A New Year means a new start for “Things from my Newsblur”, with renewed hopes of greater frequency. As usual, the more serious and the finance-orientated
things are nearer the end.
Pep Guardiola is the best football manager in the world,
and with him Manchester City have become (by far) the best team in England and
a real challenger in Europe. This is
only the start of City’s plan though, and like all amazing and disruptive plans
it is part inspiration and part evil genius.
(The Guardian, Giles Tremlett)
Inspired by Moneyball math, and with the plethora of data
now available (thanks Wikipedia!) why not make a semi-serious attempt to
quantify the Greatest Generals of all time?
Spoiler alert: It’s only battle
tactics, not overall strategy. Also, no method
is perfect, and Generals from the old days did much better than modern ones; the
benefits of getting to fight many battles!
(Towards Data Science, Ethan Arsht)
The machines are coming, the machines are coming, don’t
panic!!!! If they’re anything like this
bot, then future JK Rowling’s (and the rest of us) are safe for a while! (The Guardian, Allison Flood)
Scott Galloway was well ahead of sentiment turning on the
Big 4 Tech companies (Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Google). I suspect it’s still likely early in that
process. This piece from back in
September has a good look at their weaknesses and what they could do to protect
themselves. (L2, Scott Galloway)
Scott Galloway (of the previous) post has also been
arguing that the regulation of Big Tech will likely start in Europe (and potentially
some red states with ambitious AG’s). Europe suffers from all the social and
privacy costs, but gets few of the benefits from US Tech companies that
minimize their European taxes. This
ruling by the European Court of Justice, with no possibility of appeal, that
Uber is a taxi company rather than a technology company is likely the start not
the end of such moves. (Bloomberg View,
Leonid Bershidsky)
Regular readers know that Our Man loves a good oral
history. With the infamous Black Monday,
when the Dow and S&P 500 both fell over 20%, turning 30 in October – what
better time for an oral history! Richard
Dewey gets a truly impressive cross-section of market practitioners (there are
too many for OM to list) to recollect the events of the day and those around
it. (Bloomberg Markets, Richard Dewey)
And finally, while President Trump was likely the most
over-reported US story of 2017, OM think it is clear that the most
under-reported was ‘Opioids in the US’.
The CDC released figures showing 63,600 died from drug
overdoses in 2016, with the final total for 2017 expected to be worse. To put those numbers into context, “58,000 US
soldiers died in the entire Vietnam War, nearly 55,000 Americans died of car
crashes at the peak of such deaths in 1972, more than 43,000 died due to
HIV/AIDS during that epidemic's peak in 1995, and nearly 40,000 died of guns
during the peak of firearm deaths in 1993.”
Here are four recent stories to ponder further.
The latest data makes it official: 2016 was by far America’s worst year for drug overdose deaths (Vox, German Lopez)
The Opioid Epidemic: A Crisis Years in the Making (New York Times, Maya Salam)
This is How the Opioid Crisis is Changing America
(Bloomberg Politics, Jeanna Smialek)
America’s Opioid Crisis: A Nation Hooked (Forbes, Neil
Howe)
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