epigraph

22/02/2025

TreadCycle of Detroit putting our brand narrative to great use explaining how used tires build a more sustainable future.

https://treadcycle.co/

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18/10/2024

https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace

How AI Could Transform the World for the Better

03/10/2024

So good.

What does Iron Maiden have to do with Stoic philosophy? Nothing really, but this is my newsletter and it’s what I want to talk about. I’ve been an Iron Maiden fan since I was a kid (more about how I found them below). I’ve seen them live in Sacramento, Los Angeles, Austin and San Antonio (2x)....

18/09/2024

“Taco Bell” by Noah Verrier
(2024)

06/09/2024

Most internet content makes me dumber.
But not Aswath Damodaran's blog...
Definitiely NOT Aswath Damodaran's blog

https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com

NYU Stern School of Business

A blog about markets, finance and all things money related.

05/09/2024

"Over the past decade or so, average wages for the low-paid have done relatively well, as shown by David Autor of MIT and Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They emphasise the role of people switching to better jobs as a mechanism for boosting pay. But what happened to pay for the same work?

More recently, Ernie Tedeschi of Yale Law School has found a similar trend by constructing a Low Wage Index, which tries to strip out the effects of changes in industries, occupation, s*x or education on the numbers. Still, it will always be tough to be sure that the numbers are really describing pay for the same work, and not simply differences in tasks or even skills. Ashenfelter and Jurajda argue that the standardisation of entry-level jobs at McDonald’s means they can offer clean answers, particularly when comparing wages across different parts of the country. If Washingtonians earn higher McWages than Mississippians, it is probably because of where they live, not because they are particularly proficient at squirting sauce.

As well as gathering wages, the academics collect local Big Mac prices, as a blunt proxy for local living costs. Their measure of average “Big Macs (earned) per Hour” grew by about 1 per cent a year towards the end of the 2010s, then shot up by a supersized 14 per cent between 2020 and 2021. (This is more dramatic than anything seen by the earlier researchers.) But since then it has stagnated, and in 2023 even fell slightly as wages did not keep up with Big Mac prices. The gains were not equally felt. Whereas in Maine average Big Macs per hour for entry-level employees grew by 45 per cent between 2016 and 2023, in Mississippi the measure rose by a paltry 3 per cent over the same period. Overall, inequality between places rose a lot from 2016 to 2021, and only fell back a little over the next couple of years."

Source: Soumaya Keynes in Financial Times

26/06/2024

Siracha isaster

Sweet and spicy with a sour tinge, sriracha sauce was an instant hit when David Tran, a Vietnamese refugee, brought it to America in the 1980s under the brand Huy Fong Foods. Asian eateries were the first to snap up Mr Tran’s hot sauce, but before long the green-nozzled bottle, with its distinctive rooster logo, had become a staple in restaurants and pantries alike. Within just a few years Mr Tran went from hawking his wares out of a Chevy van in Los Angeles to walking the floor of a 20,000-square-metre factory. By 2020 his business was worth $1bn.

Since then, however, it has suffered a meltdown. First came grumblings by fans that the condiment had lost its vibrant crimson colour and peppery punch. Next came the shortages. Enthusiasts soon panicked and began to hoard the stuff. At one point last year resale prices for Huy Fong’s sauce on eBay, an e-commerce site, reached as high as $150 per bottle. To cap it off, last month the company announced it was halting production until at least September. Sweet and spicy with a sour tinge, sriracha sauce was an instant hit when David Tran, a Vietnamese refugee, brought it to America in the 1980s under the brand Huy Fong Foods. Asian eateries were the first to snap up Mr Tran’s hot sauce, but before long the green-nozzled bottle, with its distinctive rooster logo, had become a staple in restaurants and pantries alike.

Within just a few years Mr Tran went from hawking his wares out of a Chevy van in Los Angeles to walking the floor of a 20,000-square-metre factory. By 2020 his business was worth $1bn. Since then, however, it has suffered a meltdown. First came grumblings by fans that the condiment had lost its vibrant crimson colour and peppery punch. Next came the shortages. Enthusiasts soon panicked and began to hoard the stuff. At one point last year resale prices for Huy Fong’s sauce on eBay, an e-commerce site, reached as high as $150 per bottle. To cap it off, last month the company announced it was halting production until at least September. For decades Huy Fong set its sriracha apart with fresh jalapeños reddened on the vine, a difficult commodity to grow at scale. Competitors turned to dried chillies. Mr Tran turned to Craig Underwood, a Californian with a penchant for peppers. For 28 years Underwood Ranches, his company, met all Huy Fong’s jalapeño needs, at one point producing close to 45,000 tonnes a year.

To fill Huy Fong’s bottles, Underwood Ranches expanded its acreage ten-fold. The two men became chums. In 2017, however, the relationship soured following a disagreement between Mr Tran and Mr Underwood over financial terms. Although Mr Tran scrambled to find new growers, turning south to Mexico, none has been able to reliably meet his exacting requirements. “It wasn’t easy to put together that supply chain,” Mr Underwood explains. Huy Fong’s woes began in earnest once its reserves began to run out in 2020.

The Economist

21/06/2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFsVUWDNNT8

We work as we do because – of course – we need to; because nothing is cheap, because the bills are incessant; because of all the good and wise and sensible r...

30/05/2024

The director who made Babe and Happy Feet has stewarded the Mad Max saga over 45 years. Very few creatives operate at the level of George Miller.

Presented by Rolex | 'Furiosa' director George Miller delves into the boundless well of inspiration fueling his 45-year journey crafting the epic Mad Max Sag...

30/05/2024

A most instructive Bill Walton story involving John Wooden at UCLA:

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“I really kind of wrecked coach Wooden’s life,” Walton was saying Saturday morning, sitting at a table in his home near Balboa Park. “I was his worst nightmare, his biggest challenge and biggest failure.

“The maddest I’d ever seen him was the day he came to bail me out of jail after a peace rally at UCLA. Driving me home, he was in my face. ‘How can you do this? How can you let everybody down?’ I told him, ‘Coach, I have friends coming back from Vietnam in body bags.’ He told me I was right about the war, but I was going about it the wrong way, that I should write letters.”

To whom? Walton thought about it and ended up angering his coach even more.
“I went into coach’s office and got a piece of his stationery,” Walton said. “I wrote a letter to Richard Nixon, calling for his resignation for crimes against humanity. I signed it and then took it to coach to sign it.

“He read it and was livid. ‘I can’t sign this, and you’re not sending it.’ I did send it. Nixon ended up resigning.”

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Stay rebellious.
Stay principled.
History is our greatest arbiter.

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Credit to: The San Diego Union-Tribune

06/05/2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E

In a scorching talk, marketing professor and podcaster Scott Galloway dissects the data showing that, by many measures, young people in the US are worse off ...