House Hunt Victoria, Investing, Crypto Craze, and the Democratic Collapse

Tuesday morning news drop

• How to Navigate the 'Great Reset’ The closest parallel is the post-World War II era, which led to massive economic and societal changes. (Bloomberg)

• Unloved 60/40 Strategy Needs a Modern Makeover to Win Over Skeptics After half a century, the venerable investment allocation formula is showing some signs of age. But that doesn’t mean retail investors need to start from scratch. (Bloomberg)

• 200+ Years of Asset Class Returns There is a very good case to be made that returns over the next 50-100 years will be lower than they’ve been over the past 50-100 years. There’s simply more knowledge about the markets now, an implicit backstop from the Fed, lower interest rates and ever-increasing valuations. On the other hand, costs have never been cheaper, the barriers to entry to get invested have never been lower. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• $ASS Coin Billionaire: Tales From the Fringe of the Crypto Craze Meet the thrill-seeking traders who are prowling for profits in the wildest corners of the market — all in search of the next big coin. (Bloomberg)

• iTrapped: All the things Apple won’t let you do with your iPhone Have you ever tried to swap Siri for a better voice assistant on your iPhone? Don’t bother, you can’t. Tried to buy e-books from the Kindle app? Can’t do that, either. Send iMessages to someone with an Android phone? Nope. Backup your iPhone to Google Drive? Nope. Get your own iPhone repair parts from Apple? Nope. Transfer your digital life to a different kind of smartphone? When you buy an iPhone, it isn’t really yours. (Washington Post)

• If Democracy Is Dying, Why Are Democrats So Complacent? Democrats are unwilling to match their language of urgency with a strategy even remotely proportional to it. (The Atlantic)

• Are Democrats sleepwalking toward democratic collapse? “I’m not sure people appreciate how much danger we’re in.” (Vox)

• Why Are So Many Albertans Vaccine Hesitant? Jason Kenney modelled a mistrust of science and journalism — and COVID is just the latest way it’s backfiring. (Tyee)

• Why You Should Wait Out the Wild Housing Market Pick a housing statistic at random, and it’s probably setting an all-time record. Home prices: record high. Inventory: record low. Percentage of homes selling above asking price: record high. Average time on market: record low. (The Atlantic)

• May – Mixed signals in the market May ended with 1049 sales, 1333 new listings, and 1450 properties on the market. That’s the lowest level of inventory for any May on record (second lowest was 1896 in May 2017) combined with the second highest sales rate. (House Hunt Victoria)

Residential Schools, Parking Destroys Cities, Johnny Knoxville, and Crypto Memes

Monday morning news drop

• Why so many children died at Indian Residential Schools At some schools, annual death rates were as high as one in 20 (National Post)

• Inside Operation Warp Speed: A New Model for Industrial Policy Operation Warp Speed was a triumph of public health policy. But it was also a triumph and validation of industrial policy. OWS shows what the U.S. government can still accomplish when it comes to tackling a seemingly unsolvable technological challenge. It demonstrates the strength of the U.S. developmental state, despite forty years of ideological assault. (American Affairs Journal)

• How Parking Destroys Cities Parking requirements attack the nature of the city itself, subordinating density to the needs of the car. (The Atlantic)

• Johnny Knoxville’s Last Rodeo He’s been offering up his pain in this fashion for 20 years, ever since he first flung himself, human-cannonball-style, into the center ring of the great American pop-cultural circus. Jackass, the stunts-and-pranks television show that he cocreated and starred on, ran for only three seasons on MTV, but with time it came to occupy an unusually influential position in our collective consciousness—an improbable achievement given what the show consisted of. As he prepares to release his final Jackass film, the stuntman takes stock of a surprisingly long, hilariously painful, and unusually influential career. (GQ)

• Home Truths: How HGTV, Magnolia, and Netflix Are Building a Massive Space in the Stream America’s obsession with home renovation is a cash cow for streamers—though the neighbors might complain. (Vanity Fair)

• Can memes save crypto from reality? Can memes save crypto from reality? If you think you’re in on the crypto joke, the joke might be on you. (Vox)

Maple Leafs-Canadiens Game 7: Talk about it like a hockey expert (even if you're not) Despite the storied history of both clubs, the Toronto Maple Leafs host the Montreal Canadiens to face off in Game 7 for just the second time in 16 playoff series (CBC, CBCSports.ca, 4 p.m. Pacific / 7 p.m. Eastern). The winner advances to battle the Winnipeg Jets in the next round of the postseason. (CBC)

Videos of the Week, Office Space, Bitcoin, Inflation, Fast and the Furious, and Fairy Creek

Friday morning news drop and videos of the week

• Ready to Return: Fashion Rental Is Back The pandemic hit the world of clothing rental hard. Now, companies like Rent the Runway say the market is booming like never before. (New York Times)

• What’s the Point of the Office Again? The office is primarily a social space, not a productive one. Most humans aren’t solitary, like snow leopards, but more like birds. The office provides a place to ruffle plumage and establish a pecking order. (Bloomberg)

• Bitcoin’s Reliance on Stablecoins Harks Back to the Wild West of Finance To understand the weakness of stablecoins such as Tether, it is worth a quick history lesson from pre-Civil War American finance (Wall Street Journal)

• Why do people hate inflation? In theory, inflation could reduce normal people’s debt burdens while leaving their purchasing power unchanged. This is why economists used to think that inflation wasn’t a big deal. But in the 1970s, wages failed to keep up with inflation, reducing purchasing power. (Noahpinion)

• I Watched All the Fast and the Furious Movies in A Week. The problem with the Furious series: I very much want to write it off as blindingly stupid, but every now and then it will do something delightful or brilliant or downright heartwarming. Take its treatment of women – a universally problematic issue for the entire genre, the films aren’t entirely terrible with their portrayal of female characters. (The Everywhereist)

• The Fairy Creek blockaders: inside the complicated fight for B.C.’s last ancient forests For eight months a small group of protesters have successfully prevented logging company Teal-Jones from accessing forest on Pacheedaht territory, exposing tensions that can exist at the intersection of Indigenous land rights, economic opportunity and the urgent battle to protect what remains of the province's old growth. That group’s decision became a lightning rod for criticism, on the ground and online. Without the consent of the Pacheedaht, blockaders appeared to be reproducing an age-old mistake that had cut deep rifts in B.C.’s environmental movement: settlers claiming authority over land that doesn’t belong to them. (Narwhal)

Videos of the Week

29" POV on Hand Built Jump Trail! Top to bottom lap on my hand built trail 'Mayday'.

EMPTY SPACES - EMIL JOHANSSON Empty Spaces - In partnership with SRAM and RockShox. During winter, this park is a regular ride spot for me. I've been riding there since 2015 and it was where I filmed my previous skatepark edit "XXII.XI".

Island Vibes Feat. Elliot Jamieson and Lucas Cruz Deep in the untamed stands of Black Cottonwood and Western Hemlock, Norco Factory DH Team riders Elliot Jamieson and Lucas Cruz forge a bond on the trails of Mt Prevost, high above the Georgia Strait on Vancouver Island.

S&M BMX - Aryei Levenson 2021 Our first round draft pick Aryei Levenson came to California and went crazy for 3 days filming a whole video part. Kid's gonna be spooky good - shiiiit, he already is.

Ryan Decenzo's "Sender Bender" Part Ryan's been a heavyweight for over a decade, but his rampage is far from over. This part is loaded with enders, but his closing shot is in a league of its own. No wonder Phelper said, “This dude rules!"

Dalton Dern's "Florida Man" Tactics Part Dalton’s stunts defy reasoning, whether hucking a McTwist in a ditch or charging handrails like a madman. Only in Florida...

Rafa Cort's "Dear Gate" Element Part Rafa rips through Spain and a plethora of European dream spots with quick feet and the pedal to the floor. Enjoy the ride.

Construction Industry Technology, Streaming, Truck Driver Shortages, and the Crypto Crash

Thursday morning news drop

• Construction in a digital world A deep dive into technological adoption in Canada’s construction industry. Many construction firms have had little incentive to invest in technology, with current procurement practices placing much of the project risk and associated costs on the shoulders of contractors. The benefits, however, are becoming more apparent. With a workforce shortage, climate change realities and solutions reaching greater maturity, the industry is poised for significant transformation. Companies that seize the digital opportunity and integrate with others in their ecosystem over the next decade stand to gain a significant competitive advantage. Construction companies are starting to see the competitive advantages made possible by technology, and we encourage them to keep working from this perspective. The companies that come out ahead will be those that don’t wait: Develop a vision, hire a team and get started. (Canadian Construction Association)

• Streaming TV Costs Add Up as Americans Add More Services U.S. consumers turned to Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max and others like never before during the height of the pandemic, stuck indoors and starving for novelty (and something to distract their kids). Several services, including Peacock and Discovery+, launched in the middle of it all. People are subscribing to more services than they were a year ago—and their budgets have gone up, too. (Bloomberg)

• Why Amazon is paying nearly $9 billion for MGM and James Bond Amazon isn’t competing with Netflix, but it is spending billions trying to figure out Hollywood. Maybe 007 can help. (Vox)

• Is There Really A Truck Driver Shortage? The real problem is not a shortage but retention. According to ATA’s statistics, the average annual turnover rate for long-haul truckers at big trucking companies has been greater than 90% for decades. If a company has 10 truckers, nine will be gone within a year because so many new drivers leave within a few months. (NPR)

• Meet Your Next Angel Investor. They’re 19 A growing cohort of Gen Z investors who are beginning to make their mark on the startup ecosystem. Like-minded young people congregate on TikTok and Twitter, where talk of startups can lead to valuable connections and deal flow. A Slack group called Gen Z VC has more than 7,000 members, many of them still in their teens. (Wired)

• 4 Lessons From the Crypto Crash You have to stay in the game to survive as an investor. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Is Our Political System Up for the Fight Against Climate Change? A revolutionary politics isn’t necessary to combat a world-changing problem. But, to succeed, liberal democracies must adapt (Walrus)

• A Giant Old Growth Cedar Rolling Down a BC Highway Went Viral. What’s Its Story? As a new ‘war in the woods’ brews, a social media post has emerged as a rallying call. (Tyee)\

House Hunt Victoria, Inflation, Sneaker Colours, the Future of Shopping, and Cumberland

Wednesday morning news drop

• And Just Like That, Amazon Will Acquire MGM for $8.45 Billion The deal, which was rumored to be in the works last week, will find MGM’s storied catalog merging with streaming giant Amazon Studios. (Vanity Fair) The deal would add Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s 4,000 films to Amazon’s streaming library, including the James Bond, Rocky and “Legally Blonde” franchises. (New York Times)

• What rising inflation means to the loonie and the timing of a Bank of Canada rate hike Our central bank may soon have reason to welcome a higher dollar (Financial Post)

• No, Millennials Aren’t Poorer Than Previous Generations The data suggests that the narrative around Millennial wealth isn’t as extreme as the media makes it out to be. The same thing is true if we examine income (Of Dollars And Data)

• Here Are the Ways the Pandemic Changed Hollywood: A viewer’s guide to the future of entertainment, where blockbusters no longer require cinemas, studios make sitcoms again, and more. (Businessweek)

• The Secret Psychology of Sneaker Colours: You think they randomly choose those glaring shades of Nike, Adidas and New Balance? Think again (New York Times)

• What will shopping look like? The pandemic has permanently changed how Americans shop, from wider aisles to curbside pickup. (Vox)

• This Evolutionary Gift May Protect Coral From Climate Change Coral in the Red Sea is unusually heat tolerant. The secret to its success may lie in the lucky confluence of geography and genetics. (Wired)

• The Marathon Men Who Can't Go Home In the north Bronx, a small group of elite Ethiopian runners struggle to survive. The persecution they fled was far more harrowing. (GQ)

• From coal to cool: Cumberland booms again When a sleepy town attracts wealthy digital nomads, what happens to its old-school charm? (Capital Daily)

• Do high priced cities attract the wealthy? Despite the fact that house prices have spiked across the country during this pandemic, there are still radical differences between prices between our most expensive and cheapest markets. The chart below shows the difference between Victoria average prices and several major cities. (House Hunt Victoria)

Economy, Housing Market, Middle Class, Debt and Horse Racing

Tuesday morning news drop after a long weekend

• The Economy Is Booming. Why Don’t Firms Believe It? Rather than an economic crash during the pandemic, we have instead seen aging supply lines straining under a surge in demand, the likes of which hasn’t been seen for decades. Whether in lumber, shipping, semiconductors, or any of a range of industries, this has been a fascinating through-line (Bloomberg)

• Houses Have Gotten Bigger and Nicer Part of the unaffordability problem is that expectations have gotten ahead of reality. Houses were more affordable for our parents because the ones they were buying bare little resemblance to the ones we’re buying. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Did HGTV Ruin the Housing Market For Millennials? First-time homebuyers aren’t thrilled with the housing market at the moment. It’s not a buyer’s market despite (or because?) Interest rates remain at generationally low levels. What if young people are unhappy with the housing market because their expectations are too high? What if our tastes have become too expensive? (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• How McKinsey Destroyed the Middle Class Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities. Things changed in the 1960s, with McKinsey leading the way (The Atlantic)

• Many Americans struggle with debt. Social media doesn’t help. Instagram and TikTok are full of things to buy. For some users, it’s a trap, with social media leading some users into debt (Vox)

• Can Horse Racing Survive? In a time of changing sensitivities, an ancient sport struggles to justify itself. Thoroughbred racing, once the most popular spectator sport in America, has been in decline. In the past two decades, the over-all national betting handle at racetracks has fallen by nearly fifty per cent. Dozens of tracks have closed. Racing is still a fifteen-billion-dollar industry, but the number of races and the size of the thoroughbred-foal crop are less than half what they were in 1990. (New Yorker)

• All hail King Pokémon! Gary Haase has amassed the world’s most expensive Pokémon card collection, valued at over $10 million. So why isn’t he cashing in? (Input)

• How the Pandemic Has Changed Attitudes Toward Wealth Americans found that money cannot buy everything, and they used their wealth to build relationships and help others, according to two recent surveys. (New York Times)

• Stages of Grief: What the pandemic has done to the arts The pandemic has been devastating for the arts economy. Live events were the first things to stop, and they will be the last to return. That means musicians, actors, and dancers, plus all the people who enable them to take the stage—playwrights and choreographers, directors and conductors, lighting designers and makeup artists, roadies, ushers, ticket takers, theater managers—have no way to make a living from their work, and haven’t for more than a year. (Harper’s Magazine)

• The Fall of the House of Gates? Fully reckoning with Bill Gates means not just focusing on how he treats women—vital as that is—but also confronting our own deep-seated worship of wealth and hardwired belief in hero narratives. (The Nation)

• Ford’s F-150 Lightning Is Winning the EV Truck War for One Simple Reason This is a case of the early bird getting the worm, but not in the way you might expect. While other automakers may beat Ford to the starting line, Ford is set to beat everyone else to market with an electric truck that’s accessible, affordable and enticing to America’s gas-loving truck owners — and there are a heck of a lot of them. (Inside Hook)

• Inside the Rise and Fall (and Rise and Fall) of Shit Coins Welcome to the era of “pump and dump,” where investors bummed about missing out on getting rich with Bitcoin are being taken for rides by online jokesters pushing tokens with nonsensical names and no clear value. (Vanity Fair)

• Why Amazon is paying $9 billion for MGM and James Bond Amazon isn’t competing with Netflix, but it is spending billions trying to figure out Hollywood. Maybe 007 can help. (Recode)

• Ethereum Closes In on Long-Sought Fix to Cut Energy Use Over 99% Shift could boost Ether as Bitcoin’s environmental rap worsens; ETH’s 45,000 gigawatt usage may fall to 1/10,000th of that. (Bloomberg)

Videos of the Week, Canadian Steel, Inflation, Apple Screwed Facebook, and Depression

Friday morning news drop

• Canada's steel industry has a secret weapon that could soon beat China's cheaper bids Canadian steel has one of the lowest carbon footprints in the world, a standard that may soon carry more weight than price (Financial Post)

• World-Dominating Superstar Firms Get Bigger, Techier, and More Chinese The world’s biggest businesses were doing fine until Covid-19 arrived. Now they’re doing even better. The top 50 companies by value added $4.5 trillion of stock market capitalization in 2020, taking their combined worth to about 28% of global gross domestic product. Three decades ago the equivalent figure was less than 5%. (Businessweek)

• The Strongest Sign Yet That Inflation Is Transitory After a year of soaring prices, some builders — and homebuyers — are beginning to step back. The rest of the economy may follow suit. (Bloomberg)

• How Apple screwed Facebook Apple’s iOS 14.5 update has triggered an unstoppable collapse in Facebook’s ability to collect user data (Wired)

• The U.S. Is Not Ready For An All-Electric Future The U.S. is woefully unprepared to handle “the electrification of everything.” Increased electrification in all sectors will need huge investments in the electric grid, in battery storage to back up renewable power generation, in charging points for EVs, and in technologies such as green hydrogen to help those technologies to reach maturity and cost efficiency enough to start replacing fossil fuels. (Oilprice)

• What Happens to Our Brains When We Get Depressed? The human brain, in all its complexity, is nearly impossible to model. One neuroscientist is trying anyway (Walrus)

Videos of the week

No Way - The Hans Rey Story - Documentary from 2004 This documentary chronicles arguably the most famous mountain biker and trials rider’s life and biking career until 2003. From Hans’ upbringings in Germany as a Trials rider, to his move to America where he helped pioneer mountain biking and some of its subcultures such as Freeride, Trials, Extreme Biking and Adventure. His story is an inspiring tale of how a boy with a bike and dream made his way into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. Classic and rare footage, as well as interviews from Steve Peat, Brian Lopes, John Tomac, Richie Schley, Wade Simmons, Gary Turner and Hans' parents.

Bike Trials World Champion - Portsmouth street riding 2021 Charlie Rolls - street edit! here it is

Dunbar Cycles Team Rider Gabe Neron shredding Cypress Jank! 🤘

Flow State - feat Josh Lowe Kona Downhill Mountain Bike team rider Josh Lowe getting into his flow state with big whips and big air riding at Wind Hill B1kepark on the "Viagra Falls"trail.

'WHOOPS' FT. HOBIE DOAN, BRETT SILVA, JULIAN ARTEAGA, TRENT LUTZKE & MORE | DIG BMX

LEWIS MILLS - "Controller Bar" / ÉCLAT BMX

Clive Dixon's "Prine" Part Clive demolishes an abandoned warehouse and hits rails too insane to describe at breakneck speed. The dude ain’t human.

Franky Villani's "One Big RAW Mess" Part Franky’s stunts and envelope-pushing tech all require some serious skin shedding. See how he muscles through it.

Housing Crisis in Canada, the Case Against Bitcoin, F150 Lightining, and MLB No-Hitters

Thursday morning news drop

• The Case Against Bitcoin: Peter Thiel’s former portfolio manager says that the crypto narrative is built on half-truths and a nonchalance about the security provided by the nation-state. (Bari Weiss)

• Stop Worrying and Love the F-150 Lightning Ford’s first electric pickup truck signals that decarbonization has entered a new era. (The Atlantic)

• Can Apple change ads? Apple has built up its own ad system on the iPhone, which records, tracks and targets users and serves them ads, but does this on the device itself rather than on the cloud, and only its own apps and services. Apple tracks lots of different aspects of your behaviour and uses that data to put you into anonymised interest-based cohorts and serve you ads that are targeted to your interests, in the App Store, Stocks and News apps (Benedict Evans)

• Trump Officials Skirted Rules to Reward Politically Connected and Untested Firms With Huge Pandemic Contracts House Democrats investigating the COVID-19 response say Trump adviser Peter Navarro pressured agencies to award deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars. (ProPublica)

• Why Have There Been So Many No-Hitters in 2021? Pitchers are better than ever. Hitters seem worse than ever. With six no-hitters by May 19, baseball is two away from tying the full-season record, which was set in 1884. (New York Times)

• How to make space How Victoria could flip the script on density. What would that city look like? What would it feel like? (Capital Daily)

• ‘Sick City’: What the Pandemic Tells Us about Our Housing Crisis Patrick Condon’s new book ties public health to the price of land. His cures are provocative. (Tyee)

• The second-largest country in the world is running out of land Canada’s housing market is running hotter than just about anywhere else in the world. But despite the anxiety about irrational bidding wars and fears of the bubble bursting, what's fundamentally driving it is a worsening imbalance between supply and demand: Buyers want large homes but increasingly can’t have them because there isn’t enough space in and around the major cities where people work. (Bloomberg)

Housing in Victoria, BC

This hideous house on the right can be built without any approvals and is legal everywhere in Victoria, within the zoning bylaws.

These classy townhouses (451 Chester by Abstract Developments) are illegal almost everywhere in Victoria. People believe these will destroy their neighbourhood if allowed, even though it provides practical densification. In what world does that make any amount of sense?

Lumber Futures, Electric Supercars, Minimum Wage, and Virtual Art

Wednesday morning news drop

• Lumber Futures’ Rout Deepens to 27%, Hinting at Rally’s End While builders are still paying record-high cash prices for lumber, the futures market is signaling that the historic rally could be coming to a close. (Bloomberg)

• US and European companies report forecast-crushing earnings rebound Earnings season in the US is coming to a close, and while it is still in full swing across the Atlantic, one thing is clear: analysts far underestimated how much of a bonanza the global economic recovery delivered in the first quarter of 2021. (Financial Times)

• Lamborghini Will Drop $1.8 Billion on Electrifying Its Supercars From Aventador to Urus, each model will be offered as a plug-in hybrid by 2024. An EV is on the way later this decade. (Bloomberg)

• Short Their Optimism We just saw the best 52-week period for stocks in over 75 years. You know what these magazine covers were telling you the week that rally started? (All Star Charts)

• The Battle for a $15 Minimum Wage Is Already Won The Fight for $15 is winning a different way: by altering the norms of wage-setting in the U.S. Fast-food merchant McDonald’s Corp., the archetypical low-wage employer, just announced that it will raise its average wages to $15 an hour by 2024. This follows a similar move by Chipotle. Amazon raised its minimum wage to $15 back in 2018. Costco, Starbucks, and a variety of other companies have similar policies. (Bloomberg)

• Five Things My Roomba Does Better Than My Tesla (Not including vacuuming.) There are two kinds of companies: those that make products, and those that make promises. A great product does what it claims to, but I expect even more from a great technology product. If it has an app, I expect the simplicity, reliability and upgradability of my iPhone. I don’t care about the details. I don’t care about promises. There’s no better promise than a product that just works. (The Drive)

• Once-in-a-Lifetime Chance to Start Over It’s time to prepare for a new and better normal than your pre-pandemic life. (The Atlantic)

• Is Buying a Piece of Virtual Art Better for the Environment? Online consumption behaves exactly like real-life shopping, devouring more and more resources every year (Walrus)

House Hunt Victoria, Anxiety of Influencers, Cryptocurrencies, Inflation, and Vaccines

Tuesday morning news drop

• The Anxiety of Influencers Educating the TikTok generation (Harpers)

• Elon Musk, Chamath Palihapitiya and Cathie Wood Face a Reddit Reckoning Profits beat prophets in today’s stock market. While the broader stock market remains near record levels, the trio’s portfolios and businesses have been pummeled by inflation worries and rising bond yields. (Bloomberg)

• Bitcoin is Crashing. This is What it Does This is the noisiest selloff in quite some time, but other than that, this is rather ordinary. Bitcoin routinely falls 30% or more from its all-time highs, as you can see in the charts in this article. (Irrelevant Investor)

• As cryptocurrency goes wild, fear grows about who might get hurt “Right now the exchanges trading in these crypto assets do not have a regulatory framework, either at the SEC or our sister agency, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler told Congress earlier this month in one of his first remarks on cryptocurrency regulation. “Right now there’s not a market regulator around these crypto exchanges. And thus there’s really not protection against fraud or manipulation.” (Washington Post)

• The FCC’s big bet on Elon Musk The billionaire’s space internet project could connect millions of remote American homes. If it actually works. (Vox)

• The strange deal that created a ghost town: An infamous blue plume of pollution from one of the US’s largest coal-fired plants changed the course of history for one once-thriving town. (BBC)

• Bond Market Rejects Inflation Alarmism If investors were really worried about inflation, there is one really obvious thing they would do – buy TIPS, inflation-protected bonds. And yet, with inflation readings providing all kinds of headlines, investors didn’t do that. In fact, on the day of that much higher than expected CPI, investors sold long-term TIPS, the 10-year yield rising by 4 basis points. If inflation fear is driving markets, TIPS investors are curiously brave. (Alhambra)

• Most People Are Thinking of Herd Immunity All Wrong A scenario where so few people have a disease that even those who can’t be vaccinated will never get sick, simply because they’ll never have the chance. One of herd immunity’s hallmarks is that cases are so rare that they make news. It’s not a cutoff, it’s not a magic number, and it’s usually not even an ending. (Slate)

• Don’t Politicize the Lab-Leak Theory While the Biden administration should defend U.S. scientists against partisan defamation, it has no reason to protect China against the truth, whatever that may be. (Atlantic)

• How to fix the housing crisis The housing crisis is complex and multi-faceted. If anyone ever tells you that we only need to do one thing to fix it, you know they have no idea what they’re talking about. So the title of this post is somewhat tongue in cheek as of course I realize there are other actions to take. However I’m increasingly convinced that there’s one major thing we can do to control house prices and improve people’s living situations, and that is to build rentals and tons of them. (House Hunt Victoria)

Covid Vaccines: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)