The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• Savers Bid a Sad Farewell to Higher Yields: Interest rates on CDs and savings accounts are down and expected to keep falling. A mourning period is under way for the all too brief era of 5% yields. (Wall Street Journal)
• Goldman Sachs cautions that predicting the next decade of returns is hard: The strategists forecast lackluster returns, but they definitely don’t guarantee it. (TKer) but see 3% Stock Market Returns For the Next Decade? Roughly 9% of all rolling 10 year annual returns have been 3% or less. Similarities in the three instances in which this has happened in the past include all of the below-average returns occurred in or around some of the worst economic times of the past 100 years: The Great Depression in the 1930s, the stagflation of the 1970s, and the Great Financial Crisis in the 2000s. (A Wealth of Common Sense)
• How do the most successful VCs pick which companies to bet on and which to avoid? Oftentimes, good ideas look like bad ideas, and you want to have what we consider “the secret.” How has your entire life brought you to this moment? Those are the factors that have oftentimes defied the odds, but at the same time have pitched to hundreds of investors and people have told them that they’re completely crazy. Those are often some of the biggest opportunities. (Sherwood)
• Reflections on Palantir: I left last year, but never wrote publicly about what I learned there. There’s also just a lot about the company people don’t understand. So this is my effort to explain some of that, as someone who worked there for eight years. (Nabeel)
• The Rip in the World: On volcanoes, earthquakes, and our attraction to disaster: I was prepared, to an extent, for what I saw. What surprised me was how audible it all was. Currents of molten lava rose and collapsed like thick tongues of muddy ocean water, making a concussive sloshing sound that snapped and boomed. (Long Reads)
• 18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian. Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another. (The Marginalian)
• This Is Why You Don’t Recognize Your State Government: A trove of legislative and electoral data reveals that when one party secures control, voters get ignored. (Bloomberg)
• How a 12-Ounce Layer of Foam Changed the NFL: Even the makers of the Guardian Cap admit it looks silly. But for a sport facing an existential brain-injury crisis, once unthinkable solutions have now become almost normal. (Wired)
• The Unraveling of Space-Time: Many physicists suspect we are in for a radical reunderstanding of reality, as big as the one Albert Einstein orchestrated more than a century ago. The patent clerk, with his theory of relativity, united space and time into a single, malleable substance — space-time. In doing so, he transformed the inert nothingness behind the world into a dynamic fabric of the world, one with folds that we experience as the force of gravity. Now it’s Einstein’s fabric that needs unraveling. A belief has come to dominate theoretical physics that even nothingness ought to come from something — that space-time must break up into more primitive building blocks that don’t themselves inhabit space or time. (Quanta)
• Once this filmmaker landed on Planet Bruce, there was no escape: Director Thom Zimny calls “Road Diary,” his latest Springsteen documentary, a film “24 years in the making.” (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Toto Wolff, Principal and CEO of the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula-1 Team, and 33% owner of the team.
The US manufacturing construction boom is massive
Source: @Joseph_Politano
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