Happy New Year
This is the 100th Monday Read!
Well, 2021 is here. The arbitrary line drawn in the sand is unlikely to fix the problems we had in the past, but can provide motivation to make a fresh start or change something.
The forum was pretty active over the break:
Thank you to everyone who signed up for a supporter membership. We’ve now hit double figures!
We’ll be doing our annual planning post later in the week, but for now here are some links to make your first day back at work a bit less dreary.
This week’s links
- Interesting idea on how to improve Google search: https://dcgross.com/a-new-google
- This was a very enjoyable reread: https://www.espn.com/…/secret-team-dinners-built-spurs…
- This seems like a very big deal: https://www.propublica.org/…/the-big-thaw-how-russia…
- Enjoyed Sean’s first newsletter: https://seanbreslin.net/2020/12/29/journal-restless-issue-1/
- I didn’t know most of this about Paul McCartney: https://ianleslie.substack.com/…/64-reasons-to…
- I find I think about things this way. Is it not common? https://tynan.com/difficulty
- I have read some of these, have some on my Kindle, and will be checking out some of the others
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/…/the-best-books-i…/ - Everything comes back to this: https://seths.blog/2020/12/a-different-urgency/
- It’s funny, I remember the events but not the stock market moves. Guess I just wasn’t paying attention! https://www.theguardian.com/…/ive-never-seen-anything…
- Time to work on my portfolio: https://seths.blog/2021/01/a-simple-quadrant-for-choices/
- I would have thought the private sector would have been able to deliver vaccines without the need for something like this: https://theprint.in/…/indian-travel-agencies…/557283/
- MacKenzie Scott gave away 4 billion dollars in 2020: https://mackenzie-scott.medium.com/
- What are some tools we should own? https://www.raptitude.com/2020/12/own-the-tools/
- I always find these articles very badly written: these are just examples of people who didn’t have any slack in their finances: https://japantoday.com/…/japan%27s-middle-class-slowly…?
- A good post to read at the start of the year? Figure out what you want. Figure out how to get it. I’ve been circling this for a while now: https://thomasjbevan.substack.com/p/the-direct-path
- Just reread this interview Our Man in Abiko did with me two years ago: https://patricksherriff.com/…/sometimes-the-best…/
Phew! Not bad, considering I was busy cooking and looking after my new grandson Ren over the break. Anything good in there? Probably #2 or #5 for me.
This week’s books
- The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies, by Ben Fritz. This seemed interesting, so I picked it up cheaply on Kindle. Not sure when (if ever) I will go back to a cinema…
- Undiscovered Country, by Scott Snyder. Enjoyed this first volume of this slightly strange comic. It’s part Neil Gaiman, part Preacher, but not quite as good as either of those.
- Foundation, by Eric Goodman. My back has been killing me since last April, and nothing I do seems to help so have decided to invest a small amount of money and some time to see if I can learn more.
I don’t think #11 is a failure of the private sector; it’s a money-making venture for travel companies looking to profit from fear of COVID. Their clientele will obviously be Indians sufficiently well-off who don’t want to wait for the vaccine to become available in India. Having seen their businesses suffer during the COVID travel restrictions, the travel companies arranging these tours are trying to find a way to make money and satisfy demand. This doesn’t seem very different from health tourism for the wealthy, and it may be one of those companies that are doing this.
You’re right about #9, the increase in so many stock markets kind of snuck up on us. It seems to me that many investors decided that the best investments would be in stocks, a vote for optimism about the economic future in capitalist countries. The warp speed with which the vaccines were developed and approved in the US and UK would seem to support that optimism.
I would expect companies in India would have been able to provide vaccines there though, without the rigmarole of flying people to the UK, in the same way that wealthy Japanese people have already received Chinese vaccines here 😉
#15. I had to look up one of the first words there, flâneury, and it turns out it’s better to look up flâneur and go from there (“go from there” = go strolling idly about town). It’s rare, and the spell checker is underlining it in red as I write this, sending a signal…
But, becoming a flâneur–I think I might have stumbled onto a new aspiration! 🙂
((Not a boulevardier, mind you, a flâneur. I’d like to stay grounded.))
Regarding #9, this NYT article gives a good breakdown of cashflows in the US and how they are likely to have funneled money into financial assets even while unemployment was high and some sectors of the economy froze. Note that, at least in the US, the total fall in wages (-$43 billion) was much less than the various stimulus packages even if you limit the focus to the stimulus that went directly to individuals as checks (+$276 billion) or the unemployment insurance benefits (+$499 billion) over the period of the pandemic.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/upshot/why-markets-boomed-2020.html