Buffet and Climate Change, US Economy, Vaccine Doubt Is Prolonging the Pandemic

Monday morning news drop

• In Opposing Climate and Diversity Proposals, Buffett Risks Looking Out of Step Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholders are expected to follow the chairman’s lead and reject demands for more disclosures. (New York Times)

• How the US won the economic recovery No country handled the economic shock of Covid-19 perfectly. Every country, the US included, made mistakes, sometimes grave mistakes. But a detailed comparison suggests that the US had the strongest economic response to the pandemic, in terms of providing income to its citizens during lockdown and ensuring a strong, rapid recovery as the economy began to reopen. The US will come out of this economically better than any country that was similarly affected by the virus. (Vox)

• The Price of the Stuff That Makes Everything Is Surging: Global economic rebound is fueling a blistering commodities rally The prices of raw materials used to make almost everything are skyrocketing, and the upward trajectory looks set to continue as the world economy roars back to life. From steel and copper to corn and lumber, commodities started 2021 with a bang, surging to levels not seen for years. The rally threatens to raise the cost of goods from the lunchtime sandwich to gleaming skyscrapers. It’s also lit the fuse on the massive reflation trade that’s gripped markets this year and pushed up inflation expectations. With the U.S. economy pumped up on fiscal stimulus, and Europe’s economy starting to reopen as its vaccination rollout gets into gear, there’s little reason to expect a change in direction. (Bloomberg)

• State of the Union: Kellyanne Conway and her husband, George, have spent the past several years very publicly divided. Now that America is recovering from Trump, can they? (Vanity Fair)

• The Slander Industry: To get slander removed, many people hire a “reputation management” company. In my case, it was going to cost roughly $20,000. We soon discovered a secret, hidden behind a smokescreen of fake companies and false identities. The people facilitating slander and the self-proclaimed good guys who help remove it are often one and the same. (New York Times)

• The Crushing Contradictions of the American University What must one believe in to be willing to borrow tens of thousands of dollars in order to pursue a certification of completion — a B.A.? What would a college have to promise in order to compel someone to do that? What would a bank have to believe to extend this person credit? Or the U.S. government, to guarantee such loans en masse — now roughly $2 trillion? And what would a society have to believe to sustain the system that keeps it all going? Our blind faith in the transformative power of higher ed is slipping. What now? (Chronicle of Higher Education)

• The Problem With Apple’s Plan to Stop Facebook’s Data Collection “It’s not just giving users the choice,” said Gennie Gebhart, acting activism director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the internet-rights advocacy group. “It’s forcing these app developers to ask permission and possibly just stop tracking preemptively so they don’t have this scary permission associated with their app.” There’s a whole industry built around targeting ads using personal data, and if enough people start regularly opting out of tracking, Apple’s new tool could frustrate many of the businesses in this space. (Slate)

• The U.S. Has the Shots It Needs, But Vaccine Doubt Is Prolonging the Pandemic The bigger problem for everyone, even in a now vaccine-rich country like the U.S., is that there are too many of these fence-sitters to bet on widespread immunity protecting the populace anytime soon. The fewer people who get vaccinated, the longer the pandemic will drag on and the more lives will be lost. America might have the technology and personnel to stamp out the disease, but not necessarily enough trust left in public-health efforts to get it done. (Businessweek)

• Heartbreaking Photos Show How Dire This Coronavirus Surge In India Is As cases in India surge faster than anywhere in the world, Indians struggle to care for their family members who have COVID and mourn lost loved ones. (Buzzfeed)

Videos of the Week, Women in Construction, Stock Market Returns, and Corporate Tax Loopholes

Friday morning news drop and videos of the week

• Number of women in construction continues to grow in B.C., survey finds A survey conducted by the BC Construction Association (BCCA) indicates the industry is becoming increasingly diverse, with 10,667 credentialed tradeswomen now working in construction in the province. Women now make up 6.2 per cent of the workforce, a 35 per cent increase over a five-year period. (Journal of Commerce)

• Stock Market Returns Are Anything But Average From 1926-2020, average U.S. stock market return was ~10% / year. Investing in the stock market would be way easier if you could simply bank on 10% year in and year out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. It’s the Catch-22 of investing in risk assets. If you want consistency over the long haul, you have to accept lower returns. And if you want higher returns over the long haul, you have to accept more volatility. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• Corporate Tax Loopholes Matter More Than a Higher Rate A larger percentage figure just gives companies more room to maneuver to avoid paying what they should. (Bloomberg)

• Making the Top 1% Its Own Tax Class This administration has decided that the 1% have amassed so much money and power, that they deserve their own (higher) tax bracket. That is the philosophy behind the new cap gains proposal: Treat the top 1% as unique, and tax them accordingly. (TBP)

• The Economy Is (Almost) Back. It Is Looking Different Than It Used To. The central reality of the economy in 2021 is that it’s profoundly unequal across sectors, unbalanced in ways that have enormous long-term implications for businesses and workers. The economy is recovering rapidly, and is on track to reach the levels of overall G.D.P. that would have been expected before anyone had heard of Covid-19. But that masks some extreme shifts in composition of what the United States is producing. That matters both for the businesses on the losing end of those shifts and for their workers, who may need to find their way into the growing sectors. (New York Times)

• Bitcoin Doesn’t Fix DeFi, DeFi Fixes Bitcoin “Bitcoin fixes this.” I cringe every time I see this popular meme. I find it worse than nails on a chalkboard. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency (crypto) supporters seem to wheel this tired trope out for every problem they see, particularly at economic ones. To their credit, they genuinely want to fix the financial system’s problems. I do too! However, crypto’s supporters have their subjects completely reversed. (Integrating Investor)

• Satellites show world’s glaciers melting faster than ever Glaciers are melting faster, losing 31% more snow and ice per year than they did 15 years earlier, according to three-dimensional satellite measurements of all the world’s mountain glaciers. Scientists, using 20 years of recently declassified satellite data, blame human-caused climate change. (AP)

• How Much Is the Life of an Essential Worker Worth? The pandemic turned retail and food workers into heroes, but most face risks that they never signed up for (Walrus)

Tomomi Nishikubo

Retired - Calvin Huth

DYLAN STARK REAL HEAT 2021 VIDEO PART

VANS BMX ‘MASH’ - TRANSITION

VANS BMX ‘MASH’ - STREET

Krooked's "Magic Art Supplies" Video Krooked’s young bucks take the reins with Cernicky attacking The City’s walls and hills and McNeely crushing the cuts of VA and LA. Manderson makes another classy addition to the skate canon with his immaculate closing part.

Jake Ilardi's "Coastal Concrete” Part

CE Trucks "Our Turn" Video Deedz, Jacopo, Ronnie, Leo Baker, BA and more fly in formation, covering damn near every corner of the globe before Keegan McCutchen brings it home with his signature grace.

Real Skifi Tenet A paid collaboration with Valio Akatemia. Take off comes before landing. Or does it? What if the outrun is actually the inrun? Real Skifi Tenet

Big 4 Accounting Firms and China, NBA Top Shot, and Lumber Shortages

Thursday morning news drop

• Big Four auditors squeezed between US and China A fight over access to accounts of Chinese companies spells danger for PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG (Financial Times)

• There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth Baby boomers and Gen Xers have faced their fair share of calamities — stagflation, the double-dip recession of the 1980s, disco — but millennials have had it really rough. Millennials who got college degrees exited school deep in debt and entered a job market ravaged by the Great Recession. Millennials who didn’t get college degrees found it harder to get a well-paying, blue-collar job, after trade and automation closed avenues that past generations had used to get to the middle class. Child-rearing and first-home-buying years interrupted by a pandemic, all the while slogged through an economy muddied by growing inequality, stagnation and a fading American dream. (NPR)

• Why Jamie Dimon, Walmart and McDonald’s Want to Hire Ex-Convicts The more than 70 million Americans with criminal records may be a valuable pool of employees as companies juggle labor shortages and jockey for more diverse workforces. (Bloomberg)

• NBA Top Shot customers can’t get their money out. Experts are confounded NBA Top Shot is the hottest NFT marketplace on the planet. It’s also got a big problem: Customers are complaining about exceptionally long wait times to get paid from sales of digital tokens that can often cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. (CNN)

• The Psychology of Fighting the Last Crash The future never completely lines up with the past but anyone who has studied market history knows crashes are typically followed by recoveries. That’s just how this works. The problem I witnessed among most endowments and foundations is they couldn’t bring themselves out of the bunker mentality of the crisis. All of the so-called smart money continued to load up on hedge funds, tail-risk strategies and conservative investments following the crash. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The Lumber and Chip Shortages Have the Same Root Cause: Underinvestment Perhaps no manufactured good is less technologically sophisticated than a 2×4, while none is more complex than the latest microprocessors. Yet the U.S. economy is currently suffering from shortages of both lumber and chips—and for similar reasons. In both cases, today’s shortages are the legacy of past busts, which then led to years of underinvestment that has left producers unable to respond to sudden surges in demand. (Barron’s)

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)

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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)