My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:
• The Asset of the Millennium Isn’t What You Think: Here’s a real Y2K surprise — 25 years later, its Gold. The third millennium (assuming it started in January 2000; remember Y2K?) is almost 25 years old. And it makes a sensible landmark on many levels for anyone trying to understand financial history. Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, nearly to the day. The euro had been initiated a year earlier. China joined the World Trade Organization a year later. The twin towers of the World Trade Center would stand for only another 20 months. And in today’s polarized environment in the US, it’s handy that Democrats have been in power for 13 of the years and the Republicans for 12, so generalizations aren’t making a political point. (Bloomberg)
• These batteries could harness the wind and sun to replace coal and gas: After decades of development, the world has figured out how to make wind turbines and solar panels cheaply and at massive scale. They’re starting to make a dent in energy production, accounting for 15 percent of electricity globally, according to the International Energy Agency. But now, a few of the regions that have adopted wind and solar most aggressively are finding some of that energy goes to waste because they can’t store it. (Washington Post)
• Boomers say it takes $100k a year to be financially successful, Gen Z says it takes $600k: Salaries Americans say they consider the minimum to be “financially successful” (Axios)
• Chinese Carmakers Are Trouncing Once-Unbeatable Japanese Rivals: Brands including Toyota, Honda and Nissan are losing share at a worrying rate. (Bloomberg)
• Inside the Booming ‘AI Pimping’ Industry: AI-generated influencers based on stolen images of real-life adult content creators are flooding social media. (Wired)
• How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test? Turing Test? How meaningful is this? I tried to make the test as fair as possible by including only the best works from each category; on the human side, that meant taking prestigious works that had survived the test of time; on the AI side, it meant tossing the many submissions that had garbled text, misshapen hands, or some similar deformity. But this makes it unrepresentative of a world where many AI images will have these errors. (Astral Codex Ten)
• How to give a good speech: The art of good public speaking is often to say less, giving each idea time to breathe, and time to be absorbed by the audience. But the anxiety of the speaker pushes in the other direction, more facts, more notes, more words, all in the service of ensuring they don’t dry up on stage. It’s true that speaking in public is difficult, even risky. But the best way to view it is as an opportunity to define yourself and your ideas. If you are being handed a microphone and placed at the centre of an audience’s attention for 20 minutes, you’re much more likely to flourish if you aim to seize that opportunity. Everyone is watching; you’re there for a reason. So . . . what is it that you really want to say? (Tim Harford)
• A brief ode to shorter days and longer nights: Because mornings are nice, but to me there is something very reassuring about evenings. An acknowledgment, perhaps, that we’ve made it through another day and can now ease into the next, with whatever hope and expectation we might have for it. Days are, by design, draining. I find it difficult to relax in the daytime. Night’s arrival tells me I’ve survived, that an end can be a kind of beginning, too. (Hmm That’s Interesting)
• Could dark matter be the same thing as dark energy? Two parts of our Universe that seem to be unavoidable are dark matter and dark energy. Could they really be two aspects of the same thing? (Big Think)
• Teen Mathematicians Tie Knots Through a Mind-Blowing Fractal: Three high schoolers and their mentor revisited a century-old theorem to prove that all knots can be found in a fractal called the Menger sponge. (Quanta Magazine)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Michael Morris, cultural psychologist at Columbia Grad School of Business and Psychology Department. His research focuses on cultural influences on styles of cognition, communication & collaboration. He advises corporations, government agencies, NGOs, and political campaigns about culture-related issues. His new book is “Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together.”
Chinese Carmakers Are Trouncing Once-Unbeatable Japanese Rivals
Source: Bloomberg
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