What I wrote last week
Amazon’s impact on U.S sellers during holiday seasons
Business
Inside a Year at Peloton: From Pandemic Winner to HBO Punchline. The fact that Covid pulled forward demand isn’t as concerning to me as the management team’s inability to forecast and assess its business; which seems to be the case at Peloton.
No Permits, No Fabs. “From 1990-2020, the time required to build a new fab in the United States increased 38 percent, rising from an average of 665 days (1.8 years) during the 1990 to 2000 time period to 918 days (2.5 years) during the 2010-2020 time period. At the same time, the total number of new fab projects in the United States was halved, decreasing from 55 greenfield fab projects in the 1990-2000 time period to 22 greenfield fab projects between 2010 and 2020.”
Some great investment insights from Philip Fisher. “There are two approaches to accumulating wealth in the stock market. One is to time the market, buying stocks when they are cheap, and selling when they are expensive. The other is to find outstanding companies and hold them”
Chip Makers Contend for Talent as Industry Faces Labor Shortage. This labor shortage in one of the most critical and influential industries in the next few years makes you wonder why in the world lawmakers don’t open doors to welcome more hungry and talented immigrants. The tribal politics, fear-mongering and myopia are astoundingly disappointing and detrimental to the country
Hawaii Is Rethinking Tourism. Here’s What That Means for You. “For the first time, Hawaii’s tourism authority is majority-run by Hawaiian natives, rather than white mainlanders with hospitality degrees. With the input of locals, who range from farmers to hotel owners, each of Hawaii’s four counties has created a strategic plan that stretches into 2025 and focuses on sustainable destination management rather than marketing. The plan relies heavily on community involvement and visitor education. “In the past, visitors were spoon-fed what outsiders thought they wanted,” says Kainoa Horcajo, founder of the Mo’olelo Group, a Maui-based consultancy that helps hotels to reimagine their cultural experiences. “Now, it’s time to take a risk, challenge the visitor, and give them something real.”
How pioneering deep learning is reducing Amazon’s packaging waste. “Machine learning approaches helped Amazon drive change over the past six years, reducing per-shipment packaging weight by 36% and eliminating more than a million tons of packaging, equivalent to more than 2 billion shipping boxes.”
Turn podcast listeners into customers with CTA cards. Quite a big step by Spotify to improve their advertising platform.
Affirm Debit +: The Great Credit Card Unbuilding Is Underway
Other stuff that I found interesting
The Case Against Crypto. “The real world has fundamental constraints that make the technology unworkable, whenever it has to interact with the outside world the benefits of decentralization disappear and the solutions end up simply recreating slower and worse versions of processes and structures that already exist“
A good article on China from an experienced journalist, who has spent a lot of time on the ground there. “Everything that can go wrong in urban design has gone wrong in Beijing. Each region has a different personality. The north is economically dysfunctional. Large parts of it suffer from resource dependency, environmental problems, and the population loss that results from these trends. Cities near Beijing showcase overcapacity in steel and coal, while Tianjin is well-known for having falsified its economic data. The northeast provinces nearby have seen a population decline of around 10% over the last decade, while the north as a whole has seen its share of the country’s GDP shrink from half in 1960 to a third today.“
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen. “For example, one study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s human computer interaction lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20% worse. It seems to me that almost all of us are currently losing that 20% of our brainpower, almost all the time. Miller told me that as a result we now live in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”. Individual abstinence is “not the solution, for the same reason that wearing a gas mask for two days a week outside isn’t the answer to pollution. It might, for a short period of time, keep certain effects at bay, but it’s not sustainable, and it doesn’t address the systemic issues.” He said that our attention is being deeply altered by huge invasive forces in wider society. Saying the solution was to just adjust your own habits – to pledge to break up with your phone, say – was just “pushing it back on to the individual” he said, when “it’s really the environmental changes that will really make the difference”.”
The Race to Make Vials for Coronavirus Vaccines. Fascinating
Stats
The average credit card balance in the U.S in 2021 was $5,525, according to Experian
2% of U.S menus feature chicken thighs while 42% list chicken wings
Minh Quang Duong 