What I Wrote Last Week
My credit card setup – Tips to set yours
Business
Inside the booming business of wellness third spaces and membership clubs. I do notice that adults, especially parents with children, do not have a lot of opportunities and time to create new connections outside of work. Hence, these third place clubs provide a perfect platform for busy folks to hit two birds with one stone: do what they want to do and network at the same time. I don’t think we are going to get less lonely in our society soon. Hence, this is a trend that is going from strength to strength.
24 Hours With Nike’s C.E.O. as He Races to Win Back the Sports World. Nike made a grave mistake during and after the pandemic in severing relationships with key partners and letting the bond with athletes go unnurtured. Elliott is reverting the company back to what worked before. There have been positive signs, but the stock has not reflected the investors’ confidence in the company’s outlook. I thought that the upcoming World Cup would help, but it is far complicated than it should be given the current administration’s anti immigration stance, the war with Iran and so on.
After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes. Amazon, like several other companies, went too aggressively and too far on what they thought AI could do for us. While the aspirations are novel, the consequences are real. Amazon suffered debilitating and expensive outages. Now, it is putting guardrails on how AI is being used for coding and production. Something that the company should have done in the first place.
Chime Prime. Chime introduces a new membership tier called Chime Prime. To qualify, customers must have monthly direct deposits totalling $3,000 or more. Benefits include access to a high yield savings account with the current APY of 3.75%, a rotating 5% cash back on the secured Chime Card with up to $1,500 in total purchases, two complimentary visits to Priority Pass lounges a year and access to Visa Signature Concierge. The new product targets those with $3,000+ in direct deposits and for most of us, it’s our salary. The $1,500 cap means that no high spenders will actively use the card. Priority Pass is not popular in the US as the lounges are usually inferior to those outside the country. Hence, it narrows the target audience to new-to-credit folks that have a salary around $30,000 to $50,000 that want access to a high yield savings account and do not have sophisticated travel needs. Then, Chime has to compete with Capital One, which is known for underwriting thin-file customers and has a decent savings account as well.
The $40 Billion Game of Youth Sports Has Only One Winner: Dick’s Sporting Goods. It’s wild that the average family’s annual spending on baseball in the US increased by 70% between 2019 and 2024, easily outpacing inflation in the same period. The sport is very good to Dicks’ Sporting Goods.
Other Stuff I Find Interesting
The food industry is done taking RFK Jr.’s abuse. What is happening under RFK Jr is interesting. I am opposed to his view on vaccinations, but I am in favor of his stance that food dyes are harmful or of his department’s new nutrition guidelines. RFK’s proposition that any new change to food ingredients must go through federal and state scrutiny sounds good, but the food industry also has a point that this can add excessive costs. Given how tough inflation has been on Americans, the adverse impact can be significant. It’s not often that you see a Republican want to add more regulations, but this is precisely what is happening.
Welcome to Wyoming, the Frontier of America’s New Gilded Age. An interesting yet sombering read into the wealth disparity of America. Teton County, Wyoming’s top 1 percent household makes 221 times as much as the other 99 percent every year, combined. Read that again. 221 times. Since the tax cuts passed in 2017, the super rich’s wealth has been exploding to an unimaginable level. I mean, good for them. But the middle class and the poor don’t have as much support from the regulations as the top class. That’s the problem. And it’s worsening.
Cryptic emails and no strings attached. How MacKenzie Scott gives away billions. It’s great that Ms Scott shares her wealth with other less unfortunate people through donations to nonprofit organizations. However, it’s a bit concerning to me that there doesn’t seem to be any process to hold the award recipients accountable on how the donations are used. I am a firm believer that even nonprofits should still be run like for-profits. With clear goals and KPIs. Without such a mechanism, donations may not be used properly to serve whom they are intended to.
The Gulf war is reshaping how Asia works. The conflict in Iran not only affects the global markets and inflation, but also impacts how folks in Asia actually live their lives.
Stats
Sports Programming Accounts For Almost 30% Of All Ad-Supported TV Viewing
Minh Quang Duong 
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