Weekly readings – 3rd October 2020

What I wrote

Macroeconomic consequences of the election and my review of Long Way Up as well as the book Rage by Bob Woodward

Business

The CEO of Snowflake penned an article on culture designed to win. I am not 100% a fan of this seemingly cut-throat ideology, but it seems to work out well for him

Google is enforcing its own payment on Play Store

Axios seems to be doing quite well with 1.4 million newsletter subscribers, up from 700,000 a year ago. I always like their reporting, especially Jonathan Swan.

How mask sellers sold their goods on Etsy

This business lesson series from Protocol is pretty cool. Check it out

ARK’s bull thesis on Square and Cash App

Meat sales increased during the pandemic, with 50% of the surveyed consumers reporting buying and cooking more meat

Technology

What Apple did behind its Scribble feature

The Verge’s interesting story on Amazon One, Amazon’s latest consumer-centric technology

What I found interesting

Once a beacon of hope garnering admiration from around the world, the US has lost a lot of respect from people around the world in the past 4 years, highlighted by its failure to deal with the pandemic

Cement is responsible for 8% of the world’s CO2 emissions

An unprecedented look into Trump’s tax returns by The New York Times. You can say a lot of things about NYT, but this piece alone should earn them a lot of subscriptions. Excellent work by the journalists involved.

Germany has its own Fauci, but the country actually listens to him