Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%, report says: ‘Polluter elite’ are plundering the planet to point of destruction, says Oxfam after comprehensive study of climate inequality. (The Guardian)
• How Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ reached millions online: Videos citing the document had been viewed far less than many TikTok posts. Then a journalist made a compilation and posted it to X, causing attention to the manifesto to explode. (Washington Post) see also The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming: Many of the CIA analysts who spotted the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise were female. They had trouble getting their warnings heard. (The Atlantic)
• Tesla launched its own car insurance. These drivers say it’s a lemon. Illustration: John Emerson Elon Musk promised cheaper, better, even “revolutionary” auto insurance after Tesla started losing sales because of high premiums. But understaffing left some customers waiting weeks or months for compensation as they continued making payments on crashed cars. (Reuters)
• The Great Cajun Turtle Heist: Alligator snapping turtle populations in Texas were dwindling. One family of smugglers had been poaching them from the state for years. (Texas Monthly)
• Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder: Silicon Valley’s ideology is this: Libertarianism for me. Feudalism for thee. (Crooked Timber)
• ‘Tons of Crazy’: The Inside Story of How Fox Fell for the ‘Big Lie’ A play-by-play from inside Fox reveals how the network poisoned politics — and lost $787.5 million. (Politico)
• The Radio Host and the Real Estate Scam: Victims allege that The Breakfast Club host used his clout to rope them into a Ponzi scheme. (New York Magazine)
• Facing Financial Ruin as Costs Soar for Elder Care: The United States has no coherent system for providing long-term care, leading many who are aging to struggle to stay independent or to rely on a patchwork of solutions. (New York Times)
• They Tried to Expose Louisiana Judges Who Had Systematically Ignored Prisoners’ Petitions. No One Listened: The Scandal That Never Happened. Years ago, the all-white judges of a Louisiana appellate court decided, in secret, to systematically ignore petitions filed by prisoners, most of them Black, who claimed they had been unjustly convicted.This is the story of a horrendous injustice and the three people who tried to expose it. It begins with a suicide note. (ProPublica)
• It’s Not That Hard to Stop Birds From Crashing Into Windows: Chicago’s glass skyscrapers are a menace for birds. They don’t have to be. (The Atlantic)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Peter Atwater, who teaches confidence-driven decision-making as an adjunct professor at William & Mary and the University of Delaware. He coined the phrase “K-Shaped Recovery” to describe the confidence divide between the top and bottom of the economy post-pandemic. His new book is The Confidence Map: Charting a Path from Chaos to Clarity.
Large Caps May Be Generating Good Profits, but Small Caps Are Not Doing Well
Source: Torsten Slok, Apollo Global
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