for foreign investment, but not a great market for Canadians looking for choices around housing,” admits Liberal MP responsible for housing. (Vancouver Sun)

• Fast food over fine dining: What spending data tells us about the pandemic recovery Five charts that show how dramatically the pandemic affected our spending (Recode)

• How This Chinese Vaping Billionaire Became One Of The World’s Richest Women In Three Years Kate Wang, 39, jumped into the ranks of the world’s richest when her vaping company RLX went public on the New York Stock Exchange in January. Now the Procter & Gamble and Uber veteran faces looming threats from Chinese regulators and skeptical investors. (Forbes)

• Five Superpowers: Restraint, Curiosity, Creativity, Patience & Courage (Reformed Broker)

• Is Larry Kudlow Fox Enough for Fox Business? The former Trump official is back in his natural habitat: television. But middling early ratings and the inability — or unwillingness — to go Full Fox suggests that something isn’t right. (Institutional Investor)

• A 23-Year-Old Coder Kept QAnon Online When No One Else Would Nick Lim provides tech support to the U.S. networks of White nationalists and conspiracy theorists banned by the likes of Amazon. (Bloomberg)

• Why Amazon’s Workers Sided With the Company Over a Union Pay, benefits and an aggressive anti-union campaign by the company helped generate votes at a warehouse in Alabama. (New York Times)

Chapter 11 tv 010 - "I used to hate Jake"

Chapter 11 TV - Emo Micky

MASHER: Tony Hawk The Birdman summons Endless Summer vibes on the Big Island with Riley, Keegan and a tight crew for some spine dancing and deep-sea swimming.

Mouth-Watering MTB Creativity | Kriss Kyle Out Of Season “Out of Season” is a time when one pauses whatever they are doing to take a break, recover & chill a bit, but some never stop. They switch it up, letting their creativity run even wilder than usual, aiming for the unexpected.

CULTCREW/ RYOTA MIYAJI - Ryota Miyaji, full of original style. Doing his thing in the streets of Japan. Holding it down for Motocross International

CULTCREW/ JAUME SINTES / AMERICA Our amigo Jaume from BCN did a quick bid over here and put his touch on the streets...Such a refreshing style and nothing but good vibes... Barruin!!

Vans X Federal Presents "Speed Dial" | BMX | VANS

ERIK ELSTRAN - AWESOME BIKING DUDE

Children of the Dust - #1

MTB Street: Unexpected Thursday 50 - The Rise MTB videos

Dunning-Kruger Effect, Inflation, NFTs, Green Building, and Next Gen Batteries

Thursday morning news drop

• Dunning-Kruger Effect: Intuitive Errors Predict Overconfidence on the Cognitive Reflection Test The present study explores the DKE within the context of a reflective-reasoning test, where a compelling, intuitive but incorrect response must be overridden for successful performance to be attained (Frontiers in Psychology)

• How Not to Get Fooled by the New Inflation Numbers We could be on the verge of a golden era for inflation nonsense. The potential for misunderstanding derives from several forces crashing against one another at once. There are sure to be shortages of some goods and services as the economy creaks back to life, which could create scattered price increases for airplane tickets or hotel rooms or, as has been the case recently, certain computer chips. (Upshot)

• ‘The Start of a Comeback’ in 5 U.S. Cities With vaccinations picking up, warmer weather and increased business re-openings over the last week, tourism has picked up in these destinations. (New York Times)

• NFTs Are Selling for Millions. Are They Warming the Planet, Too? Making the digital artworks requires colossal amounts of computing power, and that means greenhouse gases. (New York Times)

• Home is where the cartel is Singapore expanded its housing supply, at remarkable speed and scale, by building out extremely dense but nevertheless green, livable, and attractive “new towns“. Rather than restricting our attention to putting more housing in existing desirable neighborhoods, why not follow Singapore and build new neighborhoods, and when we run out of space for those, new ring cities? Singapore has done a ton of experimenting, in regulation, architecture and urban design, in putting greenspaces around (and on) increasingly creative high-rise developments. (Interfluidity)

• How Becky Lynch Became 'The Man' On the eve of another WrestleMania, go inside the WWE Superstar's brutal, bloody fight to shape the world to her will. (Elle)

• Housing bubble Two Point No “Home prices are not in a bubble. It’s not like people are collecting houses. These are first-time home buyers! The rise in prices was fueled by Covid, low interest rates, and most importantly, demographics. Are prices red hot? Yes. Is this a bubble that will pop? No.” (Irrelevant Investor)

• Federal government unveils $1.5 billion plan to boost green building Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna has announced a $1.5-billion program designed to spur green building through retrofits, upgrades and new construction of public institutions. (On Site)

• How Hedge Funds Lost Their Way and Why They’ll Come Back HFRI Equity Hedge Total Index returned 14% a year from inception in 1990 through the financial crisis in 2008, doubling the total return of the S&P 500 Index. Since 2009, however, the tables have turned. The HFRI index has returned 8% a year through February, roughly half the return of the S&P 500. To understand what happened, and why fortune may return for equity hedge funds, it helps to know a bit about how stock pickers make money for investors. (Bloomberg)

How The Next Batteries Will Change the World Silicon Valley is about to commercialize revolutionary technology that will enable huge breakthroughs in the battle against global warming. The future of batteries, sought for decades by academics, startups, and corporate R&D armies is—quite possibly—just a slender sheet of ceramic material that’s supple enough to bend between two fingers. But no one outside of a Silicon Valley startup is allowed to know what it’s made of. Even the color of this man-made substance is a closely held secret, so of course it’s never been independently analyzed.