My mid-week morning train WFH reads:
• Deliver a safe, effective COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year? Impossible. Meet Moncef Slaoui. As science adviser of Operation Warp Speed, the veteran pharmaceutical executive helped usher a coronavirus vaccine to the US market in record time. (USA Today)
• Peak Oil Is Suddenly Upon Us It’s often difficult to recognize civilization-sized shifts in behavior until after they’ve occurred. Until the pandemic none of the major oil forecasters had seen an imminent demand peak. But if we look back from here and see the oil peak clearly in the past, what follows will be the evidence of how the energy future snuck up on us. (Bloomberg)
• Five Lessons From Dave Chappelle In the analog world there were two big obstacles facing creators: first, the cost of creating a show or record was very high, and second, it was impossible to get said show or record distributed even if you managed to get it made. The networks and labels were the ones that had actual access to customers, whether that be via theaters, cable TV, record stores, or whatever physical channel existed. (Stratechery)
• The Top 30 Stocks Over the Last 30 Years… These companies have delivered unfathomable returns to their shareholders. They have also delivered many periods of excruciating pain for anyone able to stick with them (Compound)
• People Fleeing Big Cities Risk Overwhelming Small Towns From rum factory towns to historic gold rush centers, formerly quiet backwaters are reeling as the work-from-home trend gathers momentum. (Bloomberg) see also Are Brooklyn Brownstones the New Manhattan Co-op? The coronavirus pandemic has many New York buyers shifting gears—and boroughs (Mansion Global)
• Lockdown takes ecommerce to 40% of retail In the USA, where lockdowns have been pretty patchy, ecommerce was ~17% of addressable retail at the beginning of the year. It spiked up to 22.5% in Q2 and in Q3, reported last week, it dipped back to close to 20%. In the UK, where we have monthly data that makes the picture clearer, penetration was already 20%, spiked to over 30% and now seems to be stabilising in the high 20s. (Benedict Evans)
• What if You Could Outsource Your To-Do List? Virtual assistants are one click—but often one continent—away. A new industry for bringing order to our work lives could shift the order of our workforce. (New Yorker)
• What it’s like to teach children about the election, and its results, in deep-red Trump country Never before, Cruey said, has he seen such a high level of emotion from children — such blind devotion to their preferred candidate, most often Donald Trump. Nor has he seen anything like this level of mistrust, which he said is persisting among students weeks after the results of the election supposedly were finalized. (Washington Post)
• Political lying as tribal signaling Signaling comes with a cost is essential to separating the dedicated from the posers. By going on record as saying that we should seriously ridiculous but loyal things, you exposure yourself to a lifetime of ridicule. But that very exposure might prove that you’re the real thing, hardcore, on the team, to a partisan audience who might otherwise be inclined to question your bona fides. (Noahpinion)
• Sports Keep Playing Through the Covid Surge. It’s Getting Ugly. The worst stretch of the pandemic is coming. Sports leagues are trying to plow ahead as outbreaks and postponements are making it harder to proceed. (Wall Street Journal)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Greg Fleming, founding CEO of Rockefeller Capital Management based on the prior Rockefeller Family Office. They have about $43 billion in AUM. Previously, Fleming was President of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management and served as Chief Operating Officer of Merrill Lynch, where he ran Merrill’s Global Investment Banking business.
Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
Source: Our World In Data
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