My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:
• You’re going back to the office. Your boss isn’t. Bosses are ordering people back to the office from the comfort of their own homes. (Vox)
• In the Battle With Robots, Human Workers Are Winning: As central bankers around the world are rushing to cool labor markets and tame inflation — a lot of policymakers are hoping that this week’s employment report shows declining demand for new workers — a few economic and technological truths have become evident. (New York Times) see also Meet the App That Helps Gig Workers Know How Much They Really Make: A former Uber employee created an app to help drivers. The platforms that hire them are fighting back. (New York Times)
• The Great Post-Covid Online Shopping Bet Was a Costly Delusion: Amazon, Wayfair, and other big e-commerce companies bet the pandemic would permanently change shopping behavior. They were wrong. (Businessweek)
• What Happens When You Add a Hurricane Crisis to an Insurance Crisis? Florida’s property insurance market is deeply broken, and the timing couldn’t be worse. The average premium is three times the national average, and rates are rising by 30 to 50 percent a year. Allstate and State Farm have limited their exposure there, and smaller companies are foundering: Six insurers have already become insolvent this year, and another two dozen are at risk of a credit downgrade. Only in Florida, man. (Slate)
• How the Lottery Works, and Is It Worth Playing? Here are the odds of winning the lottery, and why we do it anyway. (U.S. News)
• The economics of Costco rotisserie chicken: Costco’s popular chickens have stayed fixed at $4.99 for more than a decade — even in the face of raging inflation. But it’s come at a cost. (The Hustle)
• Have you exercised your body fat lately? Everyone has fat cells. But the more exercise you do, the more likely you are to have healthy and small fat cells. (Washington Post)
• How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors: Chinese social media companies and users are locked in a never-ending battle between free speech and censorship. (Rest of World)
• LOL: What Your Watch Brand Says About You: Casio: In school, your glasses were held together with Scotchtape, and the mechanical pencil in your shirt-front pocket always jammed, but your trusty Calculator Watch never failed. You are shocked that others are copying your look ironically. MB&F: You are an angel investor in various internet start-ups. You believe in “thinking different” and “changing the world”. Having gone through the various Pateks, Langes, and Journes that befit your station, you now find pretty much every other watch brand ridiculously boring. You wear an Apple watch concurrently on your other wrist. (Reddit)
• Too Many Songs, Not Enough Hits: Pop Music Is Struggling to Create New Stars Execs say that a deluge of new music — and the difficulty of influencing TikTok’s algorithm — has made building an audience harder than ever for new acts. (Billboard)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Tom Rampulla, managing director of Vanguard’s Financial Advisor Services division since 2002. He runs the business that provides investments, services, education, and research to more than 1,000 financial advisory firms representing more than $3 trillion in assets.
Historically, October has brought highest average daily dispersion to U.S. equities, just ahead of January’s average
Source: @LizAnnSonders
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