Downsides of Fame, You Can’t Beat Yale, Ending Traffic
Issue 363
by David Wells – Nashville TN
From the Editor
Happy Friday,
Back in action here after getting a few days of skiing in last week. Nashville is more or less shut down at the moment with a quarter in of snow – school canceled by 9PM last night.
Original content this week:
David
Back in action here after getting a few days of skiing in last week. Nashville is more or less shut down at the moment with a quarter in of snow – school canceled by 9PM last night.
Original content this week:
- Distribution Rate – The Only Variable a Family Can Control in Investing It’s not just that a family’s assets have to grow at a steep rate over time – easily 9-10% or more. It’s that there really is only one variable within the family’s control – and it’s a complicated one
David
Food for Thought
- NYT – Somewhere Between a Shared Cab and a Private Jet, It’s the Commuter Helicopter In light of the tragic passing of Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and the other passengers, this was an interesting analysis of how helicopters are used in traffic-clogged metropolitan areas.
- New Yorker – The Woman Shaking Up the Diamond Industry Eira Thomas’s company has used radical new methods to find some of the biggest uncut gems in history.
- TimFerris – 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous (or “A Few Lessons Learned Since 2007”)
- NYT – Kim Kardashian Has Learned Restraint In addition to law school, Kim has launched her new apparel company. I continue to be surprised by her evolution as she nears 40. “As her shapewear company, Skims, grows, the mogul is getting what she wants — and getting comfortable.”
Business
- Economist – Everyone now believes that private markets are better than public ones But when an idea is universally held it often pays to be cautious
- II – The (Easily Misunderstood) Yale Model What pretenders overlook, according to Yale’s former longtime chair.
- Benedict Evans – Tech in 2020: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants I personally prefer Benedict’s presentations over Mary Meeker’s. ” This year, ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants’ looks at what it means that 4bn people have a smartphone; we connected everyone, and now we wonder what the Next Big Thing is, but meanwhile, connecting everyone means we connected all the problems.”
- DF – My 2019 Apple Report Card Scoring Apple’s hardware and software across product lines.
Culture/Tech/Science:
- Wired – Behind the Scenes at Rotten Tomatoes Humans, not algorithms, determine those ubiquitous scores. Good ingredients, imperfect recipe.
- Curbed – How to end traffic European cities offer a roadmap for life with fewer cars
- ESPN – Everything you need to know about the league trying to challenge the PGA Tour
- Wired – An Artist Used 99 Phones to Fake a Google Maps Traffic Jam With his “Google Maps Hack,” artist Simon Weckert draws attention to the systems we take for granted—and how we let them shape us.