• The Contingency Contingent: My fake job in Y2K preparedness. It was a fake job because Andersen was faking it. The firm spent the late 1990s certifying fraudulent financial statements from Enron, the Texas-based energy company that made financial derivatives a household phrase, until that company went bankrupt in a cloud of scandal and suicide and Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice, surrendered its accounting licenses, and shuttered. But that was later. (N+1)
• The Man Who Made Nike Uncool: Instead of transforming the sneaker giant into a high-tech powerhouse, John Donahoe pissed off partners and disappointed fans. (Businessweek)
• How Inflation Fooled Almost Everybody: With the cutting rates for the first time in years, what have we learned about the economic disruptions of the pandemic era? (New Yorker)
• Xi Unleashes a Crisis for Millions of China’s Best-Paid Workers: China created a professional class in record time. Now, just as swiftly, many of their dreams are being crushed. (Bloomberg)
• Network of Georgia election officials strategizing to undermine 2024 result: Emails reveal Georgia Election Integrity Coalition, a group of officials and election deniers, coordinating in swing state. Terrifying. (The Guardian)
• One Million Are Now Dead or Injured in the Russia-Ukraine War: High losses on both sides are posing problems on battlefield and accelerating demographic fears. (Wall Street Journal)
• How Roberts Shaped Trump’s Supreme Court Winning Streak: Behind the scenes, the chief justice molded three momentous Jan. 6 and election cases that helped determine the former president’s fate. (New York Times) but see We Helped John Roberts Construct His Image as a Centrist. We Were So Wrong. The character John Roberts plays as an affable centrist steward of the court’s reputational interests—created largely in the press and played to the hilt by him—is a total fiction. It was Roberts who decided that Trump and Trumpism would prevail in all three insurrection cases and he did not, in this instance, follow in the wake of the court’s aggressive conservative maximalists. He was the aggressive conservative maximalist. And he created majority opinions in his own image. (Slate)
• ‘Pig-Butchering’ Scams Cost Americans Billions. This Lawyer Is Taking Them On. Prosecutor Erin West has been one of the few to have any success against the criminals perpetrating a new type of fraud. (Wall Street Journal)
• Elon Musk Is Debasing American Society: He’s not just enabling trolls; he’s personally endorsing their posts. (The Atlantic)
• How to avoid sanewashing Trump (and other politicians): Sanewashing is the act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that makes them seem normal. Here’s how reporters can eschew it. (Poynter) see also Trump is 78 and barely coherent. Where’s everyone who questioned Biden’s age and fitness? Where are the headlines screaming: ‘Deranged old man peddles nonsense while threatening violent deportation of immigrants’? (USA Today)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Victor Khosla, Founder and CIO of Strategic Value Partners. The firm manages $19 billion in client assets across a range of global private credit, distressed debt, hard assets (RE, infrastructure, planes, power plants) and event-driven opportunities. He established the proprietary trading desks at both Citi and Merrill Lynch, served as President of Cerberus Capital, and ran MooreSVP, a joint venture with Moore Capital.
It took 75 years for a 75% adoption rate of the flush toilet Smartphones took 10 years to accomplish the same
Source: @MikeZaccardi
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