P.O.S.S.E.
“Austen pitched investors that the real problem in higher education is how schools make money regardless of whether or not you get a job. If schools only got paid when a student makes money, there’s “Incentive Alignment.” VCs like Graham fell for it because if all you know is capitalism, everything looks like a free-market problem”
“This, then, is the knot for Liverpool and Manchester City to unpick. Convention says one thing; science might indicate another. Some of that might apply to Salah and De Bruyne, or all of it, or none of it. They are both at the peak of their financial powers; they are likely both past the peak of their physical ones. Quite how far down that particular slope both have travelled is possible to estimate, but not to know for sure”
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5955088/2024/11/29/salah-de-bruyne-new-contract/
“In direct lineage, it was the father of the globally successful Command & Conquer franchise, in that its code was used as a basis of the first game of the series. Yet in terms of wider influence, the battles first fought out on the vibrant sands of Arrakis continue to echo through modern videogaming. While Dune II’s designer and programmer Joe Bostic humbly maintains that RTS games would have evolved eventually, with or without Dune II, the fact remains that he was instrumental in creating them. No Dune II, no Warcraft, no StarCraft and, arguably, a completely different timeline for global esports.Yet Dune II actually invented very little and its key elements had already been seen across a handful of existing titles. The genius of the development team at Westwood Studios was to stand on the shoulders of giants to perfectly balance the tactics of wargaming against the time-critical awareness of arcade games”
“Mosquera either hacked the CBF’s official email account or created a fake one (reports vary) that he used to convince the Russians he was a representative of the national team. He allegedly then managed to get the Russians (probably desperate to put together a tournament, given the sanctions) to pay all the team’s expenses, including flights from Bogotá, luxury hotels, and meals. The “team,” however, was allegedly just 11 of Mosquera’s pals and a guy posing as their coach. Mosquera himself wrangled a flight down from Kazan (where he was reportedly studying architecture) to join them when they arrived, and the rest is allegedly history”
“How to have faith in the shadow of such uncertainty, where one afternoon, after you’ve had a bit of difficulty swallowing, the specialist speaks the words “stage four,” and life is a loan called back? Laurene told me that during Jim’s sixteen months of chemo, they never discussed his novel. But there must have been moments of quiet, of waiting for the doctor, of the hypnotic beeps of medical machines. And in those moments, did Jim wish that he had worked on the novel more or not at all?”
“It takes effort to remember that the figures and outfits in the paintings were just what was around at the time, not some remembered or imagined history. The frocks and suits were the equivalent of today’s cardigans and crop tops and baggy jeans and chore coats. (There’s a genre of 21st-century painting that I’ve taken to thinking of as Brooklyn Impressionism, IYKYK.) In the paintings, these are people just walking around in the park upon an afternoon, taking their dogs out, drinking glasses of wine. (I would love to see an Impressionism show focused solely on meals and tables.) The normalcy was radical, the banality was modern”
https://onethingnewsletter.substack.com/p/paintings-of-your-friends-and-nice
“Nature takes babies by the bushel, sending decent and vulnerable career women to the bathroom at work, bleeding, weeping and inconsolable, telling themselves they’ve got five minutes to get it together and head back to their desks so that no one knows. Once you understand that you live in a world where atoms make up cells that make up tissues that make up organs that make up embryos that end up as clots in the toilets of people who desperately, desperately want to have children, you can’t take the idea of a “right to life” seriously anymore”
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/all-the-little-unborn-babies
“farmland in the UK, up until the last budget, was not subject to inheritance tax. This made it popular as an investment for very rich people, which pushed the price up markedly. It’s quite tricky to precisely model the value of the tax shield, but the marginal rate[1] of inheritance tax is 40%; if you’re close enough to the Grim Reaper to be thinking seriously about estate planning, you might be willing to accept a really quite low annual rate of return in order to avoid that.
Which is what happened – in the thirty or so years since Agricultural Land Relief was brought into the tax code, the price per acre of farmland has gone up roughly fourfold, and according to credible numbers I’ve seen, there are plenty of farms which, considered as businesses, are earning a return on assets of less than 1%”
https://backofmind.substack.com/p/things-you-do-which-youd-rather-not
“Now, Kalshi – riding the wave of those accurate predictions, millions of new users and billions of dollars in trades – is expanding the range of what its users can bet on. Polymarket is courting political influencers like Nate Silver and ZeroHedge to pose questions that users can bet on. Robinhood and DraftKings plan to throw their hats in the political betting ring, too. Will every public event soon be freighted with billions of dollars in online wagers? Will the Oscars become a new type of speculative financial market? Would you stake your life’s savings on whether egg prices will go up during Trump’s first month in office, a real bet you can make on Kalshi?”
“there is a cult of learned helplessness at the core of most American institutions, one that Trump punctured by appearing to be a man of action. And the Democratic Party in 2024, with its associated law firms, think tanks, elected officials, donors, and media outlets, was rejected by voters precisely because the core value on the left, center, and right is about embracing powerlessness. This pervasive belief has an intellectual and political origin, and it conflicts directly with the anti-monopoly framework”
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/on-the-democratic-partys-cult-of