What I wrote last week
Own A Home To Build Equity – What Does It Mean?
Business
Inside Amazon’s Push to Crack Trader Joe’s—and Dominate Everything. Besides the ruthlessness that Amazon has always been known for, there are two other things that stood out to me. The first is that the list of suppliers and related data are proprietary and essential to the survival of retailers like Trader Joe’s. I am sure that executives at grocers and retailers will tighten access to such proprietary data after reading this article. The second is the pull of Amazon. This senior manager at Trader Joe’s accepted a job without knowing what she would do.
Wedgewood Partners First Quarter 2024 Client Letter. They had some really interesting commentary on PayPal which, at first glance, I tend to agree with.
Adtech giants like Meta must give EU users real privacy choice, says EDPB. It is going to be interesting to see how Meta will react and what the highest court in Europe will say about this. On one hand, I understand that the authority wants to assert influence and protect consumers. On the other hand, it is an attack at the business model and livelihood of the likes of Meta. They make money from ads by building a great platform for millions of users for free. Enforcing a usage fee would drive away a lot of users. Hence, how do they comply with all the laws while making money? And I am not sure leaving the US is even a viable option.
Credit Card Late Fee Cap Has Winding Path Ahead In Congress. Personally, I expect that the CFPB will fail in its attempt to cap late fees. The best scenario for the agency is to get some concessions from credit card issuers. To completely limit the fee to $8 is not going to be successful. With that said, issuers already took steps to mitigate the impact of this proposal. If the proposal failed, would the issuers roll back the higher APRs?
How F1 makes money. Source: App Economy Insights
Other stuff I find interesting
A Day in the Life of a Walmart Manager Who Makes $240,000 a Year. It’s interesting to learn what a store manager does every day. It’s impossible to be one without ground experience.
A couple of videos by F1 channel to explain key concepts in the pinnacle of motorsports like understeering/oversteering, tyre degradation and ground effect, downforce. I love videos like these. They help normal fans understand some technical terms and novel concepts so that the fans can see how cool F1 is.
CFPB Takes Action Against Coding Boot Camp BloomTech and CEO Austen Allred for Deceiving Students and Hiding Loan Cost. Aligning the interests of students with those of the school is great. What is not; however, is to advertise false numbers and deceive prospect students. It’s a shame to see such a potentially good concept spoiled with greed and deceipt.
Google fires 28 employees after sit-in protest over Israel cloud contract. The protestors should have voiced their concerns and opinions differently. They do have the freedom of speech, but the company also does have the right to terminate employment of people that cause disruption to their workplace. There is also a lot going on in this issue. First, if you believe the Israeli government is evil and doesn’t deserve services from Google, what about other governments? If you ask people from other countries, some will call the US government evil. What would you do then?Second, the executives and the Board have a fiduciary duty to maximize returns for shareholders. Not to police the world and bring world peace. It’s a very fine thin line to walk.
An interesting view with Dr McGill. Yeah, THAT Dr McGill, who is known for his expertise on the spine. I appreciate Dr Peter Attia for giving us the interview, but not having his renowned guest’s name on the title is intriguing…
Stats
Nearly 269,000 electric vehicles were sold in the United States in Q1 2024, a 2.6 % YoY increase
“Americans toss as much as $68 million worth of change each year”
Minh Quang Duong 
Leave a comment