I hope you’re all safe and not going too stir crazy! A broad Things from my Newsblur covering everything from Lord of the Flies, to Ewoks, to gambling on horse racing, before the finance and COVID-19 stuff!
William Golding’s book focuses on a stranded group of boys and their disastrous and brutal attempts to govern themselves. The real-life version proved to be rather different from that best-selling book!
(Rutger Bregman, the Guardian)
It’s not quite Ocean’s 11, but sometimes art imitates life – an all-star crew pull-off a simple but audacious plan and become folk heroes!
(Josh Dean, GQ)
It is a prerequisite that the bad guys in movies are incompetent. Unfortunately, the same is often the case for the heroes – as demonstrated by the ineptness shown in the Battle of Winterfell. Now behold, far more on this subject. As Star Wars fans must recognize, the Empire/First Order despite their overwhelming fire power lack basic co-ordination! And the Rebels…well they have great spies, but their only plan is rely on “The Force” and regularly making low probability shots from one of their fighters! Instead, as the article comprehensively shows…it is those cuddly Ewoks who’re the only ones that know what they’re doing!
(Angry Staff Officer, Wired)
Horse racing was long considered the hardest sport to bet on due to the large number of variables and potential outcomes. This is the amazing story of Bill Benter, who wrote an algorithm that won at the track - and by won, we’re talking $1 billion! For the finance folks, lots of similarities to the world of finance here!
(Kit Chellel, Bloomberg)
While Aneurin Bevan was never Prime Minister, he is one of the most important British politicians of the 20th century. Certainly the most important Labour one! Some 75-years later, we can say that Bevan largely succeeded in his ambition to build a national health service based on four principles: it was to be free at the point of use, available to everyone who needed it, paid for out of general taxation, and used responsibly. The irony, of course, was that the biggest opponent of the NHS at its inception – the British Medical Association – is now one of its biggest supporters.
(Andy McSmith, The Independent)
With the Fed’s money printer going brrr coinciding with Bitcoin’s halving, it might be Bitcoin’s time to go mainstream. For those of you of a financial persuasion, here’s Plan B’s important paper fusing a stock-to-flow to model Bitcoin’s value as one would precious metals.
(Plan B, Medium)
OM is a huge fan of Michael Pettis, whose posts and tweets on China are essential reading. He’s just written a new book, together with Matthew Klein, espousing a different view on globalization, rising inequality, rising debt and the fragile economies they produce. Matthew Klein previews it in this piece, noting “the danger is that a global conflict between economic classes within countries gets misinterpreted as a series of conflicts between countries with competing interests.”
(Matthew Klein, Barron’s)
Speaking
of trade, Brad Sester’s been through the data and pulled some
interesting (and surprising) nuggets. Unsurprisingly economic theory
holds up less well in the real world, especially when IP can be
off-shored to a tax haven!
(Brad Sester, Council of Foreign Relations)
The ever changing ‘advice’ around masks – the CDC and WHO both went from no masks to wear masks – is one of the examples of institutional failure during this crisis. Simple common sense and the maths of it should have led to early insistence on masks in public places!
(Zeynep Tufekci, Jeremy Howard & Trisha Greenhalgh, The Atlantic)
As much of Europe and the US starts to exit lockdown and slowly open the economy back up the ‘debate’ over our choices has been largely non-existent, and largely limited to two groups insisting the other’s aims are to kill the economy or kill people. Instead, we should be discussing if/how we can most effectively prevent COVID’s spread going forward. On a related point, for New Yorkers - while Governor Cuomo has largely done a good job in handling COVID-19, it may well be the ill-advised executive order to send COVID-19 patients to nursing homes negates it all!
(David Wallace Wells, New York Magazine)
