I've heard all the supposed arguments. It seems every time anything even tangentially related to electric cars is published, certain people feel compelled to share their own research. You've probably
Terry Bouricius remembers the moment he converted to democracy by lottery. A bookish Vermonter, now 68, he was elected to the State House in 1990 after working for years as a public official in Burlin
China's Police Stations Abroad To learn more about the reports of Chinese police stations in Europe, a DER SPIEGEL team conducted reporting in Italy, China, Germany and the Netherlands. Reporters trav
I kind of can’t believe this worked? Here are Bloomberg’s Philip Lagerkranser and Joanna Ossinger this morning:
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies suddenly tumbled on Tuesday in Asia, driven by questions surrounding the balance sheet of Alameda Research, billionaire Sam Bankman Fried’s crypto…
Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday. I realize I say that a lot, but I’m saying it again.
The obvious question — here and always — is: Is it a liquidity problem, or a solvency problem? Classically, if you are a bank, and you have $100 of perfectly good mortgages…
So how could this happen? I don’t know, but let me speculate a little bit.
Let’s start with Coinbase. Coinbase Global Inc. runs a cryptocurrency exchange. When FTX.com, one of the largest crypto exchanges, was instantaneously vaporized yesterday, Coinbase put out a statement, the gist of which was…
‘[T]he people who struggle against what we call totalitarian regimes cannot function with queries and doubts. They, too, need certainties and simple truths to make the multitudes understand, to provok
Notes on Progress is a new diary-style format from Works in Progress. In this issue, Hannah Ritchie writes about how counterintuitive it can be to be an effective environmentalist . If you enjoy it, p
The Age of Extinction Is Here — Some of Us Just Don’t Know It Yet We’re Crossing the Threshold of Survivability — And There’s No Going Back Published in Eudaimonia and Co · 8 min read · May 21, 2022 -
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) shakes hands and poses for photographs with Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Ian Millhiser is a senior correspo
One of the most amazing things about the Internet is how it provides a level playing field for everyone: this post that you are reading was written by a single person, and it is just as accessible as
Many computer scientists focus on overcoming hard computational problems. But there’s one area of computer science in which hardness is an asset: cryptography, where you want hard obstacles between yo
On the last day of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most dire report yet. The Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, had, he said, “seen many scie
My basic thesis about technology is that it does two things. First, it gives human beings more power over to control our world. Second, as the price for giving us increased power, technology fundament
Locations Careers Selected Country/Region: United States (English) North America Personal Wealth Management Canada English United States English United Kingdom Personal Wealth Management United Kingdo
Cryptocurrency is a scam. All of it, full stop — not just the latest pump-and-dump “shitcoin” schemes, in which fraudsters hype a little-known cryptocurrency before dumping it in unison, or “ rug pull
Users who make the whitelist and later sell their newly-minted NFT gain a profit 75.7% of the time, versus just 20.8% for users who do so without being whitelisted, Chainalysis said, citing Opensea data. The data suggests it’s nearly impossible to reap outsized returns on minting purchases without…
I didn’t anticipate how much I’d appreciate a @Jack of fewer trades. Key to progress is class traitors: Generals warning of a military-industrial complex, product managers who narc on mendacious manag
Here’s a trade.
The main point of this trade is that, in a frothy market for fast-growing companies, you can sell $1 of the right kind of revenue for much more than $1, and so it is worth your while to create some revenue, dress it up to look like the right kind of revenue and then sell it to…
For millennia, people slept in two shifts – once in the evening, and once in the morning. But why? And how did the habit disappear? It was around 23:00 on 13 April 1699, in a small village in the nort
These days so much of my free time is booked with calls to explain to people outside the software industry why crypto assets are such a destructive force and why I support forceful regulation to halt
The moment is burned into my brain like a flashbulb memory: I was teaching Introduction to Biology, a general education class for students not majoring in science. It was near the end of the semester,
Locations Careers Selected Country/Region: United States (English) North America Personal Wealth Management Canada English United States English United Kingdom Personal Wealth Management United Kingdo
Locations Careers Selected Country/Region: United States (English) North America Personal Wealth Management Canada English United States English United Kingdom Personal Wealth Management United Kingdo
Sept. 16, 2021 1:24 pm ET In January, a former cop turned Facebook Inc. investigator posted an all-staff memo on the company’s internal message board. It began “Happy 2021 to everyone!!” and then proc
Sept. 14, 2021 7:59 am ET About a year ago, teenager Anastasia Vlasova started seeing a therapist. She had developed an eating disorder, and had a clear idea of what led to it: her time on Instagram.
I was going to write a lengthy post explaining why “degrowth” — the idea that we need to halt economic growth in order to save the planet — is a very bad idea. But in the meantime, other people have w
Updated Equator Principles with stronger standards and a broader scope were finalized in November 2019 and are set to come into effect in July 2020. This new iteration will expand adhering financial i
This article was published online on August 2, 2021. T he dispossessed set out early in the mornings. They were the outsiders, the scorned, the voiceless. But weekend after weekend—unbowed and undeter
I have been saying for a while that the next front in the fight over crypto regulation is going to be about decentralized-finance (DeFi) lending protocols. The rough idea is: If you replace the words “smart contract” in that description with the word “person” (or “company,” etc.), you have a classic…
There are a lot of EV sales forecast upgrades going through at the moment. In June Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) raised its 2025E global EV sales target by 65% and its 2035E forecast by 23%. You
You could have a dumb oversimplified model that goes like this:
It is just a more efficient way to extract spending money from wealth. (This model is sometimes called “buy borrow die,” because if you die in step 9, that can further improve the tax efficiency of the strategy.) It does require a…
Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow, back on Monday.
One important thing that investment banks do is lend money to hedge funds to buy stocks. This is risky: If the stocks go down, the hedge fund might not repay the loans, and then the bank might lose money. So a central question of…
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes Knowledge work is unique among skilled professions in that we lack a culture of systematic improvement. Other skilled trades – from carpenters to welders to nurses t
My dad tells this story about his Finance 101 class in college in the 1970’s. The finance professor walks up to the chalkboard and writes ‘O – P – M’. He points to the acronym with the chalk and circl
In my old life, I was a derivatives structurer at an investment bank, and an experience that I frequently had was getting calls like this:
Relationship banker: Our client wants to do ______.
Me: That’s illegal.
Relationship banker: Yes that’s our problem.
Me: Ah.
Relationship banker: We were hoping…
Hello everyone! Do you realize it’s spring already? I’m almost ready to celebrate the holiday of flowers, but first: another data analysis practice for you today that will make your life easier (or at
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