Fake cryptocurrency giveaway sites have tripled this year: The number of websites promoting cryptocurrency giveaway scams to lure gullible victims has increased by more than 300% in the first half of this year, targeting mostly English and Spanish speakers using celebrity deepfakes. Security researchers at cybersecurity company Group-IB have identified more than 2,000 domains registered in 2022 specifically for this purpose. (Bleeping Computer)
YouTube’s Dislike Button Rarely Shifts Recommendations: New research from Mozilla shows YouTube users have little control over what is recommended to them. (New York Times)
Social Media Companies Still Boost Election Fraud Claims: The report, by New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, argues that the companies fuel false conspiracies about election fraud despite promises to combat them. (New York Times)
Locked Up: The prison labor that built business empires: More than 150 years ago, a prison complex known as the Lone Rock stockade operated at one of the biggest coal mines in Tennessee. It was powered largely by African American men who had been arrested for minor offenses — like stealing a hog — if they committed any crime at all. Women and children, some as young as 12, were sent there as well. The work, dangerous and sometimes deadly, was their punishment. (AP)
Republicans in key battleground races refuse to say they will accept results: Of the 19 GOP candidates questioned by The Washington Post, a dozen declined to answer or refused to commit. Democrats all said they would respect the results. (Washington Post)
Out of control rise in STDs, including 26% syphilis spike, sparks US alarm: The rate of syphilis cases has hit its highest in three decades as officials work on new solutions such as at-home test kits. (The Guardian)
A Legacy of Exclusion: Pro football’s turn toward inequity resonates eight decades later. Change will require intentional action. (Washington Post)
How the NFL Blocks Black Coaches: Nearly two decades after the NFL enacted the Rooney Rule, teams’ hiring and firing practices still disadvantage Black coaches at every turn — and it’s getting worse, a Post investigation found. (Washington Post)
Monday Morning Articles
The robots are here. And they are making you fries. Meet Flippy, Sippy and Chippy, the newest technology stepping in to address a protracted labor crunch in food service. (Washington Post)
Grapes, berries and robots: is Silicon Valley coming for farm workers jobs? The global ag-tech revolution has sped up in recent years, spurring a debate on how it will affect the workforce. (The Guardian)
Liquid Venture Capital: Venture capital has delivered great historical returns but is illiquid and hard to access. Fortunately, innovation does not occur only at venture-backed startups. We replicate venture capital returns using liquid small-cap public equities and find the underlying innovation premium also exists at large innovative firms. We also show that crypto tokens can provide a liquid complement to blockchain venture equity. (Sparkline Capital)
We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model: Behavioral economics today is famous for its increasingly large collection of deviations from rationality, or, as they are often called, ‘biases’. While useful in applied work, it is time to shift our focus from collecting deviations from a model of rationality that we know is not true. Rather, we need to develop new theories of human decision to progress behavioral economics as a science. Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting ‘rationally’. We need a new model: Heliocentrism. (Works in Progress)
What Canada’s Largest Art Heist Reveals about the Art World’s Shady Side: The stolen masterpieces have never turned up—and nobody’s really looking for them (The Walrus)
A Chinese Spy Wanted GE’s Secrets, But the US Got China’s Instead: How the arrest of a burned-out intelligence officer exposed an economic-espionage machine. (Businessweek)
How to give good news: The art of telling a prospect he’s going to the big leagues: Yet unlike the hidden ball trick or some of the game’s other relatively rare displays of chicanery, Kelly and minor-league managers use the same gag with regularity. Multiple times a year, those managers get to tell a player that he’ll soon be making his major-league debut. And every single time — sometimes with precious little notice, often in front of a room of players who keep one eye on any big-league openings — those managers do everything they can to make that moment surprising. (The Athletic)
Friday Morning Articles
Navigating the Pain of Your First Bear Market: In the coming 40-50 years I’m planning on experiencing at least 10 or more bear markets, including 5 or 6 that constitute a market crash in stocks. There will also probably be at least 7-8 recessions in that time as well, maybe more. (Wealth of Common Sense)
Your City’s Housing Boom Could Go Bust: A national decline in home prices is unlikely, but markets that have experienced outsized increases over the past few years may be hit harder than most by rising mortgage rates. (Wall Street Journal)
After Years of Low Mortgage Rates, Home Sellers Are Scarce: Homeowners wearing the ‘golden handcuffs’ of low mortgage costs are reluctant to sell their homes now that rates are much higher. (Wall Street Journal)
The $8.6 Billion Startup That Helps Governments Trace Crypto: Chainalysis software puts the lie to the idea that Bitcoin guarantees anonymity. (Businessweek)
The Tiger That Was a Wolf: Lessons From Julian Robertson As Jim Chanos observed, “If I had had to give my own money to any of them, I would have given it to Robertson. He knew stocks better than anyone.” (Neckar’s Minds and Markets)
Why is a small Swedish automaker a decade ahead of the rest of the industry? “I didn’t believe we could survive just doing what everyone else is doing.” (Ars Technica)
The Sneaky Genius of Apple’s AirPods Empire: AR/VR headsets are a small market by Apple standards, but Tim Cook’s massive headphones division shows just how big the company can make a niche product. (Businessweek)
Pentagon opens sweeping review of clandestine psychological operations: Complaints about the U.S. military’s influence operations using Facebook and Twitter have raised concern in the White House and federal agencies. (Washington Post)
Can Ukraine Break Through Again? A surprise advance this month exposed deep vulnerabilities in Russia’s overstretched military. As Russia calls for more troops, can Ukraine keep gaining ground? (New York Times)
Roger Federer Isn’t Going Anywhere: At 41, the Swiss icon retires from professional tennis. But his presence and impact will continue to shape the sport. (Wall Street Journal)
Thursday Morning Articles
Predicting the Next Recession: The Fed cannot ease pandemic related supply constraints (except by curbing demand), and the Fed cannot stop the war. So, there is a possibility that the Fed will tighten too much and that will lead to a “hard landing” (aka recession). (Calculated Risk)
Why Trump’s Alleged Real-Estate Shenanigans Went Too Far: You can get away with a lot when appraising property, but not this much. (Slate)
How bad is the New York AG lawsuit for the former president? The move identifies crimes and it creates institutional and political pressure on the Southern District of New York and the IRS to take further action. It legitimates that further action. (Grid)
The Trade Mess Is Improved, But Don’t Get Too Comfortable: While the armadas of container ships waiting for berths have shrunk, other problems lurk for cargo transport. (Chief Investment Officer)
This Should Have Been a Great Year for Gold. Here’s Why It Isn’t. The yellow metal is supposed to be a haven when stocks are a mess, but it is down about 8% this year. (Wall Street Journal)
The family that built a ballpark nachos monopoly: Anytime you order nachos at a sporting event, there’s a good chance they came from a molten-cheese empire in San Antonio, Texas. (The Hustle)
Does Money Make You Happy? The Latest Research Might Surprise You Evidence that money does, in fact, buy happiness continues to surface. (US News)
The iPhones 14 Pro (and iPhones 14) There are two super interesting innovations with the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max. There aren’t any interesting innovations with the iPhone 14 or 14 Plus — which fact itself is actually pretty interesting, strategically. (Daring Fireball)
The Ragtag Army That Won the Battle of Kyiv and Saved Ukraine: Citizen volunteers teamed up with soldiers to turn the tide in the most consequential European battle since World War II. (Wall Street Journal)
A Gnarly New Theory About Saturn’s Rings: The story of a long-lost moon. (The Atlantic)
Alan Alda on ‘M*A*S*H’: ‘Everybody Had Something Taken From Them’ As the acclaimed “situation tragedy” turns 50, the star reflects on its innovations: “The crazy behavior wasn’t just to be funny. It was a way of separating yourself for a moment from the nastiness.” (New York Times)
Wednesday Morning Articles
Jerome Powell’s Inflation Whisperer: Paul Volcker Aiming to reduce inflation even at the risk of recession, the Fed Chairman draws on a 1980s playbook. ‘We must keep at it until the job is done.’ (Wall Street Journal)
The “Data-Dependent” Fed and the Data Interpreting the mixed signals across the economy, with a focus on inflation, jobs, and market pricing. (The Overshoot)
Were Those Great Returns the Result of Skill — or Just Luck? Spoiler: It wasn’t luck that gave Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Carmignac, Baird, and Invesco some of the top equity portfolios. (Institutional Investor)
Dollar’s Rise Spells Trouble for Global Economies: The surge threatens to exacerbate a slowdown in global growth and amplify inflation headaches for global central banks (Wall Street Journal)
Don’t Take Financial Advice From Kanye West: Nothing fails quite like success. You could argue the more successful you become, the more advice you should seek from others. If nothing else, it’s good to hear from a wide range of sources to ensure you don’t get too full of yourself. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
The 6 Ways of Influence: 6 ways of influence show up in the financial world and how you can prevent yourself from falling for such trickery. (Of Dollars And Data)
The Odds of a Bad Outcome are Rising: The prospect of more aggressive Fed tightening raised expectations of a more severe economic slowdown and throwing financial markets into turmoil. (The Lens)
‘Dilbert’ Becomes the Voice of ESG Opposition: You know something is firmly part of the mainstream when it gets its own cartoon enemy. (Bloomberg)
For Gen Z, TikTok Is the New Search Engine: Need to find a restaurant or figure out how to do something? Young people are turning to TikTok to search for answers. Google has noticed. (New York Times)
YouTube May Force You to Watch 10 (or More) Unskippable Ads in a Row: The biggest trick the Devil ever played was convincing people that online stuff is free (The Honest Broker)
The Sinaloa Cartel Is Controlling Water in Drought-Stricken Mexico: “Water is now a valuable asset for us, and as it becomes more scarce, the more we will fight to make sure we have enough,” a cartel operative told VICE World News. (Vice)
Justin Jefferson, his wide receiver ‘sensei’ and the art of running silky-smooth routes: The Vikings star Justin Jefferson is able to do things with his body that most other receivers simply cannot: “He’s an illusion.” (The Athletic)
Tuesday Morning Articles
Most pros can’t beat the market: 2021 is the 13th consecutive years in which the majority of fund managers in this category have lagged the index. (TKer)
The 55-and-Older Labor Market Exodus Is a Statistical Mirage People in their late 50s and early 60s haven’t stopped working, and for those over 65, workforce participation declines have been smaller than generally portrayed. (Bloomberg)
Quiet Quitting Is a Fake Trend: What people are now calling “quiet quitting” was, in previous decades, simply known as “having a job.” (The Atlantic)
Inside the World’s First No-Coiner Conference The Crypto Policy Symposium in London was a historic gathering of crypto skeptics—and nobody tried to sell me anything. (Decrypt)
Four reasons why GDP is a useful number: The critics have overstated their case. (Noahpinion)
Electric Vehicles Took Off. Car Makers Weren’t Ready: More buyers are lining up for EVs, catching car companies flat-footed and triggering a race for more batteries, factories and materials (Wall Street Journal)
Why Do We Always Focus on the Bad Stuff? The bad stuff makes us feel worse than the good stuff makes us feel good. Complaining feels more natural than gratitude for most people because it’s easier. And I’m sure there is some survival of the fittest trait that was handed down from our ancestors. Paying attention to the bad stuff kept you alive. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s Future (Foreign Affairs)
Life Is an Accident of Space and Time: Even if life existed on every planet that could support it, living matter in the universe would amount to only a few grains of sand in the Gobi Desert. (The Atlantic)
Checkmate: There’s something wild happening in the chess world right now, and I’m going to tell you right up front that I don’t really understand it. But I want to talk about it anyway because it speaks to something larger happening in all sports, something confusing and alluring and perilous. (JoeBlogs)
When Duke Ellington Made a Record for Just One Person—Queen Elizabeth The jazz legend had a single golden disc pressed, and sent in secrecy to Buckingham Palace. (The Honest Broker)
Monday Morning Articles
Rising Bond Yields Change the Calculus for Stocks: Whether markets get any reprieve from their recent selloff depends in part on what happens at the Fed meeting. (Wall Street Journal)
Municipal Bonds Suddenly Look Cheap. Some Are Tax Traps. Investors are bailing out of municipal bond funds at a record pace, but bargain hunters should beware of some potential pitfalls. (Wall Street Journal
Interest Rates Are Up, So Why Are Bank Stocks Down? As inflation rises, bank deposits fall by nearly $370 billion in the second quarter—the largest decline in 20 years. (Chief Investment Officer)
‘Poison’ Ivy Zelman—the analyst who predicted the 2008 housing bust—sees U.S. home prices falling in both 2023 and 2024. Here’s how much: When Toll Brothers CEO Bob Toll tried to say the housing market had bottomed out in 2006, Zelman famously quipped back, “Which Kool-Aid are you drinking, because I want some.” Fast-forward to 2022, and Zelman once again has housing bulls sweating. (Fortune)
Current State of the Housing Market: This is a market overview for mid-September (Calculated Risk)
Some WFH Employees Have a Secret: They Now Live in Another Country: With growing pressure to return to the office, some employees are struggling to hide the fact that they now live abroad. “It’s quite hard to keep up the facade all the time,” one person said. (Vice)
Scams are showing up at the top of online searches. Searchers, beware: That Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo ad might be ‘malvertising’ — phishing campaigns and malware hiding behind legit-looking links (Washington Post)
No, the U.S. didn’t outsource our carbon emissions to China Busting a common myth. (Noahpinion)
How Patagonia’s ownership bombshell changes the game for American business: Forget woke capitalism or some tax scheme. Patagonia has moved the goalposts—again—on our expectations of what companies can do to fight climate change. (Fast Company) see also
Earth is now our only shareholder. Yvon Chouinard: If we have any hope of a thriving planet—much less a business—it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have. This is what we can do. (Patagonia)
I Went to Trash School: An education in “juice,” how to protect your shins, and keeping 12,000 daily tons of garbage at bay. (Curbed)
Life on Mars? This Could Be the Place NASA’s Rover Helps Us Find It. Rocks collected by Perseverance are filled with organic molecules, and they formed in a lake that would have been habitable a few billion years ago. (New York Times)
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Investigates Geologically Rich Mars Terrain: “This juxtaposition provides us with a rich understanding of the geologic history after the crater formed and a diverse sample suite. For example, we found a sandstone that carries grains and rock fragments created far from Jezero Crater – and a mudstone that includes intriguing organic compounds.” (NASA)
Mar-a-Lago: the lax security of Trump’s alternative ‘White House’ – visualized The ex-president’s Florida estate has a history of security breaches, from US military plans viewed in front of paying guests to a makeshift ‘situation room.’ (The Guardian)
Friday Morning Articles
Most pros can’t beat the market: 2021 is the 13th consecutive years in which the majority of fund managers in this category have lagged the index. (TKer)
The 55-and-Older Labor Market Exodus Is a Statistical Mirage People in their late 50s and early 60s haven’t stopped working, and for those over 65, workforce participation declines have been smaller than generally portrayed. (Bloomberg)
Quiet Quitting Is a Fake Trend: What people are now calling “quiet quitting” was, in previous decades, simply known as “having a job.” (The Atlantic)
Inside the World’s First No-Coiner Conference The Crypto Policy Symposium in London was a historic gathering of crypto skeptics—and nobody tried to sell me anything. (Decrypt)
Four reasons why GDP is a useful number: The critics have overstated their case. (Noahpinion)
Electric Vehicles Took Off. Car Makers Weren’t Ready: More buyers are lining up for EVs, catching car companies flat-footed and triggering a race for more batteries, factories and materials (Wall Street Journal)
Why Do We Always Focus on the Bad Stuff? The bad stuff makes us feel worse than the good stuff makes us feel good. Complaining feels more natural than gratitude for most people because it’s easier. And I’m sure there is some survival of the fittest trait that was handed down from our ancestors. Paying attention to the bad stuff kept you alive. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
The Weakness of Xi Jinping: How Hubris and Paranoia Threaten China’s Future (Foreign Affairs)
Checkmate: There’s something wild happening in the chess world right now, and I’m going to tell you right up front that I don’t really understand it. But I want to talk about it anyway because it speaks to something larger happening in all sports, something confusing and alluring and perilous. (JoeBlogs)
Thursday Morning Articles
How many people can Earth handle? Towards the end of 2022, the human population on Earth is expected to reach eight billion. To mark the occasion, BBC Future takes a look at one of the most controversial issues of our time. Are there too many of us? Or is this the wrong question? (BBC)
The Mysterious, Stubborn Appeal of Mass-Produced Fried Chicken: Why do so many accomplished chefs call Popeyes their favorite fried chicken? (Vice)
The World’s Hottest Housing Markets Are Facing a Painful Reset Frothy property markets are poised for double-digit price declines as consumers face mounting financial pressures. (Bloomberg)
The focus on misinformation leads to a profound misunderstanding of why people believe and act on bad information: Misinformation has been a prominent paradigm in the explanation of social, political, and more recently epidemiological phenomena since the middle of the last decade. However, Daniel Williams argues that a focus on misinformation is limiting when used to explain these phenomena. Primarily, as it distracts us from more important ways in which information can be misleading, and it overlooks the social dynamics of competition involved in information marketplaces that produce effective rationalisations of the favoured narratives of different social groups. (London School of Economics)
Oops, Minnesota Accidentally Legalized THC-Spiked Seltzer Craft breweries are cranking out cannabis-infused drinks after a sudden law change. (Vice)
Dry Cleaners Were Disappearing Even Before the Pandemic: Starched shirts just don’t have the same appeal they once did. But there are forces greater than the virus at work here. (Businessweek)
They built a Minecraft crypto empire. Then it all came crashing down: Kids in the Philippines were earning hundreds of dollars from a play-to-earn Minecraft game, until new rules sent the community into a tailspin. (Rest of World)
More Than 335,000 Lives Could Have Been Saved During Pandemic if U.S. Had Universal Health Care: In the United States, death rates from COVID-19 are higher than in any other high-income country—and our fragmented and inefficient health system may be largely to blame, Yale researchers say in a new study. (Yale School of Public Health)
Wednesday Morning Articles
“Scary easy. Sketchy as hell.”: How startups are pushing Adderall on TikTok: A telehealth company called Done wants Gen Z’s attention. (Vox)
A Rare Peek Inside the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy: The Council for National Policy, a secretive network of powerful conservatives, goes to great lengths to conceal its activities and even its members. But recently uncovered documents reveal the extent of the group’s influence on American politics. (New Republic)
Cyber slavery: inside Cambodia’s online scam gangs. Illicit industry traffics thousands of victims from China through Southeast Asia (Nikkei)
Yes, it’s a scam: Simple tips to help you spot online fraud Here’s how to protect your family members and yourself from scams. (Washington Post)
Mothers Are Dying From Treatable Mental Health Conditions; Advocates spotlight an overlooked cause of maternal mortality: The national conversation around maternal mortality has served to spotlight preventable physical complications, but it often overlooks a leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths – conditions linked to behavioral health. (Cronkite News)
The Illusion of Knowledge: I’ve been expressing my disregard for forecasts for almost as long as I’ve been writing my memos, starting with The Value of Predictions, or Where’d All This Rain Come From in February 1993. Over the years since then, I’ve explained at length why I’m not interested in forecasts – a few of my favorite quotes echoing my disdain head the sections below – but I’ve never devoted a memo to explaining why making helpful macro forecasts is so difficult. So here it is. (Oaktree Capital)
Most pros can’t beat the market: It continues to be incredibly difficult to generate returns in the stock market that beat (or outperform) a passively managed fund tracking the S&P 500. According to S&P Dow Jones Indices (SPDJI), 51.2% of U.S. large-cap equity fund managers underperformed the S&P 500 during the first half of 2022 — despite the fact that the S&P itself fell into a bear market during that period. (TKer)
Market Share: Understanding Competitive Advantage Through Market Power “There is no more important proposition in economic theory than that, under competition, the rate of return on investment tends toward equality in all industries. (Morgan Stanley)
We Spoke With the Last Person Standing in the Floppy Disk Business Turns out the obsolete floppy is way more in demand than you’d expect. (AIGA Eye On Design)
Coming Into Focus: Once thought to primarily affect overstimulated boys, ADHD diagnoses have spiked among adult women. For one writer, coming to terms with her diagnosis later in life has put her past and family history in a new light. (Harpers Bazaar)
Roger Federer is retiring from tennis — but his mark on the sport is indelible: To understand Roger Federer is to capture sports harmony. He talks about his strategy of fire and ice: combining the burning desire to succeed and the coolness to keep his composure. His career has been a tale of mind and body working together like clockwork, to create an aesthetically delightful state of tennis — and also a method which has led to incredible success. (ESPN) see also Roger Federer as Religious Experience: (Published 2006) (New York Times)