Russian Invasion, Climate Change, and CM Punk

Wednesday morning news drop

• A moment of clarity The Russian invasion of Ukraine should wake us up. Ukraine wasn’t threatening Russia in any way; Ukraine never fired a shot into their neighbor, even though that neighbor had already carved off pieces of their country in 2014 and subjected them to a grinding eight-year war. Putin simply declared that Ukraine is historically part of Russia and sent in his troops. (Noahpinion)

• Is Taiwan Next? Russia’s invasion of Ukraine makes the frightening possibility of China seizing control of the island more real. (The Atlantic)

• At 91, Warren Buffett Still Isn’t in Any Hurry: Lacking prospects for a new megadeal, he and longtime Berkshire Hathaway partner Charlie Munger are content to bide their time sitting on a massive pile of cash. (Bloomberg)

• How Ikea tricks you into buying more stuff The home furnishings giant enlists a maze-like layout, cheap food, and crafty psychology to get you to fill up your cart. (The Hustle)

• Sea Level Rise Will Be Catastrophic—and Unequal: A chilling new report predicts a foot of sea level rise in the US by 2050. But quirks of physics mean everyone will suffer in different ways. (Wired)

• Climate change is killing people, but there’s still time to reverse the damage Heat waves, droughts, floods, wildfires, disease outbreaks and other dire effects of climate change are accelerating more rapidly than scientists expected in many parts of the world, including in North America. And as oceans, rainforests and polar regions heat up, nature is less and less able to help us with the task of adapting to a hotter Earth. (NPR)

• A Nineteenth-Century Flu Pandemic May Be a Window into Coronaviruses Experts have turned back the clock to see what the Russian flu and other epidemics can teach us. (Walrus)

• The Fall and Rise of CM Punk Nearly a decade ago, he walked away from pro wrestling and swore never to return. Now he's back, headlining All Elite Wrestling, a new league that's challenging the mighty WWE for dominance. Where did CM Punk go, and how did he get here? (Esquire)

Ukraine, Russia, and the Stock Market

Monday morning news drop

• The ruble crashes, the stock market closes and Russia’s economy staggers under sanctions. The ruble cratered, the stock market froze and the public rushed to withdraw cash on Monday as Western sanctions kicked in and Russia awoke to uncertainty and fear over the rapidly spreading repercussions of President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. (New York Times)

• In Ukraine, Daily Life in the Face of War Through years of conflict, people in eastern Ukraine have sought a semblance of normal existence—one that’s now under siege. (New Yorker)

• The West Weaponizes Russia’s Central Bank Against Putin The sanctions have the potential to devastate the country’s economy and sow the seeds of Putin’s downfall. (Bloomberg)

• Talks to end fighting between Russia and Ukraine end with no substantial agreement Exodus from Ukraine continues while sanctions have an impact on Russian economy (CBC)

• The big sanctions: A quick explainer Western countries are now pulling out all the stops in terms of sanctions. The latest round includes: Cutting some Russian banks out of the SWIFT messaging system, Freezing the Russian central bank’s access to its foreign currency reserves held in the West, Increased sanctions on Russian banks in general, Establishing an international task force to hunt down and freeze the assets of Russian companies and Russian oligarchs Just a couple of days ago, these sanctions were almost unthinkable. But the moral clarity of the unprovoked and brutal Russian assault has changed minds (Noahpinion)

• Big Tech’s Russia problem Social media companies are in a standoff with Russia on censorship and there’s no easy solution. (Recode)

• Cryptocurrency Is a Potential New Tool for Billionaires to Avoid Sanctions Individuals and other entities targeted in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may circumvent penalties if they choose to use crypto. (Bloomberg)

• The Stock Market is Heartless It seems odd to worry about the stock market at a time of war when people are dying, losing their homes and potentially the country they love. The point here is the stock market is heartless. It often goes up in the face of godawful events when it almost doesn’t seem right. (A Wealth of Common Sense)

• Berkshire Hathaway Rebounds From the Pandemic In announcing the company’s $90 billion profit in 2021, Warren Buffett noted the role that Berkshire plays in the American economy. (Dealbook)

America and Child Poverty, the War in Ukraine, and the Tech Selloff

Monday morning news drop

• Why America Has Been So Stingy In Fighting Child Poverty For decades, many American economists were pretty much obsessed with trying to document the ways in which welfare programs discouraged work, or broke up families, or encouraged pregnancy, while ignoring all the benefits that society gets from having kids grow up in a more financially secure environment. Aizer, Hoynes, and Lleras-Muney analyze research papers in America’s top academic journals since the 1960s, and they find that prior to 2010, fewer than 27 percent of all articles about welfare programs even bothered to try and document their benefits. (NPR)

• War in Ukraine: How we got here — and what may come next The road to war was long and complicated. The way out may be, too. (Grid)

• Putin And Ukraine Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is entirely about what a country and its people are permitted to be (Globe and Mail)

• The impact of throwing Russia out of Swift The messaging network has become the embodiment of the “weaponisation of finance” (Financial Times Alphaville)

• Scammy Instagram ‘war pages’ are capitalizing on Ukraine conflict Beware: Despite their claims, these accounts are not run by journalists on the ground. (Input)

• What happens when Americans stay in the same house forever? Americans used to move a lot; now they don’t. It could be causing a social crisis. (Vox)

• Tech Selloff Hints at Deep Cracks in Glamour Stocks Shares of highly valued, rapidly growing companies with little or no profits are suffering declines typically associated with financial meltdowns and other crises. (Bloomberg)

• Unfunded Liabilities: How Three Public Pensions Found Themselves in Crisis And how they are clawing their way out. (Chief Investment Officer)

• The professor who beat roulette: How a renowned researcher beat the odds, stumped casino owners around the world, and walked away with a fortune. (The Hustle)

Videos of the Week, Putin and Ukraine, and Shopify's Evolution

Friday morning news drop

• Why is Russia invading Ukraine and what does Putin want? For months Russia’s Vladimir Putin denied planning to attack Ukraine, but on Thursday he announced a “special military operation” in the country’s Donbas region. The announcement on live television was followed by reports of explosions in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv as well as other parts of the country. (BBC)

• Autopsied bodies and false flags: How pro-Russian disinformation spreads chaos in Ukraine In Russia, military might and KGB-inspired disinformation go hand in hand. (Grid)

• Efficiency Rules – The future of retail The future of retail is all about customer productivity. At Canadian Tire Hillside, owner Justin Young is thinking outside the box to create an in-store experience that is efficient, engaging and technologically informed. (Douglas)

• It’s Ugly Out There Since 1950, the S&P 500 has declined 10% from its highs 25 times. Twelve times it fell more than 20%. A coin toss that a correction turns into a bear market. It’s important to point out that most investors don’t have all of their money in the S&P 500. The numbers don’t adequately convey the stress felt by some investors, so let me break it down… (Irrelevant Investor)

• S&P 500 Charts Are So Bad Even Bulls Are Looking to Adjust Bets Stocks under pressure on Ukraine-Russia tensions, hawkish Fed S&P 500 living on edge of support, says Piper’s Craig Johnson (Bloomberg)

• Shopify’s Evolution Even with a toehold in the consumer space, though, Shopify has remained a company that is focused first-and-foremost on its merchants and its mission to “help people achieve independence by making it easier to start, run, and grow a business.” That independence doesn’t just mean one-person entrepreneurs either: good-size brands like Gymshark, Rebecca Minkoff, KKW Beauty, Kylie Cosmetics, and FIGS leverage Shopify to build brands that are independent of Amazon in particular. (Stratechery)

• What It’ll Take to Get Electric Planes off the Ground The lithium-ion battery is good for moving cars short distances, but aviation requires longer-lasting power. Maybe we need to try other elements. (Wired)

• The Millions of People Stuck in Pandemic Limbo: What does society owe immunocompromised people? Close to 3 percent of U.S. adults take immunosuppressive drugs; at least 7 million immunocompromised people—a number that’s already larger than the populations of 36 states, without even including the millions more who have diseases that also hamper immunity, such as AIDS and at least 450 genetic disorders. (The Atlantic)

Videos of the Week

Chaos in Duluth | Red Bull Heavy Metal 2022 Highlights After a nearly two-decade hiatus, Red Bull Heavy Metal is back - and heavier than ever. Taking place at the iconic Cascade Park in Duluth, MN, Red Bull Heavy Metal played host to 40 of the world’s top rail riders in a day-long street snowboarding competition unlike any other.

Sage Cattabriga-Alosa - Hallways: "The experience of skiing chutes, couloirs, ridges, and corridors are also correlated to the way bike trails snake and wind through the land. What we do on the trail is fun, but it's the 'where we are' factor that really grabs me in either environment."

CHAD KERLEY - THE WAY OF THE MASTER - LOCKDOWN RAW CUT

CULTCREW/ CHAD CURTIS/ 2022 One of the coolest things in BMX is the unique individuals that make up this community...Chad Curtis is exactly this, super original, passionate, creative, BMX lifer...Stoked to finally show you some of his shredding...

DYLAN RIEDER 5 years since Dylan Rieder passed away. In my opinion he was the coolest to ever step on a skateboard, and the world is so much less cool without him.

Cold Call: Felipe Nunes Hop on the mission with Felipe as he tackles a behemoth bank ride and comes back for more. Grit doesn't even begin to describe this guy.

Cold Call: Bob Burnquist Bob shows us around the compound, hoppin' the channel switch in his concrete bowl and closing out at the Mega.

Andy Anderson Joins Etnies Skate Team

MASHER: Houston Gregson treks down to Texas, catching clips with T-Hawk, The Muscle, Rune, Andy Mac and more. This crew can kill some ‘crete.

The Great Retirement, Home Building, and Living With Covid

Thursday morning news drop

• The Great Resignation is also the Great Retirement of the Baby Boomers. That’s a Problem. Employers are dependent on the outsize baby boomer cohort, whose exit is contributing to growing shortages of workers everywhere, from nursing to school bus drivers to the service industry. It’s not just 22-year-old baristas who have had it with working conditions. Those understaffed stores? Retailers became increasingly reliant on older workers in the wake of the Great Recession. Many are now making an exit. (Washington Post)

• 4 Bed, 3 Bath, No Garage Door: The Unlikely Woes Holding Up Home Building Supply-chain complications are giving the industry and buyers fits. (New York Times)

• Is There a Way Out of America’s Impossible Housing Mess? The first step, according to economist Jenny Schuetz, is recognizing there is more than one housing crisis. (Slate)

• Chrystia Freeland, Minister of Everything, has big plans for Canada’s economic future In an alternate universe, you would know Chrystia Freeland only as a writer and journalist, as an eminent authority on Vladimir Putin and the oligarchs who feed off him, perhaps eventually as the editor-in-chief of this newspaper or the Financial Times. You would see her on talk shows, on the lecture circuit, publishing another award-winning book examining the ways of wealth and power. That was the train she was on in 2013, when she decided to jump the track and enter national politics. Since being elected in 2015, she’s become known as Justin Trudeau’s Everything Minister (Globe and Mail)

• As food prices soar, communities find innovative ways to feed more people Experts stress charity not a long-term solution to food insecurity in Canadian households (CBC)

• COVID-19 Isn’t Going Anywhere — And Americans Know It Most Americans believe COVID-19 will persist into the near (or distant) future, but what that means to people’s daily lives is the subject of much more dissent. That’s because understanding COVID-19 as an ongoing reality means something different to everyone. (FiveThirtyEight)

• COVID Won’t End Up Like the Flu. It Will Be Like Smoking. Hundreds of thousands of deaths, from either tobacco or the pandemic, could be prevented with a single behavioral change. (The Atlantic)

• Francis Ford Coppola’s $100 Million Bet Fifty years after he gave us The Godfather, the iconic director is chasing his grandest project yet—and putting up over $100 million of his own money to prove his best work is still ahead of him. (GQ)

Practical Performance - The two best cars (wagons) on the market

Interest Rates and Stocks, Rental Vacancy Rates, and Ukraine

Wednesday morning news drop

• How Do Stocks Perform When the Fed Raises Rates? There have been 8 longer-term rate hiking cycles since 1970 Surprisingly, stocks have held up relatively well on average, with a total return in these periods of 23%. (Wealth of Common Sense)

• Everyone Thinks Rising Interest Rates Are Bad for Tech Stocks. But Are They? A closer look at the numbers shows that the relationship may not be as clear-cut as many investors believe. (Institutional Investor)

• Big Tech Makes a Big Bet: Offices Are Still the Future Even as they allow some employees to change how often they come into the office, tech companies are rapidly buying and leasing properties around the country. (New York Times)

• What We Lose When Work Gets Too Casual The loss of workplace formalities like fixed start and stop times, managerial hierarchies with clear pathways for advancement and professional norms that create boundaries between personal and professionally acceptable behavior only hurt workers. We should not be deceived: Many of these changes mostly benefit employers. (New York Times)

• Putin’s New Age of Conquest In today’s world, borders are almost never redrawn at the point of a gun. Could the Ukraine crisis change that? (Grid)

• Inside the High-Stakes Fight to Control the Narrative on Ukraine As Putin searches for a false pretense to invade Ukraine, the Biden Administration has moved to release, in real time, what it knows of Russia’s war plans (New Yorker)

• How Winter Olympians who hate the cold compete in freezing weather As the Beijing Games carry on through frigid temperatures and frosty conditions, athletes reveal the cold hard truth about competing in a polar climate. (Sports Illustrated)

• Rental reprieve over: vacancy rate returns to 1% Unfortunately, we’ve known for months that the brief reprieve for tenants was already over, with reports of ultra low vacancy rates in purpose built rentals, a rental crisis for returning students, and swarms of applicants for private suites. The recent CMHC rental report confirmed the return of the dire situation, with Greater Victoria vacancy dropping back to the pre-pandemic rate of 1%. (House Hunt Victoria)

Declining Birth Rates, Corporate Pricing, and the Pandemic's True Death Toll

Tuesday morning news drop

•  March 2020: How the Fed Averted Economic Disaster As markets plunged, Jerome Powell and his colleagues vastly expanded the reach of the central bank, with implications that will be felt for years to come. (Wall Street Journal)

• Corporate pricing is boosting inflation — but we’re still buying Corporations pass more than increased costs on to consumers. (Vox)

• Wall Street Is Buying Starter Homes to Quietly Become America’s Landlord Private equity money is pouring into the Phoenix real estate market, turning first-time homebuyers into renters. (BusinessWeek)

• The Mystery of the Declining U.S. Birth Rate The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. (Econofact)

• The pandemic’s true death toll: Millions more than official counts: Countries have reported some five million COVID-19 deaths in two years, but global excess deaths are estimated at double or even quadruple that figure. (Nature)

• China promised Trump a better deal for America; it didn’t actually deliver. While China did ramp up its purchases of U.S. agricultural products, when it comes to buying U.S. products and services overall, it still hasn’t even returned to buying the amount of stuff it had bought from America before the trade war began. (NPR)

• An incomplete history of Forbes.com as a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism That “rapper” accused of billions in crypto fraud was also a Forbes contributor. Is it finally time to move past the contributor network? (Nieman Lab)

• Does China think long-term while America thinks short-term? It’s far from clear that Chinese leaders engage in more long-term thinking than American leaders do. There are plenty of examples to show this. (Noahpinion)

Long Haul Covid Moms, Olympics TV Ratings, and Vancouver Vacancy Rates

Monday morning news drop

• The Long Haul Symptoms of Being a Covid-Era Mom Male pundits urge us to "go back to normal," but those of us who've endured the grief and isolation of new motherhood during the pandemic know better. (Jezebel)

• Dreadful TV ratings for Beijing Games should send IOC a message The Olympics that should never have been are over. The challenge is to be sure they never go to tyrannical regimes again. (Montreal Gazette)

• The New Secret Chicken Recipe? Animal Cells. Here’s an early taste of the laboratory-grown meat that companies are racing to bring to market, and a look at the questions it raises about how we feed ourselves. (New York Times)

• The Lesson to Unlearn The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn’t something you learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades. (Paul Graham)

• The Everything Town in the Middle of Nowhere: How the tiny town of Roundup, Montana, became a hub in Amazon’s supply chain (The Verge)

• This Is How To Overcome Regret: 5 Secrets From Research When asked, “How often do you look back on your life and wish you had done things differently?” — you know what people said? (Barking Up The Wrong Tree)

• Once again, Vancouver region has highest rents, lowest vacancy rate of any major metro area in Canada More students, mobility brought vacancy rates below 2% again; average 2-bed apartment nears $2,500 per month (CBC)

Videos of the Week, Bond Yields, Ikea and Old Growth, and LGBTQ2+ Bars

Friday morning news drop

• The Bond Market Is Sending a Worrying Message About the Economy Fixed-income investors don’t think the Fed can rein in inflation without stalling the recovery. (Bloomberg)

• Carolyn Wilkins: Canada must build framework to make crypto as safe as our financial system If done well, we can achieve benefits of financial innovation for households and businesses and avoid build up of systemic risk (Financial Post)

• Canada’s Biggest Bank Faces Shareholder Vote on Climate Standards The RBC resolution is set to focus on standards for sustainability-linked debt (Bloomberg)

• Why all of Canada will pay for Doug Ford’s choice to cancel Ontario’s cap-and-trade program Newly public documents reveal the Progressive Conservatives stonewalled Koch Industries' requests for compensation and pushed the global giant to take its complaints to international court (Narwhal)

• Ikea’s Race for the Last of Europe’s Old-Growth Forest The furniture giant is hungry for Romania’s famed trees. Little stands in its way. (The New Republic)

• Libfeld vs. Libfeld vs. Libfeld vs. LibfeldTeodor Libfeld arrived in Toronto with nothing and built a multi-billion-dollar real estate company. When he died, his four sons took over and destroyed the empire he created (Toronto Life)

• It’s a Drag: Many Gay Bars Are Closing, But We Can Still Save Them For over a century, these spaces have been hubs for LGBTQ2+ communities. How can they prepare for new realities? (Walrus)

Videos of the Week

Riding Off Cliffs - Teaser: Reed Boggs stomped his biggest flip ever for 'Riding Off Cliffs,' a 51 foot step down backflip, right before he got a call from Todd Barber letting him know that there was a position available for him to compete at Red Bull Rampage. The full film that follows Boggs in his journey to becoming one of the world's best freeriders will be released this spring.

Denis Yakimov - How It's Made: Denis Yakimov took the BMX world by storm in 2021, especially with the release of his wild Lumpen video part. This year Denis is mixing things up with a departure from Fiend and a new sponsorship announcement on the way soon. In the meantime we've got a look at all the behind-the-scenes clips from his mind-blowing 'Lumpen' part. Those big setups are outrageous. Some of the biggest 3's and 540's you would have seen to date! Look out for this guy in 2022.

Enough: “Enough” features Martin Siman riding in Czech Republic and Berlin.

Candide Thovex - Pretty Tight: Candide skiing some canyons in Crans-Montana, Switzerland. Filmed by Anthony Vuignier and Franck Moissonier.

Aaron Wilson's "Homage" Heroin Part

Bobaj's "Anahí" Chapter 2

Analytics Regulation, Facebooks Sweatshop, Basketball, and Inflation

Thursday morning news drop

• Europe’s Move Against Google Analytics Is Just the Beginning Austria’s data regulator has found that the use of Google Analytics is a breach of GDPR. In the absence of a new EU-US data deal, other countries may follow. (Wired)

• Why Trucking Can’t Deliver the Goods The yearly turnover rate among long-haul truckers is 94 percent. And you wonder why you’re not getting your orders on time? (Prospect)

• Tech Companies Face a Fresh Crisis: Hiring Recruiters in tech are desperate for workers. But candidates are the ones who hold all the power. (New York Times)

• Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop In a drab office building near a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, nearly 200 young men and women from countries across Africa sit at desks glued to computer monitors, where they must watch videos of murders, rapes, suicides, and child sexual abuse. (Time)

• Curry, Calm and Collected Steph Curry’s shot revolutionized the NBA, but his greatest weapon may be his ability to find balance. So even as his Warriors struggled to rebound from Kevin Durant’s departure, as he suffered through the worst shooting slump of his career, and as his role in his family changed, the two-time MVP was looking for ways to get back on top. “Just reimagining what impossible is,” he says. (Ringer)

• Reintroducing the Marvelous DeMar DeRozan He was dismissed as a throwback to the NBA’s “heroball” era and traumatically traded from his adopted hometown of Toronto. Now he’s the best closer in the NBA and the leader of a resurgent Chicago Bulls team. (GQ)

• In The 1990s, The New York Knicks Fought Everyone — Even David Stern The one play that perfectly crystallizes the 1990s Knicks isn’t the famous dunk by John Starks. It’s not the miraculous four-point play by Larry Johnson in 1999. It’s not the picture-perfect baseline jumper from Patrick Ewing, which was responsible for more points than any other shot in those years. As you might guess, offense has nothing to do with it. (Five Thirty Eight)

• Inflation surges to three-decade high, adding pressure on Bank of Canada to raise rates Inflation at this pace guarantees a raise in March and puts half-point hike in play (Financial Post)

• ‘Survival mode’: Inflation falls hardest on low-income Americans Higher costs for the basics — rent, groceries, paper towels — leave families to make hard choices (Washington Post)