Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Welcome to the golden age of scammers Everything is a grift nowadays. There are individual scammers, sure, and there always have been: the Billy McFarland’s of the see-and-be-seen party circuit, or the Bernie Madoffs of the world of wealth management (or mismanagement). Yet increasingly the headline-making cons of the moment seem like full-fledged cosmologies — personal, professional and political belief systems. And the adherents are trying to fool others even as they fool themselves. (Washington Post)
• I’m A Twenty Year Truck Driver, I Will Tell You Why America’s “Shipping Crisis” Will Not End This slowdown is warehouse management related: very few warehouses are open 24 hours, and even if they are, many are so short staffed it doesn’t make much difference, they are so far behind schedule. It means that as a freight driver, I cannot pick up as much freight in a day as I used to, and since I can’t get as much freight on my truck, the whole supply chain is backed up. Freight simply isn’t moving. (Medium)
• Inside Amazon’s Failures to Protect Your Data: Internal Voyeurs, Bribery Scandals and Backdoor Schemes For years, the retail giant has been keeping something from you: It’s handled your information much less carefully than it handles your packages. (Reveal)
• Bubblicious: Crypto Euphoria’s Emerging Impact on Housing The percentage of home buyers voluntarily documenting crypto accounts during mortgage underwriting has gone from almost 0% one year ago to between 5% and 10% today. Home buyers using crypto gains towards the down payment of a home are estimated at ~5%, namely in higher price points and/or communities skewing toward younger buyers more familiar with crypto. (John Burns Real Estate Consulting)
• Boeing Built an Unsafe Plane, and Blamed the Pilots When It Crashed Cost-cutting, corporate arrogance, and a new plane that was supposed to be easy to fly. An exclusive excerpt from Flying Blind: The 737 Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing. (BusinessWeek)
• Why thieves love to steal catalytic converters In the past few years, this little car part has sparked a massive crime wave. It has a lot to do with the booming market for precious metals. (The Hustle)
• The Bad Guys Are Winning: If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. (The Atlantic)
• To Catch a Turtle Thief: Blowing the Lid Off an International Smuggling Operation The terrapin black market resembles a sinister web, connecting the overlooked marshes fringing America’s coastal vacation lands with buyers around the world. Just because nobody around here eats them doesn’t mean there isn’t a market for them.”(The Walrus)
• ‘Ghost Guns’: Firearm Kits Bought Online Fuel Epidemic of Violence They are untraceable, assembled from parts and can be ordered by gang members, felons and even children. They are increasingly the lethal weapon of easy access around the U.S., but especially California. (New York Times) see also Police Have a Tool to Take Guns From Potential Shooters, but Many Aren’t Using It Red-flag laws have been used only a handful of times in New York City, Chicago and Hawaii, but thousands of times in Florida (Wall Street Journal)
• Marilyn Manson: The Monster Hiding in Plain Sight He was a provocative media darling for decades. Offstage, exes allege, he was an abuser who made their lives hell. A Rolling Stone investigation based on court documents and more than 55 new interviews (Rolling Stone)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Edwin Conway, Global Head of BlackRock Alternative Investors (BAI), which runs over $300 billion in total assets. BlackRock’s global alternatives business includes Real Estate, Infrastructure, Hedge Funds, Private Equity, and Credit, and is one of the fastest-growing parts of the investment giant.
In the future interest rates are going up, but in the past they mostly just go down
Source: @lenkiefer
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