Energy's Future, Low Water Supply, Remote Work, Digital Dollar, and Affordable Housing

Thursday morning news drop

• Your boss secretly wants to quit. Business leaders can’t take COVID-19 work life anymore The crushing pace and volume of white collar work during the pandemic, coupled with the intricacies of working from home, are pushing business leaders to the brink – and half are ready to leave their current jobs. Their propensity to flee is rooted in something much deeper than the usual office grievances and politicking. After 16 months of high-adrenaline, high-strain work, leaders and managers are flat-out exhausted. (Globe and Mail)

• More Power Lines or Rooftop Solar Panels: The Fight Over Energy’s Future The president and energy companies want new transmission lines to carry electricity from solar and wind farms. Some environmentalists and homeowners are pushing for smaller, more local systems. (New York Times)

• The U.S. Is Rapidly Running Low on Water There’s a gross way to fix this. (Slate)

• There is So Much Money Sloshing Around A billion-dollar valuation for a private company used to be so special that they had a special name for it. A unicorn. But what used to be extraordinary is now commonplace. More private companies are running a four-minute mile than ever before. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Crane operators ‘no different than pilots’: Experts say crane safety top notch Structural engineering experts say that while the sight of yet another crumpled crane in Canada may be unsettling, the towering equipment powering the country’s construction boom has a top-notch safety record. (On-Site)

• Why Remote Work Might Not Revolutionize Where We Work Even with the pandemic giving a boost to remote work, most companies aren’t seriously considering an officeless future. New full-time remote jobs has tripled, but the overall percentage remains incredibly low. Before the pandemic, it was about 2% of all new office jobs, and now it’s only about 6 to 7% of new office jobs. (NPR)

• The World’s Financial Centers Struggle Back to the Office: The journey back to your desk is shaping up to be slow and indirect. Roughly 15 months after locking down to ward off Covid-19, several of the globe’s key financial centers are struggling to get employees back to their offices. (Citylab)

• Why Wall Street Is Afraid of a Digital Dollar The idea of a government-backed virtual currency has support in policy circles, but Wall Street sees a threat to its consumer-finance dominion. (Businessweek)

• The Stock Market is Outperforming Most Stocks Right now the market is being led higher by the big five, which are flirting with new highs as a percent of the overall index. They’re masking some of the weaknesses in other areas. (Irrelevant Investor)

• Investors, Don’t Depend on Stocks and Bonds to Hedge Each Other The negative correlation between their monthly returns is no sure thing. (Businessweek)

• When the Next Animal Plague Hits, Can This Lab Stop It? A new federal facility in Kansas will house the deadliest agricultural pathogens in the world—and researchers working tirelessly to contain them. (Wired)

• It’s Dark Days for Affordable Housing. Here Are Some Bright Ideas The ‘Unlocking Doors’ expert panel makes some strong calls to action deserving attention. (Tyee)

• Young, Dumb, and Broke: Why Outdoorsy Types Suck at Money Young, Dumb, and Broke: Why Outdoorsy Types Suck at Money (Outside Online)

Bank of Canada Interest Rates, Lumber Prices, and the Movie Business is Dead

Wednesday morning news drop

• Bank of Canada maintains policy rate and forward guidance, adjusts quantitative easing program 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 is being adjusted to a target pace of $2 billion per week. This adjustment reflects continued progress towards recovery and the Bank’s increased confidence in the strength of the Canadian economic outlook. (Bank of Canada)

• Lumber prices drop again as customers hold off purchasing It is usual that the dual national holiday weeks, Canada Day and Independence Day, show a slow-down in lumber sales. Normally by this time of year buyers have ordered — and indeed received — the vast bulk of the wood they will be needing for the season’s building projects, so demand is slowing down and prices are softening (Canadian Forest Industries)

• 'Massive corrective free fall': Lumber wipes out all its 2021 gains after record boom Prices have declined on rising inventory levels and a 'significant drop' in lumber demand at large retail stores (Financial Post)

• Lumber Wipes Out 2021 Gain With Demand Ebbing After Record Boom Lumber, which at one point was among the world’s best-performing commodities as the pandemic sent construction demand soaring and stoked fears of inflation, has officially wiped out all of its staggering gains for the year. (Bloomberg)

• In Investing, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff It is easy to obsess about the smallest parts of your portfolio, like the tiny amounts of interest spun off by money-market funds today. Don’t waste your time. (New York Times)

• Monty Python and the Search for the Ultimate Index Why is MSCI seeking something that was proved not to exist back in 1977 and then declared dead in 1992? (Bloomberg)

• On Chandler Bing’s Job Twenty-five years ago, Friends anticipated a time that would both romanticize and mistrust the culture of work. (The Atlantic)

• Barry Diller Headed 2 Hollywood Studios. He Now Says The Movie Business Is Dead "The movie business is over," Diller said in an exclusive interview with NPR on the sidelines of the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, a media and technology conference in Idaho. "The movie business as before is finished and will never come back." (NPR)

• The baby bust: How a declining birth rate will reshape the world We are now facing a demographic winter that will transform the way we live. (New Statesman)

• The Dream of Florida Is Dead The Miami condo collapse is a crisis for the entire state. (Slate)

House Hunt Victoria, BC Check-Up Report, Condo Buildings, and Food Waste

Tuesday morning news drop

• BC Check-Up 2021 CPA BC Report The BC: Check-Up Live report focuses on demographic and housing activity across the province and in each of the province’s seven regional developments. BC Check-Up: Live focuses on the impact of travel restrictions during the COVID-19 pandemic—specifically, how these restrictions affected migration patterns and stunted BC’s previously rapid population growth. The report also examines demographic trends, including how the average age of British Columbians continues to rise. Finally, it assesses housing affordability, highlighting the surging cost of residential real estate, the lag in housing supply, and the increasing disparity between family income and housing prices. (CPA BC)

• Condos Are in Uncharted Territory: The first generation of American condominiums is reaching old age. Are homeowner boards up to the task? (Slate)

• What the condo collapse means for agents, sellers and buyers in South Florida “The condo market was on fire. There is no question that the condo market is going to take a hit because of the fear factor. I’ve already seen it in closings.” (South Florida Agent Magazine)

• An Investing Truth: Roughly 80% of Stocks Are “Duds” Whether you’re measuring 19th-century whaling, early stage startups, or large stocks, you can’t escape this investing truth. Lots of losers and a few big winners. (Risk Hedge)

• Is Moderna’s Vaccine Breakthrough Really Worth $100 Billion? The company’s hugely successful Covid shot sent the stock sky-high, but its hefty valuation comes with some big risks. (Bloomberg)

• “I Don’t Think I’ll Ever Go Back”: Return-to-Office Agita Is Sweeping Silicon Valley As more of America gets vaccinated, executives—especially in tech—are facing a conundrum: a scattered workforce, employees enchanted by the WFH lifestyle, and million-dollar campuses standing vacant. (Vanity Fair)

• The lie of “expired” food and the disastrous truth of America’s food waste problem Stop throwing your food away (Vox)

• There’s A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States’ Vaccination Rates But surveys have shown Trump supporters are the least likely to say they have been vaccinated or plan to be. Remember, Trump got vaccinated before leaving the White House, but that was reported months later. Unlike other public officials who were trying to encourage people to get the shot, Trump did it in private. (NPR)

• 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. For nearly every U.S. county, both the 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. (New York Times)

• What about those downsizers? Downsizing is a topic that I’ve found to be difficult to get solid information on. You will find various surveys out there that say that either a large number of people end up downsizing or that most will stay put. A good article in the Financial Post making the latter case cited two surveys that indicated around 9 in 10 seniors intend to stay in their current home as long as they were able to. (House Hunt Victoria)

Lumber Crisis, Bond Markets, Vaccinations, Luxottica, and TikTok Marketing

Monday morning news drop

• Everything You Need to Know About the Great Lumber Crisis of 2021 Lumber prices are coming back down to Earth, but the crisis shows how many industries can be rocked by the price of wood. (Vice)

• What’s Driving the Stock, Bond & Housing Markets Right Now? Right now some people would say that variable is the Fed or interest rates. That might be true but I have my own unifying theory of what’s driving markets at the moment — money. People have plenty of it and nowhere else to put it. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• The Bond Market Is Telling Us to Worry About Growth, Not Inflation The economy remains hot, but the future is looking less buoyant than it did just a short while ago (New York Times)

• Alberta's COVID-19 vaccination rates tied to levels of formal education, data shows

  Researchers say correlation can help guide efforts to immunize more people An analysis of COVID-19 vaccination rates in Alberta suggests one socio-economic factor, more than others, is correlated to vaccine uptake. And it's not income, language or cultural barriers. It's education. People who have fewer years of formal education, have a different sort of trust. So they're not going to listen to the experts (CBC)

• Canada needs to vaccinate 90 per cent of adults and teens. At this rate, we’ll never get there The government has detailed information on who and who hasn’t been vaccinated, income brackets and education levels. Vaccination is our ticket out of the pandemic. It’s the way to protect ourselves against a variant-powered fourth wave. Public-health experts have been saying it for months, and you will hear it, again and again and then some more, over the summer. It’s as true as truisms get. (Globe and Mail)

• Trump Country Rejects Vaccines Despite Growing Delta Threat President Biden missed a July 4 target for shots after politically conservative areas balked (Bloomberg)

• Five under vaccinated clusters put the entire United States at risk Clusters of unvaccinated people, most of them in the southern United States, are vulnerable to surges in Covid-19 cases and could become breeding grounds for even more deadly Covid-19 variants: Starting in Georgia and stretching west to Texas and north to Missouri + include parts of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. see also (CNN)

• How Canada's COVID policies stoked asset bubbles and income inequality More than any time in recent history, the rich have gotten richer (Financial Post)

• Meet the Four-Eyed, Eight-Tentacled Monopoly That is Making Your Glasses So Expensive Luxottica controls 80% of the major brands in the $28 billion global eyeglasses industry. This monopolistic structure of the market leads to profits that are “relatively obscene” (Forbes)

• This Is Tax Evasion, Plain and Simple The race to the bottom on corporate taxes has gone on for too long. Since the 1980s, countries have competed for business by reducing companies’ taxes. A few nations, like Ireland and Bermuda, have adopted extremely low rates and become tax havens for companies like Google and Apple. Last week, 130 countries, including the United States, agreed to a blueprint to tax their companies’ profits at a minimum 15 percent rate — no matter where the profits are booked. (New York Times)

• TikTok made me buy it The video app is causing products to blow up — and flame out — faster than ever. TikTok allows certain creators and businesses in the UK and Indonesia to sell products within its TikTok Shop, though the feature doesn’t yet exist in the US. But it’s almost certainly coming. What effect that might have on American consumerism depends on whom you ask. (Vox)

• What Makes a Cult a Cult? The line between delusion and what the rest of us believe may be blurrier than we think. (New Yorker)

Videos of the Week, Inflation, Private Equity, Gen Z Misinformation, and Dining Out

Friday morning news drop

• Everything feels more expensive because it is Why are prices going up? Used cars, gas, and groceries seem more expensive because they are. (Vox)

• Are Private Equity Firms to Blame For Rising Home Prices? Wall Street is an easy scapegoat. The real villain lives much closer to home. (Marker)

• A Memo to Investors That’s it. That’s the stock-picking game. Stocks are not pieces of art. They are not fiat money. Cults of personality do not last forever in the stock market. Narratives break. Eventually, everyone figured out that Galileo was right. Eventually, everyone will figure out that Cathie Wood isn’t. And it won’t take as long either. (Albert Bridge Capital)

• A Great Inflation Redux? Economists Point to Big Differences. Prices climbed for years before the runaway inflation of the 1970s. Economists see parallels today, but the differences are just as important. (New York Times)

• Vinyl Is More Popular Than Ever. Surprisingly, That’s a Problem Pressing plants can’t keep up with unprecedented demand, and big box chains are selling LPs now, resulting in devastating delays. (Vice)

• Why Generation Z falls for online misinformation We can all learn from how today’s young people evaluate truth online. (MIT Technology Review)

• The Tech Cold War’s ‘Most Complicated Machine’ That’s Out of China’s Reach A $150 million chip-making tool from a Dutch company has become a lever in the U.S.-Chinese struggle. It also shows how entrenched the global supply chain is. (New York Times)

• Dining Out, Digitized: Many restaurants dropped printed menus during the pandemic in favor of QR codes sending diners to online ordering platforms. Will eating out be the same? (Bloomberg)

• Cricket is Having its Moneyball Moment When Twenty20 launched, the game of cricket changed forever. Now a team of data evangelists are taking the sport to the next level. (Wired)

• Artist Esmaa Mohamoud Examines How Pro Sports Profit from Black Athletes Sports bring people together in living rooms, in crowded bars, and in the streets. Mohamoud seeks to expose the monstrous underbelly of all that winning (Walrus)

Videos of the Week

“It all starts with a push” Tony Hawk

OUR BMX MASHUP

CULTCREW/ NORTH EAST RAW CUT -10 day in NJ, PA, NY, CT, MA w/ Chase Dehart, Brandon Begin and Trev Mags. Documented by Veesh and Eddie Cuellar.

S&M BMX - Mike Stahl - WELCOME TO PRO It's been in the pipeline for a bit, but today we're proud to announce that Mike Stahl has been bumped to the pro team! Mike is one of the hardest working dudes in BMX and we're proud to have him repping!

Courage Adams: REAL BMX 2021 | World of X Games

Felix Prangenberg: REAL BMX 2021 | World of X Games

Chad Kerley: REAL BMX 2021 | World of X Games

Julian Molina: REAL BMX 2021 | World of X Games

BluePrint Mark Matthews New Trail in Cumberland BC The day has come! The trail is finally open to public! Blueprint can be found in the Cumberland, BC trail network. Thanks to Shimano, The United Riders of Cumberland, and Mosaic Forest Management for making this project possible

Home Stretch feat. Henry Fitzgerald

Fresh Flow with Reed Boggs Reed Boggs rips up the Virgin, Utah landscape onboards his new Flow wheelset.

Girl X Volcom's "Pretty Stoned" Video: Simon, Rick, Manchild, Cody, Griffin and Niels along with their synergized squad rip the indoor ramps and paved waves of the Pacific Northwest. Get high off the vibes.

Andres Bill's "Be Water" Video Flowing through Southern California’s alleys and well-trafficked avenues, Andres’ crew hits huge taildrops and ditch dives with their own rhythm.

Matt Bublitz' "Enter the Museum" Part

Kyle Walsh's "Dogwood" Part Water hazards, street snowboarding and massive rails, this vid is pure party. Heavy Muska vibes on that noseslide…

Tim Debauche's "Opus 1" Part Tim blends bank transfers, stacked homie sessions and serious 360 flips across Europe—all set to the late, great Daniel Johnston.

Ocean Temperatures, Tampa Bay Lightening Stanley Cup Champions, and Lil Nas X

Thursday morning news drop

• It’s so hot that Canada’s sea creatures are cooking to death in their shells Extreme heat temperatures, rising up to 40 C in Vancouver, had caused sea animals like mussels, clams and snails to cook to their death. (Toronto Star)

• Why the Lightning are the most impressive Stanley Cup champions of the NHL's salary-cap era Evil has prevailed. Tampa Bay has captured a second straight Stanley Cup. The Great Lightning Heist has been completed. (ESPN)

• The Billionaire Playbook: How Sports Owners Use Their Teams to Avoid Millions in Taxes Owners like Steve Ballmer can take the kinds of deductions on team assets — everything from media deals to player contracts — that industrialists take on factory equipment. That helps them pay lower tax rates than players and even stadium workers. (ProPublica)

• Crypto Scammers Rip Off Billions as Pump-and-Dump Schemes Go Digital Billions are getting pilfered annually through a variety of cryptocurrency scams. In today’s cryptocurrencies, it’s known as the rug pull: Shit Coins, obscure digital something-or-others are being minted by the thousands. Telegram (a popular instant messaging app) has become a major crypto boiler room “Everybody I know has gotten rug-pulled.” The way things are going, this will only get worse. (Bloomberg Wealth)

• Is This the End of the ‘Fiery’ Public Versus Private Equity Debate? 60/40 portfolios: when private assets are included within the equity allocation, the fund’s performance is stronger than its private equity-less counterparts. This is true even when underperforming funds are involved. (Institutional Investor)

• Before investing in Robinhood or trusting it with your money, read these documents Finra accused Robinhood of plying millions of customers with “false or misleading information” about their account balances, of leaving millions of customers unable to trade because its IT systems broke down at crucial moments, and of approving thousands of customers for options trading even though it should have known they were unqualified to play the options market. (Los Angeles Times)

• The Robinhood Conundrum 47% of traders use the product on a daily basis. Among those customers who visted the app on a daily basis, the average number of visits was seven per day. More than 98% of users use the app on a monthly basis. This type of engagement and usage is insanely high for an investment product. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Why do we buy what we buy? A sociologist on why people buy too many things. What’s at the root of modern American consumerism? It might not just be competition among the brands trying to sell us things, but also competition among ourselves. American consumerism is also built on societal factors that are often overlooked. And in an increasingly unequal society, the Joneses at the very top are doing a lot of the consuming, while the people at the bottom struggle to keep up. (Vox)

• To Expand U.S. Vaccine Access, Consider the Dollar Store: The dollar store footprint lends itself to thinking about this broader aim of making vaccines available right where people are located, and the people that are disproportionately under-vaccinated in so many of our cities and communities right now. Dollar stores could be key access points for reaching vulnerable populations who have limited access to health care services, and sometimes lack trust in the system. (Citylab)

• The Internet Is Rotting Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. (Atlantic)

• The Mountain Bike Tech Infiltrating the Tour de France While mountain biking has spent the past 30 years trying to shed its road cycling similarities, the road cycling world has now begun taking some cues from its muddier cousin. Last year we talked about how mountain bike products such as dropper posts, mountain bike rotors and inserts were becoming viable options for Tour de France riders and we're back with another haul of tech trends for 2021. (Pink Bike)

• The Subversive Joy of Lil Nas X’s Gay Pop Stardom A peek into a hot boy summer filled with new highs, disappointment and growth. (New York Times)

Investing, Private Equity, Global Stocks, Chinese Immigration, Shohei Ohtani, and Terminator 2

Wednesday morning news drop

• How Long Does it Take For the Stock Market to Double Off a Bear Market Bottom? Investing during a market crash can be lucrative. After the Great Financial Crisis caused the market to fall 56%, the S&P bottomed on March 9, 2009. The market snapped back in a hurry, surging nearly 70% from those lows through the end of the year. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Private Equity Still Outperforms Listed Stocks — But It’s Losing Its Edge Investors can blame stimulus from central banks and government spending as well as private equity’s unstoppable popularity for the sector’s narrower win over public equities. (Institutional Investor)

• In Defense of Global Stocks Global stocks are nothing to be overlooked. While the U.S. is clearly an outlier on the world stage, most of the strategies discussed here can be applied just as well to equity markets around the globe. Consider how a typical global equity investor would have performed over the last few decades as an asset class. (Of Dollars And Data)

• The 3 Simple Rules That Underscore the Danger of Delta Vaccines are still beating the variants, but the unvaccinated world is being pummeled. (Atlantic)

• When Chinese in Canada Were Numbered, Interrogated, Excluded Systemic racism left a paper trail. A century later, researchers are hunting for the evidence. (Tyee)

• Giannis Isn’t Cooked—and Neither Are the Bucks Milwaukee’s two-time MVP not only suited up in Game 1, but also surprisingly looked like his usual self. The same can’t be said for Jrue Holiday, who struggled mightily, but a return to form from both stars could help the Bucks recover quickly. (The Ringer)

• Shohei Ohtani Isn’t Babe Ruth—He’s Better Ohtani is a once-in-a-century player in a year when we need to be awed, inspired and distracted. Comparing him to the Babe is no longer enough. (Sports Illustrated)

• The Tin Man Gets His Heart: An Oral History of ‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ Three decades ago, James Cameron, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Linda Hamilton joined forces again to make the biggest, baddest, most eye-popping sequel ever. Here’s the story of how the machines took over Hollywood. (The Ringer)

House Hunt Victoria, Treasury Yields, Stock Market, Fires in Canada, and Instagram Influencers

Tuesday morning news drop

• Low Treasury Yields Today, the 10-year Treasury yields a paltry 1.5%. With real rates negative, the near-consensus view is that rising inflation will end the 35-year Treasury bull market. And commentators are arguing that Treasurys at 1.5% have far less upside than they did at 6.4%. (Verdad)

• Let’s Face It, Most Bankers Are Going Back to the Office Despite the press releases, very few companies have actually committed to new, more flexible ways of working. Credit Suisse is a case in point. (Bloomberg)

• Why fragility is the new reality for the stock market An imbalance has developed between the supply of and demand for liquidity, and as a result we’ve seen a significant increase in the potential for the public equity market to jump from a state of calm to one of chaos. Consequently, we tend to distrust situations where stability has become the consensus, as we believe any change in the narrative is apt to bring surprisingly drastic changes in the equilibrium. (Wellington Management)

• Record Stock Sales From Money-Losing Firms Ring the Alarm Bells If you think a rush by companies to sell their shares is a bad omen for the market, imagine a scenario where most of the sales come from firms that don’t make money. It’s happening now. Since the end of March, almost 100 unprofitable U.S. companies, including GameStop Corp. and AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., have raised money through secondary offerings, twice as many as coming from profitable firms. (Bloomberg)

• Shrinkflation Is an Economic Monster Worth Watching When inflation strikes, retailers have a proven strategy to pass the costs on to consumers. (Bloomberg)

• No, it doesn’t need to be a Zoom: We’re wasting hours of our lives on inefficient video calls. Here’s how to decide when you should jump on a Zoom – and when not to (Wired)

• The Future of Fire in Canada We’re on the brink of a ‘runaway fire age.’ Here’s why. And how to respond. (Tyee)

• Instagram’s Parent Trap Influencers modelling an idyllic image of motherhood are highly clickable—but pictures never tell the whole story (Walrus)

• The population inflection For a long time population growth in the region was quite sedate and predictable, growing slowly at around 1%/year and that’s what the CRD has used to project population for the next 20 years in the Regional Growth Strategy. However starting in 2011, population growth in many parts of the Greater Victoria area accelerated suddenly, and this new higher rate of growth has continued up to 2020, the most recent data available. (House Hunt Victoria)

Real Estate, Investment Returns, Oil, China, Social Media, THC, and Britney Spears

Monday morning news drop

• A new wave of buyers expected to hit B.C. real estate market Throughout the pandemic, home sales soared, and in some markets, set record prices. Industry insiders say that postpandemic, the B.C. housing market is expected to boom again – driven by Canadians returning home and the federal government’s plan to bring in more than 1.2 million immigrants by 2023. (Globe and Mail)

• Farmland Investing: Impact Beyond Returns Farmland is the latest asset class to be revolutionized by the fintech wave. Whether it’s through REITs, commodity ETFs or crowdfunding platforms, farmland sticks out among investors, both in terms of its attractive return on investment and its potential to increase the sustainability of the agriculture sector. (Worth)

• How Last Century’s Oil Wells Are Messing With Texas Right Now Ranchers and regulators are contending with uncontrolled leaks from thousands of abandoned oil and gas sites that could render some land “functionally uninhabitable.” (Bloomberg)

• How big business exploits small business Companies like Facebook and Uber say they’re supporting small businesses while squashing them. But what can be less obvious is that these same entities are constantly finding new ways to stunt small-business growth to keep new entrants and potential competitors at bay. They also create roadblocks and find ways to extract money and power from small businesses in order to maintain their positions and increase profits. (Vox)

• ‘A Form of Brainwashing’: China Remakes Hong Kong Neighbors are urged to report on one another. Children are taught to look for traitors. Officials are pressed to pledge their loyalty. (NYT)

• When the US risks being leapfrogged: Three decades ago many fretted that Japan was set to overwhelm America’s prowess; now it’s China and the fears are eerily similar (Asia Times)

• Reddit Hates Short Sellers, But the Stock Market Needs Them Meme investors may like cutting shorts off at the knees, yet when the goal is setting accurate prices, people betting on shares to fall provide crucial information. (Businessweek)

• “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” The distance between this platform and the slave plantation, from which I escaped, is considerable — and the difficulties to be overcome in getting from the latter to the former, are by no means slight. That I am here to-day is, to me, a matter of astonishment as well as of gratitude. You will not, therefore, be surprised, if in what I have to say I evince no elaborate preparation, nor grace my speech with any high sounding exordium. (Teaching American History)

• The Forever Virus: A Strategy for the Long Fight Against COVID-19 The virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic is not going away. SARS-CoV-2 cannot be eradicated. Among humans, global herd immunity, once promoted as a singular solution, is unreachable. Most countries simply don’t have enough vaccines to go around, and even in the lucky few with an ample supply, too many people are refusing to get the shot. (Foreign Affairs)

• America’s Pot Labs Have A THC Problem America’s legal weed industry sold over $17 billion of pot last year and the industry’s obsession with THC, pot’s most famous intoxicant, has created financial rewards for every marginal increase in THC potency. “THC inflation is pernicious, it’s easy to accomplish and there are strong financial incentives to do it.” (FiveThirtyEight)

• Robbing the X-Box Vault - Inside a $10 million gift card cheat A junior Microsoft engineer figured out a nearly perfect Bitcoin generation scheme. (Bloomberg)

• Why some biologists and ecologists think social media is a risk to humanity Researchers who specialize in widely different fields, from climate science to philosophy, make the case that academics should treat the study of technology’s large-scale impact on society as a “crisis discipline.” A crisis discipline is a field in which scientists across different fields work quickly to address an urgent societal problem — like how conservation biology tries to protect endangered species or climate science research aims to stop global warming. (Vox)

• The social media influencers are just getting started Don’t believe rumours of their decline and imminent extinction. A revolutionary new digital marketplace is emerging, which will be dominated by content “creators” defined by their authenticity, transparency and values (Tortoise)

• The Internet Is Rotting: Too much has been lost already. Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system, operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. But the glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. (The Atlantic)

• Britney Spears’s Conservatorship Nightmare How the pop star’s father and a team of lawyers seized control of her life—and have held on to it for thirteen years. (New Yorker)

Commodity Traders, Nike's Business Model, Economy, Macaloney Scotch, and Extreme Heat

Wednesday morning news drop - Tomorrow is Canada day, we will be taking the day off!

• Commodity Traders Harvest Billions While Prices Rise for Everyone Else From oil to steel, raw material prices are surging. As the world economy recovers, how much further does the boom have to run? (Bloomberg)

• The balance in Nike’s business is shifting dramatically Nike didn’t make its billions alone. Most of its sales have come from selling to wholesale partners such as department stores, mom-and-pop shops, sporting goods specialists, and all the thousands of retail businesses Nike has long relied on to distribute its products to shoppers. Just a decade ago, in 2011, roughly 84% of Nike brand sales were still to wholesale customers. Sales Nike made to shoppers itself, through channels such as its stores and website, amounted to just 16% of its business. (Quartz)

• A financial shock is coming for those who jumped into the housing market during the COVID-19 pandemic The widely anticipated post-COVID discretionary spending binge is variously being branded as the Roaring 20s; revenge spending; YOLO, for you only live once; and MUFLT, for make up for lost time. A recent personal finance column warned of the risks of getting carried away with this spending in ways that increase debt. The smart splurge is one you can pay for out of savings. (Globe and Mail)

• Seven Reasons to Be Extremely Optimistic About the Economy Right Now The U.S. economy is in the middle of an awkward transition. Like a groggy bear roused from hibernation, the country is no longer dormant due to the pandemic but isn’t quite back in full form either. Millions remain unemployed, businesses are having trouble hiring, workers are still avoiding the office, and shortages of everything from lumber to computer chips have helped push up consumer prices. (Slate)

• Why Aren’t Interest Rates Higher? We may not get 4-5% sustained inflation but we could see 2-3% which would be a step up from the 1-2% post-2008 recovery. And we may not see 6-7% real GDP growth continue but it’s certainly possible for 3-4% for a few years as opposed to the 2% or so we’ve become accustomed to. Yet interest rates remain stubbornly low. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Injuries Are Haunting the NBA Playoffs. How Teams Respond Will Decide Them. Atlanta found a way to steal Game 4 without its superstar. Milwaukee may have to do the same in Game 5. It’s been an all-too-common theme this postseason, and one that isn’t likely to go away. (Ringer)

• 'Big Scotch' is going after this Canadian distiller from Victoria, BC for naming his whisky after himself The Scotch Whisky Association filed a lawsuit alleging Graeme Macaloney's distillery was illegally branding its whisky as though it were Scotch, with his use of words like 'island' and even his surname, 'Macaloney' (McLean’s)

• Can We Survive Extreme Heat? Humans have never lived on a planet this hot, and we’re totally unprepared for what’s to come (Rolling Stone)