Bespoke Brunch Reads: 12/12/21

Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.

While you’re here, join Bespoke Premium with a 30-day free trial!

NFL

Why 169 former NFL players have turned to coaching high school football by Jeff Legwold (ESPN)

After spending a lift in the game, many former pro football players turn to the coaching ranks, even at the lower levels of the game as assistants. [Link; auto-playing video]

Running the Football Is Dying. Jonathan Taylor Brings It Back to Life. by Andrew Beaton (WSJ)

With short careers, high paychecks, and relatively small offensive production, running backs are out of vogue with NFL front offices….but don’t tell that to the Colts’ starter. [Link; paywall]

Misbehavior

Trump SPAC under investigation by federal regulators, including SEC by Dan Mangan (CNBC)

The blank-check company that has proposed taking a digital network backed by President Trump public is under investigation by Finra and the SEC. [Link; paywall]

US billionaire surrenders $70m of stolen art by Dalya Alberge (The Guardian/MSN)

A billionaire agreed to surrender a vault full of artefacts that were stolen from their countries of origin including Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Turkey. [Link]

World Affairs

In need of a baby boom, China clamps down on vasectomies by Alcia Chen, Lyric Li, and Lilly Kuo (WaPo)

Forced sterilizations and the one child policy were so successful that Chinese policymakers are trying to unwind the demographic catastrophe looming in the country’s rapidly aging population. [Link; soft paywall]

Sanna Marin: Finland’s PM sorry for clubbing after Covid contact (BBC)

Finland’s Prime Minister missed a text telling her to isolate due to a COVID-19 exposure because she was busy clubbing. [Link]

Social Media

Instagram will bring back a chronological feed in 2022 by Karissa Bell (Endgadget)

After half a decade of pumping timelines full of algorithmically-selected content, Instagram will revert to a chronological feed that shows photos in the order they were posted. [Link]

How An Excel TikToker Manifested Her Way To Making Six Figures A Day by Nilay Patel (The Verge)

After discovering her Excel tips were massively popular on TikTok, Kat Norton opened a software training business that is doing six figures a day in revenue. [Link]

Birds Aren’t Real, or Are They? Inside a Gen Z Conspiracy Theory. by Taylor Lorenz (NYT)

A joke conspiracy theory has metastasized into a movement of young people who genuinely believe birds are government drones. [Link; soft paywall]

Covid Spurs Biggest Rise in Life-Insurance Payouts in a Century by Leslie Scism (WSJ)

With hundreds of thousands of Americans succumbing to COVID-19, life insurance payouts have soared 15% to more than $90 billion. The smaller payouts to older victims of the pandemic meant the cost to insurers was far smaller than expected initially. [Link; paywall]

Botched Deployments

Death, drugs and a disbanded unit: How the Guard’s Mexico border mission fell apart by Davis Winkie (ArmyTimes)

The National Guard’s deployment to the US border was nothing short of a disciplinary disaster, with 1200 legal actions, 500 car accidents creating more than $600k in total damage, multiple deaths, and alcohol abuse so severe that officers issued breathalyzers to make sure soldiers weren’t drunk on duty. [Link]

How Amazon Outage Left Smart Homes Not So Smart After All by Isabella Steger (Bloomberg)

A massive outage at AWS didn’t just take down large numbers of websites that rely on the cloud infrastructure; smart homes and other IoT use-cases got temporarily bricked as well. [Link; soft paywall, auto-playing video]

Apple’s iPhone Successor Comes Into Focus by Christopher Mims (WSJ)

The world’s largest company is expected to unveil a “head-mounted” device that will mark its follow-up to the iPhone; whether this headset or smart glasses product actually works in the real world is a very different question. [Link; paywall]

Inflation

Retreat From Globalization Adds to Inflation Risks by Yuka Hayashi (WSJ)

Unwinding the massive offshoring of global supply chains over the past few decades is not a fast process, and it could end up being an expensive one for customers of companies that are trying to avoid tariffs and uncertainty from overseas suppliers. [Link]

Indices

S&P500 Rebalance for December 2021 – Rearranging the Deckchairs by Travis Lundy (SmartKarma)

At the close on the 17th of December US large, mid, and small cap indices will be rebalanced in changes announced last week, with implications for a number of stocks and a clear trade catalyst. [Link]

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Have a great weekend!

Bespoke Brunch Reads: 5/16/21

Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.

While you’re here, join Bespoke Premium with a 30-day free trial!

Papers

The 15-Hour Week: Keynes’s Prediction Revisited by Nicholas Crafts (Warwick Economics Research Papers)

Longer life expectancy in retirement and longer retirement periods mean that non-work hours have risen 60% over the last 90 years or so, meaning Keynes was right about his prediction for less work but wrong about the distribution of when that time would be enjoyed. [Link; 17 page PDF]

School Reopenings, Mobility, and COVID-19 Spread: Evidence from Texas by Charles J. Courtemanche, Anh H. Le, Aaron Yelowitz & Ron Zimmer (NBER)

A new paper argues that reopenings of Texas schools drove 43,000 new COVID-19 cases and 800 deaths in the first two months of reopening for districts, with changes in adult behavior that school reopenings allowed playing significant contributing role in the overall increase. [Link]

Defense Contracts

Luxury jet makers battle over lucrative spy plane niche by Allison Lampert and Tim Hepher (Reuters)

Lower operating costs make Gulfstreams popular platforms for militaries operating intelligence-gathering platforms that sniff around foreign radar and communications networks looking for signals intelligence. [Link]

The Pentagon Inches Toward Letting AI Control Weapons by Will Knight (Wired)

US military leadership is currently considering if they should allow machines to decide whether weapons are used and what they’re aimed at. [Link; soft paywall]

Post Pandemic

Many Vaccinated Americans Are Still Uncomfortable Returning to Public Activities. The U.S. Economy Needs Them by Alex Silverman (Morning Consult)

People who have received a vaccine are at lower risk than their peers, but are still less likely to eat in a restaurant, travel abroad, or go to the gym as concerns that lead them to seek vaccination aren’t totally solved by the dose. [Link]

The people who want to keep masking: ‘It’s like an invisibility cloak’ by Julia Carrie Wong (The Guardian)

Masking has been a necessary step to preventing the spread of COVID, but has also served to keep people anonymous and discrete, which for some holds an appeal that will last long past the pandemic. [Link]

Risk Appetite

New Amazon bond rivals yield on US Treasuries in record-breaking sale by Joe Rennison, Dave Lee and Camilla Hodgson (FT)

Amazon borrowed at a record low spread to Treasuries this week, part of a staggering decline in the risk premiums offered to investors in the US corporate bond market. [Link; paywall]

What Happens to Stocks and Cryptocurrencies When the Fed Stops Raining Money? by Greg Ip (WSJ)

The latest in a long line of opinion columns asking the question “is the Fed entirely responsible for elevated asset prices across financial markets”. [Link; paywall]

From Dutch Tulips to Internet Stocks, How to Spot a Financial Bubble by Jon Hilsenrath (WSJ)

The soaring prices of extremely speculative assets in 2020 and 2021 bear much in common with similarly speculative manias of the past. [Link; paywall]

Malfeasance

Colonial Hacker Group Seeks to Shift Blame for Ransomware by Alyza Sebenius and Ryan Gallagher (Bloomberg)

The hack which has left much of the US Southeast without gasoline may have been conducted by an affiliate group of the hackers whose software was used to execute the attack. [Link; soft paywall]

Crypto Fraudsters Made a Big Bet on Dogecoin, New York Claims by Olga Kharif (Bloomberg)

An NYAG suit alleges a crypto trading platform misused funds by betting the house on Dogecoin, a crypto that started as a joke and has since exploded higher. [Link; soft paywall]

Semiconductors

Your Car, Toaster, Even Washing Machine, Can’t Work Without Them. And There’s a Global Shortage. by Alex T. Williams (NYT)

A detailed look at the global semiconductors shortage and some policy proscriptions for how it might be fixed longer-term. [Link; soft paywall]

Middle East

The War That Shouldn’t Have Been by Neri Zilber (Newlines)

An insightful look at the roots of the most recent flare-up of violence in Israel and Palestine: internal political realignments within both Gazan and Israeli politics have seeded and exacerbated the conflict. [Link]

Education

Catholic Schools Are Losing Students at Record Rates, and Hundreds Are Closing by Ian Lovett (WSJ)

The United States had almost 6,000 Catholic schools before the pandemic, but hundreds have closed and enrollment is falling, with urban dioceses especially pressured by a declining prevalence of Catholicism nationally and difficulties among parents meeting the cost of an education within the faith. [Link; paywall]

Natural World

Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language by Craig Welch (National Geographic)

Whales have a language, but knowing it exists and translating it into something that humans can understand (let alone speak back) is a massive challenge for scientists. [Link; soft paywall]

Are These Two Men Going After the Holy Grail of Himalayan Climbing? (Climbing)

There’s speculation brewing that two of the most accomplished climbers in the world are considering a double-ascent of Everest and nearby peak Lhotse in one climb. [Link]

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Have a great weekend!

Bespoke Brunch Reads: 12/6/20

Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.

While you’re here, join Bespoke Premium with a 30-day free trial!

Ancient History

A great wave: the Storegga tsunami and the end of Doggerland? by James Walker, Vincent Gaffney, Simon Fitch, Merle Muru, Andrew Fraser, Martin Bates, and Richard Bates (Cambridge University Press)

A review of the history of Doggerland, the delta region between the modern low countries and UK, which was subject to a catastrophic tsunami over 8,000 years ago. [Link]

‘Sistine Chapel of the ancients’ rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest by Dalya Alberge (The Guardian)

Deep in the Amazonian rain forest of Colombia, paintings on rock faces stretching across almost 8 miles reveal a fascinating insight into the pre-historic Americas. [Link]

Breakthroughs

How a Couple’s Quest to Cure Cancer Led to the West’s First Covid-19 Vaccine by Bojan Pancevski (WSJ)

A husband-and-wife team of German scientists whose parents migrated from Turkey were the core of a vaccine development team that turned around the eventual Pfizer product in a period of mere days. [Link; paywall]

Alphabet’s DeepMind achieves historic new milestone in AI-based protein structure prediction by Darrell Etherington (TechCrunch)

This week, Alphabet’s subsidiary DeepMind reported that it had developed a major leap in predicting protein folding, which could lead to much faster biological research and drug development. [Link]

Cultured meat has been approved for consumers for the first time by Niall Firth (MIT Technology Review)

A San Francisco-based start-up has been given preliminary approval to sell its lab-grown meat chicken nuggets in Singapore. While the initial product is very expensive and also relies on plant proteins, the move towards commercialization gives a peak into the potential for synthetic meat, a holy grail for vegans and climate activists alike. [Link; soft paywall]

Why Is Apple’s M1 Chip So Fast? By Erik Engheim (Debugger)

The chip Apple has developed in-house for its latest line of Mac computers represents a truly epic leap in terms of both technical approach and competitive landscape. [Link]

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Peak Oil Is Suddenly Upon Us by Tom Randall and Hayley Warren (Bloomberg)

COVID has brought forward an almost unthinkable reality: maximum oil demand. A look at what that might mean for the future of the global economy. [Link; soft paywall]

House passes historic bill to decriminalize cannabis by Alicia Victoria Lozano (NBC)

In a vote that mostly broke down on party lines (Democrats mostly in favor, Republicans mostly opposed) the House passed a historic bill that would remove pot from the Controlled Substances Act. [Link; auto-playing video]

How The Tumult of 2020 Will Shape the Future of Ride Sharing (Wired)

A podcast discussing the very strange ride for ridesharing giants which have been brought low by the pandemic…but offered some new opportunities as well. [Link; soft paywall]

Disaster

Huge Puerto Rico radio telescope, already damaged, collapses by Dánica Coto (PhysOrg)

The massive radio telescope dish of the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico has collapsed, with the receiver assembly collapsing after a cable snapped back in August. [Link]

Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (McDreeamie-Musings)

One potential reason for the Columbia shuttle disaster which killed its crew in 2003 was a poorly-designed slide in PowerPoint that was used to create a risk assessment. [Link]

Bad Calls

One country tells Apple to put a wall charger in iPhone 12 box by Trevor Mogg (digitaltrends)

Apple has been told by a Brazilian state regulator to include a wall charging unit compatible with the USB-C cords it includes with its new iPhone 12 or face a fine. [Link]

David Einhorn Has Made a Lot of Bad Bets — And One Very Good One by Katherine Burton (Bloomberg)

Since 2015, Greenlight Capital has lost 34%, with a slew of bad investments weighing returns. This year, the fund is flat thanks to a 15% gain for a homebuilder that the fund owns half of. [Link; soft paywall]

Policy

In Blue States and Red, Pandemic Upends Public Services and Jobs by Patricia Cohen (NYT)

Plunging tax receipts are forcing state and local governments to cut back, extending the economic pain of the COVID recession. [Link; soft paywall]

Bros

Bro Culture, Fitness, Chivalry, and American Identity by Patrick Wyman (Substack)

A deep investigation into bro culture, from the gym floor to the coffee grinder. Wyman ties his narrative into the medieval past as well as the contemporary reality of American bros. [Link]

Hungarian MEP admits he was at lockdown ‘orgy’ by Maïa De La Baume (Politico)

Brussels policy broke up a lockdown party this week with explosive results: a Hungarian MEP closely allied to Hungarian Viktor Orbán was in attendance at a gay orgy. This wouldn’t be remarkable if it wasn’t for the Orbán government’s long track record of LGBTQ suppression. [Link]

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Have a great weekend!

Bespoke Brunch Reads: 10/4/20

Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.

While you’re here, join Bespoke Premium with a 30-day free trial!

Clean Energy

Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work,’ Studies Suggest by Henry Fountain (NYT)

“Hot” fusion has been the energy of the future for decades, and there’s no reason to suspect that it’ll come soon, but recent research is showing some modest progress. [Link; soft paywall]

Solar’s Future is Insanely Cheap (2020) by Ramez Naam (Ramez Naam)

An overview of the absolutely staggering rate of decline in solar prices and why those declines are likely to continue, pushing the cost of new solar watts far below the operating cost of natural gas and coal plants. [Link]

Education

University lockdowns: a whole new way to fail young people by Robert Shrimsley (FT)

Frustration over steps to reduce transmission of COVID on university campuses after a failure to introduce a mass testing regime in the UK. [Link; paywall]

The Students Left Behind By Remote Learning by Alex MacGillis (The NYer)

As with so many aspects of COVID, the costs of remote learning are not born evenly by wealth and lower income students. [Link]

‘Roadschooling’ 101: Families Make Remote Learning Work in an RV by Julie Jargon (WSJ)

Families that can afford it are taking advantage of remote schooling to hit the road, spending months wandering American roads and national parks with pauses for video chats. [Link; paywall]

Teachers Find Higher Pay and Growing Options in Covid Pods by Nancy Keates (WSJ)

Higher-income families are getting together for small-group learning with private teachers that bypass many of the risks of the public school system. [Link; paywall]

Retail Investing

A 32-Year-Old Trader Is Driving 21,000 Amateur Stock Investors by Edward Robinson and Justina Lee (Bloomberg)

A feature allowing users to automatically copy trades of other platform users has fueled growth for UK-Israeli brokerage eToro. [Link; soft paywall]

The Rise of Retail Investing In The U.S. (Morning Consult)

A highly-detailed, very long overview of the retail investment landscape: what motivates retail investors, who they are, and how they use investing platforms. [Link; 55 page PDF]

New Swath Of ETF Closures Fuels Record Pace by Heather Bell (ETF.com)

It shouldn’t be a surprise that an industry which innovates as quickly as ETFs do with a huge proliferation of products also cuts losers, and that’s what’s been going on lately. [Link]

Local Challenges

Vermont was making progress against opioid deaths. Then coronavirus hit. by Hilary Swift and Abby Goodnough (South Florida Sun-Sentinel)

Opioid-related deaths are surging across the country as the disruption of COVID drives current and recovering addicts into despair and spirals of use which too often end in tragedy. [Link]

‘Crisis point’: How the Gallatin Valley’s hot housing market leaves people behind by Melissa Loveridge (Bozeman Daily Chronicle)

Homes in Gallatin County, Montana are surging thanks to COVID; the median single-family home is listed for $575,450 in August, almost 10x median income for the county. [Link]

Travel

Some Travelers Miss Flying So Much, They’re Taking Planes to Nowhere by Dasl Yoon and Joyu Wang (WSJ)

Travelers are taking flights to nowhere, sometimes facilitated by package “tours” that don’t involve actually landing, in a desperate bid to regain a sense of normalcy. [Link; paywall]

Amazon jumps into virtual tourism, offering live one-on-one experiences around the world by Todd Bishop (GeekWire)

Remote tourism is a brand new concept that AirBnB has already introduced and Amazon is now putting into beta, allowing walking tours, cooking classes, and other experiences from the comfort of home. [Link]

False Positives

Clinical evaluation and diagnostic yield following evaluation of abnormal pulse detected using Apple Watch by Kirk D Wyatt, Lisa R Poole, Aidan F Mullan, Stephen L Kopecky, and Heather A Heaton (JAMIA)

Only 11% of patients whose Apple Watches alerted them to an abnormal pulse received an explicit diagnosis, suggesting the device could create over-use of health care by Apple Watch owners. [Link]

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Have a great weekend!

Bespoke Brunch Reads: 9/27/20

Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of the favorite things we read over the past week. The links are mostly market related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.

While you’re here, join Bespoke Premium with a 30-day free trial!

COVID

J&J offers PhI/IIa data showing its single-dose vaccine can stir up sufficient immune response by Amber Tong (Endpoints News)

The outlook for vaccine coverage got a shot in the arm this week as Johnson & Johnson’s early stage data revealed that a single dose gave 98% of participants neutralizing antibodies 29 days after administering just one dose of vaccine. [Link; soft paywall]

How Italy Snatched Health From the Jaws of Death by Elisabeth Braw (Foreign Policy)

After a horrifying first wave, Italians have avoided seeing a resurgence in COVID infections, unlike many of their European neighbors. [Link]

SARS-CoV-2 Transmission Dynamics Should Inform Policy by Muge Cevik, Julia Marcus, Caroline Buckee, and Tara Smith (SSRN)

A detailed review of possible mitigation strategies based on the results of contract-tracing studies. Lower income and high-occupant households are key to the strategy. [Link]

A Notorious COVID Troll Actually Works for Dr. Fauci’s Agency by Lachlan Markay (Daily Beast)

One of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ PR team has been waging an online disinformation campaign designed to undermine NIAID communications related to COVID. [Link]

“Security”

Ring’s latest security camera is a drone that flies around inside your house by Dan Seifert (The Verge)

Home surveillance company Ring is rolling out an aerial drone designed to be used inside the home, allowing users to remotely activate and patrol when they’re away. [Link]

Texas Deployed SWAT, Bomb Robot, Small Army of Cops To Arrest A Woman And Her Dog by Seth Harp (The Intercept)

Police shut down an entire bridge because they thought a woman’s car decorations meant she was carrying a bomb. [Link]

Schools

Temperature Isn’t a Good Litmus Test for Coronavirus, Doctors Say by Sumathi Reddy (WSJ)

Schools and a variety of other institutions have been using temperature as a proxy for COVID infection, but the loose proxy for infections might be much less useful than widely hoped. [Link; paywall]

New York’s Online Class Sizes Could Reach Nearly 70 Students by Lee Hawkins (WSJ)

With NYC’s in-person reopening of classrooms pushed back, online learning programs may be overwhelmed by students who had planned for in-person learning. [Link; paywall]

Forgone Growth

Citi Pledges to Become Antiracist, Review Internal Policies by Jennifer Surane (Bloomberg)

A new Citigroup report estimates that economic discrimination against Black Americans has cost the US economy $16trn over the last 20 years via lost wages, less education, and less access to loans for business or homeownership. [Link; soft paywall]

Americans Want Homes, but There Have Rarely Been Fewer for Sale by Nicole Friedman (WSJ)

Thanks to both longer-term structural patterns including demographics and the shorter-term drive of lower interest rates and the COVID pandemic, there aren’t many houses available to buy these days. [Link; paywall]

Conservation

Botswana says toxins in water killed hundreds of elephants by Brian Benza (Reuters)

Bacterial blooms in drinking water that produce toxins that are toxic to animals are responsible for the deaths of hundreds of elephants, a devastating side-effect of climate change for an already stressed population. [Link]

Airbus has revealed three zero-emission plane designs that could become reality in just 15 years — take a look at the hydrogen-powered aircraft of the future by David Slotnick (Business Insider)

Hydrogen powered planes are being touted by Airbus as a potential climate solution, with three concept models in the works and potentially ready within 15 years. [Link]

Sustainability Timeline: Walmart’s Journey to a Better Future (Walmart)

This week Wal-Mart committed to zero emissions by 2040 and reserving 50 million acres of land and 1 million square miles of ocean by 2030. [Link]

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Have a great weekend!