Hey, happy Monday! Enjoy the newsletter.
Start your week with this School of Rock excerpt (8 minutes).
Articles to Read.
In short, you would do what Warren Buffett has done with Berkshire Hathaway. Mr. Buffett, to our knowledge, has never used a computer model in his life, yet manages an institution half a trillion dollars in size by assets, a large portion of which are financial assets. How?
The approach requires not only assuming a future worst case far more severe than the past, but also dictates building an institution with a robust set of backup systems, and margins-of-safety operating at multiple levels. Extra cash, rather than extra leverage. Taking great pains to make sure the tails can’t kill you. Instead of optimizing to a model, accepting the limits of your clairvoyance.
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Seeing is believing. Open your Google Earth and have a look at what is really going on in China from above. Western media won’t normally tell you about this.
I will guide you through and point you where to look at. Our first destination is the coastal area in Fujian province. If we zoom in, we can find millions of floating houses and cages on the sea surface.
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Against against billionaire philanthropy
Journalists and intellectuals who criticize billionaires’ philanthropy but not their yachts, or who spend much more energy criticizing philanthropy than yachts, probably aren’t doing much to promote a world without billionaires. But they’re doing a lot to promote a world where billionaires just buy yachts instead of giving to charity.
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How to Save $900 Billion Annually in American Healthcare
The American health care industry wastes $1T by some estimates,[1] and possibly as much as 30% of health care spending by others.[2] US health care expenditures are twice the OECD average — for instance, we spend twice what the UK does on health care (as a percentage of GDP) — and American health care costs are growing at 5% a year.[3][4]
Fixing our sprawling, tangled healthcare system is one of our nation’s greatest policy challenges. In the coming years, America should move swiftly to embrace value-based care models which align market incentives to produce a wealth of patient data and an ecosystem of new information technologies geared at preventive treatment. At the same time, we must address specific areas where poor incentives have throttled the production and delivery of medical services. Replacing bureaucratic mandates with proven Western values of entrepreneurial innovation and educated individual decision-making will yield better patient experiences and results for Americans from every walk of life while saving our country $600-$900B annually — a transformative amount of money for the well-being of our nation.
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Ordinary Americans are using armies of phones to generate cash to buy food, diapers, and beer through ad fraud.
Netflix thought I was four different people. I was being paid through an app to watch its trailers over and over again, racking up digital points I could eventually trade for Amazon gift cards or real cash. But rather than just use my own phone, I bought four Android devices to churn through the trailers simultaneously, bringing in more money.
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What is Amazon? (long read)
Amazon over the past 20 years has been as meaningful an economic revelation as Walmart was in the 20 years before it, and I don’t say that lightly: Walmart is one of the wonders of the modern world, built from scratch in a hyper-competitive environment, scaled from nothing to the largest company in the US by revenue and by headcount, all resulting from a singular vision of saving everyday people money with everyday low prices. It is the most successful social welfare system ever implemented, saving billions and billions of dollars for everyday Americans without costing taxpayers a dime. It is a testament to the power of compounding interest, to the power of a focused plan executed violently for decades.
I am going to answer the question – what is Amazon? – but you can’t begin to understand Amazon without first understanding Walmart. Walmart revolutionized the retail game; Amazon “borrowed” Walmart’s playbook as a starting point, just as Walmart borrowed the playbook from the early discount retailers as a starting point before it. And so I’ll start by answering the question: what is Walmart?
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One of the most dramatic developments of the past 30 years has been emerging Asia’s soaring consumption and its integration into global flows of trade, capital, talent, and innovation. In the decades ahead, Asia’s economies will go from participating in these flows to determining their shape and direction. Indeed, in many areas—from the internet to trade and luxury goods—they already are. The question is no longer how quickly Asia will rise; it is how Asia will lead.
As consumption rises, more of what gets made in these countries is now sold locally instead of being exported to the West. Over the decade from 2007 to 2017, China almost tripled its production of labor-intensive goods, from $3.1 trillion to $8.8 trillion. At the same time, the share of gross output China exports has dramatically decreased, from 15.5 percent to 8.3 percent. India has similarly been exporting a smaller share of its output over time. This implies that more goods are being consumed domestically rather than exported. Furthermore, as the region’s emerging economies develop new industrial capabilities and begin making more sophisticated products, they are becoming less reliant on foreign imports of both intermediate inputs and final goods.
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More to Check Out:
- 88% Of Adults Dine While Staring At A Screen, Survey Finds
- The risks of alcohol (again)
- Why everything you know about nutrition is wrong
- Chinese vertical dramas made for phone viewing show the future of mobile video
- Walmart Is Trying to Patent Its Own ‘Libra’ Like Digital Currency
My Update.
Saw the latest Fast and the Furious movie so you know it has was a good week. Ah, and still working lots — making progress!
Thanks so much for reading! Find me on twitter : )