House Hunt Victoria, Skilled Trades Certification in B.C, Vaccines and Formal Education

Tuesday morning news drop

• Mandatory Skills Trades Certification in BC Skilled Trades Certification means uncertified workers in selected trades will need to become certified or register as an apprentice with the Industry Training Authority (ITA) to be legally able to work in that trade. (BC Government)

• The Amazon That Customers Don’t See Each year, hundreds of thousands of workers churn through a vast mechanism that hires and monitors, disciplines and fires. Amid the pandemic, the already strained system lurched. (New York Times)

• Alberta's COVID-19 vaccination rates tied to levels of formal education, data shows An analysis of COVID-19 vaccination rates in Alberta suggests one socio-economic factor, in particular, is correlated to vaccine uptake. And it's not income, language or cultural barriers. (CBC)

• The Most Important Thing to Know About Inflation Right Now For the past two months, the cost of living has been rising quickly. In May, the Consumer Price Index jumped 0.6 percent, faster than economists anticipated. It was the second largest monthly increase in more than a decade, just behind April’s 0.8 percent spike. (Slate)

• The Green Revolution Is Being Built on a Very Dirty Industry: The battle against climate change is relying on the same polluting building block that drove the second Industrial Revolution a century and a half ago: Steel (Bloomberg)

• Lithium Gold Rush: Inside the Race to Power Electric Vehicles A race is on to produce lithium in the United States, but competing projects are taking very different approaches to extracting the vital raw material. Some might not be very green. (New York Times)

• Winners and Losers of the Work-From-Home Revolution High-income workers at highly profitable companies will benefit greatly. Downtown landlords won’t. (The Atlantic)

• Renting Is Cheaper Than Buying, Almost Everywhere The choice, however, is almost always about money, and in today’s hot seller’s market, a lack of available homes and skyrocketing prices have stymied many aspiring buyers. The flip side has been falling rents, especially in cities, where landlords struggle to fill record numbers of vacant apartments by offering rent cuts and concessions. Although rents show signs of recovering, it’s still a good time to sign a lease. (New York Times)

• Insights from the VREB Buyer Survey Outside of the usual data on prices, sales, and inventory, the VREB also surveys buyers’ agents after each sale to collect some information about the buyer. Outside of a few missed months during the pandemic, we have about 10 years of data from those surveys now available.(House Hunt Victoria)

Lumber Prices, Real Estate, Crypto, Vaccination Rates, and the Tax Squeeze

Monday morning news drop

• Why is lumber so expensive right now? An illustrated explainer of the factors driving up the market. (The Hustle)

• Yes, Real Estate Prices Are Soaring, and No, It’s Not a Bubble The parallels are hard to ignore: the record prices, the bidding wars, the subdivisions that fill up as soon as they’re built, the resourceful buyer who clinched a deal by dropping off cupcakes that matched the home’s interior paint colors. Today’s real estate market feels a lot like the bubble market circa 2006. There’s one very big difference between then and now, though: Mortgage loans are much harder to get. (Businessweek)

• There’s a New Vision for Crypto, and It’s Wildly Different From Bitcoin Give Bitcoin some credit: A nearly $1 trillion asset has been memed into existence, despite being backed by nothing. The market is still treating the rest of the crypto space as a monolith. It’s time for that to change. (Bloomberg)

• There’s A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States’ Vaccination Rates “The top 22 states (including D.C.) with the highest adult vaccination rates all went to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election … Trump won 17 of the 18 states with the lowest adult vaccination rates.” (NPR)

• Why I’m Not Worried U.S. Household Debt Is At Record Highs For once it’s not just the top 10% or even the top 1% who are better off. Wealth for the bottom 50% is at an all-time high:; The same is true for the 50th to 90th percentile. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• World’s Richest Face Tax Squeeze After 40% Run-Up in Fortunes The world’s wealthiest 500 individuals are now worth $8.4 trillion, up more than 40% in the year and a half since the global pandemic began its devastation. Meanwhile, the economy’s biggest winners, the tech corporations that created many of these vast fortunes, pay lower tax rates than grocery clerks, and their mega-wealthy founders can exploit legal loopholes to pass huge windfalls onto heirs largely tax-free. (Bloomberg)

• King of Cards: As a new generation gets into sports memorabilia, Ken Goldin — market maker, evangelist, therapist — is cashing in on priceless pieces of cardboard. (Businessweek)

Videos of the Week, Interest Rates, Commuting to Work, and Excess Bank Capital

Friday morning news drop and videos of the week

• Why Interest Rates Have to Stay Low For a Very Long Time Now, you could make the case that higher inflation is a good thing because it actually reduces the debt load in real terms. And if the Fed keeps short-term rates on the floor it’s possible government spending could still be funded with low borrowing costs. But higher inflation and low interest rates can’t coexist forever. Eventually, something has to give. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The Future of Power Is Transcontinental, Submarine Supergrids Coal, gas and even nuclear plants can be built close to the markets they serve, but the utility-scale solar and wind farms essential to meet climate targets often can’t. They need to be put wherever the wind and sun are strongest, which can be hundreds or thousands of miles from urban centers. Long cables can also connect peak afternoon solar power in one time zone to peak evening demand in another, reducing the price volatility caused by mismatches in supply and demand as well as the need for fossil-fueled back up capacity when the sun or wind fade. (Businessweek)

• The Psychological Benefits of Commuting to Work Here’s the strange part: Many people liberated from the commute have experienced a void they can’t quite name. In it, all theaters of life collapse into one. There are no beginnings or endings. The hero’s journey never happens. The threshold goes uncrossed. And employers—even the ones that have provided the tools for remote work—see cause for alarm. (The Atlantic)

• Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities? Highways radically reshaped cities, destroying dense downtown neighborhoods, dividing many Black communities and increasing car dependence.Now, some cities are looking to take them out. But reconnecting neighborhoods is more complicated than breaking them apart. (New York Times)

• 'Big dividend increases coming' as Big Six sitting on 'unheard of' levels of excess capital Dividend hikes, share buybacks and acquisitions are primary options of deploying billions in extra cash (Financial Post)

Videos of the week

Dark Hollow | Dion Agius | Full Length Film “Joe G and I have been working on Dark Hollow for the past few years. It’s grown and evolved over time, but it has always taken its core inspiration from my home state of Tasmania. The film is our vision of how the world could be if we looked after it, and features appearances from some of my best friends, including Craig Anderson and Chippa Wilson.” – Dion Agius

Dean Tennant | Welcome to the NOBL Family When NOBL moved to Vancouver Island last year, we knew we had to connect with Dean Tennant. His video edits inspired a whole generation of riders (and still do). To welcome him to the NOBL family, there was no other option but to film him at Mt. Prevost, a place synonymous with his riding and free-racing style. Enjoy 2 minutes of Dean doing what he does best!

WELCOME DYLAN LEWIS ÉCLAT BMX proudly welcomes Dylan Lewis to the family. Dylan's riding needs no introduction, no one blasts a quarter like this guy. We're stoked to welcome Dylan into the fold and have him repping éclat down under.

ROUGH CUT: Louie Lopez' "Seize the Seconds" Part Louie’s Cons part was one of the highlights of 2020. See all the madness that couldn’t fit in the final cut.

Jack O'Grady's "Pass~Port" Part Trick after trick of jaw-dropping mania, Jack attacks Sydney like nobody before. Think that cover was a hoax? See for yourself.

CPI 3.4% and Bank of Canada Holds Rates, Microsoft Console Wars, Meme Stocks, Pensions, and FinTech

Thursday morning news drop

• Bank of Canada will hold current level of policy rate at 0.25% until inflation objective is sustainably achieved, continues quantitative easing - CPI 3.4% The Bank of Canada today held its target for the overnight rate at the effective lower bound of ¼ percent, with the Bank Rate at ½ percent and the deposit rate at ¼ percent. The Bank is maintaining its extraordinary forward guidance on the path for the overnight rate. This is reinforced and supplemented by the Bank’s quantitative easing (QE) program, which continues at a target pace of $3 billion per week. (Bank of Canada)

• Inflation spike shows U.S. consumer appetite bumping up against shortages Some price increases making up for higher wages to keep or attract workers (CBC)

• How Microsoft Is Ditching the Video Game Console Wars Known for the Xbox, Microsoft has been diversifying away from boxy hardware in favor of reaching millions more new gamers. (New York Times)

• Apple’s Walled Garden Is Becoming Harder to Escape The company just unveiled a ton of new features designed to trap you in its confines. (Slate)

• Global Investable Assets Reach Record $250 Trillion Financial wealth rose significantly even amid the pandemic. That means asset managers have new opportunities among the high-net-worth and to bring alternatives like private equity to individuals. (Institutional Investor)

• Is There A Better Way to Invest in Meme Stocks? Ladies and Gentlemen, I am here to report that we have officially entered Act II of the joke as investment meme cycle. The intermission has ended and now it’s AMC (and not Gamestop) that is at center stage. (Of Dollars And Data)

• Is Day Trading a Good Idea? “Why do you want to day trade?” The answer often is, “To make money, obviously.” I ask, “Why do you think you can make money day trading?” There is generally a pause, and then this reply, “I see so many people making money day trading.” (Safal Niveshak)

• Special Report: Will Pension Risk Transfers Someday Control All DB Plans? The trend is mounting for corporate sponsors to shunt liabilities to insurers. But some don’t want to do that, and others can’t. (CIO)

• The Fintech 50 2021 The most innovative fintech companies (Forbes)

Retail Investing, Cheering for Sports Teams, and Fossil Fuels

Wednesday morning news drop

• Make Money Day-Trading from Home! Change is happening in the financial markets. Can you feel it? It’s like the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Something new is happening, and maybe, just maybe, this time really is different. (Belle Curve)

• The Shoeshine Indicator is Dead One of the questions that came up a year ago when the Robinhood traders, and my plumber, emerged on the scene was, “What’s gonna happen when their stocks crash?” My answer was always that they’d move on to something different, a la the aliens in Independence Day. (Irrelevant Investor)

• The Fed Is Paying 0.00%. Such a Deal! Depositors Are Flocking Starting in April, “No Interest” started looking interesting to certain investors with too much cash on their hands. The amount of money they placed at the Fed overnight at 0.00% grew from nothing to single-digit millions to billions and, as of June 8, $497.4 billion. That’s the most ever. (Bloomberg)

• The Worst Business Ever Food delivery just isn’t a very good business. It’s hard to make a profit when you don’t make any money. This describes the state of the food delivery business, which according to the founder and CEO of GrubHub, “is and always will be a crummy business.” (Irrelevant Investor)

• Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy The price for Ubers, scooters and Airbnb rentals is going up as tech companies aim for profitability. (New York Times)

• A company you’ve probably never heard of caused half the internet to go dark Countless websites, including major news outlets, were offline after an outage at Fastly, a cloud computing provider. (Vox)

• How A New Team Of Feds Hacked The Hackers And Got Colonial Pipeline’s Ransom Back That said, the attackers made an unusual error in this case by failing to keep money moving. The $2.3 million that ultimately was recovered was still sitting in the same Bitcoin account it had been delivered to. (NPR)

• The Retreat of Exxon and the Oil Majors Won’t Stop Fossil Fuel National oil champions are likely to fill the gap left by private-sector players—meaning emissions won’t shrink as fast the supermajors (Bloomberg Green)

• Exxon’s Board Defeat Signals the Rise of Social-Good Activists The energy giant’s stunning loss was the work of a tiny hedge fund that believes investing for social good is also good for the bottom line. (New York Times)

• The Paradox of Being a Leafs Fan Generations of Indigenous fans have followed the Toronto Maple Leafs through close calls and decades of despair. Ultimately, it's the hope that connects us (Walrus)

Investing, Cannabis Economy, Carbon Dioxide CO2 Levels, and NBA Fans

Tuesday morning news drop

• A Guide to Moving from Cash to Investments “Valuations are high.” “Stocks have had an incredible run, how much higher can they go?” “Interest rates are near historic lows. What happens when they rise?” These are all reasonable things to think about when allocating a lump sum of money that has been sitting on the sidelines. But what does the data suggest? (Compound Advisors)

• Dollar Cost Averaging vs. Lump Sum: The Definitive Guide One of the biggest problems in personal finance is deciding when to invest a sum of money. Whether you have $10, $10,000, or $10 million that you could put to work, the question is: Should you invest all that money over time (dollar cost averaging) or now (lump sum)? (Dollars & Data)

• The Bottom 90% of Americans Are Borrowing From the Top 1% The savings of the rich are recycled into household and government debt (Businessweek)

• U.S. Trophy-Home Market Poised for a Banner Year The market for $50 million-plus home sales got off to an incredibly strong start to 2021, with the number of listings and sales on pace to outdo previous years (Mansion Global)

• A Commodities Crunch Caused by Stingy Capital Spending Has No Quick Fix Limited inventory of resources is converging with a buying spree to supercharge prices, spurring inflation concerns (WSJ)

• The Hazy Economy of Cannabis When Canada legalized recreational marijuana, a team of statisticians set out to decode how much exactly the weed business is worth (Walrus)

• Affected Development: Will Kids Ever Recover from Isolation? For many children, our panicked pandemic lives are the only lives they’ve ever known (Walrus)

• Why Confederate Lies Live On For some Americans, history isn’t the story of what actually happened; it’s the story they want to believe. (Atlantic)

• Earth’s carbon dioxide levels hit 4.5 million-year high The amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has reached its annual peak, climbing to 419 parts per million (ppm) in May, according to scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). (Axios)

• CO2 levels are at an all-time high The historic CO2 record was pretty unfazed by the pandemic (The Verge)

• The argument for a carbon price We are paying a price for fossil fuels, but that price is not paid by those that burn the fossil fuels – we need to change that (Our World in Data)

• N.B.A. Fans Wanted a Show. They’re Also Getting a Reckoning. The entertainment of the playoffs has been coupled with a pressing message from players that fans have disrespected them for too long. (NYT)

House Hunt Victoria, Pitch Doctoring, Leafs, and Climate Change

Monday morning news drop

• Yellen Won a Global Tax Deal. Now Comes the Hard Part. The Treasury secretary worked with finance ministers from the G7 to win support for a global minimum tax. But selling the idea to Republican lawmakers will not be easy. (New York Times)

• Employees Are Gaining Leverage Over Employers Right Before Our Eyes “Employers are becoming much more cognizant that yes, it’s about money, but also about quality of life.” (Upshot)

• Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home The drive to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who’ve embraced remote work as the new normal. (Bloomberg)

• How cybercriminals hold data hostage... and why the best solution is often paying a ransom Targets have included hospitals and municipalities, but the FBI says anyone on the internet should expect to be attacked by cybercriminals. (60 Minutes)

• How SoundScan Changed Everything We Knew About Popular Music Thirty years ago, Billboard changed the way it tabulated its charts, turning the industry on its head and making room for genres once considered afterthoughts to explode in the national consciousness. (The Ringer)

• The World’s Best Hope to End the Pandemic Still Needs More Doses The nonprofit Covax, which distributes Covid vaccines to mostly poor countries, has been saying for a year no one is safe until everyone is. Rich countries may finally be getting the message. (Businessweek)

• ‘This Should Be the Biggest Scandal in Sports’ The inside story of how rampant pitch-doctoring in MLB is pumping pitchers up and deflating offenses. (SI)

• Fixing the Leafs: Why trading Morgan Rielly should be on the table. And what if Mitch Marner is their DeMar DeRozan? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity. Yet Maple Leafs president Brendan Shanahan and general manager Kyle Dubas plan to bring back essentially the same team — certainly the same core — that has disappointed fans in the playoffs for five years now. They’re expecting different results (Toronto Star)

• The World’s Northernmost Town Is Changing Dramatically Climate change is bringing tourism and tension to Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (Scientific American)

• Sir David Attenborough explains what he thinks needs to happen to save the planet The legendary wildlife filmmaker tells Anderson Cooper why urgent action on climate change is crucial and why we need to save nature in order to save ourselves. (60 Minutes)

• Are the rungs in the property ladder growing further apart? You’ll often hear said that you want to get on the “property ladder” as quickly as possible. Buy a starter property, then ride any price gains upward and upgrade the house when you can. Is that really true? And do price gains help you upgrade to the next house? Let’s take a look. (House Hunt Victoria)

Videos of the Week, Home Costs, Harley Davidson, and Kyrie Irving on a Skateboard

Friday morning news drop and videos of the week

• Building a Home in the U.S. Has Never Been More Expensive From lumber to paint to concrete, the cost of almost every single item that goes into building a house in the U.S. is soaring. In some cases, the price increases have topped 100% since the pandemic began. Fom rock-bottom mortgage rates to city dwellers’ rush to the suburbs to shortages of materials—but the simplest explanation is that there is just too much demand for builders and their suppliers to handle. (Bloomberg)

• No More Bear Markets Remember when it took an hour to download a song? Remember when it took 6 months for a movie to go to DVD? Remember when bear markets used to last more than a few months? (Irrelevant Investor)

• A New Era Dawns for Harley-Davidson The feature-stuffed Pan America is a stark diversion for a company long associated with bulky, expensive cruisers. Early impressions suggest a potential blockbuster. (New York Times)

• How Covid Inspired a New Generation of Entrepreneurs The pandemic forced everyone to adopt new technology and rethink their jobs, spurring our economy to lean in to independent work. (Bloomberg)

• Commuting is psychological torture: Not doing that commute gave me 15 hours per week of my life back “I am never going back to that commute five days a week every single week again,” a friend told me recently. Before Covid he was spending about three hours a day in his car driving back and forth. When things started to shut down last year his employer was staunchly against people working from home at first, but before long it became unavoidable. (Welcome to Hell World)

• The Tyranny Of Time The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political: It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us. (Noema)

• Dunning-Kruger meets fake news: People who overrate their media saviness share more misleading material Inspired by the widespread sharing of blatantly false news articles, a team of US-based researchers looked into whether Dunning-Kruger might be operating in the field of media literacy. Not surprisingly, people overestimate their ability to identify misleading news. But the details are complicated, and there’s no obvious route to overcoming this bias. (Ars Technica)

Videos of the week

GoPro: DarkFEST MTB Course Preview 2021 - Gnarly train

Team Shredits Vol. I - Nic Court Nic rips some of his local favourites in the Cowichan Valley for Vol. I of the new Cowichan Cycles team "shredit" series.

BRANDON BEGIN - BMX PRO PART

Christian Rigal - 'STILL UNITED' Full Part

Primitive Skate | What the P-Rod? We are very proud to present Paul Rodriguez's newest video offering: "What the P-Rod?"

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!"

NBA All Star Kyrie Irving Skateboarding - 2014 footage

Brooklyn Nets and Durant, Stock Market, Infrastructure, and German Renewable Energy

Thursday morning news drop

• Kevin Durant and (Possibly) the Greatest Basketball Team of All Time The Brooklyn Nets were built to be an unbeatable superteam of eccentric basketball superstars. Will they dominate the N.B.A. playoffs? (New York Times)

• Your father’s stock market is never coming back With a Robinhood account, your first exposure to cryptocurrencies does not frame them as an unproven alternative to stocks. The two stand on equal footing. Coke and Pepsi. Feel like trading one or the other? Have at it, no difference. This is radically different from the experience of the Gen X and boomer investors logging in through Schwab, Fidelity, or Vanguard to check their balances or download a statement. (Fortune)

• How to fix America: Take a road trip from New York to California to see infrastructure projects with the potential to make cities more livable and equitable. (Bloomberg)

• Billionaires are racing to sidestep President Biden’s plan to raise their taxes How Silicon Valley might beat the Tax Man. (Vox)

• What Germany Can Teach America About Renewable Energy Bringing energiewende across the Pacific—this time with nuclear in the mix. (Slate)

• ‘We’re Not Going to See Tankers in Active Pass Ever Again’ Advocates celebrate after officials publicly ban tankers carrying dangerous cargo in the narrow passage. (Tyee)

• Soft skills and hard times: Female leadership during COVID he shift from head to heart is not novel to human resources, but construction, a big and bold industry in many respects, has been slow to recognize the value of soft skills. In many cases, it has been even slower to shed the antiquated approach of authoritarian leadership. This changed last year when COVID-19 forced leaders to take extraordinary efforts to keep job sites not just physically safe, but psychologically safe. (On-Site)

Mortgage Stress Test, Big Tobacco and Fake News, Fairy Creek, and Supply Chain Attacks

Wednesday morning news drop

• Tougher mortgage stress test shaves up to 5% off some homebuyers' purchasing power

  New rule could reduce the mortgage you qualify for by between $14,000 and $47,000 (Financial Post)

• How Big Tobacco Set the Stage for Fake News A coordinated program of public deception that spanned four decades has become a template for modern disinformation (Walrus)

• Worsening opioid crisis taking outsized toll on Ontario’s construction workforce An “increasingly volatile” unregulated drug supply is among the reasons cited for the significant increase in opioid-related deaths in Ontario during the pandemic. (On-Site)

• The Covid Trauma Has Changed Economics—Maybe Forever Policymakers learned the lessons of 2008 and deployed a wider set of tools to help repair the damage from Covid. They know how to create a recovery, but can they manage the boom? (Bloomberg)

• Americans Don’t Want to Return to Lousy Low Wage Jobs The majority of the jobs that aren’t back to prepandemic work force levels are very low-income jobs; they are what the U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index, which I cocreated, calls low-quality jobs. (New York Times)

• Hacking: What Is a Supply Chain Attack? From NotPetya to SolarWinds, it’s a problem that’s not going away any time soon. (Wired)

• How Electric Car Designers Are Reimagining Iconic Grilles With their electric vehicles, BMW, GM and Ford are re-inventing the grille in ways both familiar and strange. (Bloomberg)

• Three Days in the Theatre of Fairy Creek The drama playing out today was set in motion 150 years ago. One person can change the ending. (Tyee)

• The World’s Northernmost Town Is Changing Dramatically Climate change is bringing tourism and tension to Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard (Scientific American)