What I Wrote Last Week

Book Review – Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

Business

How Health Insurers Racked Up Billions in Extra Payments From Medicare Advantage. Insurance companies have a role to play in the healthcare ecosystem, but their greed needs investigating. If these claims by WSJ are true, insurance companies profit off a lot of people, many of who already struggle with bills and their health. I hope Congress and the government will look into these practices.

U.S. Appeals Court Strikes Down FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules. I am a proponent of an open Internet and net neutrality. This decision results from the Supreme Court ruling that pretty much deprives government agencies such as the FCC of the authority to make rules. A big win for cable and communications companies. An awful loss for everyone else.

What Jamie Dimon’s potential successor says about regulation, customer growth. As someone working in the banking industry, I am impressed by how JPMorgan Chase is run. They have an outstanding portfolio of products and are willing to invest in future growth, not resting on their laurels. For instance, they openly talked about how they wanted to grow branch footprint in the Midwest and leverage the branches for growth in consumer products. Then, they spent a lot of money on their tech stacks and AI.

Casual viewing. Why Netflix looks like that. A long interesting read on the evolution of Netflix. It started out as a replacement of cable providers and Blockbuster. Now, it is functioning like those companies.

Other Stuff I Find Interesting

Europe’s stunning high-tech luxury train. Latest item on my bucket list. I didn’t know about the “variable gauge bogie” technology, which enables trains to jump tracks while moving.

Don’t Bet Against Biology. It’s never too early to invest in your health. Start now. Start today!

Notes on China. A couple of interesting points stood out for me from Patel’s notes on China. The first is that the country built enormous construction sites that were way bigger than they needed to be. The out-of-proportion supply of construction is probably linked to the amount of debt that local governments in China have to deal with. The second is his interaction with young people. The young people that Patel mentioned in his piece took lower-paying jobs in smaller cities to avoid the pressure of living in mega cities. If you scroll up and read the piece by BBC on unemployment among the young in China, you can see that it is a big problem on the horizon for Beijing.

Africa Has Entered a New Era of War. It is sad to see that the continent is still embroiled in wars and conflicts, instead of leveraging the young population and richness in natural resources for economic gains.

China’s overqualified youth taking jobs as drivers, labourers and film extras. “China is now a country where a high-school handyman has a master’s degree in physics; a cleaner is qualified in environmental planning; a delivery driver studied philosophy, and a PhD graduate from the prestigious Tsinghua University ends up applying to work as an auxiliary police officer. The economy has been struggling and stalling in major sectors, including real estate and manufacturing. Youth unemployment had been nudging 20% before the way of measuring the figures was altered to make the situation look better. In August 2024, it was still 18.8%. The latest figure for November has come down to 16.1%.“

How Armenian lavesh bread is made in a traditional oven

Stats

One million Americans are classifed as homeless

Investors plowed more than $1 trillion into U.S.-based exchange-traded funds in 2024

There are about 6,200 VC firms in the US as of 2024, down from approximately 8,200 in 2021

“Total mortgage application volume for the two weeks ended Dec. 27, 2024, dropped 21.9% compared with the week before that period”