🚗 Grandma Kept the Keys (Car Charts)
Every so often, someone reports the falling numbers of teens getting licenses and declares driving to be over. But 87% of Americans keep a license no matter what. It turns out that more seniors are holding onto the license, if not the keys.
⚙️ The Price of No Cost Differential (The Last Software Engineer?)
AI collapses the cost differential to produce seemingly high-quality output. The shortcuts people once used to judge if a product was trustworthy have been undermined. Signals are collapsing everywhere all at once. Recovery will be interesting.
🤕 Compounders Have a Capacity to Suffer (Jimmy's Journal)
The best companies — the compounding winners — develop a capacity to suffer. To invest current cashflow in the future. These investments can look like wasted capital on the surface but can often pay off for investors. Spotting the winners is the tricky part, but a checklist helps.
🧑⚕️ The Doctor Glut that Wasn’t (Asterisk Magazine )
The American Medical Association lobbies for practicing doctors. In 1997 Congress capped Medicare-funded medical residency with the organization’s blessing. We now have many fewer, if richer, doctors.
🧑🎨 Tell Your Kids to Take Up Restoration (Carbon Upfront!)
Everyone says the kids should learn a trade. But trades wreck bodies, and greenfield construction is target #1 for automation. Restoration is all labor and does not scale in a way that attracts venture capital.
📈 The Market Followed the Model (Nate Silver)
Prediction markets are taking a victory lap. On election night they found the winners before the networks called them. Going into election night, they followed models like Nate’s, but the models were downstream of the polls. The models needed pollsters who published inconvenient numbers to do their magic.
🏛️ Frivolous Software is Here (Ian McCrystal)
Ian didn’t like the World Cup apps out there, so he had Claude create his dream version. He kept tweaking the tool throughout the tournament, including a Roman numeral skin after a friend pointed out that Italy had not qualified since they were in common use. Software can be built and modified in a whim with a few pithy words today.
♠️ Tarot Was Just Renaissance Spades (Swim and Color )
Tarot was not invented for fortune telling, it was just a fancy 15th century card game with somewhat convoluted rules.
The Look
Michael McDonough shows how the best days on the stock market often follow the worst days on the stock market, to the point the graph is nearly a mirror image.
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