10 Sunday Reads

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

• Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand: Organized crime is mining sand from rivers and coasts to feed demand worldwide, ruining ecosystems and communities. Can it be stopped? (Scientific American)

• Think millennials have it tough? For ‘Generation K’, life is even harsher: After our in-depth investigation of the issues faced by young adults, Noreena Hertz takes a look at the lives of today’s teenagers, after interviewing 2,000 of them in the past 18 months – and finds a generation who feel profoundly anxious and distrustful. (The Guardian)

• Their Songs Were Stolen by Phantom Artists. They Couldn’t Get Them Back. Bad Dog, a group from D.C., was forced to take a crash course in streaming fraud, a shadowy realm that costs musicians $2 billion a year. (New York Times)

• Very Ordinary: Men Elon Musk and the court biographer: I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk; I was asked to review his biography because I’m the kind of person who can be relied upon to hate Elon Musk. Because of his terrible politics, or his hideous wealth. Or simply as a matter of taste. But despite everything, I find it very hard to hate the man. I can tell you who I do hate, though. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson. (The Point)

• Report: Half of recent US inflation due to high corporate profits: Thinktank report says ‘resounding evidence’ shows companies continue to keep prices high even as their inflationary costs drop. (The Guardian) see also Who Cares Whether A Monopoly is Efficient? The Sherman Act Is Supposed to Ban Them All: Every one of Scalia’s preferred period dictionaries defined “monopolize” as simply to gain all the sales of a market or the control of a market. A textualist analysis of contemporary legal treatises and cases yields the same result. None required conduct we would today characterize as anticompetitive, or exclude a firm gaining a monopoly by efficient means. (The Sling)

• The Economists Who Found the Richest People of All Time: Branko Milanovic and Guido Alfani study inequality over the course of human history. The results are not good. (New Republic)

• Why the World Is Betting Against American Democracy: Ambassadors to Washington warn that the GOP-Democratic divide is endangering America’s national security. (Politico)

• California Has Dealt a Blow to Renewable Energy, Some Businesses Say: Some companies are leaving the state or reducing their presence there after California greatly reduced incentives for homeowners to install rooftop solar panels. (New York Times)

• Hit Men Are Easy to Find in the Movies. Real Life Is Another Story. • Hit Men Are Easy to Find in the Movies. Real Life Is Another Story. Many attempted murder plots, whether instigated by amateurs or professionals, are marred by ineptitude, experts say, despite what happens in “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos.” (New York Times)

• The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition: Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s. (New Yorker)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Shomik Dutta, co-founder and managing partner at Overture, a venture capital firm focused on climate tech and sustainability startups. He is also co-founder and general Partner of Higher Ground Labs. Previously, he was an aide in the Obama White House and an advisor to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

Visualizing Climate Disasters’ Surprising Cascading Effects (far beyond the initial event)

Source: Scientific American

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