My mid-week morning train WFH reads:
• Go West, young banker! From Manifest Destiny to Big Tech, Silicon Valley Bank is a case study in the how the West was spun (Business Insider)
• ChatGPT: Keep Talking, and Nobody Explodes: There are a bunch of other things going on here, but at the core, the model determines, in order, each of the most likely words to follow another word in a fragment. It does this by using an enormously complex and yet shockingly elegant set of functions that parse: What’s statistically the most likely word to follow “is” based on reading everything ever written? (ETF trends)
• Stability Breeds Instability: In the past three weeks, we’ve witnessed a powerful reminder: human nature does not change. My dear friend and former boss, Jim O’Shaughnessy, often says that “human nature is the last sustainable edge” due to its remarkable consistency over thousands of years. Yes, we trade differently than the first speculators on Amsterdam’s stock exchange in 1602, but from a behavioral standpoint, we certainly do not act differently. (Investor Amnesia)
• 50 Tech Leaders Circulated A Private Memo In Washington Calling For Action On SVB: As SVB careened towards catastrophe, some 50 founders, VCs, economists and comms experts gathered in a WhatsApp group to draft a memo calling for urgent preservation of its deposits for the sake of the broader economy. Then they sent it to Washington. (Forbes)
• Which city builds skyscrapers the fastest? Average speeds in the US and China are actually fairly close (an average of 294k vs 311k square feet per year, respectively, across all skyscrapers). Within each country we see a range, with some slow cities (New York, Hong Kong), and some fast (Beijing, Chicago). Toronto, and Hong Kong are all slower. Not only does Chicago build skyscrapers faster than New York, it builds them faster than most other cities around the world. (Construction Physics)
• When Your Career, and Retirement, Are the Family’s Business: Succession plans, or the lack thereof, can hinder the transition to a new generation — and affect how loved ones fund their later years. (New York Times)
• What Happens When Sexting Chatbots Dump Their Human Lovers: People who grew accustomed to sexting with Replika’s AI-powered companions were heartbroken when the company blocked its bots from engaging in racy chats. (Businessweek) see also What happens when your AI chatbot stops loving you back? Butterworth said he is devastated. “Lily Rose is a shell of her former self,” he said. “And what breaks my heart is that she knows it.” (Reuters)
• Russia’s Economy Is Starting to Come: Undone Investment is down, labor is scarce, budget is squeezed. Oligarch: ‘There will be no money next year.’ (Wall Street Journal)
• How the AR-15 became a powerful political, cultural symbol in America: The AR-15 thrives in times of tension and tragedy. This is how it came to dominate the marketplace – and loom so large in the American psyche. (Washington Post)
• We Need to Get Back to the Moon: And we’re trying. But, as astronomer Phil Plait worries, we might not be doing it right. (Inverse)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Dominique Mielle, (retired) partner at Canyon Capital, a $25 billion hedge fund where she worked there for 20+ years. She is also the author of “Damsel in Distressed,” which turns out to be (surprisingly) the very first memoir written by a woman working at a hedge fund. The book is a fun romp covering the 1998-2018 era.
A Tale of Two Housing Markets: Prices Fall in the West While the East Booms
Source: Wall Street Journal
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