10 Sunday Reads

Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:

• What We Lost When Twitter Became X As a former Twitter employee, I watched Elon Musk undermine one of the Internet’s most paradoxical, special places. (New Yorker)

• Buying Home and Auto Insurance Is Becoming Impossible: Huge losses from national disasters prompt industry to jack up prices and pull back from some markets; ‘worst possible scenario’ for consumers. (Wall Street Journal) see also Thousands of U.S. homes have flooded over and over again. Here’s where. ‘What we are seeing is flooding is increasing faster than we are mitigating our risk,’ one analyst says of data from the National Flood Insurance Program. (Washington Post)

• 2023’s billion-dollar disasters list shattered the US record for weather and climate disasters amid Earth’s hottest year on record: The U.S. set an unwelcome record for weather and climate disasters in 2023, with 28 disasters that exceeded more than US$1 billion in damage each. While it wasn’t the most expensive year overall – the costliest years included multiple hurricane strikes – it had the highest number of billion-dollar storms, floods, droughts and fires of any year since counting began in 1980, with six more than any other year, accounting for inflation. (The Conversation)  

• Extreme Weather and Financial Market Uncertainty: Extreme weather can have signficiant effects on business performance— creating significant uncertainty about outcomes for those businesses. Financial markets show heightened uncertainty among investors for companies that have been hit by hurricanes. This uncertainty persists for several months after a hurricane’s landfall. (FRBSF Economic Letter)

• Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again. (New York Times)

• The great Medicare Advantage marketing scam: How for-profit health insurers convince seniors to enroll in private Medicare plans. Jayne Kleinman is bombarded with Medicare Advantage promotions every open enrollment period — even though she has no interest in leaving traditional Medicare, which allows seniors to choose their doctors and get the care they want without interference from multi-billion-dollar insurance companies.   “My biggest problem with being barraged is that so many of the ads were inaccurate,” Kleinman, a retired social services professional in New Haven County, Connecticut. (Health Care Un-Covered)

• Florida school district removes dictionaries from libraries, citing law championed by DeSantis. The Escambia County School District, located in the Florida panhandle, has removed several dictionaries from its library shelves over concerns that making the dictionaries available to students would violate Florida law. The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students, and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary are among more than 2800 books that have been pulled from Escambia County school libraries and placed into storage. The Escambia County School District says these texts may violate HB 1069, a bill signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis (R) in May 2023. (Popular Information)

• Why America hates its children: Kids are worse off in America than in any other rich country. It’s almost as if its by design… (Business Insider)

• How a Conservative Christian College Got Mixed Up in the 2020 Election Plot:  Hillsdale College has become quietly involved in many political fights — including Trump’s attempt to overturn his defeat. (New York Times)

• We tested the predictive power of astrology. Here are the results. Our study provides evidence that sun sign astrology does not make accurate predictions about any of a wide variety of aspects of people’s lives and therefore cannot be relied on as a method for developing accurate beliefs about those aspects. Zodiac signs had absolutely no influence on compatibility. (Clearer Thinking)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Cathy Marcus, co-CEO, global COO of PGIM Real Estate. She develops and leads the company’s global strategy, and is responsible for overseeing business and investment operations globally. Marcus is also co-chair of the board of directors of RealAssetX, PGIM Real Estate’s innovation lab aimed at accelerating advancement in the real assets industry. Previously, she was Senior Portfolio Manager for PGIM Real Estate’s flagship core equity real estate fund. She was named one of Barron’s 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance in 2023

Office vacancies hit a new record high

Source: Axios

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