Business
How Apple made its first ‘carbon neutral’ product. Every business exaggerates. Some more than others. Apple is no exception. The company is legendary in marketing and making themselves look good. But it doesn’t erase the fact that it takes a certain kind of belief, commitment and operational execution to reduce carbon emissions from products.
Equifax: Your Score & More. An informative and interesting episode on Equifax. I particularly enjoyed the section on The Work Number, which is the dominant income and employment verification business on the market.
Todd Combs – Investing, the Last Liberal Art. A great episode featuring Todd Combs, one of the investment managers at Berkshire Hathaway and CEO of GEICO. I did learn a few things from Todd and more importantly, I felt inspired by his stories before he started working at Berkshire and the perspective on generalists.
Disney Goes All In on Sports Betting. On one hand, I understand the concern about sports betting ruining the iconic brand that is family and child-friendly. On the other hand, the excutives have a point that they NEED a new stream of revenue and they may avoid such a threat because not every Disney fan knows ESPN is owned by the company. The problem I see here is that Disney wants to sell bundles that include ESPN. They have to do it because Disney+ or Hulu alone is not strong enough to acquire AND retain subscribers. Not the kind of numbers that the Street wants. But if they keep advertising bundles, they have to talk about ESPN. So where will that line be drawn? How will they navigate the tricky waters and talk about ESPN as part of a streaming bundle without letting sports betting soil the good name of Disney?
How Netflix crushed the Latin American password black market. Streaming executives must have read this piece and sent it to their subordinates to ask how they could do what Netflix did here. Preliminary data seems to vindicate Netflix’s plan of cutting down password sharing to increase subscription revenue.
Other stuff I find interesting
How humble oats have fuelled a nation. I was ignorant of the fact that oats were synonymous with Scotland and was an important staple in the country
Why This Florida City Is a Safe Haven From Hurricanes. What really caught my eyes is that home insurance premium for a house in Bonita Springs, an area vulnerable to annual hurricanes, can get up to $20,000 a year while that for a house in Ocala only costs $6,000.
How the Costs of Car Ownership Add Up. Insurance got 30% more expensive now than in Feb 2020 and so did maintenance & repair. Parts prices increased by 22%. Car prices are up to. The lesson here is that cars are more liabilities than assets. Given the high-interest environment and inflation, it’s not a great time to buy a car or to have a lot of cars, if you can avoid it.
The Californization of the Texas Housing Market. “The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas recently analyzed data on housing affordability in Texan cities, defined as the percentage of the housing stock affordable to families earning the median income in those places. At the beginning of 2014, nearly two-thirds of homes in San Antonio were affordable for a median-income family. By the end of 2022, fewer than one-third were. Affordability, defined as what a family spending 28% of its gross income on housing could buy, also declined in Dallas, Fort Worth and Austin, before ticking up slightly early this year. In this year’s second quarter, 40% of homes in Raleigh, N.C., were considered affordable, down from 73% in first-quarter 2014, according to data from the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index. In Sacramento, the share of affordable homes fell from 45% to 18% during that period. The Affordability in Colorado Springs dropped from 79% to 25%, and in the Fort Myers, Fla., metro area, from 69% to 26%.“
Vietnam tried to hack U.S. officials, CNN with posts on X, probe finds. As bad as it may sound, let’s not pretend that countries don’t try to spy on one another. Even a member of the Intelligence Committee said that this sort of things was not really earth-breaking. Still, this is probably the coverage I have read on the Vietnamese government’s attempt to spy on another country’s politicians, let alone those of the US government.
Guns are seized in U.S. schools each day. The numbers are soaring. ““School a war zone …” the teen wrote on Instagram. Last school year, news reports identified more than 1,150 guns brought to K-12 campuses but seized before anyone fired them, according to an investigation by The Washington Post. That’s more than six guns each day, on average. Nationwide, 1 in 47 school-age children — 1.1 million students — attended a school where at least one gun was found and reported on by the media in the 2022-2023 school year. But the true number is almost certainly far higher. A Washington Post survey of 51 of the country’s largest school systems showed that 58 percent of seizures in those districts last academic year were never publicly reported by news organizations. “
Stats
7 out 10 loan originations by fintechs in Q1 2023 were Sub & Near Prime customers
Every year, there are about 5-6 million new-to-credit consumers in the US
US onine holiday sales this year are expected to reach $222 billion
Minh Quang Duong 
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