The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Colombia Tolima Los Brasiles Peaberry Organic coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:
• America Underestimates the Difficulty of Bringing Manufacturing Back: The 14 Reasons Why these Tariffs Will Not Bring Manufacturing Back. (Molson Hart)
• How a Funeral Director Brought Wind Power to Rural Missouri: Every year for nearly two decades, the small city of Rock Port has been producing more electricity from wind energy than it needs. (New York Times)
• ‘It’s Disneyland for preppers’: why apocalypse-minded shoppers go to Costco. A doomsday meal bucket drew attention to something end-timers have known forever: the bulk store is the perfect place for stockpiling. (The Guardian)
• The Stock Market’s Casino Problem: Casinos have long known a simple truth: if you want people to gamble more, just add a subtle unpredictability. Just enough to keep people guessing. Make the lights flash. Add a few near-misses. Let them win once in a while so they feel like they’re on the edge of something big. (Safal Niveshak)
• 4chan Is Dead. Its Toxic Legacy Is Everywhere: It’s likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again. But everything now—from X and YouTube to global politics—seems to carry its toxic legacy. (Wired)
• Meet the KGB Spies Who Invented Fake News: We reveal how one of the biggest fake news stories ever concocted — the 1984 AIDS-is-a-biological-weapon hoax — went viral in the pre-Internet era. Meet the KGB cons who invented it, and the “truth squad” that quashed it. For a bit. (New York Times)
• The pundit’s dilemma: Conservative industrialists, however, are facing a much harder dilemma right now. Biden’s industrial policy was a mixed bag, with more successes than failures. But Trump’s tariff policy is a giant flaming disaster. The dollar is down, as investors flee American bonds, putting the country’s whole financial stability in danger. Forecasts for the real economy are getting more pessimistic by the day. Stocks are down yet again. Here’s a representative headline. (Noahpinion) see also An Autopsy of American Exceptionalism: The strange thing about this turmoil was that much of it was predicated on falsehoods. I remember specifically combatting many of the narratives following the Financial Crisis. While I disagreed with policies like QE and the bank bailouts I also thought that the fear mongering around these ideas was misplaced. The common narrative was that these policies would cause hyperinflation, but as we now know QE did nothing of the sort. That policy has since been thrown in the dustbin and I am proud to have consulted on legislation banning its use and also helping to create a more automated interest rate policy at the Federal Reserve. But its impact lingers to this day. (Pragmatic Capitalism)
• The Architect: Behind Trump’s imperial presidency (and Elon), there’s Russell Vought. The Trump loyalist who’d just been named director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as well as acting director of the CFPB. A self-described “boring budget guy,” he’s best known for co-authoring the 900-page policy playbook of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which has become something of a bible for Trump’s second term. Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, has produced numerous policy papers that advocate for such Trump fixations as the annexation of Greenland (“a prudent aim,” according to a CRA paper) and enacting broad tariffs (“just as sometimes a nation must go to war with guns and bombs, so sometimes are trade wars necessary”), among others. At the center of Vought’s ideology is the unitary executive theory, which critics say amounts to an argument that Trump should have wide latitude to do whatever he wants. • The Real Mastermind Behind Trump’s Imperial Presidency (Bloomberg)
• Why Is Everyone Getting Their Tattoos Removed? For decades, Americans were covering their bodies with more and more tattoos. Now, they’re getting them removed as fast as they can. We speak with the patients going under the laser, the tattoo-removal technicians whose business is booming, and the tattoo artists whose work is being erased to understand how something so permanent became so ephemeral. (GQ)
• 37 takeaways from 200 hours with Bach: “Year of Bach” snowballed from a tired bit of shtick I shared with my son on a drive to Trader Joe’s, Christmas Eve 2023. It grew into hundreds of hours of rewarding listening and writing. Here are 37 takeaways from my survey of the complete works of J.S. Bach: (Year of Bach)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this week with Jeff Becker, Chairman and CEO of Jennison Associates (a division of PGIM). The firm was founded in 1969. Prior to joining Jennison in 2016 as CEO, Becker was CEO of Voya Investment Management.
Technology developments over time vs population
Source: Haim Israel, Merrill Lynch Thematic Investing
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