ToMorrow's View

Episode 64: Look Up Child

Fri, 24 Dec 2021 18:21:00 GMT

As they say, it's been a while. I appreciate the queries about the newsletter and the "when are you going to write again" comments. My absence is a combination of being busy with my coaching practice, personal travel, and football season (Go Vols)! I have no idea how much I will publish in 2022, but I hope to continue to do so when inspired.

Speaking of inspiration, I recorded a podcast a few months ago with one of my coaching clients, Harry Allen . Harry truly inspires me. Intelligent, compassionate, high integrity, and a solid character are just a few words describing Harry. I will leave the rest of his fascinating story to unfold on the embedded podcast, so please take a listen.

The James Webb Space Telescope

I want to highlight one of the most outstanding human achievements in the making that will occur tomorrow (potentially)! The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), named in honor of a former NASA administrator, launches the biggest mirror ever to fly in space tomorrow morning on Xmas Day at 7:20 am Eastern Time. This video looks into the history of the project and critical facts. The JWST is the long-awaited successor to the $1.5 billion Hubble Space Telescope , named after astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble , who discovered in the 1920s that the universe is not static. In other words, the universe's expansion was not slowing due to gravity, but instead, inexplicably was accelerating. The unknown force driving this accelerating expansion is dark energy , and it remains one of the greatest mysteries in science—more on that revelation and the implications below.

Tomorrow's JWST launch is a 25-year collaboration between hundreds of scientists and engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency, costing $10 billion. The launch has been delayed for a decade due to costly mistakes and challenging technical issues. Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope, which was repaired post-launch in space, there is no prospect of any human or robotic intervention or rescue should something go wrong. JWST will be sent nearly a million miles from home to a point where it will take minimal fuel to counteract the gravitational pull of the sun and Earth and where the shield will be able to block their light effectively. (For comparison, the Moon is 238,855 miles away from Earth; Mars is 222 million miles from Earth; Scientists estimate that the edge of the solar system is about 9 billion miles from the sun.)

The JWST has 344 "single points of failure" to unfurl its big golden mirror and deploy five thin layers of a giant plastic sunscreen that will keep the telescope and its instruments in the cold and dark. One mistake and a $10 billion investment and 25 years of work go down the toilet. When the Hubble Space Telescope launched, a testing error led to a distorted lens which was a single millimeter off and produced an out-of-focus image. NASA had to schedule a repair mission that sent astronauts in the space shuttle Endeavor to repair the telescope manually. Since JWST will be launched a million miles into space, there will be no second chances. How's that for pressure!

The Launch

JWST will launch from Europe's Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America. (It is beneficial for launch sites to be located near the equator, so the spin of the Earth--roughly 1,000 mph at the center--can help give an additional push.) JWST will hitch a ride on an Ariane 5 rocket, a tried-and-true vehicle with a streak of 82 consecutive successful launches between April 2003 and December 2017. The Ariane 5 is part of the European Space Agency's contribution to the mission. Following the launch, the telescope will require about a month to travel to L2 , the second Lagrangian point, located at some four times the Moon's distance. The telescope will unfold in space. A gold-coated segmented mirror of 18 hexagons will span 21 feet in total. A five-layer, diamond-shaped sun shield will unfurl to the size of a tennis court to block out excess light that might hinder the search for exoplanets and other faint cosmic objects. This video shows the deployment procedure, timeline, and satellite location during deployment. Like Matt Damon in the movie, The Martian , many brilliant people are going to have to science this shit out of this for JSWT to work.

The Mission

Astronomers expect that JWST's five-year mission will pierce a dark curtain of ignorance and supposition about the early days of the universe and allow them to snoop on nearby exoplanets. They'll also probe some of the first galaxies to form in the early universe, which humans have never seen before. JWST will beam hundreds of gigabytes of data back to scientists on Earth every day. It will be in continual communication through the Deep Space Network, an international array of giant antennas managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Scientists will try to use the telescope to solve one of the strangest puzzles of the cosmos, the fact that no one can pin down the rate at which the universe is exploding outward. Other astronomers will use JWST to probe the early universe and detect thousands of galaxies within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang . They hope to spot the first stars and galaxies emerging from the primordial fog when the universe was only 100 million years old and the first steps out of the big bang toward the cozy light we inhabit today. Search for the origins of supermassive black holes is also on the mission list.

Big Bang Theory

Let me caveat this section by emphasizing this is not a religious statement of any kind. People reading this newsletter hold a variety of beliefs, and I respect each of them. The timing of this post, the day before the most important date on the Christian calendar, is merely coincidental. Therefore, please read this section in the spirit it is intended—absent any religious POV.

The Big Bang Theory is scientists' best guess of how the universe began. (Less popular alternate theories include the Steady State Theory and the Oscillating Theory .) However, despite its name, the Big Bang did not occur as an explosion in the usual way one thinks about such things. An explosion implies that something exploded, or expanded, from one center point outward into space. The Big Bang theory suggests that space itself expanded. Instead of a center from which everything grew, scientists think space is increasing everywhere, in all directions, equally. Though to some, whether there was an explosion or not is just semantics. To fully understand what happened at the universe's origin, scientists think we need a better physics theory that can incorporate our current description of the very small ( general relativity ). But one thing the scientific community is in agreement on is that the universe began extremely hot and extremely dense. Around14 billion years ago, space itself expanded and cooled down, eventually allowing atoms to form and clump together to build the stars and galaxies we see today.

As you might imagine, this topic is a rabbit hole that can quickly spiral into ridiculously technical and complex issues to understand and explain. Plus, I'm not an astrophysicist (stop the laughter), so I will summarize the critical points of the Big Bang theory as follows:

Conclusions

My key takeaway from this post is humility. If you think life isn't short, consider the span of human history compared against the universe's age. And given the average life expectancy in the US is 78.9 years (76.3 for men; 81.4 for women), our lives are less than a blink in the history of time. So, Carpe Diem, my friends!

My other takeaway is awe, as I marvel at the human achievement and intellect driving scientific discovery related to this topic. But at the same time, we must recognize how little we know. A century ago, astronomers thought that our Milky Way Galaxy was the entire universe! Our cosmos appeared static — it had always been, and would always remain, roughly the same. However, as Albert Einstein formulated his theories of relativity, he noticed signs of something strange. His equations implied a universe in motion, either expanding or contracting. In 1927, an astronomer named Georges Lemaître suggested that the universe started as a single point and began to expand in an accelerating fashion. The universe's growth was confirmed observationally in the 1990s with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Since the 1920s, astronomers have hypothesized that the universe contains more matter than seen by the naked eye. Research now confirms that atoms only make up 4.6 percent of the universe. Of the remainder, 23 percent is made up of dark matter , which is likely composed of one or more subatomic particles that interact very weakly with ordinary matter, and 72 percent is made of dark energy, which is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. In other words, most of the universe is made up of things that we can't see and don't understand. Mind blown.

In closing, I want to wish everyone a Merry Xmas and a happy holiday season! And I encourage you to pause from opening gifts tomorrow and look up, child , and tune in at 7:20 am Eastern Time and watch the launch of JWST. The success of this mission is likely to change our understanding of the universe and our role in it.

Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Look Up Child” by Lauren Daigle because it’s Harry Allen’s favorite song.

Lauren Ashley Daigle is an American contemporary Christian music singer and songwriter. After being signed to the label Centricity Music, she released her debut album, How Can It Be, in 2015. Look Up Child is Daigle’s third studio album. It was released on September 7, 2018, through Centricity Music. The album received the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Christian Music Album at the 2019 Grammy Awards.

Episode 63: Brick House

Sat, 18 Sep 2021 12:28:00 GMT

I am sorry for the delay in writing. I needed a break. The newsletter is a lot of work, and it’s been challenging to balance that effort with my expanding executive coaching practice and other professional interests. I appreciate your support and kind words over the last year regarding the newsletter. Unfortunately, it’s not realistic for me to publish weekly at this point. I plan to continue writing when I have something to say and will cover compelling business, political and socioeconomic topics as often as possible. Plus, I’d like to expand my podcast series as it’s been fun talking to entrepreneurs and sharing their stories. Thank you for understanding the necessary changes with ToMorrow’s View, and I hope you continue to open my email when it arrives.

I spent a few weeks back in Knoxville, TN, visiting with family and childhood friends. I had the pleasure of spending quality time with a life-long friend, Terry Turner . Terry and I grew up in Clinton, a small town just outside Knoxville. Our stories are similar. Small-town kids, raised by divorced parents, with fun-loving personalities that occasionally stepped beyond the line of acceptable behavior, we were ambitious and dreamed of leaving our mark on this world and doing important things. I am proud but not surprised that Terry has become a successful entrepreneur and built the region’s largest event and party rentals business, All Occasions Party Rentals . (For those of you who are UT football fans, Terry is the business behind all the white-tent tailgate parties in Circle Park.)

Terry’s entrepreneurial story is not uncommon. Intelligent, hard-working, and opportunistic, Terry realized college wasn’t the path for him, so he started working in the party rental space and learned the business from the ground up. On the podcast, we discuss many topics—his “big break” in business, leadership, working with family, retirement and succession planning. Terry lives by some powerful but simple tenants:

Many business owners profess similar guiding principles, but I can assure you that Terry “walks the walk.” We toured his headquarters and operations facility which is impressive and surprisingly complex. He stopped to chat with each employee and say hello, asking how they were doing, and acknowledged their work and commitment. Terry is a brilliant entrepreneur, and I hope you take the time to listen to his story.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

Machiavelli for Women: 7 power strategies for the workplace

Worldview-changing drugs are poised to go mainstream

9/11 and the rise of the Homeland-Security industrial complex

What’s in the Democratic tax plan? Increases in Capital Gains and Corporate Tax Rates

Workers want to do their jobs from anywhere and keep their big-city salaries

It’s time for a flu shot. Here’s what you need to know

You can predict how long you will live in 10 seconds

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- In the decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, military spending more than doubled in absolute terms to $700 billion, or about 20% of total government spending. In 2011, the nation’s military expenditure peaked at 19.6% of total federal outlays and represented approximately 4.6% of GDP. By 2020, it had fallen to 11% of total federal spending and represented 3.5% of GDP.

- In 2017 , the US Food and Drug Administration designated MDMA a “ breakthrough therapy ,” which meant it would be fast-tracked through to the second stage of Phase-3 trials. The drug could gain FDA approval by as early as 2023.

- Across some 6,000 studies, on over 40,000 patients, psychedelics were tried as experimental treatments for an extraordinary range of conditions: alcoholism, depression, schizophrenia, criminal recidivism, childhood autism. Participants included artists, writers, creatives, engineers, and scientists. And the results were promising. From as little as a single LSD session, studies suggested that the drug relieved problem drinking for 59% of alcoholic participants. Experimenting with lower, so-called “psycholytic” doses, many therapists were amazed by LSD’s power as an adjunct to talking therapy.

III. Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Brick House” by Commodores because it’s Terry Turner’s favorite song.

The Commodores were a six-man, American funk and soul band popular in the 1970s and early 1980s. The band members met at Tuskegee University in Alabama in 1968 and signed with Motown in 1972, having first caught the public eye opening for the Jackson 5 while on tour. Founding band member, William King, named the group by opening a dictionary and randomly picking a word on the page. Fortunately, he didn’t select Commode. The most famous band member was Lionel Richie, who left the Commodores in 1982 to pursue a (record-breaking) solo career. The band was nominated for nine Grammy nominations, winning one. They have sold over 70 million albums worldwide.

“Brick House” is a song from the Commodore’s 1977 self-titled album. The original lyrics were “built like a brick shithouse,” but the wife of William King modified the expression to be more female-friendly. That was a sound and profitable decision, as it’s not clear there would be demand for a “Brick Shithouse” album.

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Episode 62: Finna Get Loose

Fri, 20 Aug 2021 23:29:00 GMT

In a typical news cycle, President Biden's support in the Senate for a $1 trillion infrastructure package, with the backing of 18 Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, would dominate headlines and be cause for celebration. However, three developments trumped (no pun intended) the infrastructure milestone:

President Biden is now fighting a three-front war and losing. COVID, immigration, and Afghanistan threaten Biden’s presidency (in that order). According to polls, most Americans favored the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan: Democrats—77% support / 22% oppose; Republicans—56% support / 43% oppose. However, the clumsy retreat from Afghanistan and chaos that followed, along with the Taliban’s surge to power, weren’t anticipated. With the benefit of hindsight, poll numbers would look very different. Accordingly, this week I wanted to look closer at Afghanistan and understand how we got here and what it means for our future.

Who are the Taliban?

They emerged in the civil war that followed the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan in 1989. Taliban , literally meaning ‘students of Islam’ or ‘seekers of knowledge,’ first appeared in religious seminaries which preached a hardline form of Sunni Islam. (Ironically, the CIA provided arms and military support to the Taliban to fight against the Soviets in the 1980s.)

The Taliban rose to power on the vow to fight corruption, improve security, and follow an austere form of Islam. They enforced their hardline version of Sharia, or Islamic law, and introduced brutal punishments—public executions of convicted murderers and adulterers and amputations for those found guilty of theft. Men were made to grow beards, and women had to wear the all-covering burka; girls over age ten were forbidden from school. TV, music, and cinema were banned. By 1998, the Taliban had taken control of almost all of the country.

How are the Taliban different from al Qaeda and the Islamic State?

The Taliban, al Qaeda, and Islamic State are all radical jihadist groups focused on ridding the world from the threat, as they perceive it, that Western culture poses to Islam. Although the groups share a similar ideology, their views differ significantly, so much so that the groups have often found themselves in conflict. (The Islamic State is a staunch rival of al Qaeda.)

Al Qaeda follows Wahhabism – an extreme form of Sunni Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Koran. The group was founded in 1988 in Pakistan by Osama Bin Laden and Mohammad Atif shortly before Soviet forces withdrew from neighboring Afghanistan.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as ISIS, ISIL, or Daesh, is a Sunni jihadist group with a particularly violent ideology that calls itself a caliphate and claims religious authority over all Muslims. It emerged from the remnants of al Qaeda in Iraq. Founded by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in 2004, ISIS controlled about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq at its height. In 2015, ISIS expanded into a network of affiliates in at least eight other countries. Its branches, supporters, and affiliates increasingly carried out attacks beyond the borders of its so-called caliphate. ISIS’s Egypt affiliate bombed a Russian airplane, killing 224 people. And in June 2016, a gunman who pledged support to ISIS killed 48 people at a nightclub in Orlando, Florida.

The United States adopted a “limited liability, limited risk” strategy to defeat ISIS that called for Iraqi and Syrian ground operations to provide the primary effort. At the same time, the US military and its coalition partners—29 countries that contributed military support—played a supporting role, contributing critical air power to combat operations. President Trump pledged to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS, and he lived up to his word. The US and its allies dropped more than 150,000 bombs in Iraq and Syria. (The US and its partners have dropped more than 326,000 bombs and missiles on people in other countries since 2001. That’s an average of 46 bombs and missiles per day for nearly 20 years.) By December 2017, the ISIS caliphate had lost 95 percent of its territory . On December 19, 2018, President Donald Trump declared that ISIS was defeated and signaled a withdrawal of all 2,000 US troops.

Why did the US invade Afghanistan?

The 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington resulted in the death of nearly 3,000 people, and officials identified Islamist militant group al Qaeda and its leader Osama Bin Laden as responsible. Bin Laden was in Afghanistan, under the protection of the Taliban. When they refused to hand him over, the US intervened militarily, quickly removing the Taliban and vowing to support democracy and eliminate the terrorist threat. Nato allies joined the US, and a new Afghan government took over in 2004, with Hamid Karzai chosen as the country’s new leader.

Troops in Afghanistan increased from 1,300 in 2001 to 68,000 in 2009, with 36,000 US and 32,000 from NATO countries. Despite being out of power, the Taliban survived and reorganized, growing in financial strength from donations from wealthy patrons in the Persian Gulf and utilizing the country’s bountiful poppies. (By 2006, 90% of the global opium trade revolved around Afghanistan, with the Taliban being the primary beneficiary.) In 2010, President Barack Obama ordered a surge of troops in Afghanistan—a move opposed by then Vice-President Joe Biden. Obama approved the deployment of an additional 17,000 personnel in early 2009 and would add another 30,000 in 2010 and oversee an increase in drone strikes in Pakistan.

The original mission in Afghanistan was to dismantle al Qaeda and kill Osama bin Laden. The US accomplished both objectives. A Navy SEAL raid killed bin Laden in Abbottabad in 2011. In terms of al Qaeda, the terrorist group bears little resemblance to the terror network that struck the US on September 11, 2001. Egyptian jihadist Ayman al-Zawahiri succeeded Bin Laden, but rumors began swirling last fall that al-Zawahiri died of natural causes. However, al-Qaida’s official media arm, al-Sahab, released a video earlier this year of al-Zawahiri, perhaps intended to quell reports of his demise. Still, the terror group is a fraction of its former self.

The Taliban entered direct talks with the Trump administration back in 2018. In February 2020, the two sides struck a peace deal in Qatar that committed the US to withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Taliban to prevent attacks on US forces. Other promises included not allowing al Qaeda or other militants to operate in areas it controlled and proceeding with national peace talks. But in the year that followed, the Taliban continued to target Afghan security forces and civilians, advancing rapidly across the country. The Trump administration also forced the Afghan government, which was not allowed to be in the negotiations about the future of their country, to release more than five thousand Taliban fighters.

How costly was America’s war in Afghanistan?

Research by Brown University estimates losses in the Afghan security forces at 69,000. It puts the number of civilians and militants killed at about 51,000 each. More than 3,500 coalition soldiers have died since 2001 - about two-thirds of them Americans. More than 20,000 US soldiers have been injured.

Brown University research also puts the US spending on the conflict - including military and reconstruction funds in Afghanistan and Pakistan - at $1 trillion. Some media outlets estimate that figure to be much higher.

What happens next?

The Taliban are now in control of Afghanistan, including the capital, Kabul. Taliban forces have pledged not to allow Afghanistan to become a base for terrorists who could threaten the West. But questions are already being asked about how the group will govern the country and what their rule means for women, human rights, and political freedoms. Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen says the group will respect the rights of women and minorities “as per Afghan norms and Islamic values.” Militants also declared an amnesty across Afghanistan and said it wanted women to join its government. But many worry Taliban actions will not match their words, and it’s unclear if women will be allowed to work, dress as they choose, or even leave home alone under Taliban rule.

Another major fear is that the country will once again become a training ground for terrorism. Taliban officials insist that they will fully adhere to the US deal and prevent any group from using Afghan soil as a base for attacks against the US and its allies. But it’s hard to take these pledges seriously, given past behavior. Many analysts say the Taliban and al Qaeda are inseparable, with the latter’s fighters heavily embedded in the country and engaged in training. Thousands of inmates, including former Islamic State and al Qaeda fighters , were recently released from a prison on the outskirts of Kabul. The Bagram airbase, now under Taliban control, housed 5,000 prisoners, including the maximum-security cell block with al Qaeda and Taliban members. Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Iran are safe havens for terrorist activity, and Afghanistan is back in business. Can we effectively fight terrorism without a military footprint on the ground? The US presence in Afghanistan allowed us to track Taliban and other jihadist group activities, monitor neighboring Iran, and be strategically close to Russia. It’s hard to envision how our unorganized departure ends well, and my guess is things are “ finna get loose .”

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

David Petraeus on American mistakes in Afghanistan

8 paradoxes that sum up America’s 20-year mission in Afghanistan

Vaccination status has Americans picking sides

Overcoming ’That’s the way we’ve always done it’

Why worker loyalty is at a breaking point

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- President Biden: “today we declare our independence from coronavirus“ (Whitehouse lawn with 1k unmasked guests, July 4th weekend). Fast forward six weeks: Covid cases are rising in all 50 states and up 930% since June.

- COVID cases in kids and % of total infections, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics:

July 8-15 / 23,551 / 16%

July 15-22 / 38,654 / 17%

July 22-29 / 71,726 / 19%

- “I’m not gonna drag the state through the mud, through a three-month impeachment, and then wink and have made the State Legislature and the state government look like a ship of fools when everything I’ve done all my life was for the exact opposite.” Governor Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) with New York Magazine

- Ultra-processed foods — such as frozen pizza, microwave meals, packaged snacks, and desserts — accounted for 67% of calories consumed in 2018, up from 61% in 1999, according to research.

- U.S. Census data 2010 - 2020: Population breakdown: White 57.8%, Hispanic 18.7%, African American 12.4%, Asian 6%.

- Haiti was ill-prepared for the magnitude 7.2 earthquake that hit its western region on August 14. At the time of publication, the official death toll hovers around 2,000. But the actual number of deaths is probably at least five to 50 times that number , according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

- The Honus Wagner baseball card sold for $6.6m .

III. Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Finna Get Loose” by Puff Daddy (featuring Pharrell Williams).

Sean Love Combs, also known by the stage names Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, or Diddy, is an American rapper, singer, record producer, and entrepreneur. He was born in New York City, working as a talent director at Uptown Records before founding his record label, Bad Boy Records, in 1993. Combs has cultivated artists such as The Notorious B.I.G., Mary J. Blige, and Usher. Combs has won three Grammy Awards. In 2019, Forbes estimated his net worth at $750 million.

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Episode 61: Don't Go

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 22:01:00 GMT

The US is on the verge of another pandemic, and it has nothing to do with coronavirus. The current and long-term problem facing this country is a shortage of workers--there is simply not enough skilled labor to manage and grow our companies.

The jobs report dropped today, and it was a strong one. Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 943,000 in July, the best gain in 11 months, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate, derived from a separate survey of households, fell to 5.4% in July from 5.9% in June to touch the lowest level since the pandemic took hold in the US in March 2020. The economy has recovered rapidly this year with the availability of vaccines, business reopenings, pent-up consumer demand, and aid flowing from multiple rounds of government stimulus legislation. However, we are quickly approaching the point where the lack of skilled labor willing to work will limit economic growth and impact asset values.

A recent survey from the Manpower Group exemplifies the issue: Nearly 7 in 10 employers reported talent shortages in 2019, the worst level ever and a jump of 17 percentage points from just a year ago. It's also more than three times higher than a decade ago. The labor force shrank to the smallest proportion of the population since the mid-1970s.

Several macro trends are driving the labor shortage:

The bottom line is skilled workers have leverage in today's employment market. It reminds me of the "SELL" scene in the movie Trading Places . Mortimer and Randolph Duke are like today's employers, with their stodgy and anachronistic mindset. Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy are today's skilled workers, calling the shots and enjoying multiple job offers for more money and better benefits. It's truly a golden age for skilled labor: Looking good, Billy Ray! Feeling good, Louis!

Baby Boomer Blues

It's a tale of two circumstances with Baby Boomers, people born between 1946 and 1964. Some have fared well. Many Baby Boomers experienced a massive accumulation of wealth over the last ten years. US household wealth climbed to a record $136.9 trillion in Q1, thanks to the rising value of stocks and real estate. For perspective, that's a 3.8% increase from the previous quarter and almost double Americans' wealth from 10 years ago. Faced with the decision to retire early (and comfortably) vs. work through a pandemic, many chose the former.

But some Baby Boomers are not so fortunate. COVID pushed many Baby Boomers out of the job market forever. A Pew Research Center study shows that COVID has forced many Baby Boomers out of the labor market. Since the onset of the outbreak, the number of Boomer-aged retirees has increased by about 1.1 million. A few factors are at play. Falling revenue due to the pandemic forced employers to scrutinize expenses and downsize. One of the methods used to ax expenditures is to eviscerate middle-management positions held mainly by older workers. The jobs were either eliminated or pushed to lower-level workers, and younger employees replaced mid-to-senior-level workers.

The impact of these trends is astonishing. According to the Pew Research Center, in the third quarter of 2020, roughly 28.6 million Baby Boomers left the job market and retired. And the size of the working-age population has been shrinking since 2008.

Who Wants to Work?

Due to social distancing measures resulting from the pandemic, companies were forced to replace conventional rules around "working" with work-from-home policies, flexible schedules, and virtual meetings. Workers tasted the flexibility of remote work and liked it. The thought of going back to a drab office Monday through Friday for eight hours a day and dealing with traffic, mind-numbing meetings, expensive (and unhealthy) lunches, and office politics all of a sudden felt antiquated and wildly unappealing. As pandemic life recedes in the US, people are leaving their jobs searching for more money, more flexibility, and more happiness. Many are rethinking what work means to them, how they are valued, and how they spend their time. In what's being coined as the "Great Resignation," 4 million people , or 2.7% of US workers, quit their jobs in April. That's a record going back to 2000. In all, 41% of workers globally are considering leaving their current employer this year, according to a survey from Microsoft. Employers are scrambling and pleading to workers, Don't Go !

According to the University of Chicago research, the pandemic has wreaked havoc on older people, particularly those 50 years of age and older . The study concludes, early retirement is a major force in accounting for the decline in the labor-force participation. Employers favor younger (often cheaper) employees. It's common to read job descriptions written to dissuade older workers by using thinly veiled jargon, such as "under ten years of experience," "requiring cutting-edge technology knowledge," and lower-level corporate titles. The combination of cost-cutting, relocating positions, junior sizing roles, and downgrading job descriptions, coupled with unspoken ageism, creates a crisis for older workers. A big challenge for older people is that most Americans lack the money needed to sustain them in retirement, especially as life expectancy increases. The Federal Reserve Bank says that around 44% of Americans self-report that their retirement savings are not on track, and 25% don't have pensions or retirement savings.

The US is also tightening the noose on immigration, a significant source of cheap labor. Wherever you fall on immigration, the fact is hard-working immigrants (legal and illegal) have fueled our country's growth and collective prosperity. Given what's happening with immigration, combined with century low population growth, we don't have a new tranche of people coming into the workforce. That will spell trouble for companies down the road and much higher prices.

And for the people who do want to work, let's face it, they are increasingly a pain in the ass. The positive social and cultural movements that have brought awareness and change to gender equality, sexual harassment, and discrimination, have also produced unintended (negative) consequences. Employees are armed with a growing list of protections that make it challenging for employers and managers to navigate. Employers are walking on eggshells. Lawsuit landmines seem to be at every corner, with some employees taking advantage of the system and waiting for an opportunity to exploit employers.

Technical Skill Requirement

For decades, companies were awash in qualified, highly-educated workers looking for jobs. The baby boomer generation entered the workforce at levels unseen since World War II and had college degrees. That meant that companies could pick and choose who they wanted for any particular job and ultimately created precise job descriptions with a laundry list of skills and requirements. Today, those are unrealistic expectations.

The surge in demand for technical skills coupled with a drop-off in manufacturing activity has exacerbated the great divide in the US labor market. The skills gap issue is most discussed in the US, but other countries feel the same bite. The latest Manpower global surveys show the problem is acute in Finland, Poland, Hungary, Hong Kong, Croatia, Greece, Taiwan, Romania, and Japan. Each of these reports at least 66% of companies having trouble filling jobs.

Lastly, with soaring education costs and questionable ROI for some degrees, there is a drop in new college enrollments, from 18.2 million in 2019 to 17.8 million in 2020, meaning future talent will also be reduced.

Is anyone making babies?

The general fertility rate in the US was already at a record low before the COVID-19 pandemic began. In 2019, there were 58.3 births for every 1,000 women ages 15 to 44 in the US, down from 59.1 in 2018, making it the fifth consecutive year the fertility rate declined. The total fertility rate declined to 1,706 births per 1,000 women in 2019. Various factors have driven down the pace, including a decline in birth rates among women 34 and younger. The decrease also likely reflects the lingering effects of the Great Recession and longer-term demographic changes such as increased educational attainment among women and delays in marriage.

Changing Values about Work

Another factor impacting company productivity is the change of mindset of Millenials and Gen Z when it comes to working. The younger generation is more interested in balancing the hours they spend at work and spend with friends and families. The status of being a "hard worker" has faded and been replaced with the notion that working hard somehow means you are a sucker. Consequently, books like the 4-hour workweek are bestsellers, and lotto participation is at a record high. Hard work and delayed gratification have been replaced with list of conditions for working and entitlement. Pop the Cristal, and make it rain! Sigh.

Employer Options

The labor shortage will eventually limit economic growth. Companies who get ahead of this issue can survive and prosper, and those that don't will flounder. Here are suggestions to consider:

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

How the bobos broke America

Why fish are becoming addicted to illegal drugs

Companies are sliding into workers’ personal DMs and social media

Optimism is a superpower (and other lessons I learned from dying)

Astronomers have spotted x-rays from behind a supermassive black hole

What pandemic parenting taught us about leadership

California’s new animal welfare law could mean the end of bacon

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- With more than 3 billion monthly searches, YouTube is the second largest search engine on the Internet (following Google.com). YouTube has 2 billion active monthly users who watch over 1 billion hours of content on the platform every single day. Five hundred hours of video footage was uploaded to YouTube every single minute in 2019 — and that figure has likely grown. The key to getting more views on YouTube videos isn’t to be unique enough or loud enough to get noticed in the crowd. Instead, the key is to tag your content with lots of detail-rich identifying information, making it searchable in the catalog for viewers who are already looking for videos like yours. Here is a guide for “SEO your YouTube content” and getting more visibility on the platform.

- Elizabeth Currid-Halkett reported in her 2017 book, The Sum of SmallThings , affluent parents have increased their share of educational spending by nearly 300 percent since 1996. Partly as a result, the test-score gap between high- and low-income students has grown by 40 to 50 percent. The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place. Roughly 72 percent of students at these colleges come from the richest quarter of families, whereas only 3 percent come from the poorest quarter. A 2017 study found that 38 schools—including Princeton, Yale, Penn, Dartmouth, Colgate, and Middlebury—draw more students from the top 1 percent than from the bottom 60 percent.

- Tobacco giant Philip Morris will stop selling cigarettes in Britain within the next ten years, marking the end of the Marlboro brand on UK shelves after a century.

- The Tokyo Olympics’ opening ceremony drew just 16.7 million viewers in the US, down 37% from Rio 2016 and the smallest audience for the event in 33 years.

- According to a McKinsey report , about 50 percent of the companies researched increased performance during the pandemic, while the rest saw no meaningful change or decreases. These numbers remained true for various measurements--decision speed and quality, individual productivity, team productivity, or other performance metrics. The top performers also had lower variability, meaning they were more likely to see performance gains across the board and not just for some teams. The most productive even witnessed a 48 percent increase in employees' job satisfaction versus a decrease of 9 percent at the worst-performing organizations.

III. Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Don’t Go” by Yaz as I write this newsletter.

Yazoo (known as Yaz in North America) is an English synth-pop duo consisting of former Depeche Mode member Vince Clarke (keyboards) and Alison Moyet (vocals). The team formed in late 1981 after Clarke responded to an advertisement Moyet placed in a British music magazine, although the pair had known each other since their schooldays. Yazoo enjoyed worldwide success, particularly in their home country, where three of their four singles reached the top three of the UK Singles Chart.

Despite Yaz’s success, the duo split acrimoniously in May 1983 due to a combination of Clarke’s reluctance to make more records under the Yazoo name, a clash of personalities , and a lack of communication between the pair. Clarke went on to form Erasure , another successful and longer-lasting synth-pop duo, while Moyet embarked on a highly successful solo career. In 2008, 25 years after splitting, Clarke and Moyet reconciled and reformed Yazoo to play a successful tour of the UK, Europe, and North America.

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Episode 60: Rockstar

Fri, 23 Jul 2021 22:38:00 GMT

I gather my Nashville-based coaching clients once a month for a full day of leadership development. Most meetings feature a speaker who will talk to the group about a topic related to leadership. The speakers are generally former executives who now operate consulting practices, but this week was quite different. The group had the pleasure of meeting and learning from Sandy Gennaro , a professional drummer with over 50 years of recording and performance history. Sandy’s Rolodex is The Who’s Who of music. He has performed with the Monkees, Bo Diddley, Johnny Winter, Cyndi Lauper, and Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, to name a few. Sandy is a true rockstar , both as a musician and a speaker. I would highly recommend Sandy for a conference, event, or team off-site.

I can’t possibly relay the entire message that Sandy delivered, but the spirit of his talk anchors around principles that I subscribe to and will highlight in this week’s episode.

Conceive, Believe, and Achieve

I’m the first to say that many of the “gurus” in the personal development space are too hokey for me. Their message feels disingenuous and condescending. It may work for some people, but I’m not a sheep and way too skeptical (some would say controlling!) to let go of the wheel and let someone in a shiny suit drive. However, I am a huge believer in mindset as it relates to outcomes. Being intentional and having a positive attitude are critical for success. The opposite pose would be the classic victim mindset, where people blame their situation on external circumstances. If you want to enrage me, and ensure a miserable existence, act like a victim. I have very little patience for that nonsense. We all have our challenges—some more than others. But each of us can choose a positive mindset.

It’s easy to conceive but do you believe? Faith is the hard part. Putting in the work and exercising patience is where most people fail in life. They let their fear of failure (or fear of success) stop them from starting, or quit too early. And then the victim mindset prances out. Look at what happened! Look at what they did to me! Look anywhere but inside of me!

A close cousin of the victim mentality is entitlement. I deserve these things! Why am I not getting what I want? This situation isn’t fair! I can barely write the words without my eyes rolling back in my head. People with positive mindsets approach obstacles with the perspective that a setback is an opportunity to improve, or recognition that you may not be ready, or the belief that something better is around the corner.

There is often a letdown for the people who conceive and believe and earn the opportunity to achieve. One of the most common feelings after “getting to the top of the mountain” is “it’s not what I thought it would be” or “it doesn’t feel that different.” The reason being achievers have such conviction of their goals that achievement feels predestined in their minds, and it was just a matter of time. So when the achievement arrived, it felt familiar. This irony is why successful entrepreneurs say the journey is the reward. If you aren’t enjoying the struggle and the climb up your mountain, whatever that may be, then you are climbing the wrong mountain.

Everyone Has Something to Offer

I’ve learned many life lessons, but one keeps resurfacing: everyone has something to offer. I am a classic ENTJ on the Myers Briggs, a “3” on the Enneagram, a “DI” on DISC, and a “Persuader” on Predictive Index. Some may say that adds up to asshole. Perhaps so. But I tend to make goals, create a plan, work hard (efficiently), make decisions, observe results, adjust if needed and restart the cycle. I know this sounds like a ball of fun to be around. One area where I can get in trouble is overlooking or underestimating people who aren’t like me. I can quickly judge and rashly conclude that someone is dim, or lazy, or strange. More often than not, when I take the opportunity to get to know these people, I’m blown away by what I find. Some of the most interesting people in my life could easily be overlooked based on first impressions.

I’m not an overly religious person, but I do believe we are all connected. If I am successful in a vacuum while other people are suffering, I can’t have inner peace and happiness. What’s the point of achieving something if you can’t share it with other people? When you die, your possessions die with you. Our legacy is what we do for others. Lifting those around us and finding ways to help people should be a daily practice. Taking time to get to know the cleaning lady in your office, or the cook at your local diner, or the postman who delivers your mail are simple steps that make a difference in people’s lives. At work, do you know the names of your employees’ kids? Do you show an interest in employees’ lives outside the office? Little gestures can go a long way in building trust with employees and lead to a more meaningful existence.

How Big is Your Frying Pan?

There is a parable of two fishermen on a boat enjoying a day on the water. One of the fishermen is older and more experienced. The other fisherman is younger and ambitious. The bite was strong, and the two friends enjoyed a successful day of fishing. The younger fisherman observed that the older fisherman would release all of the large fish he caught and only keep the smaller fish. The younger fisherman asked the older fisherman why he released all of his prize fish? The older fisherman replied, I only have an 8-inch frying pan. What’s the point of keeping anything bigger?

The moral of the story is how much is enough? The beauty of living in this country is we all get the opportunity to determine how big our frying pan is and what we put in it. Some people have large families, and some people have small ones. Some people embrace lavish lifestyles, and others prefer the tranquility of a simple existence. That’s a personal preference. However, there is a limit at some point, and you need to assess how big your frying pan is and realize anything beyond it is a waste of resources.

Some people may read this section and scratch their heads and wonder if I’m suggesting that growth isn’t good. That would be an untenable message for someone in the Executive Coaching profession. I proselytize growth. But growth can come in various forms, personal and professional. And, the reality is financial gain enables people with a platform and resources to help others. Doubling the size of your company can help create more jobs and enrich the lives of others. So the message I’m relaying is to think about your intention and motivation, maximize your potential, and lift others along the way.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

The uneven odds for promotions with hybrid work

How lessons from COVID can shape a robust operating model for hybrid and beyond

Bitcoin is failing its first inflation test

A coaching paradox

Instagram has become SkyMall

7 ways to compete for employees in the new talent wars

Do diverse hiring committees choose more diverse leaders?

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- Alabama football coach Nick Saban hasn’t officially named Bryce Young the Crimson Tide’s starting quarterback, yet Saban says that Young is already approaching $1 million in endorsement deals.

III. Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Rockstar” by Nickelback as I write this newsletter. (I realize I am going to catch grief for showcasing Nickelback and Whitesnake in back-to-back episodes of my newsletters. Fair enough. But you have to admit this video is fantastic. You are lying if you aren’t singing along by the end.)

Nickelback is a Canadian rock band formed in 1995 in Hanna, Alberta. The band formed in the early 1990s as a cover band called “Village Idiot.” The band name originated from the nickel in change that a band member gave customers at his Starbucks job. He would say, “here’s your nickel back.”

The band performed covers of songs from Led Zeppelin and Metallica before moving to a pop-rock sound. Nickelback is one of the most commercially successful Canadian rock bands, having sold more than 50 million albums worldwide. In 2009, Billboard ranked it the most successful rock group of that decade.

The song “Rockstar” is one of Nickelback’s most popular singles, peaking at number two in the United Kingdon and selling 4.5 million copies in the US. The lyrics feature the pretentious, materialistic desires of a wannabe rockstar who craves money, cars, and women. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top provides spoken-word vocals between each verse. It’s a fun video and a great way to kick of the weekend!

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Episode 59: Here I Go Again

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 23:25:00 GMT

If coronavirus had a voice, she’d say, here I go again . And just like that, COVID is front and center in the news. The Delta variant is dominant in the US, prompting a surge of COVID in 45 states. Cases rose 47% last week, the biggest increase since April 2020. The CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said COVID is “becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.” She said 97% of the current COVID hospitalizations nationwide are among people who are not fully vaccinated. This statement seems at odds with the decision of Los Angeles County to reimplement a mask mandate indoors, regardless if people are vaccinated. At this point, 185 million people have received at least one dose of vaccine, roughly 65% of the population age 12 and older. However, health experts worry that the vaccination rate is not high enough to stop the spread of the Delta variant. And in states like Tennessee, where the (fully) vaccinated rate is only 38%, the rise in Delta presents concerns for the start of the school year a few weeks away.

Some reporters misunderstand and, therefore, misreport whether Delta is more contagious and more severe than earlier versions of the virus. It is highly unusual for a virus variant to be both more contagious and more severe. For example, if a variant is more virulent, it will lead to a rise in cases which will drive up the raw numbers of hospitalizations and death. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s more severe. When a variant is more severe, it causes worse symptoms for the average person who gets the virus and leads to a more significant percentage of cases that result in hospitalization or death. Therefore, when “journalists” talk about the variant being “worse” or “more dangerous,” it is imprecise language—and very misleading. Janet Baseman, a University of Washington epidemiologist, said: “I have not seen compelling evidence that the Delta variant is more severe.” Dr. Aaron Richterman of the University of Pennsylvania said that he did not think Delta required vaccinated parents to behave differently than they did a few weeks ago. An excellent way to understand Delta is to look to England, where the variant has circulated widely since May , longer than in the US. If Delta were more severe than earlier versions of the virus, the percentage of cases leading to hospitalization or death should be rising. The data shows otherwise.

This clarification does not mean that the Delta variant is not a problem. Quite the contrary. For unvaccinated older adults, Covid does not need to be additionally severe to be a mortal threat. This variant is more contagious and led to Covid surges across much of the globe, putting those unvaccinated adults at greater risk of contracting it. As a result, vaccination has become even more critical. Brazil, Indonesia, Tunisia, Thailand, and Namibia all have low vaccination rates and currently face severe coronavirus outbreaks . Sydney, Australia, has been on lockdown since June 26 to slow a spike in Delta variant cases. Tokyo entered a state of emergency this week that will extend through the entire duration of the Olympics, and other parts of eastern Asia also reintroduced social distancing rules. Britain said it would continue with its plan to drop nearly all Covid-19 restrictions next week but warned its citizens to keep wearing masks indoors. France will make vaccines mandatory for all healthcare workers starting Sept. 15, while regular citizens will need “health passes” to access shops, bars, cinemas, and long-distance trains beginning August. Health passes are obtained through proof of vaccination, previous infection, or a negative test.

And there is growing talk of a vaccine booster shot. Israel’s Ministry of Health began offering a third dose of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine to severely immunocompromised adults. The new program’s goal was to raise antibody levels among immunocompromised citizens, including cancer patients, recipients of liver transplants, and others who have recently exhibited weakened vaccine protection. The Department of Health and Human Services said that fully vaccinated Americans do not need a booster for now. Pfizer still must receive emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for its third dose, and a CDC advisory panel must decide whether and to whom to recommend boosters. That process could take several weeks or months. The discussion of booster shots has also raised concerns about the impact it could have on vaccine hesitancy and questions about the ethics of providing fully vaccinated residents of wealthy countries a third shot when most of the world has yet to receive a single dose. The UN health agency, public health experts, and advocates have warned of a widening global vaccine gap and urged governments to do more to share doses and increase supply.

RACE

More than 30 million people in Britain tuned in to watch England take on Italy on Sunday. In Europe, soccer is more than a sport. It holds traditions, spurs patriotic unity, and can help the economy. But it comes with a few notable drawbacks. In its first major tournament final since 1966, England lost in the penalty shootout. It was a severe blow to the country psyche. However, a deeper blow is the racism that emerged following the match. Angry fans directed their emotion at the Black players that missed their penalty kicks. Marcus Rashford, Jadon Sancho, and Bukayo Saka helped carry England to the Euro Championship final. Now, they've been hit with hundreds of offensive and racist comments flooding social media. Twitter removed 1,000 posts. And it has permanently suspended several accounts. In Manchester, vandals defaced a mural of Rashford. Unfortunately, this behavior is not new among British soccer fans. Throughout the years, fans have thrown bananas peels at Black players and led monkey chants. It's a terrible look for Britain and the sport.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Over 50% of the global population lives in cities. Twenty-five mega-cities generate 52% of global greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), according to a Frontiers study of 167 cities worldwide. The 25 cities, which cover only 2% of the Earth's surface, are mainly situated in Asian and European countries, but there are also some in the US. They include Handan, Shanghai, and Suzhou (China), Tokyo (Japan), Moscow (Russia), and Istanbul (Turkey). For a list of GHG emissions by city by continent, click here . Some highlights from the report:

ECONOMY

Retail sales rose 0.6% in June compared to the previous month, partially due to more spending and an increase in inflation. Consumer demand at restaurants, in stores, and online appeared strong. Sales of furniture and business materials dropped as demand for those products was exceptionally high during the pandemic, with people mainly staying at home. Car sales fell by 2% in June as inventories are dwindling. The overall increase in June retail sales is 1.3% if auto sales are excluded.

Consumer prices rose by 5.4% in June versus the same month last year, the highest 12-month jump since August 2008. Prices also increased by a seasonally adjusted 0.9% from May to June, the most significant one-month increase since June 2008. However, the growth may not be a fire alarm for runaway inflation, given one-third of the rise, according to the Labor Department, was in used car prices . Core CPI, which strips out volatile food and energy components, rose 4.5%, the sharpest move for that measure since September 1991. The 10-year Treasury yield fell after the news, indicating markets weren't too bothered by the number. Some economists argue the uptick in inflation in recent months is due to a mismatch between a vast amount of pent-up demand and a limited supply of goods and services from COVID. Plus, the desire for travel and road trips has also fueled an appetite for used automobiles.

Xmas came early for families with children. As part of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package passed in March, the Biden administration set aside $105 billion to hike the child tax credit up to $1,600 per child, and parents started reaping the benefit this week. Almost 90% of the US' 74 million children will qualify for the program. The standard credit increased to $3,600/child under six and $3,000/child between ages 6 and 17, compared to the existing $2,000 per child under 17. After one year, the current expansion will expire, but President Biden asked for a four-year extension in his American Families Plan. Some Democrat lawmakers are seeking to make the credits permanent. Warning label: consult with your CPA as these payments could have tax implications next year.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

The scapegoating machine

How social media has made us all rivals

The Fulbright paradox

Buy, Borrow, Die: How rich Americans live off their paper wealth

Is a graduate degree worth the debt? Check it here

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- Americans today are less than one lifetime removed from the system of apartheid . The United States has had only one president who came of age when full racial equality was the law of the land. Eighty-one of the 100 current US senators were born in an era when people could be arrested for marrying across racial lines.

- Border Patrol agents have made more than a million arrests at the U.S.-Mexico border so far this year, already higher than any full-year total since at least 2005, according to new Customs and Border Protection figures released today. Agents made more than 178,000 arrests in June, a 3% increase over the prior month.

- According to a McKinsey report , about 50 percent of the companies researched increased performance during the pandemic, while the rest saw no meaningful change or decreases. These numbers remained true for a variety of measurements--decision speed and quality, individual productivity, team productivity, or other performance metrics. The top performers also had lower variability, meaning that they were more likely to see performance gains across the board and not just for some teams. The most productive even witnessed a 48 percent increase in employees’ job satisfaction, versus a decrease of 9 percent at the worst-performing organizations.

- Autonomous vehicle startup Aurora announced plans yesterday to go public via SPAC at a valuation of $11 billion. In doing so, it’ll become the first major company in this young industry to hit the markets. Aurora is expected to have $2.5 billion in cash at closing. It raised nearly $2 billion from the transaction, including from partners in the industry like Uber, Volvo Group and trucking manufacturer PACCAR. The SPACs founders include Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn, co-founded PayPal, and was one of the earliest investors in Facebook, and Mark Pincus, who founded the social game developer Zynga.

- Jeff Bezos donated $200 million to the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. The Smithsonian said $70 million would support museum renovations. The other $130 million would go toward building a new education center at the museum called the Bezos Learning Center.

III. Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake as I write this newsletter.

Whitesnake is a hard rock band formed in England in 1978. The group was initially put together as the backing band for singer David Coverdale, who had recently left Deep Purple. Coverdale’s vision was to create a hard rock band that combined elements of R&B and blues with good commercial hooks. Whitesnake’s early influences include Cream, Fleetwood Mac, Jeff Beck, and Jimi Hendrix. However, the band became unfavorably compared to Led Zeppelin in the 1980s, and Coverdale was accused of imitating singer Robert Plant. Coverdale is the only constant band member throughout the group’s history.

Whitesnake released their eponymous album in 1987, which became their biggest success, selling over eight million copies in the US. “Here I Go Again” was the hit single. The song was written by Coverdale and featured on the 1982 album Saints & Sinners and re-recorded in 1987 with a different pace. The re-recorded version landed with listeners and hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the Canadian Singles Chart in 1987. VH1 ranked “Here I Go Again” as number 17 of the 100 Greatest Songs of the 80s, and Rolling Stone ranked it 9th among the Top 10 “The Best Hair Metal Songs of All Time.”

Whitesnake was criticized during their peak for the use of sexual innuendos and double entendres. The 1982 music video for “Here I Go Again” features model Julie “Tawny” Kitaen, who was married to Coverdale from 1989 to 1991. In the video, Tawney’s sex appeal jumps off the screen, lighting up the imagination. The iconic scenes of her dancing on the hood of a Jaguar are forever etched in my teenage mind. I haven’t watched the video in decades, and I was surprised by how innocent it seems in modern times. Give it a watch and judge for yourself!

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Episode 58: Could You Be Loved?

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 23:23:00 GMT

This past week I spent time in Eleuthera, Bahamas . If you’ve never been before, I highly recommend it. Eleuthera, which lies 50 miles east of Nassau, is both a single island and an associated group of smaller islands that form part of the Great Bahama Banks. This area offers a beautiful contrast to Nassau and Grand Bahama. Tourists visit Harbor Island to see Pink Sands Beach but will be pleased to discover much more.

This vacation forced me to turn off the news for a week and focus on rum, reggae, and fishing (not in that order) and ponder the existential question— could you be loved ? It also created an excellent opportunity to introduce my second podcast. My interview is with Pablo Conde . He is a Cuban-American serial entrepreneur who currently runs two companies, Concealment Express and Pink Sand Spirits . The son of immigrant parents who fled Castro’s communist reign, Pablo has a fascinating life story that showcases an immigrant’s meaningful, symbiotic relationship with our nation. Some of the topics covered are as follows:

This podcast is my second effort, so I appreciate the feedback . And let me know if you have an interesting story to share and would like to be on a future podcast. ToMorrow’s View is officially on Spotify, so thank you in advance for following me on that platform!

Please note that this podcast is an unscripted, one-take, unedited recording. Accordingly, any bloopers, awkward segues, and the occasional cuss word should be overlooked and only add to the production’s charm. (GRIN)

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

Older Americans stockpiled a record $35 trillion. The time has come to give it away.

Donald J. Trump: Why I’m suing big tech

The next great disruption is hybrid work—are we ready?

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- In what’s being coined as the “Great Resignation,” 4 million people, or 2.7% of US workers, quit their jobs in April. That’s a record going back to 2000. In all, 41% of workers globally are considering leaving their current employer this year, according to a survey from Microsoft. Experts have floated several explanations .

- This year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, Zaila Avant-garde , is also a record-holding basketball dribbler and math prodigy. The 14-year-old from Harvey, Louisiana, holds three Guinness World Records for basketball tricks and would like to play basketball at Harvard before becoming an NBA coach or join NASA or pursue neuroscience. Plus, she can read 1,150 words per minute. Avant-garde is the first Black American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee.

- The percentage of Americans who identify as white Christians, which has been on the decline for the last 45 years, has stabilized. The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) reveals that the percentage of white and Christian Americans is now 44%. That number was 80% in 1976 and 66% in 1996. Though white Christians no longer make up a supermajority of the US, their number appears to have stopped declining.

- Billionaire Richard Branson is going to suborbital space this weekend aboard a Virgin Galactic space plane, less than two weeks before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos makes his journey. Branson will travel aboard the VSS Unity, which will reach just over 50 miles above the Earth . That counts as “space,” according to NASA and the FAA, though it’s below the Kármán line , an area 62 miles above the Earth considered by some experts to be the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space

- According to CDC modeling, the Delta variant is now the dominant strain of coronavirus in the US. The CDC says approximately 51.7% of cases recorded between June 20 and July 3 are linked to the virulent strain, first identified in India. Drugmaker Pfizer said Thursday it is seeing waning immunity from its coronavirus vaccine and says it is picking up its efforts to develop a booster dose to protect people from variants. Of the 158 million fully vaccinated people in the US, more than half received the Pfizer shot.

- Children over the age of 12 are eligible to receive a coronavirus vaccine. It’s unclear when the shots will be available for children under 12, though clinical trials are underway, with results expected by fall. At this point, 24% of children between 12 and 15 are fully vaccinated, and that number rises to 36% among 16- and 17-year-olds. The CDC urges schools to promote vaccination to all eligible students, as they have been shown to reduce transmission and remain largely effective against the delta variant.

III. Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Could You Be Loved” by Bob Marley and The Wailers as I write this newsletter.

Bob Marley was a Jamaican singer, songwriter, and musician. He is considered one of the pioneers of reggae, and his greatest hits album Legend in 1984 became the best-selling reggae album of all time. However, Marley’s influence expands beyond music into politics and culture. He is a Rastafari icon, and he infused his music with a sense of spirituality. He was outspoken in his support for the legalization of marijuana and advocated for Pan-Africanism.

In 1963, Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, Junior Braithwaite, Beverley Kelso, and Cherry Smith were called the Teenagers. They later changed the name to the Wailing Rudeboys, then to the Wailing Wailers, at which point record producer discovered them, and finally arrived at simply Wailers. The Wailers disbanded in 1974, with each of the three principal members pursuing a solo career. Despite the break-up, Marley continued recording as “Bob Marley & The Wailers,” and under that name, released 11 albums. Marley ranks as one of the best-selling artists of all time, with estimated sales of more than 75 million records worldwide. Rolling Stone ranks Marley as No. 11 on its list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

In 1977, Marley was diagnosed with acral lentiginous melanoma. He died as a result of the illness in 1981. Jamaica gave Marley a state funeral, and fans around the world mourned the loss.

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The story of a Cuban-American and the highs and lows of entrepreneurship

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 23:03:00 GMT

My interview is with Pablo Conde. He is a Cuban-American serial entrepreneur who currently runs two companies, Concealment Express and Conch and Coconut. The son of immigrant parents who fled Castro’s communist reign, Pablo has a fascinating life story that showcases an immigrant’s meaningful, symbiotic relationship with our nation. Some of the topics covered are the following: 1) The Cuban-American experience 2) The highs and lows of entrepreneurship 3) The experience of selling a business and getting a successful exit 4) Eleuthera, Bahamas as a getaway destination

If you want to improve your marriage, or looking to find one, Kimberly Beam Holmes has the answers.

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 17:36:00 GMT

My interview is with Kimberly Beam Holmes. She is CEO of Marriage Helper, a research-based company focused on saving marriages. The program has a staggering 77% success rate. And as you might imagine, most people who arrive at Marriage Helper are in serious trouble, and it’s the last resort before a divorce. The Marriage Helper program, which features workshops, marital coaches, and proprietary courses, is rooted in scientific principles that drive relationships. Therefore, even if you have a great marriage or looking to find one, you can benefit from the content and deepen your connection with others and live a happier, more fulfilling life. Some of the topics covered in this week’s podcast are the following: 1) What it means to be a sexologist 2) The proven process for falling in love 3) What makes a great marriage 4) Balancing being a wife/mom/CEO/Ph.D. candidate 5) The joy of adoption

Episode 57: Courtesy of The Red, White And Blue

Sat, 03 Jul 2021 00:01:00 GMT

America turns 245 years old on Sunday. The Fourth of July has been a federal holiday in the United States since 1941, but the tradition of Independence Day celebrations goes back to the 18th century.

On July 2nd, 1776, the Continental Congress voted in favor of independence, and two days later, delegates from the 13 colonies adopted the Declaration of Independence, a historic document drafted by Thomas Jefferson. From 1776 to the present day, July 4th has been celebrated as America’s birthday, with festivities ranging from fireworks, parades, and concerts to more casual family gatherings and barbecues that showcase our team colors, Courtesy of The Red, White And Blue .

The History Channel documents the following seven events that escalated tensions between the British and Colonists that culminated in America’s War for Independence and resulted in the birth of our nation:

More than 47 million Americans are expected to travel this holiday weekend, representing an increase of nearly 40% compared to last year. The vast majority of travelers (43.6 million) will hit the road, the most on record and 5 percent more than the record set in 2019. Approximately 3.5 million people will take to the skies, 164% more than last year. Travelers can expect to find higher prices for hotels and car rentals as demand climbs. Mid-range hotel rates have increased between 32% and 35%, with average nightly rates ranging between $156 and $398 for AAA Two Diamond and AAA Three Diamond hotels, respectively. Smaller fleets have translated in a spike in Rental car prices of 140% compared to 2019. Gas prices are the most expensive since 2014, with the national average above $3 per gallon. Top destinations this weekend are as follows: Orlando, FL, Anaheim, CA, Denver, CO, Las Vegas, NV, Seattle, WA, Chicago, IL, New York, NY, Atlanta, GA, Boston, MA, Maui, HI.

CHINA

America isn’t the only one celebrating a birthday. China’s President Xi Jinping delivered an address to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) founding. Thursday’s event began with dozens of military helicopters and jets, including the J-20 stealth fighters, flying in formation through Beijing’s skies, trailing flags and colored smoke over Tiananmen Square, where 56 cannon – representing the 56 ethnic groups of China – were fired 100 times. A 3,000-strong chorus sang seven socialist songs during the event. In a speech before a crowd of 70,000, Xi praised the ruling party for lifting China out of poverty and humiliation and pledged to expand China’s military and influence. Xi said the era of China being bullied was “gone forever.” He continued by saying, “anyone who dares to do that will have their heads bashed bloody against the Great Wall of steel forged by over 1.4 billion Chinese people,” sparking applause from an invited audience gathered in the massive square in central Beijing.

Xi has served as General Secretary of the CCP since 2012 and President of China since 2013. Xi has cemented his eight-year rule through a personality cult, ending term limits and declining to anoint a successor. He has purged rivals and crushed dissent – from Uyghur Muslims and online critics to pro-democracy protests on Hong Kong’s streets. The CCP wields absolute rule over 1.4 billion people and one of the world’s largest economies. But China is also an increasingly isolated member of the international community due to its human rights abuses and actions towards regional neighbors who dispute China’s claims in the South China Sea. The CCP has never ruled over Taiwan but considers it a breakaway province of China that must be unified by force if necessary. Xi said Taiwan reunification remained an “unshakeable commitment.” A Pew Research Center survey in 17 advanced economies, including the U.S., Canada, France, Japan, and Germany, released this week shows the opinion on China and President Xi to be negative and near historic lows. This week also marks Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule in 1997. There are usually protests around the date, but these have been banned under China’s national-security law.

POLITICS

The U.S. has vacated Bagram airfield, its main airbase in Afghanistan. While about 650 US troops will remain to protect the U.S. embassy and Kabul airport, the U.S. is set to end its occupation of Afghanistan by mid-July, ahead of the September 11th goal established by President Biden. The sprawling air base north of Kabul was the symbolic and operational heart of the U.S. military operation in Afghanistan. With that hub handed over to Afghan security forces, it sets the scene for the final departure of U.S. troops from the country only months before the twentieth anniversary of the start of U.S. operations to topple the Taliban, launched in response to the 9/11 attacks.

Built by Soviet engineers in the 1950s, the airbase has been at the heart of two ill-fated foreign military campaigns, one launched by Moscow in 1979, and America’s war on terror, dubbed the “forever war” because it seemed to have no endpoint. In 2001, the base was devastated by years of civil war, the two ends of its 3km-long runway held by opposing factions. But the U.S. quickly built it into a sprawling citadel with boardwalks, fast food restaurants, a sewage treatment camp, and even at one point a swimming pool. At its peak, 40,000 military personnel and civilian contractors were stationed there. Taliban spokesman Sohail Shaheen said the group welcomed the U.S. departure from Bagram. The militants have been seizing swathes of territory across the country in recent months as foreign troops headed home, taking control of 50 out of nearly 400 districts since May. Some intelligence analysts have warned the government in Kabul could collapse within months. Gen Scott Miller, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, warned that the country could be headed for civil war. Ironically, a 20-year military project launched to destroy the Taliban ends with the same group resurgent across Afghanistan.

President Biden grew irked today with repeated press questions about the Afghanistan troop drawdown, saying he didn’t want to answer any more of the topic because it was a holiday weekend. Biden said he wanted to talk about “happy things.” Biden sniping at press questions is nothing new. He repeatedly lashed out at reporters who brought up investigations into his son Hunter on the campaign trail. He apologized last month after ripping a CNN reporter’s question about his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, scolding her , “if you don’t understand that, you’re in the wrong business.” One can’t help but muse that a political figure who doesn’t like reporters and their questions may be in the wrong business.

ECONOMY

U.S. hiring picked up in June as the economy added 850,000 jobs , the most significant single-month gain since August 2020, well above the consensus estimate of 706,000 . Hourly pay for private-sector employees was up 3.6% year-over-year, as companies raise wages in a bid to attract workers. According to the Labor Department, the economy is still not back to where it was before the pandemic – the U.S. has 6.8 million fewer jobs than it did in February 2020. The main question now for markets and economists is whether the positive June report could encourage the Federal Reserve to taper its monthly asset purchases – a form of monetary stimulus – more quickly. There’s a raging debate over the matter currently ongoing within the Federal Reserve over whether the U.S. central bank needs to throttle back from the stimulus as the economy accelerates out of the pandemic to keep inflation from getting too hot.

COVID

Coronavirus infections are up 10% since last week. And it’s primarily because of the Delta variant – the strain that’s 60% more contagious than Alpha and carries double the risks of hospitalization. Delta already counts for a quarter of all new cases and has been detected in every single state. It could become the dominant strain in a matter of weeks. And the CDC’s warning that the slowing vaccination rate could leave many vulnerable to the virus. More than 15 million people failed to get their second shot of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, making them susceptible to the Delta variant.

Most concerning is the spike in Covid cases in under-vaccinated states, based on a two-week average:

Alabama - +111%

Nevada - +107%

Arkansas - +80%

Mississippi - +64%

Missouri - +54%

According to the CDC, 172,549,399 or 66.8% of Americans age 18+ have received at least one dose of a vaccine. This mark means the country will miss President Biden’s goal of 70% vaccinated by July 4th by approximately 7 million shots.

SCOTUS

Yesterday, SCOTUS upheld Arizona voting restrictions in a 6-3 decision along ideological lines. It’s one of the court’s most significant voting rights rulings in years. The case looked at two-state rules: one, allowing it to throw out ballots cast in the wrong precinct. And two, banning “ballot harvesting” – when someone other than a family member or caregiver collects and drops off your ballot. Democrats argued they disproportionately impact voters of color. A lower court agreed. But most of the Supremes said just because there’s “some disparity” doesn’t mean there’s an unequal opportunity to vote. Republicans applauded the move, taking it as a hint SCOTUS could side with them on several voting restriction cases.

OTHER

Thursday at midnight, college athletics created a new billion-dollar industry. The relaxation of rules governing name, image, and likeness (NIL) allows college athletes to sign endorsement deals and make money off their fame for the first time. Twenty-five states passed NIL bills that challenged the NCAA’s rules banning student-athletes from monetizing their popularity. Seeing the writing on the wall, the NCAA lifted its restrictions on NIL on Wednesday, paving the way for college athletes to link up with brands just hours later. An entire roster of college athletes took advantage of the new NIL rules yesterday to launch their business careers. If you think NIL will primarily benefit the biggest stars in the most prominent sports (football, basketball), you wouldn’t be wrong. But there are plenty of exceptions for the most social media-savvy athletes. Industry insiders expect LSU gymnast Olivia Dunne to earn the most of any NCAA athlete from NIL endorsements. She’s the only one with more than 1 million followers on both TikTok and Instagram. In total, the NIL market could hit $500 million in 2022 and $1 billion/year annually after that, per athlete marketing platform Opendorse. Check out the top 20 athletes who could capitalize on NIL and the earning potential of athletes across sports and endorsement deals.

Attorney General Merrick Garland announced a moratorium on federal executions. It’s so the DOJ can continue its review of the death penalty. There hasn’t been a scheduled federal execution since President Biden took office. But the former Trump admin carried out the first one in more than 17 years and 12 more after that. Now, Garland says the death penalty could be disproportionately impacting people of color . There are currently 46 inmates on federal death row.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

National parks are overcrowded and closing their gates

How the world ran out of everything

College athletes are ready to reap the rewards of a billion-dollar NIL market

Joe Rogan is too big to cancel

Millions become millionaires during COVID pandemic

How to organize your leadership team

Investors worry inflation will bring wild markets

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- John Adams believed that July 2nd was the correct date to celebrate the birth of American independence and would reportedly turn down invitations to appear at July 4th events in protest. Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4th, 1826—the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

- The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) have agreed to an $850 million settlement with more than 84,000 people who claimed they were sexually assaulted as Scouts. The high dollar amount and number of accusations, which date back to the 1960s, make this among the most prominent child sexual abuse cases in US history.

- The State Department said Americans could immediately pick whether they identify as “M” or “F” for their passport – without a medical certificate. Furthermore, a plan to add a third option – for those who identify as “nonbinary, intersex, and gender nonconforming” – is in the works. The Human Rights Campaign said that the State Department’s announcement could impact the more than 1.2 million non-binary adults in the US and the 2 million transgender people in the country, and 5.5 million people born intersex.

- The EU rolled out its vaccine passport yesterday. Vaccinated Europeans will receive their certificate for free through an app-based QR code. At this point, 50.4% of Europe’s population have received at least one vaccine dose, and over 200 million certificates have already been downloaded.

- Trading app Robinhood filed to go public under the ticker symbol HOOD. Robinhood’s revenue surged to $959 million in 2020 , a 245% jump from 2019. Robinhood wants you to buy into Robinhood’s IPO on Robinhood. In an unusual move, it’s setting aside 20%–35% of its Class A stock for its customers instead of bankers.

- Google, Facebook, Alibaba, Bytedance (TikTok’s owner), and Amazon now control 46% of the global ad market. The combined companies generated $296B in ad revenue. In 2010, the top five ad companies (Google, Viacom/CBS, News Corp/Fox News, Comcast, and Disney) only made up 17% of the market, with a total of $70B in revenue. Google and Facebook, known as “the Duopoly,” have combined ad revenues of $219B or 34% of the 2020 ad market. In 2015, they sold $101B in ads for 19% of the market. The two companies are respectively the largest and second-largest ad companies in every market outside China.

- While many poor people became poorer during the pandemic, the number of millionaires increased by 5.2 million to 56.1 million globally, Credit Suisse research found . In 2020, more than 1% of adults worldwide were millionaires for the first time.

III. Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Courtesy of The Red, White And Blue” by Toby Keith as I write this newsletter.

Toby Keith Covel is an American country singer, songwriter, actor, and record producer. Keith was born in Clinton, Oklahoma . Keith attended Moore High School, where he played defensive end on the football team. Keith worked as a derrickhand in the oil fields after graduation. When Keith was 20, he and his friends formed the Easy Money Band, which played at local bars as he continued to work in the oil industry. At times, he would have to leave in the middle of a concert if paged to work in the oil field. In 1982, the oil industry in Oklahoma began a rapid decline, and Keith soon found himself unemployed. He fell back on his football training and played defensive end with the semi-pro Oklahoma City Drillers while performing with his band.

In the early 1990s, Keith went to Nashville, Tennessee, where he hung out and busked on Music Row and at a place called Houndogs. He distributed copies of a demo tape the band had made to the many record companies in the city. There was no interest by any of the record labels, and Keith returned home feeling depressed. A flight attendant and fan of his gave a copy of Keith’s demo tape to an executive at Mercury Records who was a passenger on her flight. The agent enjoyed what he heard, went to see Keith perform live, and then signed him to a recording contract with Mercury. Keith’s debut single, “ Should’ve Been a Cowboy ,” went to number one on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in 1993. By the end of the decade, “Should’ve Been a Cowboy” received more than three million spins on radio, thus making it the most played country song of the 1990s.

Keith wrote “Courtesy of The Red, White And Blue” in late 2001, inspired by his father’s death, as well as September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Keith explained the song is a tribute to his father’s patriotism and faith in the USA, and it took him 20 minutes to write. “Courtesy of The Red, White And Blue” references the war in Afghanistan and was the last song aired by the Armed Forces Radio Network in Baghdad before ceasing operations during the drawdown from Iraq.

Keith had a public feud with the Dixie Chicks over both the song and comments about President George W. Bush. The lead singer of the Dixie Chicks, Natalie Maines, publicly stated that the song was “ignorant, and it makes country music sound ignorant.” Keith responded by belittling Maines’ songwriting skills and displayed a backdrop at his concerts showing a doctored photo of Maines with Saddam Hussein.

Keith has released 19 studio albums, two Christmas albums, and five compilation albums, with over 40 million albums sold worldwide. He has charted 61 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, including 20 number one hits and 21 additional top 10 hits. His longest-lasting number one hits are “ Beer for My Horses ” and “ As Good as I Once Was .” President Donald Trump awarded Keith the National Medal of Arts in a closed ceremony on January 13, 2021.

Episode 56: Yellow

Fri, 18 Jun 2021 23:27:00 GMT

In the spirit of innovation and testing my fear of failure, I’m trying something new this week. I produced my first podcast about a month ago, and since I am on vacation in Pinehurst, NC, the timing was right to share it with you. My interview is with Kimberly Beam Holmes . She is CEO of Marriage Helper , a research-based company focused on saving marriages. The program has a staggering 77% success rate. And as you might imagine, most people who arrive at Marriage Helper are in serious trouble, and it’s the last resort before a divorce. The Marriage Helper program, which features workshops, marital coaches, and proprietary courses, is rooted in scientific principles that drive relationships. Therefore, even if you have a great marriage or looking to find one, you can benefit from the content and deepen your connection with others and live a happier, more fulfilling life.

Some of the topics covered in this week’s podcast are the following:

This podcast is my first effort, and I would appreciate feedback . There are obvious things I could improve, such as sound quality, but before I invest in expensive equipment, I want to make sure there’s interest in more of these 1:1 interviews. I would also love suggestions for other people to interview and topics that may have appeal. For fans of the standard ToMorrow’s View newsletter, don’t fret. I am not abandoning the written news summary format, but I would like to do a podcast each quarter, assuming the content is interesting to my audience.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

While America slept, China stole the farm

China’s diplomacy is limiting its own ambitions

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- In 2020, 38,680 people died on US roads – 7.2% more than in 2019 – although people drove 13% fewer miles. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cited impaired driving, speeding, and failure to wear seat belts as the primary reasons.

- The top five US cities in terms of net tech worker inflows per 10,000 LinkedIn users: Austin (217), Nashville (155), Charlotte (146), Jacksonville (136), Denver (130).

- Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has finally found a profitable business. Internet sellers are cashing in on mugs, T-shirts, and even shower curtains in the weeks before her criminal fraud trial starts in August. There are more than 50 listings of Holmes and Theranos merchandise on Etsy, Poshmark, and eBay. One of the unique items is an authentic Theranos lab coat listed for $17,000. Holmes, who is pregnant and due next month, is facing up to 20 years in prison if convicted of all charges . She has pleaded not guilty.

- Over the past 25 years, IRS resources have been steadily cut, with the rate of enforcement funding to returns filed falling by around 50%. Today, the IRS has fewer auditors than at any time since WW2 . Accordingly, the agency cannot appropriately focus scrutiny on complex returns, where noncompliance is greatest. Of about four million partnership returns filed in 2018, the IRS audited 140 of them . Former IRS. Commissioner Charles Rossotti estimates $1.6 trillion could be collected within a decade from efforts to close the gap between taxes owed and collected.

III. Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Yellow” by Cold Play as I write this newsletter.

Coldplay is a British rock band formed in London in 1996. The quartet met at University College London and began playing music together from 1996 to 1998, first calling themselves Pectoralz and then Starfish before finally changing their name to Coldplay. The song “Yellow” was Coldplay’s breakthrough hit internationally, reaching number one in Iceland, number five in Australia, number nine in Ireland, and number 48 in the United States. Lead singer Chris Martin commented that the song is “about devotion, referring to his unrequited love for someone or something.” Despite its lyrical theme, many fans have considered “Yellow” to be an upbeat track, although critics interpret it as melancholy. The music video for “Yellow” was filmed in Studland Bay in South West England. The video is minimalistic, featuring only Martin singing the song as he walks along the beach. The video is one continuous shot with no cuts, and the entire sequence is in slow motion. After “Yellow,” Coldplay continued their success, registering 24 Top 40 hits, including 18 Top 10s, two of which were chart-toppers. The group has sold more than 100 million albums worldwide, making them one of the best-selling bands of all time.

If you enjoyed the newsletter, please add a friend and share it on social media!

Episode 55: Cruel to Be Kind

Sat, 12 Jun 2021 14:27:00 GMT

America is the fattest country in the world. According to a 2018 study conducted by OECD , the obesity rate for American adults (aged 15 and older) is 40%. The following fattest country is Chile at 34%, followed by Mexico at 33%. The latest data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, published this year, puts the average male weight at 199.8 pounds and the average female weight at 170.8 pounds. And Americans are trending fatter. In 2005, the last time the FAA required airlines to update, the same survey found that people weighed, on average, about 5% less: Men averaged 190.4 pounds and women 163.3. Meanwhile, airline seats have remained the same width for the most part, but legroom has shrunk.

Aside from more cramped flights, the problem is the higher average weights might add more than 3,000 pounds to weight-and-balance calculations for a fully loaded 737 with 172 passengers. That’s significant. Close to what 500 gallons of jet fuel weighs. How weight is distributed on a plane affects safety and performance. Before takeoff, an airline dispatcher calculates the center of gravity for the airplane and makes sure it’s within the allowed envelope for that aircraft. When questioned about the expanding American waistline, Delta and United say they are developing plans to minimize impact and declined to comment further. (I hope their strategy goes beyond cutting out soda, peanuts, and pretzels.) Southwest and JetBlue declined to discuss passenger weight at all. But, why?

This brings me to a coaching topic. Who is the most direct, honest person you know? Who will call you out when you are out of line? Who will be honest about your talents and abilities and point out when/where you need to grow? And, yes, who will tell you are fat when it’s time to put down the Long Island Iced Teas and Krispy Kreme doughnuts? Celebrate the person who will tell you like it is, not mince words, and be brutally honest. The reality is that person is probably your best support system, provided they care about you. Most people aren’t direct when they communicate, and too often, people get defensive when someone is being honest and offering (caring) feedback. Both are counterproductive behaviors.

I understand it’s hard and awkward to be direct. And it can be painful to be on the receiving end of that type of communication. However, the alternative is Hans Christian Andersen’s parable: The Emperor Has No Clothes . Too many people surround themselves with people who placate and tell them what they want to hear. When a leader surrounds himself with “yes” men , it often leads to absurd and embarrassing results. It is far better to surround oneself with honest people who are unafraid to ask questions or to point out deficiencies as they see them. Don’t be the emperor with no clothes or the person who enables it. As the song goes, “ cruel to be kind means that I love you.”

POLITICS

Progressives vs Moderates

There is a tug-of-war going on in the Democrat party between progressives, led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “the squad” on one side, and moderates such as Senator Joe Manchin (D - WV) on the other side. This week Manchin angered Democrats by spelling out in a newspaper column that he would oppose his party’s broad voting rights bill, For The People Act, arguing that “the right to vote has itself become overtly politicized and more about seeking partisan advantage.” Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) also came out against the bill. These developments have thrown a dark cloud over Democrats’ hopes for voting legislation ahead of the 2022 midterm elections.

Earlier this year, Manchin got a lot of attention for his opposition to the $15 per hour federal minimum wage in the COVID-19 relief bill. Sinema also rejected the wage hike. In addition to Manchin and Sinema, the $15 figure was opposed by Democratic Senators Maggie Hassan (NH), Jeanne Shaheen (NH), Chris Coons (Del.), Tom Carper (Del.), Jon Tester (Mont.), and independent Sen. Angus King (Maine).

Furthermore, Manchin and Sinema and 87-year-old Diane Feinstein (D-CA) have publicly stated that they will never vote to end the legislative filibuster, something progressive Democrats are championing. Manchin defended his position by saying that some Democrats have “attempted to demonize the filibuster and conveniently ignore how it has been critical to protecting the rights of Democrats in the past.” In the US Senate, a filibuster is a tactic employed by opponents of a proposed law to prolong debate and delay or prevent a vote on a bill, resolution, amendment, or other debatable question. Supporters of the filibuster suggest it is an effective check and balance to ensure one party doesn’t wield too much power. Before 1917, the Senate rules did not provide a way to end debate and force a vote on a measure. That year, the Senate adopted a law to allow a two-thirds majority to end a filibuster, a procedure known as “cloture.” In 1975 , the Senate reduced the number of votes required for cloture from two-thirds of senators voting to three-fifths of all senators duly chosen and sworn, or 60 of the 100-member Senate. With a 50-50 split in the Senate, progressives fear Republicans will use the filibuster to block meaningful legislation during President Biden’s first term.

Foreign Affairs & Diplomacy

President Biden took his first international trip since taking office. He attended a three-day G7 summit in Cornwall, England, with Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the UK. Australia, South Korea, and India were invited to attend as guests. Queen Elizabeth II even made an appearance, her first public meeting with a foreign leader since the pandemic started. Biden met the queen in 1982, but that was when he was a US senator. Queen Elizabeth II has now met with 13 of the last 14 US Presidents . Lyndon Johnson is the only president who failed to sip tea with the 95-year-old monarch.

Biden suggested the trip objective was to rebuild the relationship with allies and unravel Trump’s “America first” agenda. Topics for the G7 meeting were as follows:

Vice President Kamala Harris took her first trip abroad while in office, visiting Guatemala and Mexico. By all accounts, the trip was an unmitigated disaster. Biden allies and even some people close to Harris said they were left wondering why she seemed so ill-prepared to handle basic questions like “Why haven’t you been to the border?” Republicans and conservative media have telegraphed this question, and she fumbled the answer in a friendly-format interview with Lester Holt. And her “do not come” statement became an instant internet meme, mocking the Vice President. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Harris’ immigration comments’ disappointing .’ One Harris ally, when asked about her trip, put it bluntly : “It was terrible. I don’t know how else to say it.”

Meanwhile, the immigration crisis continues at our border. Approximately 180,000 immigrants were intercepted in April trying to cross the border, the highest number in 20 years. It is estimated that 44% of the immigrants are from northern triangle countries Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. In addition, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 17,000 unaccompanied children are in US Custody at the border. President Biden announced that he would invest $4 billion in countries sending the most significant number of immigrants to improve the quality of life in their home country. However, the US has invested $1.6 billion in aid to Guatemala over the last decade only to see social conditions deteriorate and the pace of migration quicken. Therefore, it’s unclear how sending more money will address the issue.

COVID

President Biden has a goal of 70% of Americans vaccinated for coronavirus by July 4th. At this point, 13 states reached the benchmark of at least 70% vaccination: Washington, California, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Hawaii. Conversely, six states have less than 50% vaccination (Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Mississippi), with Mississippi trailing all states at just 44% vaccination rate.

The FDA ruled that Johnson & Johnson must discard 60 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine over possible contamination. The defective vaccines come from a Baltimore manufacturing facility that has been the subject of a sanitation investigation. The factory has been closed for two months over possible contamination concerns. Despite being the only single-shot vaccine approved for use in the US, the rollout of the J&J shot has been slower than that of two-shot vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer. The FDA also paused the J&J shot in April over concerns of rare blood clots in a small number of individuals who received the vaccine.

The Delta variant that was first identified in India and now is the dominant strain of coronavirus in the UK is present in the US. The variant has been reported in 29 states and represents 6% of cases in the US, double from last week. One-shot from the Pfizer vaccine is 33% effective against the Delta variant, and a second shot increases effectiveness to 88%. However, one-third of US adults and 50% of all Americans are not vaccinated. Meanwhile, the COVID death toll is approaching 600,000.

CYBERCRIME

Cybercrime appears to be everywhere these days. Colonial Pipeline, which brings gasoline to parts of the East Coast, fell to hackers. And then cybercriminals brought JBS to a halt. JBS is the world’s largest meat company which processes 23% of the country’s beef production and 18% of all pork. First gas and then hot dogs? Shit just got real! You have my attention, hackers. Fujifilm , Boston Ferry , and Electronic Arts were all hit with cybercrime this week. The attacks show how hackers have shifted from targeting data-rich companies such as retailers, banks, and insurers to essential service providers such as hospitals, transport operators, and food companies.

This new form of cyber-terrorism is profitable. It is estimated that over $350 million in ransomware payments have been paid this year and cost the world economy over $1 trillion. Colonial Pipeline paid about $4.4 million to regain control of its operations and restore service. Joseph Blount, CEO of Colonial Pipeline, defended his decision to pay a ransom to hackers during congressional testimony. He told lawmakers he was unsure whether the hack, which impacted the company’s business network, would spread to the operational network that controlled the pipeline. “The FBI never recommended that we not pay,” Mr. Blount said, describing conversations that took place after the hack was discovered but while the pipeline was still offline. “Think about what we would look like if we didn’t bring the pipeline back on until the following week,” he said.

JBS paid $11 million in bitcoin to resolve their ransomware attack and shield the meat plants from further disruption. The CEO of JBS said, “it was very painful to pay the criminals, but we did the right thing for our customers.” JBS’s outside advisers negotiated the payment amount with the attackers, and that the company kept federal law-enforcement officials informed throughout the process. The FBI officially discourages companies hit by ransomware attacks from paying hackers, arguing that doing so supports a booming criminal industry. Often, the decryption tools given in exchange for a ransom don’t work. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that she would support legislation banning companies from paying such ransom.

ECONOMY

A trio of indicators this week showed that the US economy is racing with adrenaline. Consumer prices jumped 0.6% from April to May and up 5% from last year, the fastest annual increase since 2008. Driving the price increases were airfare, food, household furnishings, and used vehicles. Jobless claims , which tracks the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits, dropped for the sixth straight week to 376,000. That’s the lowest number since last March. US employers are struggling to fill vacancies and complain of a labor shortage, with a recent NFIB survey suggesting nearly half of small businesses cannot fill job openings. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics , the US employers had 3.9 million job openings at the end of April, the highest recorded number since the government started collecting data. At the same time, the rate of workers quitting jobs reached the highest level on record in April, while layoffs reached a series low. US household wealth climbed to a record $136.9 trillion in Q1, thanks to the rising value of stocks and homes. For perspective, that’s a 3.8% increase from the previous quarter and almost double Americans’ wealth from 10 years ago.

The Federal Reserve announced that it would begin winding down a program that purchased tens of billions of dollars of corporate assets to shore up the economy during the pandemic. The Fed currently holds $13.7 billion worth of corporate assets, including more than $5 billion of corporate bonds and another $8.5 billion worth of exchange-traded funds. That’s a massive amount of money to unwind, so the Fed said it would slowly sell off those assets to keep markets functioning property and reduce any shock to the system.

President Biden indicated that the US wouldn’t extend federal unemployment benefits beyond September’s expiration date. The federal government has been providing additional unemployment insurance as part of three COVID relief packages approved by Congress since March 2020. Four million people are on track to lose all or some of their unemployment benefits. So far, 25 states have announced they’ll end the federal benefits before September’s deadline.

HEALTH

The FDA approved a new Alzheimer’s drug by Biogen, the first medical treatment approved for the disease in 18 years. The approval comes despite an independent advisor panel suggesting more clinical trials are necessary, and there is uncertainty in findings. Harvard Medical School professor Aaron Kesselheim resigned from the advisory panel after the FDA ignored a “do not approve” recommendation and approved the drug. Three members of the advisory panel have now quit following the decision. The cost of the new drug will be about $56,000 per year.

Good news in the fight against cancer! A new blood test offers a game-changer in cancer management. Signatera, a “tumor-informed” blood test developed by Natera, can detect circulating tumor DNA in the bloodstream for certain types of cancers up to two years before scans. The blood test works by looking at over 20,000 genes from the patient’s tumor and comparing them to normal genes. Once a unique fingerprint of that tumor is identified, a personalized blood test is created unique to that person’s cancer. The test only works for solid cancers—lung, colon, bladder, and breast. A positive test result means the chance of cancer recurring is 97%, giving doctors and patients advance notice to develop a treatment plan.

OTHER

There is a megadrought in the southwest. Nearly all of California, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and North Dakota are in a drought , and in large areas of those states, conditions are “severe” or “exceptional.” Reservoirs in California hold about half as much water as usual for this time of year. Lake Mead which is part of the Colorado River system and provides water to 40 million people across seven states, is at 37% capacity and dipped to its lowest level on record. In the last two decades, the water level decreased by 130 feet or about 13 stories. This iconic water source makes agriculture in the southwest possible. Given the lack of rain, experts are concerned that this summer’s wildfires will be severe and widespread.

The Turkish coast is covered in what is being dubbed as “sea snot.” A thick, brown, slimy sludge that is the result of pollution and global warming. The naturally occurring mucilage was first documented in Turkey in 2007, but this outbreak in the Sea of Marmara along Turkey’s southern coastline is the largest on record.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

Women now drink as much as men

Mike Tyson says psychedelics saved his life, now he hopes they can change the world

The Western drought is bad. Here is what you should know about it.

It’s time to disrupt the toxic animal agriculture industry with bioreactor-brewed meat

Cryptocurrency comes to retirements plans as coinable teams up with 401(k) provider

From Tesla to GE, see how much CEOs made in 2020

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- According to a story on Axios , foreign crime syndicates in China, Russia, and Nigeria, may have stolen as much as half of the US unemployment benefits over the past year, totaling $400 billion. Scammers often steal personal information and use it to impersonate claimants. Other groups trick individuals into handing over personal information voluntarily. Low-level criminals, or “mules,” are given debit cards and asked to withdraw money from ATMs and transfer the assets abroad, often via bitcoin. Unemployment fraud is now offered on the dark web on a software-as-a-service basis, much like ransomware.

- US cybersecurity insurance premiums rose 18% in Q1, compared to the norm of 1–2%, per the Council of Insurance Agents & Brokers via the Financial Times.

- According to Nature , China has been vaccinating an average of 20 million people a day! At this rate, it would vaccinate the entire population of the US in around two weeks. China now accounts for nearly 60% of all vaccine doses given globally.

- Ford received 100,000 preorders for its electric vehicle, the F-150 lightning , in just three weeks. By comparison, Tesla’s Cybertruck netted around 250,000 preorders in five days. Ford’s F-Series, the #1 selling vehicle in the US for 42 straight years , sold more than 787,000 trucks last year and had 16.1 million trucks on the road in the US.

III. Name that Tune!

I am listening to “Cruel to Be Kind” by Nick Lowe as I write this newsletter.

Nicholas Drain Lowe is a British singer-songwriter, musician, and producer. Lowe was born in 1949 in Surrey, England, and grew up on military bases in Jordan and Cyprus. (In a Rolling Stone interview , Lowe remembers pushing toy cars around Amman, Jordan, with a young King Hussein, who had taken a liking to Lowe’s father.) Lowe had a ukulele as a kid, and his mother taught him a few chords and turned him onto her record collection: Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Lowe’s favorite, Tennessee Ernie Ford.

Around 1971, Lowe suffered something close to a nervous breakdown after years of taking too much acid. As he told journalist Will Birch, “I had to be led around for nine months. I was covered in lice and had gonorrhea. I was a horrible hippie case.” Lowe cleaned up, cut his hair, shifted from LSD to alcohol (which is what passed for detox in the early 1970s.), and began his music career by playing pubs. His band introduced new material every week, mixing covers of whatever was topping the charts with their songs. A kid in Liverpool, Declan MacManus (the future Elvis Costello), became a fan of the group, and the relationship with Lowe started. Lowe produced the first five albums for Elvis Costello and penned the song for one of Costello’s most indelible songs, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding .” Curtis Stagers covered the song on the 1992 soundtrack to The Bodyguard, which, thanks to Whitney Houston, sold roughly 40 million copies and handed Lowe a windfall of songwriting royalties just as his career started moving in a less-commercial direction.

In 1979, Lowe married country singer Carlene Carter, daughter of fellow country singers Carl Smith and June Carter Cash and stepdaughter of Johnny Cash. The wedding was filmed, and the footage became the basis for the promotional clip for “Cruel to Be Kind.” The song was more successful than the marriage. The pair split in 1990, but they remained friends, and Lowe remained close to the Carter/Cash family. He recorded with Johnny Cash, and Cash recorded several of Lowe’s songs.

MTV debuted on August 1, 1981, and was rebroadcast on VH1 Classic in 2006 and again in 2011 (the latter celebrating the channel’s 30th anniversary). The first video to air on MTV was emblematic of MTV’s concept, The Buggle’s “Video Killed the Radio Star,” which was immediately followed by a brief message about music and television coming together. The video for “Cruel to Be Kind” aired that day as #69 on the list. For a complete list of songs that aired on MTV day one, click here .

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Episode 54: Don't Change

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 02:30:00 GMT

I woke up this morning with a sunny disposition and a solid plan to crank out the newsletter today, just as I have the last 53 weeks. As usual, I start my day with a large Americano to energize my morning and start the writing process. I walked to my car, cranked her up, and started the four-block drive (you think I would walk?) to get my caffeine injection. As I pulled out of the driveway this morning, I discovered my day would go fundamentally different than planned. As they say, make a plan to make God laugh.

My car was tilted to one side, and the culprit visually apparent: a completely flat tire. Sigh. For those who know me well, I wouldn’t exactly call me “handy.” Ok, maybe I can make a keyboard light up as I type close to 60 words a minute. And in sports, I had “good, quick hands” that belied my “slow feet.” But in the classic sense of being handy around the house or good with anything mechanical, forget it. My favorite phrase to anything involving manual labor is “outsource!” With that confession, I proceeded to change my completely flat tire, install the spare, and--frown on my face in place--hobble to the shop on a stunted spare to replace the tire.

This preamble is simply an explanation why your treasured newsletter (indulge me) is late because life happened. There’s a life tax we all pay and its unavoidable. Mine came due today. I’d apologize but it would be insincere. We’ve all been here. I know all of you can relate. You just do your best and move on. But my message this week is clear: life, don’t change a thing for me. Things didn’t go as planned, but I’m increasingly convinced a positive mindset is the key to happiness. With that in mind, I will celebrate that I got to get my hands dirty and punched my “man card.” Yee Haw!

CRITICAL RACE THEORY

I am confused about an increasingly hot topic, Critical Race Theory. The subject is everywhere, but my sense is few people understand it. So I decided to dig in this afternoon with tire grease on my hands, research the topic, and report my findings.

What is Critical Race Theory?

Critical Race Theory (CRT) is a movement of civil rights scholars and activists in the US who seek to critically examine the law as it intersects with race issues. CRT critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT proponents believe that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continues to permeate the social fabric of this nation.

Two common themes loosely unify critical race theory: 1) that white supremacy, with its societal or structural racism, exists and maintains power through the law 2) achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, is possible. According to Khiara Bridges, in a paper published in the American Bar Association, the CRT suggests the following:

When did CRT start?

The CRT movement started in the mid-1970s in legal academia, and the originators include Derrick Bell , Kimberle Crenshaw , Cheryl Harris , Richard Delgado , Patricia Williams , Gloria Ladson-Billings , among others. In 1995, Gloria Ladson-Billings began applying the CRT framework in the field of education. Her primary goal was to understand inequities in the context of schooling better.

Why is CRT receiving so much attention today?

The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. The project aims to reframe American history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. The debut publication contained essays on different aspects of contemporary American life, from mass incarceration to rush-hour traffic, that allegedly has their roots in slavery and its aftermath. These works are all original compositions by contemporary black writers who were asked to choose events on a timeline of the past 400 years.

The 1619 Project highlights the legacy of slavery, and most importantly, the unparalleled role black people have played in our democracy. Most schoolchildren can recite the founding date of the United States of America: July 4th, 1776. But the 1619 Project changes that date to August 20th, 1619—the day enslaved Africans first arrived on Virginia soil. In August of 1619, the NYT suggests a cargo ship arrived at Point Comfort in the British colony of Virginia, bearing 20-30 enslaved Africans, and inaugurated a barbaric system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This action is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin, and to supporters of CRT, it is our nation’s origin. The argument continues that out of slavery and the anti-black racism that it required grew nearly everything that has made America exceptional—economic might, industrial power, electoral system, and inequities in the legal, public health, and education systems.

A report last year from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights and advocacy organization, found no systematic approach to teaching slavery in schools —and lessons often miss crucial components to understanding this fundamental American topic. It’s taught as a Southern phenomenon rather than sanctioned in the Constitution, and the voices and experiences of enslaved people are generally left out. The Pulitzer Center curriculum offers discussion questions and guided reading and activities aligned with the Common Core State Standards. However, twenty state attorneys general told the Education Department that they oppose teaching CRT in classrooms. Last month, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a measure into law banning teachers from teaching certain concepts of race and racism in public schools, where teachers risk losing valuable state funding if they violate the new law.

Following the release of The New York Time’s work, former President Trump organized the 1776 Commission in 2020. The objective was to set up a national commission to “promote patriotic education” and “restore the understanding of the greatness of the American founding.” President Biden rescinded the commission on his first day in office. Trump also signed an executive order banning federal contractors from conducting specific racial sensitivity training. The measure was challenged in court, and President Biden rescinded the order the day he took office. Since then, the issue has taken hold as a rallying cry among conservative media outlets and some Republican lawmakers.

Republicans, who are fighting the teaching of CRT in schools, contend it divides Americans and overturns racial progress. Democrats and their allies maintain that progress is unlikely without examining the root causes of disparity in the country. A culture war is heating up just as students and teachers are starting to break for summer. Many school board meetings and elections are seeing robust parent turnout, spurred by disputes over CRT and anti-racist curricula. Arguments for and against the approach do not always track precisely along political, racial, or ideological lines. In general, those in favor of the new laws want more restrictions as classroom discussions and hastily implemented anti-racist lesson plans have taken hold in the past year. Those opposed say statehouse rules could have a chilling effect on the conversation about racism and race in schools just when it is needed most. Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests , “the debate isn’t about whether there’s been racism in our country; it’s about what racism has meant and what it’s done to America. Is it something that’s been progressively overcome as we move toward fulfilling our national ideals, or is it something that’s been a constant force in society, making society itself irredeemably racist?”

With no national standardized history or social studies curricula, it’s not clear how many teachers across the county’s 13,000 school districts teach critical race theory as an academic concept or how many schools have anti-racist practices. A nationally representative survey by EdWeek Research Center in August 2020 found that 81% of educators identify themselves as “anti-racist/abolitionist” educators, and 84% are very or somewhat willing to teach or support the implementation of anti-racist curricula. It’s unclear where this debate ends, but one thing is for sure it will be front and center for the midterm elections.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

How to win a bidding war before it starts

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- The Nasdaq Composite rose nearly 47% over the past 12 months, and even after a recent pullback, a crypto investor who put $10,000 in bitcoin at the end of 2019 could have netted more than $50,000 in gains after bitcoin’s 2020-21 surge.

III. Name that Tune!

As I write this email, I am listening to “Don’t Change” by INXS.

INXS was an Australian rock band. The origins of INXS began in 1977 with Andrew Farriss convincing his fellow Davidson High School classmate, Michael Hutchence, to join his band, Doctor Dolphin. Andrew’s brother, Tim Farriss, convinced Doctor Dolphin to merge with his band, and they briefly took the name of The Farriss Brothers before playing under the title The Vegetables. The crew toiled in obscurity before a chance meeting at a pub with Gary Morris, the manager of Midnight Oil. That relationship led to The Vegetables supporting Midnight Oil at shows. The group officially changed its name to INXS in 1979, inspired by English band XTC and Australian jam makers IXL. Initially known for their new wave/pop style, the band later developed a rock style that included dance elements. In 1984, INXS had their first number-one hit in Australia with “Original Sin.” The band would achieve international success in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with hit albums, Listen Like Thieves and Kick. The band’s hit singles included “What You Need,” “Need You Tonight” (the band’s only US number-one single), “Devil Inside,” “Never Tear Us Apart,” Suicide Blonde,” and “New Sensation.” INXS has sold over 75 million albums worldwide, making them one of Australia’s highest-selling music acts of all time.

For 20 years, INXS was fronted by Hutchence, whose magnetic stage presence made him the band’s focal point. Hutchence was a media darling with notable love affairs with prominent actresses, models, and singers, including Kylie Minogue , Belinda Carlisle , Helena Christensen , and Paula Yates . Hutchence would have a baby with Yates, the former wife of musician Bob Geldof , and name her Heavenly Tiger Lilly Hutchence.

On November 22nd, 1977, Hutchence, age 37, was found dead at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Double Bay, Sydney. Hutchence hung himself with his snakeskin belt tied around the automatic door closure to his room. The autopsy report confirmed the cause of death was suicide but noted copious amounts of alcohol, cocaine, and Prozac in his system. In a 1999 interview on 60 Minutes , Yates claimed that Hutchence’s death might have resulted from autoerotic asphyxiation. At Hutchence’s funeral, the casket was carried out of the cathedral in Sydney by members of INXS and his younger brother, Rhett, with “Never Tear Us Apart” playing in the background.

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Episode 53: The Killing Moon

Fri, 28 May 2021 22:23:00 GMT

This week bore witness to an extraordinary lunar display, the “super flower blood moon.” It simultaneously combined three lunar phenomena: a supermoon, meaning the moon appears up to 14% bigger and 30% brighter in the sky as its elliptical orbit brings it closest to Earth; a total lunar eclipse, when the moon passes entirely within Earth’s shadow; and a blood moon, when light filtered through Earth’s atmosphere during an eclipse turns our natural satellite a rusty, reddish hue. The moon’s red hue is caused by red-orange light refracted through Earth’s atmosphere and can appear even redder if there are more clouds or dust in Earth’s atmosphere.

The uncommon occurrence of the super flower blood moon, combined with the 15th mass shooting this year, while coinciding with Memorial Day weekend to honor those who have fallen in battle, makes it more appropriately a killing moon .

Memorial Day

Memorial Day is an American holiday, observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who died while serving in the US military. Originally known as Decoration Day, it started informally in the years following the Civil War, and in 1966 the federal government declared Waterloo, New York, the official birthplace of Memorial Day and made it an official national holiday in 1971.

Memorial Day originally honored only those lost while fighting in the Civil War. It evolved to commemorate American military personnel who died in all wars, including World War I, World War II, The Vietnam War, The Korean War, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans typically observe Memorial Day by visiting cemeteries and memorials. Some people wear a red poppy in remembrance of those fallen in battle—a tradition that began with a World War I poem by a brigade surgeon who was struck by the sight of the red flowers growing on a ravaged battlefield. The vast majority of people celebrate the holiday as the start of summer and take the long weekend to travel to favorite destinations and enjoy cookouts and time with friends and family.

Americans are expected to travel this weekend the most since the pandemic started. This weekend Delta Airlines reported 3 million bookings between Thursday and Sunday, and that figure was 300,000 the same weekend last year. In total, 37 million people are expected to fly for the holiday weekend, which is up 60% from 2020. Top destinations include Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, Vail, Las Vegas, Miami, and Orlando. More than 34 million people will hit the roads for their travel plans. Expect heavy traffic. In Atlanta, congestion is expected to be 3x usual traffic and New York 5.4x usual traffic. And traveling will be more expensive this year than last. Gas prices have soared. According to AAA, the national average for a gallon of gas is $3.04, and last year the cost $1.96.

Amidst the fun and folly this weekend, it’s important to remember the cost of war. Please take a moment to acknowledge the sacrifice made by those who died in battle. These aren’t just statistics but lives, and these people paid the ultimate price to ensure our freedom and liberty. Below is a list of casualties from each major American war, ranked by lives lost:

COVID

Flip Flop from the Top

Two days ago, left-leaning CNN and right-leaning Fox News reported that the Biden State Department ended an inquiry into the origins of the COVID pandemic. Here is a link to the article on CNN and the one on Fox News . Former President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo launched the original inquiry to determine if the coronavirus leaked out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Multiple media outlets cited and confirmed that the Biden administration terminated the investigation on Wednesday. However, later that day, CNN and Fox News reported the opposite storyline—Biden tasked the intelligence community to report COVID origins in 90 days. These contradicting reports on the same day make CNN, Fox News, and the Biden Administration look silly. So what happened?

It's impossible to know what happened behind the scenes. My guess is the Biden administration felt heat about ending the inquiry, especially after the Wall Street Journal published an article that several researchers at China's Wuhan Institute fell ill with flu-like symptoms in November 2019 and had to be hospitalized. The story offered a new detail that fueled public pressure on Biden to delve deeper into the virus's origin.

Lab-Origin Theory

The origin of the coronavirus remains unclear. However, suddenly, talk of the Wuhan-lab-leak theory as the origin of coronavirus seems to be everywhere. Two prevailing theories exist for the origin of the virus: 1) the virus originated from an animal and jumped from animal to human, possibly at a "wet market" in Wuhan, China 2) the virus accidentally leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China. The Washington Post put together a timeline that shows the series of events that have ignited the lab-origin theory.

Many scientists have long believed that the most likely explanation behind coronavirus is that it jumped from an animal to a person. Animal to human transmission is a typical origin story for viruses. But scientists are increasingly pointing to the belief that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Two weeks ago, 18 scientists wrote a letter to the journal Science calling for a new investigation and describing both animal-to-human and lab-leak theory as "viable." And three scientists who last year dismissed the lab-leak explanation as a conspiracy theory have told the Wall Street Journal that they now consider it plausible. Chinese officials have refused to allow an independent investigation into the lab and have failed to explain some inconsistencies in the animal-to-human hypothesis. As recent as this week, the Chinese government announced they would not participate in additional investigations by the World Health Organization. The US is attempting to walk a careful line between pressuring Beijing to cooperate and demonstrating it its absence, the US will intensify its own investigation.

The momentum behind the lab-origin theory is vindication to many who have voiced this theory and received condemnation and been accused of conspiracy theory madness. Almost 15 months ago, two Chinese researchers wrote a paper published in Lancet concluding that the virus "probably originated from a lab in Wuhan." Alina Chan, a molecular biologist, affiliated with Harvard and M.I.T., made similar arguments. Former C.D.C. Director Dr. Robert Redfield, a world-renown virologist, created a stir several months ago when he disclosed in a CNN interview that the animal-to-human theory didn't make sense given the spread of infection in humans. His comments were unambiguous, "I don't believe this virus somehow came from a bat to a human; it just doesn't make biological sense." He continued by saying that the most likely etiology is the virus escaped from a lab. Researchers sometimes modify viruses to understand and treat them, and it's not unusual for respiratory pathogens to infect lab workers.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas noted early on in the pandemic the location of the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a likely point of origin. And, of course, former President Donald Trump made headlines by repeatedly calling it the "China Virus," suggesting that intelligence reports pointed to the lab but he failed to produce tangible evidence. And some health officials were wary of Trump’s motives, along with his penchant for lying, arguing that his interest in the origins of the pandemic was either to deflect blame from his administration’s handling of it or to punish China. The World Health Organization dismissed the lab-leak theory as implausible. And infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci testified this week before Congress that the most likely scenario is an infected animal but confessed it's challenging to ascertain the origin, noting scientists still don't know the source of ebola.

What's at Stake?

On the one hand, the source of the virus is irrelevant as it doesn't change the fact that more than 3 million people are dead due to coronavirus. On the other hand, it goes to accountability. The answer, especially if China is guilty of creating and then covering up the origin of the virus that led to the worst global health crisis this century, has enormous geopolitical consequences. For starters, if guilty, China should bear the burden of footing the bill to vaccinate the world as quickly as possible and offer some form of reparation to countries and victims. Secondly, China should open its labs to WHO and other health organizations to study the virus and develop ongoing treatments. Lastly, new safety protocols must be implemented for all labs that work with viruses to ensure a similar outbreak doesn't happen again.

Vaccine Progress

Moderna says its coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective in children as young as 12. The company plans to apply to the FDA for authorization to administer the vaccine to 12-to-17-year-olds in June. Moderna’s clinical trials included 3,732 children between 12 and 17, none of whom developed symptomatic COVID-19 after receiving two doses. As of May 18, 600,000 children between 12 and 17 had received the first dose of the Pfizer shot. Children generally had milder COVID-19 symptoms than adults, though some developed a severe condition called Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) after an initial coronavirus infection. A new study suggests that most children will overcome the most severe MIS-C symptoms within about six months, though some may have lingering muscle weakness after that.

More than half of US adults are fully vaccinated against COVID, though inoculation rates vary widely around the country. States leading the race to get their populations vaccinated are in the northeast—Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont. States such as Mississippi and Alabama trail the pack with less than 30%. This site offers a great tool to estimate when your state might reach what is considered “herd immunity” of 70% - 85% vaccination. Spoiler alert: the forecast for Tennessee is June 2022 and California October 2021.

MASS SHOOTING

Two weeks ago, NPR reported that just 18 weeks into 2021, the US had experienced 15 mass shootings that killed almost 200 people. That averages out to about ten a week. And we can add another to the list this week. Samuel Cassidy, 57, shot nine people at the rail yard in San Jose, CA, before turning the gun on himself. Police dogs discovered multiple explosive devices on the railyard property. His ex-wife said he was known to have a temper and talked about killing people at work over a decade ago.

US POLITICS

Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) continued her streak of public blunders this week. During an interview on a conservative podcast , Greene compared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to continue to require members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor to steps the Nazis took to control the Jewish population during the Holocaust. Greene, in a conversation with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody “The Water Cooler,” attacked Pelosi and accused her of being a hypocrite for asking GOP members to prove they have all been vaccinated before allowing members to be in the House chamber without a mask: “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany,” Greene said. House Republican leaders condemned her remarks amid a wave of criticism from Republican and conservative critics and Jewish groups.

But the blunders didn’t stop there. Greene attempted what she called her “ really bad Mexican accent ” during a speech last night in Dalton, Georgia. It’s probably the first time that Greene told the truth on any matter. It was, indeed, a bad impersonation. Greene has been in hot water since being elected. The House voted to strip Greene of her committee assignments earlier this year, following the resurfacing of old social media posts where she shared conspiracy theories questioning the reality of 9/11 and some school shootings. Greene said on the House floor that she regretted those comments. It’s not clear whether Greene expressed remorse in her Mexican accent.

ECONOMY

US weekly unemployment claims were 406,000 , their lowest since the onset of the pandemic and down from 444,000 the week prior. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected a total of 425,000. Accordingly, at least 24 states have said they will stop paying Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation of $300 per week beginning in June. The employment rate now stands at 6.1%.

Amazon continued its meteoric expansion by acquiring MGM in a deal worth $8.5 billion. The pick-up is Amazon’s second-largest acquisition after Whole Foods. MGM offers Amazon a blockbuster content catalog, featuring franchises such as James Bond and Rocky , as well as award-winning series such as The Handmaid’s Tale , Fargo , and Vikings , that could soon port over to Amazon Prime Video. For now, most streaming services continue to post impressive growth numbers, including Disney+, Discovery+, and Paramount+, but the market is getting crowded and consumer bandwidth finite, especially post-pandemic. And the consolidation of services is inevitable and already started, with AT&T this month spinning off its entertainment division , WarnerMedia (CNN, HBO, and Warner Bros.). AT&T acquired WarnerMedia just three years ago for $85 billion and is now merging it with Discovery to create a $150+ billion media company spanning news, sports, film, scripted and unscripted programming. AT&T shareholders will have a majority stake (71%), and Discovery CEO David Zaslav will lead the new company, and his current shareholders own the remaining 29%. If approved by regulators, the deal effectively reverses AT&T’s years-long plan to combine content and distribution in a vertically integrated company. (As for WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, the former head of Hulu and previous Amazon employee, the NYT reported that Kilar wasn’t told about the deal until recently and has hired a legal team to negotiate his exit.) As AT&T backs away from its expansion plans to focus on core operations, and history reminds us of the disastrous $165 billion AOL/Time Warner merger, one can’t help but wonder if this is Amazon’s “jump the shark” moment.

OTHER

A Massachusetts woman who accidentally tossed out a $1 million lottery ticket eventually collected her winnings thanks to the kindness and honesty of the owners of the store where she bought it.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

America hasn’t lost its demographic advantage

Women: A century of change

Don’t be against Beijing’s efforts to smother Bitcoin

If you thought working from home was messy, here comes hybrid work

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- San Francisco has a significant shoplifting problem. Walgreens says that thefts at its locations in SF were 4x the chain’s national average ; it’s had to close 17 stores in the area mainly because of the shoplifting epidemic.

- Although it has 5.4 million active listings, that will not be enough for what Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky describes as a “once-in-a-century travel rebound.” In Q1, Airbnb reported 64+ million booked nights and experiences, up 13% annually. A quarter of trips were long-term stays (28 days or more).

- The Dow Jones turned 125 years old this week. The index of 12 smokestack companies closed that first trading day, May 26, 1896, at 40.94. It included General Electric Co. and long-forgotten names like American Cotton Oil and Distilling & Cattle Feeding. The Dow index closed today at 34,529.

III. Name that Tune!

As I write this email, I am listening to “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen.

Echo and the Bunnymen are a post-punk, new wave band formed in Liverpool in 1978. Lead guitarist, Will Sergeant, is the only surviving member of the band, with Ian McCulloch leaving the group in the late 80s and Les Pattinson dying in a motorcycle accident. According to Sergeant, he grew up in Liverpool in the 1960s and 70s when skinheads, football violence, and fear of just about everything was the natural order of things. A young Sergeant found the emerging punk scene, and it offered him a shimmer of hope amidst a crumbling city still reeling from the destruction of World War 2.

The band’s biggest hits are “Lips like Sugar,” “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” and “The Killing Moon.” The latter was written by original vocalist Ian McCulloch and released in 1984 on the album Ocean Rain . When McCulloch was asked what he thinks is the greatest song of all time, his response is unequivocal—his own, “The Killing Moon.” He claims, “no one else has a song like The Killing Moon, not even Bowie.” “It’s more than just a song; it’s about everything in life.” That’s quite a statement, but the riffs are undeniably seductive and catchy and allegedly based on David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” played backward.

Alas, McCulloch offers his only form of modesty by saying that he partially credits God for the song. McCulloch woke one morning to find the words’ Fate, up against your will. Through the thick and thin. He will wait until you give yourself to him.’ lodged in his head. So he grabbed a guitar and starting working out the rest. According to McCulloch, that music magic hadn’t happened before or since.

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Episode 52: Danke Schoen

Fri, 21 May 2021 23:32:00 GMT

I started writing this weekly newsletter one year ago during the height of COVID. My motivation for creating ToMorrow’s View was twofold. The first goal was to be of service to others by creating and curating high-quality content that is (mostly) objective, fair-minded and informative. Walking the middle of the road is hard while still having something interesting and impactful to say. I hope that my “voice” has come close to its aim. I’ve lost a few subscribers who lean far right and far left but managed to grow readership a respectable margin without any form of promotion.

The second goal was to create a community during a once in a hundred years health crisis. Like many of you, I suffered from isolation during COVID, and this newsletter allowed me to stay connected with friends, colleagues, and strangers who enjoy the fruit of my labor. I will not mince words. Producing this newsletter each week is a lot of work, and the pay is shit, lol. There have been weeks when doing my taxes feels like a more desirable task. However, I will also confess that I get a great sense of pride in hitting the “publish” button each week and watching the “open, page view and click” stats accumulate. Creating something that people enjoy consuming is rewarding. Please know that I am grateful for your patronage and the kind words many have sent my way. Danke Schoen !

COVID

Great News

The COVID charts in the US paint a beautiful picture: the retreat of coronavirus appears permanent. While victory isn’t final, it’s growing close. After almost a year and a half of sickness, death, isolation, and untold undocumented collateral devastation such as mental illness, suicide, and ignored chronic diseases, the progress against coronavirus is cause for celebration. More than 60 percent of American adults have received at least one vaccine shot, and the share is growing by about two percentage points per week. States are increasing the incentive to get vaccinated. Ohio recorded a 28% boost with vaccinations with its “Vacci-million” lottery. Maryland is giving away $40,000 for 40 days with a grand prize of $400,000. New York rolled its “vax and scratch” (sorry, New Yorkers, that sounds like an STD) with prizes totaling $5million. The government is also partnering with dating apps so members can showcase their vaccination status. These incentive schemes seem ridiculous on the cover; however, they appear to be working. The share of COVID tests coming back positive has fallen below 3 percent for the first time since widespread testing began, and the number of hospitalized patients has fallen to the lowest point in 11 months. The US experienced the lowest 7-day average in a year, dropping below 40,000 cases or an 18% drop from last week.

Mask Mayhem

Masks continue to be a lightning rod subject across the country, and the views, mainly, fall along political party lines. Last week, the CDC issued guidance that people who are fully vaccinated against coronavirus no longer need to wear masks while indoors and are safe to gather with groups of any size outdoors. Yet, a handful of states continue to have mask mandates, and even in states that have lifted the mask mandate, many shop owners still require them. It’s left vaccinated citizens confused and with an uneasy and guilty feeling when walking “mask free” into stores or indoor facilities, despite being perfectly safe—to themselves and others.

To make matters even more confusing, the CDC released guidance today reinforcing an old message : COVID spreads less in schools where teachers and staff wear masks and that schools should require masks at least through the end of this school year. The statement arrives as states and school districts across the country have begun scaling back or simply dropping their masking requirements for staff and students alike. Parents are lining up on both sides of this issue. Team Mask points to the fact that anyone under 12 has not been vaccinated and, therefore, at risk. Plus, they point to a new study from Georgia that compares COVID infection rates across 169 k-5 schools. Some schools required teachers, staff, and (sometimes) students to wear masks; some did not. Researchers found that between Nov 16 and Dec 11, infection rates were 37% lower in schools where teachers and staff members were required to wear masks. Team Face points out that the risk of severe illness and death from coronavirus for children under 12 is low. Plus, they point out that only 12% of schools invited to share their data did so for the study. And, the adult vaccination rate end of last year was significantly lower than today, making the research misleading.

The latest and perhaps broadest effort to change schools’ masking policies comes from Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order Tuesday banning all mask mandates in the state’s public schools. After Jun 4, the order says, “no student, teacher, parent or other staff member or visitor may be required to wear a face covering.” Zeph Capo, president of the Texas American Federation of Teachers, called the move “unconscionable.” The Governor in Iowa passed a law this week banning schools and communities from requiring a mask. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster issued a similar executive order. Expect this issue to heat up as we move into summer, and we approach the re-opening of schools in the fall.

Outside the US

Globally, the coronavirus situation is not as encouraging, but it has improved. Confirmed new cases are down 23 percent from their peak in late April. In India, caseloads have been falling rapidly for almost two weeks. Most countries remain more vulnerable than the US because of their lower vaccination rates. A tiny share of people have received a shot in Africa, and the numbers are only modestly higher in much of Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

After 11 days of violence that displaced more than 52,000 people and killed more than 230 people in Gaza and 12 people in Israel, Hamas and Israel entered a ceasefire . Fresh clashes broke out at the al-Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem this morning, testing the truce. But the ceasefire seemed to hold as nightfall approached. The Israeli military says more than 4,300 rockets were fired towards its territory by militants and that it struck more than 1,000 militant targets in Gaza. Egypt, which mediated the truce, is sending security delegations to the region to make sure the agreement holds. President Biden said the US would work with the UN to offer rapid humanitarian assistance in Gaza while also replenishing Israel’s missile defense system. The comments come as a group of progressive lawmakers, highlighted by the “Squad,” are pushing to block a pending arms sale to Israel.

There is a noteworthy shift happening in American politics as it relates to Israel. For decades, Democrats and especially Republicans have stood by Israel, almost unconditionally, insisting the country has a right to defend itself. But the latest violence in Gaza has splintered support for Israel, particularly among Democrats. Many on the left are accusing Israel of human rights violations due to mounting civilian casualties in Gaza and suggesting the US is complicit in arming Israel with weapons. It appears three factors are responsible for this political shift, creating the possibility of new power dynamic in the Middle East:

US POLITICS

CNN anchor Chris Cuomo advised his brother New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and senior members of the governor’s staff on responding to sexual harassment allegations made earlier this year by women who had worked with the governor. Some may argue it’s unrealistic that siblings wouldn’t talk about important matters with high stakes. However, it’s one thing to offer support to a family member and another to join a series of conference calls with the governor, his top aides, lawyers, and the communication team to develop a media response strategy while operating as a national journalist. Allegedly, the cable news anchor encouraged his brother to take a defiant position and not resign from the governor’s office. According to two people, he even used the phrase “cancel culture” as a reason to hold firm in the face of the allegations. In a statement, CNN acknowledged that Chris Cuomo took part in the strategy session, saying his involvement was a mistake. The network said Cuomo would not be disciplined for his actions. Nicholas Lemann, a professor at Columbia Journalism School and a New Yorker staff writer, said, “if you are actively advising a politician in trouble while being an on-air host on a news network, that’s not okay.” Regardless of your position on this topic, it’s undeniable that the Cuomo brothers, who are 13 years apart in age, have benefited from their respective high perches in politics and the media.

ECONOMY

The US has proposed a minimum global tax rate of 15%. The Treasury Department argues that such a move would prevent corporations from moving the headquarters to other countries in a bid to avoid paying taxes. The Treasury Department said a global corporate tax would ensure “innovation, growth, and prosperity” while allowing governments to raise funds for “the middle class and working people.” In 1980, corporate tax rates around the world averaged 40%. Since then, countries have recognized the impact that high corporate tax rates have on business investment decisions so that in 2020, the average is now 23.85% . Europe has the lowest regional average rate, at 19.9%. Conversely, Africa has the highest regional average statutory rate, at 28.5%. President Trump’s administration slashed the US corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, and the Biden administration has proposed raising the rate to 28%.

Bitcoin

Elon Musk, Tesla’s boss, tweeted that the electric-car maker would not, after all, accept payments in bitcoin and hinted that the firm might sell some of its crypto stashes. Then on May 18, China warned financial firms against servicing cryptocurrencies. The price of bitcoin tumbled to $30,000, half its record high in April, before stabilizing. As it cratered, bitcoin dragged most other cryptocurrencies with it. Several big crypto exchanges, including Coinbase, experienced lengthy outages. Investors unable to liquidate positions felt trapped; those willing to “buy the dip” felt cheated. The latest swing might raise doubts about whether crypto markets are liquid or even reliable enough to welcome institutional investors.

Still, America’s big banks have been venturing into cryptoland . The Commodity Futures Trading Commission regards bitcoin and other digital currencies as commodities, enabling banks to trade derivatives linked to them. In March, Morgan Stanley became the first to offer wealthy customers access to bitcoin funds. This month Goldman Sachs revived the crypto desk it had mothballed in 2017; Citigroup said it might provide crypto services. BNY Mellon and State Street are vying to administer bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs), currently under regulatory review in America. Once adamant that it would steer clear unless cryptocurrencies began to be regulated, JPMorgan Chase has hinted that it might start trading operations if the digital currency market expands. But it is the next level of services, where banks hold digital assets on their balance sheets, either as collateral or by trading in spot markets, that is currently beyond reach. After a day like May 19, when bitcoin lost nearly a third of its value in a few hours, regulators may ensure it stays that way. And a prolonged beatdown of BTC could still scare off prospective converts and trigger a regulatory crackdown.

OTHER

Scientists predict an “above-normal” hurricane season in the Atlantic Ocean for the third year in a row. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there could be between 13 and 20 named storms and six to 10 hurricanes. Three to five of those hurricanes could reach Category 3 or higher, meaning they will pack wind speeds of more than 111mph. Hurricane season in the Atlantic typically runs from Jun 1 to Nov 30, with peak activity in September and October. Climate scientists say global climate change has made hurricane seasons longer and storms more devastating. Last year was a record-breaking year for a hurricane with 30 named storms .

Microsoft will retire its Internet Explorer web browser in June 2022. The company encouraged users to adopt its newer Microsoft Edge browser. The browser wars remind me of the digital hot dog races at baseball games where the winner is impossible to predict and the result acutely unsatisfying. As it currently stands, the top browsers in terms of market share are Google Chrome (64%), Safari (19%), and Firefox (4%), with Internet Explorer trailing the pack (1%).

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

How your hot showers and toilet flushes can help the climate

The math that explains the end of the pandemic

Why more young Chinese want to be civil servants

Sperm counts are falling precipitously across the rich world

Migrant children flying, riding buses into Tennessee

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- In 2017, Shanna Swan of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and six other researchers estimated the average sperm count for 43,000 men in 55 countries worldwide. The data from 185 previously published studies suggest that sperm counts fell by about 25% between 1973 and 2011. But the academics performed a regression analysis that controlled for variation in the studies’ sampling technique, their potential sample bias, the age of men, and their level of abstinence before a sample was taken. They found that sperm counts had fallen by about 50% in Western countries over the period. She argues that the most likely culprit is the proliferation of harmful chemicals such as bisphenol A (BPA), a compound commonly found in household plastic goods.

- Working too many hours causes physical and mental stress that killed 745,194 people before their time in a single year around the globe due to heart disease and strokes. While the definition of “long hours” varies by country (and boss), the study considered 35–40 hours per week as a global standard for normal, and 55 or more to be too long. Working 55+ hours a week raises the risk of stroke 35% and the risk of heart disease 17% compared to working 35–40, the study found. About 72% of the premature deaths were among men, and most were ages 60 to 79 and had been working those long hours since age 45.

III. Name that Tune!

As I write this email, I am listening to “Danke Schoen” by Wayne Newton.

Okay, let’s be honest, the vocals on this song sound female. I was shocked when I learned Wayne Newton is the man behind the voice. Whoa!

Carson Wayne Newton is an American singer and actor. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and grew up in Newark, Ohio, the son of an auto mechanic and a homemaker. He is of Irish, German, and Native American ancestry. His mother is half Cherokee, and his father is half Powhatan. In 1958, near the end of Newton’s junior year of high school, a Las Vegas booking agent saw Newton on a local TV show and signed him. Newtown also began acting at an early age, appearing on the classic TV show Ponderosa as the baby-faced ranch hand, Andy.

The song Danke Schoen is a pop song of German origin. The phrase is equivalent to the English expression’ Thank you very much’ or’ Thank you kindly.’ Newton’s first version of the song was released in 1963 when he was 21 years old. The title would become his signature song and used in the coming-of-age movie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

Most people associate Newton with Las Vegas, where he was a prolific performer, earning him the moniker Midnight Idol and Mr. Las Vegas. In 1994, Newton performed his 25,000th solo show in Las Vegas. (That figure is hard to believe but not a typo.) In 1999, Newton signed a 10-year deal with Stardust hotel and casino, calling for him to perform 40 weeks out of the year. He followed up that gig with a long-term contract with the Las Vegas Hilton.

Legal and financial woes have plagued Newton. From 1980 to 1982, he was one of the owners of the Aladdin Hotel. Newton ended up having $20 million in debts related to him suing NBC for libel when the network claimed he had partnered with the Mafia to purchase the hotel and casino. He filed for bankruptcy in 1992. By 1999, Newton had rebounded and was wealthy again. In 2005, the IRS filed another lien against Newton, claiming he owed $1.8 million. Wayne appears to be good at making money but not very good at keeping it. Let’s just hope he keeps singing like a woman!

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Episode 51: Safety Dance

Fri, 14 May 2021 22:28:00 GMT

This week’s news cycle was robust, from surprising CDC guidance to gas shortages in the Southeast, to a shake-up in the Republican leadership in the House, to over 1,800 rockets fired between Israel and various Palestinian militant groups. Whew, let’s dive in.

COVID

Mask(less)

The CDC announced surprising guidance that people who are fully vaccinated against coronavirus no longer need to wear masks while indoors and are safe to gather with groups of any size outdoors. The guidance still calls for mask-wearing in crowded indoor locations like public transportation and hospitals.

This guidance is excellent news, especially for close talkers. CDC Director Rochelle Walensky called the updated recommendation ‘an exciting and powerful moment, resulting from following the science.’ The problem is it’s old news, at least to rational people who have critical thinking skills. We have three vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna, J&J) that are all extremely effective against contracting coronavirus and passing it to others , plus it’s effective against all known variants. So why are vaccinated people still wearing masks? And, yes, it’s still possible to contract the virus after vaccination—a whopping ~0.008% of people (9,245 cases out of 117 million fully vaccinated individual cases) fall in this bucket, and they experienced either mild or no symptoms. Yet, President Biden, who was immunized six months ago, has consistently worn a mask. During the last presidential address, both Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi donned masks for the duration of Biden’s speech. For many, this gave the impression that either (1) the vaccines don’t work or (2) there’s little benefit to getting one, at least regarding mask-wearing and social distancing. I understand that a health organization like the CDC needs to be conservative, given coronavirus is new with many unknowns. However, our government’s health cognoscenti have exhibited an awkward safety dance over the last three months, which feels political.

Still, let’s try and celebrate good news when we get it. As of this week, more than 150 million Americans age 18 and older have received at least one dose, according to the CDC. The data shows that 35.4% of Americans are fully vaccinated, and 46.4% have received at least one dose. The CDC recommended on Wednesday, after a 14-0 vote of support (with one abstention) from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, expanded usage of the Pfizer vaccine for 12-15-year-old kids . Two days earlier, the FDA approved Pfizer’s request to allow their shot to be given to young teens on an emergency use basis. From a pool of 2,000 children in the clinical trial, there were no serious adverse events associated with the Pfizer shot, so the vaccine is 100% effective with this age group. Most vaccine recipients, 91%, experienced a mild side effect, typically after the second shot. The most commonly reported side effects were pain at the injection site and joints and muscles, fatigue, headache, chills, and fever. Vaccinating children is crucial to ending the pandemic, as children make up around 20% of the total US population of 331 million. Research suggests that only about 50% of parents want their kids vaccinated. Reasons for not getting the shot include safety concerns, the time it took to develop the vaccine, and not having enough information.

Schools

So when will all kids be back in school? The latest CDC announcement would seem to pave the way for mask-less in-person learning. Local teacher unions have faced criticism for being slow to agree to reopen and requesting enhanced safety measures like a new ventilation system. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president, a union representing 1.7 million educators, said that “schools must be open” entirely in the fall. Accordingly to ATF president Randi Weingarten, AFT members are 89% fully vaccinated or want to be. Weingarten suggested that reopening by fall is “not risk-free” and emphasized the need for continued masking by teachers and students and appropriate social distancing. Wait, what?

Public schools have mostly eschewed in-person schooling during the pandemic, while private schools have typically embraced it. A survey conducted by the journal Education Next found that while 60 percent of private school students were receiving in-person instruction, only 24 percent of traditional public school students were in the classroom. In some places, such as Los Angeles, private schools were prohibited by law from opening in person. The share of private students physically in school would have likely been even higher otherwise. Alas, the education gap continues to widen. Congratulations, teachers’ unions, on your “victory;” your short-sightedness and self-interest continue to disappoint me.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

Middle East History

Israel, which is about the size of New Jersey, was established as a nation on May 14, 1948. Israelis and Palestinians have been in a violent conflict since its creation. In 1947 after WWII was over, the United Nations decided to partition Palestine into two countries: the Jewish State of Israel and the Arab State of Palestine. Israel agreed to the partition, and borders were drawn for the two states, but many Arabs thought the division favored the Jewish people. The US supported the plan, but the British, who held a colonial mandate for Palestine until May 1948, opposed creating a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine and unlimited immigration of Jewish refugees to the region. Still, on November 29, 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181 (also known as the Partition Resolution) that would divide Great Britain’s former Palestinian mandate into Jewish and Arab states.

Geography & War

Many Jews, Muslims, and Christians view Israel and the surrounding land as sacred based on cultural and religious history. Geographically, Israel is surrounded by Arab nations on all borders—Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. Immediately after Israel’s formation, the Arab league formed and disputed the UN-determined geographic boundaries and attacked Israel one day after its formation. That conflict would be become known by Israel as the “War of Independence.” Israel fought five Arab nations to preserve their land and even took control over much of the territory once delineated as Palestinian. Egypt took control of what became known as the Gaza Strip, and Jordan would control West Bank. The surrounding Arab states refused to recognize Israel, and the dream of a Palestinian state crumbled. Consequently, the outcome and new territory boundaries displaced approximately 700,000 Arabs, and the refugees took shelter in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The most significant change to Israel’s frontiers came in 1967, with the conflict known as the Six-Day War. The spoils of that conflict left Israel in occupation of the Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and most of the Syrian Golan Heights—effectively tripling the size of territory under Israel’s control. Israel annexed East Jerusalem, claiming the whole of the city as its capital. The international community did not recognize these moves until the US changed its official position on the matter under the Trump administration, and the embassy moved to Jerusalem. Overwhelmingly, the international opinion continues to consider East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as occupied territories.

Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize the Jewish state in 1979 in exchange for Israeli troops and settler withdrawal from the Sinai peninsula, a process completed in 1982. That left Israel in the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, with its official frontiers still delineated by the 1949 armistice lines. In 1994, Jordan became the second Arab state to recognize Israel, formalizing its long border with the Jewish state in the process. While there has not yet been a peace treaty between Israel and Lebanon, the two countries’ 1949 armistice line serves as Israel’s de facto northern border, while Israel’s border with Syria (and the Golan Heights) remains unsettled.

Gaza Strip

The Gaza Strip , sandwiched between Israel and Egypt, is just 25 miles long and six miles wide, and the ~2 million population is predominately Sunni Muslim. The land was part of the British-ruled Palestinian Mandate before Israel’s creation. Initially, the UN allocated this area to the Palestinians to create an Arab state. Still, that area fell into Egypt’s control during Israel’s War of Independence and then fell back into Israel’s rule after the Six Days War in 1967.

Israel withdrew troops and settlers from Gaza in 2005 after a violent Arab intifada. In 2006, Hamas won the Palestinian elections. Hamas, a Sunni Islamist group, is considered by many to be a terrorist group because they shelter suicide bombers and call for the destruction of Israel. Despite Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian populated land, most governments consider Gaza to remain occupied by Israel. The Jewish nation maintains direct external control over Gaza and indirect control over life within Gaza: it controls Gaza’s air and maritime space and six of Gaza’s seven land crossings. More importantly, Gaza is dependent on Israel for its water, electricity, telecommunications, and other utilities, and Israel and Egypt imposed a crippling blockade on Gaza after Hamas’ rise to power. The trade closure, along with years of misrule, has devastated Gaza’s economy. Unemployment hovers around 50%, power outages are frequent, and water is badly polluted. In 2017, Hamas called for the formation of a Palestinian state that respected the 1967 borders but did not acknowledge Israel as a nation, so the initiative failed. Palestine continues to be without a nation-state. As a result, the battle with Israel rages on, with the primary disputes being the status of Jerusalem, rights of refugees, and increased Jewish settlements in Palestinian lands.

Conflict This Week

This week’s fighting is the escalation of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at a holy hilltop compound in East Jerusalem during the final week of the holy month of Ramadan. The site is revered by both Muslims and Jews. Hamas demanded Israel remove police from the location and the nearby predominantly Arab district, where Palestinian families face eviction by Jewish settlers. Hamas launched rockets at Israel when its ultimatum went unheeded, and top militant commanders were killed during Israeli airstrikes. Palestinian militants have fired more than 1,500 rockets at Israel. Israel says its American-financed “Iron Dome” missile defense system has intercepted many of those strikes. The escalation, which began on Monday, triggered street violence in Israel between Jews and Israeli Arabs. (Palestinian Arabs make up about 20% of Israel’s ~8.5 million population.) Israel responded by hitting “strategic targets” in the Gaza territory. Israel warplanes have struck more than 600 sites in Gaza , sometimes densely populated civilian areas. Palestinians say the Israeli military has warned civilians by phone to evacuate the buildings ahead of a strike.

The death toll paints a one-sided picture: some 122 Palestinians have been killed since fighting began on Monday, including 31 children and 20 women and 900 others wounded, while Israel has reported seven deaths, including a 6-year-old child. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel would continue attacking Palestinian militant groups and Hamas said it’s ready to respond to a possible ground invasion. Israel has faced criticism for launching attacks that kill civilians. Still, the Israeli army argues that it is Hamas’ fault because the organization places its infrastructure and weapons within civilian areas, sometimes inside churches and schools.

This week’s conflict is Israel’s worst civil unrest in decades. This skirmish marks the fourth round of major conflict between Israel and Hamas since 2008. The tiny area’s more than 2 million Palestinian residents bear the brunt of deaths and destruction. The worst was the 2014 war that lasted for 50 days and killed some 2,200 Palestinians , more than half civilians. Seventy-three people were killed on the Israeli side. Beyond the death toll, Israel’s airstrikes into Gaza have left vast swaths of destruction, with entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble and thousands forced to shelter in UN schools and other facilities. Of course, Palestinians have fired thousands of rockets at Israel. Although Israeli defenses have intercepted most, the attacks generate widespread fear and make day-to-day life in Israel unsettling. The bottom line is more than 70 years after Israel declared statehood, its borders are not settled, and peace remains out of reach.

US POLITICS

Congresswoman Liz Cheney was fired this week from her position of conference chair. Three months ago, House colleagues voted 145 to 61 to support her after facing criticism for validating the 2020 election results. Cheney became emboldened after that vote and continued to air grievances against Trump. She emphasized that the 2020 elections were free and fair, and she called out colleagues who supported the “big lie.” She lost support from colleagues over the last few weeks, a clear sign that Donald Trump maintains a stranglehold on the party. Critics of Cheney felt she should have focused on pushing back on the Biden policies, namely the lower than expected jobs report in April, the multi-trillion infrastructure plan and ballooning national debt, and the crisis at the border. Cheney embraced her downfall, warning the GOP of Trump and his policies. The House voted today to elevate Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York to replace Cheney as conference chair. Stefanik, a high-profile Trump defender, had the support of House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, Minority Whip Steve Scales, and Trump. Not all Republican House members are pleased with the move. More than 100 influential Republicans plan to release a call for reforms within the GOP alongside a threat to form a new party if a change isn’t forthcoming. The push will include 13 yet-to-be-revealed principles that the signatories want the GOP to embrace.

ECONOMY

Gas Shortage

The Colonial Pipeline operates 5,500-miles of pipe from Texas to New Jersey and provides ~45% of the region’s fuel shut down last Friday after a massive ransomware attack. The FBI confirmed a Russian criminal gang known as the Dark Side is responsible for the cyberattack. Dark Side is described as a ransomware-as-a-service platform, which vets cybercriminals who desire to infect companies with ransomware. Annual revenue is estimated to exceed $15 billion. Experts say ransomware attacks will continue to grow in sophistication, frequency, and cost unless something is done to disrupt the ability of crooks to get paid for crimes. According to a report from Coveware , the average ransomware payment in Q3, 2020 was $233,817, up 31% from a year prior. Emsisoft found that almost 2,400 US-based governments, healthcare facilities, and schools were ransomware victims in 2020.

Colonial Pipeline paid a $5 million ransom to hackers who caused the shutdown. The company restarted pipeline operations Wednesday and said it was resuming service throughout the entire system. However, energy analysts said it would likely take days before gas supplies return to normal in the Southeast. This crisis is the second energy-related incident to expose the vulnerability of our nation’s infrastructure. In February 2021, the state of Texas suffered a major power crisis, which came about as a result of three severe winter storms sweeping the US, leaving millions of customers without power during freezing temperatures. Both incidents offer a playbook to terrorists and bad actors for how to attack our nation. According to the Peter G. Peterson foundation, the US spends more on defense ($732 billion) than the next ten countries combined. But how much of that is dedicated to cyber? Not enough.

Jobs

New jobless claims fell to 473,000 , the lowest level since the start of the pandemic. Job losses are still higher than their pre-pandemic levels—the 2019 weekly average was 218,000. Job growth is not yet keeping pace with the lack of job losses, as employers added only 266,000 jobs in April, far less than the one million anticipated. The rate at which workers quit their jobs—a proxy for confidence in the labor market— held steady at 2.4% in March , matching a record high for data tracing back to 2000. Employers are shifting from “how do I keep my staff on the payroll” to “how do I retain my key staff and hire qualified workers?” Employers argue that the additional $300 weekly benefit for unemployment benefits is encouraging people not to work on top of regular state benefits.

Consequently, the lack of available workers to meet surging demand is limiting production and growth. There are 12 states with Republican governors who have announced they will stop paying additional pandemic unemployment benefits in June or July to get workers to take available jobs. A total of 16.9 million people were receiving benefits at the end of April through one of several programs, including regular state aid and federal emergency programs put in place in response to the pandemic. Total claims are down about 3 million from the first week of March, but still nearly eight times as high as before the pandemic’s onset. President Biden said workers remain on the sidelines for fear of getting sick during the pandemic and lacking full-time child care. It seems like the perfect time to require vaccination—now that we’ve established it works—as a condition for receiving government unemployment benefits.

Inflation

One abundantly clear thing, prices are rising. Higher commodity prices deliver economic windfalls to countries that supply metals vital to the global recovery from the pandemic. Prices of iron ore and copper both hit record highs this week as trillions of dollars of stimulus deployed globally push up demand for metals . It is a case of history repeating itself for export nations such as Australia and Chile, which benefited from heavy infrastructure spending by China and other countries striving to recover from the financial crisis more than a decade ago. (Australia accounts for more than 50% of global iron-ore exports.) Rising prices help commodity-producing countries by delivering more tax revenue. From the US to Russia to countries in the Middle East, oil producers could benefit from a similar trend. One key oil market benchmark, Brent crude , is up more than 30% this year.

Other materials have soared in price in the last year. Gas prices are up more than 60% from a year ago, in part due to a shortage of qualified drivers of trucks. Lumber futures hit a record high , a staggering sevenfold gain from April 2020. The increase in lumber is contributing to a shortage of housing and raising the price of new homes. There is a chicken shortage. Independent eateries and bars have gone weeks without wings, owners say. According to market research firm Urner Barry, chicken breast prices have more than doubled since the beginning of the year, and wing prices have hit records. Used car prices have skyrocketed. According to JD Power, across the US, used car prices in April rose to an average of nearly $25,500. That’s the highest price ever recorded by the research firm, which began tracking used vehicle sales in the early 1980s. That figure is up 17% since the beginning of the year. Plus, there’s a microchip shortage that has slowed the production of new cars, sending more would-be buyers to the used car market. On Wednesday, the Labor Department reported that US consumer prices last month rose at their fastest pace since 2008 . Overall, prices were up 4.2% from a year ago.

OTHER

Trading has boomed in cryptocurrency while volumes in stocks and derivatives have tumbled, with an increasing number of day traders and institutional investors setting their sights on more speculative assets. Last month, a slowdown in equities trading contrasted with a frantic first quarter, during which activity jumped in stocks like GameStop and AMC. Monthly data from exchanges, and public filings, indicated retail investors, who had helped fuel the surge in trading for much of last year, turned their attention to betting in cryptocurrency markets. Trading on major crypto exchanges surged from less than $100 billion in April 2020, to $1.7 trillion last month, per data from The Block Crypto.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

Has American had enough of war?

The mortgage boom is fading

Everything screams inflation

JPMorgan, others plan to issue credit cards to people with no credit scores

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- In 2011, only 8 percent of Americans believed “there are other countries that are better than the US,” according to Pew Research Center. But that proportion rose to 21 percent in 2019 , and it is even higher—36 percent—among 18-29 year-olds (up from 12 percent in 2011). For young voters on the left, it rises to 47 percent.

- Research suggests that about a fifth of the 775,000 US troops who have served in Afghanistan suffer from depression and PTSD. More than 45,000 veterans or service members have died by suicide since 2013.

- New homes cost $36,000 more because of an epic shortage of lumber.

- According to Fair Issac Corp, the creator of FICO credit scores, some 53 million adults in the US don’t have traditional credit scores.

III. Name that Tune!

As I write this email, I am listening to “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats.

Men Without Hats are a Canadian new wave and pop band founded in Montreal, Quebec, in 1977. The group’s popularity is based on a single hit song, Safety Dance, released in 1982 as the second single from Rhythm of Youth . Lead singer Ivan Doroschuk wrote the song after being kicked out of a club for pogo dancing. The pogo is a dance where the dancers jump up and down. Pogo dancing is most associated with punk rock and is a precursor to moshing. Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious claimed that he invented the pogo sometime around 1976 at shows in the early days of London’s punk scene.

Doroschuk explained that the song Safety Dance is a protest against bouncers prohibiting dancers from pogoing to 1980s new wave music in clubs when disco was declining. The song peaked on the US charts at number 3 in 1983 and stayed on the Billboard Hot 100 for 24 weeks. The Safety Dance found similar success in other parts of the world, entering the UK charts and peaking at number 6, and entering the New Zealand charts and peaking at number 2 in early 1984. The song was a massive success in South Africa, reaching number 1 on the charts. The song has been inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame (it’s a small club).

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Episode 50: Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Fri, 07 May 2021 22:28:00 GMT

I attended a leadership meeting recently, and the facilitator asked each of us to take out a pen and paper and answer the following question: what is holding you back? I found this exercise fascinating and fell in love with the question. I like that it’s simple and straightforward, and it doesn’t specify a particular area of your life—personal, professional, health, relationships, etc. You can interpret the question however you want. Fixed mindset people (euphemism for victim mindset) may find this question threatening and get defensive or quickly talk about their circumstances or limiting external factors. However, growth mindset people will embrace the challenge and take the opportunity to look inward for answers. The truth is most people have a boulevard of broken dreams , and those that don’t probably aren’t reaching high enough. I encourage you to give this question some thought this weekend and let me know if you uncover anything interesting!

COVID

Good News

The vaccines are working remarkably well. COVID cases and deaths are at the lowest level in seven months . On a micro level, there are some fantastic success stories. San Francisco boasts a 73% vaccination level and is averaging less than 30 new cases per day. American casualties are expected to decrease by late July as nearly all seniors receive the vaccine. Now, approximately 80% of those over 65 are fully vaccinated, and ~83% of this demographic has received at least one dose. In the rosiest of the researchers’ projections, weekly deaths due to COVID-19 would drop to 200 or 300 a week by late July.

Bad News

Efforts to vaccinate Americans for coronavirus have hit a wall and threaten President Biden’s promise of returning to normalcy by July 4th. Many of those who were most eager to get vaccinated have already done so. More than 110 million people in the US are fully immunized against COVID, and over 150 million (57%) have received their first dose. However, the US is running out of ready and willing adults who want to get vaccinated against COVID. A Yahoo news survey found that just 6% of Americans who have not been vaccinated plan to get a shot “as soon as it is available to me.” That’s down from 35% in February. The sentiment among other groups has remained constant—people who say they are “unsure” (7 percent), those waiting to see “what happens to others before deciding” (10 percent), and people who will “never” get vaccinated (20 percent).

Vaccinations fell sharply in the days after April 13th, when health officials announced a pause on the J&J vaccine due to blood clotting concerns in a small sample of women who received the vaccine. Experts say the 11-day break is partly responsible for the slow down in vaccinations, but the data also shows a slowing uptake of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The CDC revealed that declines since mid-April have been sharpest for those aged 18 to 64, who became eligible for a vaccine in most states last month. Just over 50 percent of this age group remains unvaccinated. Some who have not yet been vaccinated will never get a shot, but others might have had trouble finding time to make an appointment or have questions about safety or vaccine efficacy. The current forecast is fewer than 65 percent of US adults are likely to be inoculated against COVID by summer. This figure is far short of the level experts say is required for herd immunity. The predominant variant now circulating in the United States, called B.1.1.7 and first identified in Britain, is about 60 percent more transmissible. As a result, experts now calculate the herd immunity threshold to be at least 80 percent . If more contagious variants develop, or scientists find that immunized people can transmit the mutant virus, the calculation will have to be revised upward.

Moving Forward

The White House has shifted its strategy to battle the pandemic, from mass vaccination sites to more local settings to target younger Americans and those hesitant to get a shot. The new goal is to vaccinate 70 percent of adults (160 million) by Independence Day. The plan to hit that milestone is as follows:

The situation in the US stands in stark contrast to other parts of the world, where many countries are still scrambling to secure access to vaccines. India’s health ministry reported 412,262 new coronavirus cases yesterday, a single-day world record . According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 30 million people in India are fully vaccinated, 2.21% of its population. India has tallied more than 21 million confirmed cases and 230,000 deaths, still short of the 32 million and 577,000 in the US.

Follow the Money

Pfizer reported earnings this week and said it expects to make $26 billion in revenue from vaccine sales in 2021, up from its previous forecast of $15 billion. Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors that the company believes there will be “durable demand for their COVID vaccine, similar to that of the flu vaccine.” The company also announced its plans to file for full FDA approval of its COVID vaccine with German drugmaker BioNTech at the end of this month. Due to the once-in-a-century pandemic, the FDA granted Pfizer conditional approval for the emergency use of the vaccine based on two months of data. In contrast, the standard approval process takes a year or longer and requires six months of data. If the FDA signs off, Pfizer will be able to market the shot directly to consumers.

The White House flipped positions and now supports waiving patents for COVID vaccines to allow low-income countries to manufacture their own. The World Health Organization applauded the move, saying it shows “moral leadership.” Countries that have failed to secure ample vaccine supplies, such as India and Brazil, face deadly outbreaks, while the virus is receding in nations that bought large stocks, like the US, UK, and Israel. Under operation Warp Speed, the federal government gave pharmaceutical companies $18 billion to finance the development and manufacturing of coronavirus vaccines.

The Pharmaceutical industry is, not surprisingly, denouncing the government’s position. Pfizer revealed the company’s vaccine requires 280 components from 86 suppliers in 19 countries and highly specialized equipment and personnel. They claim lifting IP protections would undermine the fight against coronavirus because it would disrupt the supply chain they rely upon to secure raw materials in favor of counterfeit vaccines. They also point out that eliminating IP protection would undermine private enterprise risk-taking and innovation and threaten efforts to combat the next public health crisis. Furthermore, handing over the patents is useless without a complete tech transfer where patent holders supply technical know-how and personnel to other countries. It would be the equivalent of delivering a recipe book without the ingredients, safeguards, and skilled workforce. Support from the White House is not a guarantee that a global IP waiver will be adopted. For this to happen, the WTO would need approval from all 164 members, and the EU and other countries have not announced their position.

OTHER NEWS

Bill and Melinda Gates are splitting up after 27 years. The couple met in 1991, four months after Melinda began working for Microsoft as a multimedia specialist. They have three children: Jennifer, 25, Rory, 21, and Phoebe, 18. Bill Gates led Microsoft as CEO from its founding with Paul Allen in 1975 until 2000, when he and his wife launched the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2000. According to some accounts, it’s the largest private foundation globally, with more than $51 billion in assets. The foundation is dedicated to addressing global healthcare issues, improving early childhood education, and lifting people out of hunger and extreme poverty.

Bill Gates still owns 1.37% of Microsoft’s outstanding shares, worth more than $26 billion. With a net worth of about $145 billion, Bill Gates is the fourth-richest person in the world behind Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, LVMH’s Bernard Arnault, and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Bill and Melinda have pledged to donate more than half of their fortune as part of the Giving Pledge, which they helped create with Warren Buffett in 2010. Details of the divorce settlement are unclear, but Bill transferred nearly $2.4 billion worth of stock to Melinda on the day they made their divorce public.

Texas may soon allow residents to carry handguns in public without training or a license, following a bill by the Texas State Senate this week. Iowa, Montana, Tennessee, Utah, and Wyoming have also passed similar “permit-less carry” laws this year.

Golfer Amy Bockerstette is set to become the first person with Down syndrome to compete for a collegiate national championship. The 22-year-old sophomore at Paradise Valley Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, was already the first person with Down syndrome to receive an athletic college scholarship in the US. She will compete with the Paradise Valley Pumas at the NCAA golf national championship in Florida later this month. Bockerstette was already famous for her par at the 16th hole of the practice round at the Phoenix Open. The viral, heart-warming moment captures her saying, “I got this,” before sinking the par putt. Amy started the I Got This Foundation which provides golf lessons and events for people with intellectual disabilities.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

Why so many millennials fall prey to imposter syndrome

Psychological safety and the critical role of leadership development

Think Black CEOs are scarce? It’s worse than you think

Why you shouldn’t skip your second COVID shot

Inside ‘Facebook Jail’: The secret rules that put users in the doghouse

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- There are four Black CEOs in Fortune 500 companies. At parity with the Black US population, the number would be no fewer than 60.

- According to the CDC, more than five million people, or nearly 8 percent of those who got a first shot of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, have missed their second doses.

- Americans had 3.6 million babies last year, the lowest number in four decades. The US birth rate fell 4% in 2020, marking its sixth year of continuous declines, the CDC said on Wednesday. The birth rate has been declining as women increasingly delay motherhood and couples choose to have fewer children. Historical data shows the birth rate reached its lowest level in 1936, in the wake of the Great Depression.

- A bottle of French wine that spent 14 months inside the International Space Station will likely sell for around $1 million, according to the Christie’s auction house.

- Cryptocurrency ether, the token transacted on the ethereum blockchain, broke past $3,000 this week to set a new record high. The digital currency has quadrupled in value in 2021 .

III. Name that Tune!

As I write this email, I am listening to “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day.

Green Day is an American rock band formed in the East Bay of California in 1987 by lead vocalist and guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong and bassist and backing vocalist Mike Dirnt. For much of the band’s career, they have been a trio with drummer Tre Cool, who replaced John Kiffmeyer in 1990. Green Day was part of the late 80s/early 90s punk scene in Berkeley, California, and along with bands Sublime, Offspring, and Rancid, credited with taking punk rock mainstream in the US. In 1994, Green Day’s major-label debut Dookie became a breakout success and shipped over 10 million copies.

The song “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” debuted on the album American Idiot . Armstrong wrote the song about his time in New York City and “feeling alone” and trying to take power from the fact. He said it fit nicely with the album’s storyline, which is about “going away and getting the hell out, while at the same time fighting inner demons.”

Green Day has sold more than 75 million records worldwide, making them one of the best-selling music artists of all time. The group has been nominated for 20 Grammy awards and won five. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015.

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Episode 49: A Pirate Looks At Forty

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 22:43:00 GMT

I celebrated another turn around the sun this week. When I look back on my life, I'm grateful for the opportunities and blessings bestowed upon me. I've been fortunate to live in beautiful cities in the US and abroad, work in dynamic and innovative industries, and built wonderful professional and personal relationships that have weathered time and transcended geography. I've packed a lot of life into my time on this planet. In many ways, I feel like A Pirate (who) Looks At Forty , and Jimmy Buffet's lyrics resonate. I'm optimistic the future will bring an abundance of continued adventure and hopeful for love and happiness. In the words of Matthew McConaughey in the movie Dazed and Confused: "The older you do get, the more rules they are going to *try* to get you to follow. You gotta just keep livin', man. L-I-V-I-N!" Onward and upward!

POLITICS

President Biden celebrated 100 days in office this week. According to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll , 52% of adults say they approve of Biden's job, compared with 42% who disapprove. That's better than former President Donald Trump's 45% rating at the same time during his first 100 days in office, but worse than the ratings of 62% and 63% for former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, respectively. Biden's approval rating is the second-worst at this point in the president's first 100 days since 1974 when Gerald Ford became president after Richard Nixon's resignation.

The president earned his highest marks for handling the coronavirus pandemic, which garnered 58% approval, but he lags on immigration and border security—with only 34% and 35% support on those issues, respectively. At least two-thirds of Americans also said they were very or extremely concerned with gun laws (74%), healthcare (73%), the nation's infrastructure (68%), and illegal immigration (67%). Many Americans said they favor Biden's proposed tax increases on families earning over $400,000 annually (63%) and corporations (56%) to pay for his proposed $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which about 49% of respondents said they support.

One thing is clear. President Biden is eager and willing to spend money. In front of a joint session of Congress , Biden pitched his $1.8 trillion American Families plan, which includes funds for free preschool and two years of free community college, as well as hundreds of billions in financial aid for parents. Combined with the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan, and the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the White House has passed and proposed more than $6 trillion in spending in the first 100 days in office. Biden said the federal government needs to play a more prominent role in the economy because "trickle-down economics has never worked." Republican Senator Tim Scott delivered the rebuttal to Biden's speech on Wednesday.

Below is a snapshot of the $6 trillion in spending proposals:

I. American Rescue Act (passed), $1.9 trillion, allocates money for vaccines, schools, small businesses, and anti-poverty programs such as an expanded child tax credit that will mean new monthly payments to many parents. No GOP member voted in favor, saying that the package is too broad and only 9% of the funds going directly toward COVID-19 relief. Highlights of the bill are as follows:

Who Pays the Tab?

It's unclear, but it will undoubtedly be in the form of higher taxes.

II. American Jobs Plan (proposed), $2.3 trillion, designed to fix the nation's crumbling roads and bridges, create green economy jobs, and tackle climate change. Highlights of the plan are as follows:

Who Pays the Tab?

President Biden has proposed 15 years of higher corporate taxes, which would generate $2 trillion . The tax rate go up to 28% from 21%. That is still lower than the 35% that existed before the 2017 Trump Tax Cuts, but it would put the US back toward the top of the pack among major economies. Higher tax rates reduce the return on investment, so business groups say companies might be less likely to build factories or make other investments in the US. Some projects that make sense at a 21% tax rate won't make sense at a 28% rate. The Biden administration urges other countries to cooperate with it to set a global minimum corporate tax rate . Without such an agreement, non-U.S.-based companies could have an advantage over US-based firms.

Who is *really* paying for this tax increase? Many tax experts say most of the burden falls on the owners of capital , such as corporate shareholders. That can get reflected in stock prices. Some of the load gets passed on to the public at large. That can either happen through lower wages or higher prices than would otherwise be the case. Those workers and shareholders include some people making under $400,000, the threshold below which Mr. Biden has promised no tax increases.

Republican Counter Plan

Senate Republicans unveiled a $568 billion infrastructure proposal to counter the $2.3 trillion plan from the Biden administration. The GOP plan would be financed with user fees on electric vehicles and repurpose state and local relief passed as part of prior COVID relief bills:

III. American Families Plan (proposed), $1.8 trillion plan, $1 trillion in spending + $800 billion in tax credits, to fund Democratic priorities, including billions of dollars on child care, prekindergarten, paid family leave, and tuition-free community college. Highlights of the plan are as follows:

Who Pays the Tab?

Biden proposes paying for the plan via taxes on the rich . The proposal seeks to raise $1.5 trillion over a decade via higher taxes on the top 1%. The Biden tax plan would raise levies on capital gains and ordinary income and increase tax audits for those earning more than $400,000 a year. Biden's tax plan would raise the top income tax rate to 39.6%. That was the highest rate before the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which lowered it to the current 37%. The 39.6% rate would apply to the top 1% of Americans.

Biden’s tax plan would raise the top tax rate on long-term capital gains to 39.6% — the same rate as their wages. (Including a 3.8% Medicare surtax, they would pay a 43.4% top rate.) It would increase from the current 20% (or, 23.8% including the surtax on net investment income). The policy applies to taxpayers with an annual income of more than $1 million — the top 0.3% — who sell stocks, bonds, and other assets held in taxable accounts for a gain. According to a Tax Foundation analysis, investments account for more than 40% of income for taxpayers who make at least $1 million a year.

Also, the so-called “death tax” would change and heirs would have a tax liability on the step-up in basis of assets transferred at death. Essentially, the appreciation of any unsold assets — also known as unrealized gains — would be subject to capital gains tax upon the owner's death. (Again, this would be as high as 43.4% for the wealthiest households.)

According to the White House, family-owned businesses and farms would get an exclusion — they wouldn't have to pay tax when the company or farm is passed to heirs who continue to run the business.

The White House would also allocate additional resources to the IRS to enhance tax audits of households with more than $400,000 of income. Audit rates on those making more than $1 million per year fell 80% between 2011 and 2018, according to IRS data cited by the White House, which said its enforcement plan would raise $700 billion over a decade.

ECONOMY

Economic output grew at a 6.4% annualized rate in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said yesterday. Now, the US economy is less than 1% off its pre-COVID peak , clear evidence of a "V"-shaped recovery. Personal consumption grew 10.7%, the second-fastest pace since the 1960s. Just a year ago, the economy was sharply contracting—output in the second quarter fell by a record annual rate of 31.4%—and the unemployment rate soared to 14.8% last April, a post-World War II high. The S&P benchmark index finished yesterday 87% above its March 2020 bottom, fueled by the Federal Reserve's loose monetary policy, Congress' spending binge, vaccinations, and the US economy's reopening.

The stock market continues to set new records. (I feel like I can copy and paste that sentence in each newsletter.) Halfway through earnings season, S&P 500 companies have reported the strongest earnings growth in more than a decade. Big Tech continues to set the pace and reinforce a shifting economy to all things digital, with Google and Amazon posting record profits. Even dinosaurs like McDonald's joined the party announcing sales returned to pre-COVID levels . Joe Biden has been president for 100 days, and the S&P has gained more than 10% since the inauguration on Jan 20, making it the best first 100 days for stocks since FDR in 1933. After Biden, it’s JFK 9.27% (1961), George H.W. Bush 7.93% (1989), Donald Trump 5.32% (2017) and Barack Obama 2.77% (2009). For those counting at home, that's three Democrats and two Republicans. The average since 1929 is 3.8%.

Everyone is celebrating and taking bows for record GDP growth and stock market prices. However, thanks to Uncle Sam, low-level workers can make more money by staying home than working, and service and hospitality sectors are struggling to find hourly workers. The economy is on a sugar high, and everything looks rosy, but there is always a price to pay for indulgent behavior, and time will tell what that means for the US when the hand-outs vanquish and there’s a bill to be paid.

COVID

President Biden, the CDC, and most health officials urge Americans to stay vigilant around COVID health precautions. The CDC issued new guidelines that said it's now safe to exercise outdoors without a mask. (Uh, thank you, CDC, for such bold guidance.) The agency also said fully vaccinated people can now safely gather with other vaccinated people in small groups, but social distancing measures should remain, and everyone should wear a mask indoors.

I know there are varying beliefs about COVID, vaccines, and the role of government in health matters. The CDC and US government muddy the waters when they issue what feels like nonsensical directives. The pandemic is a serious matter, as evidenced by the 32 million Americans who have contracted the coronavirus and the 570,000 who have died from it. However, at this point, 237 million doses of the vaccine have been administered, with 100 million US citizens fully vaccinated. Studies show that the current vaccines are effective against the multiple variants, and vaccinated people are at low risk for passing the virus to other non-vaccinated people. With these facts in hand, why are vaccinated people still required to wear masks and social distance? Such conservative guidance raises doubt in people not vaccinated about the vaccine's efficacy and offers a disincentive to getting it.

OTHER

The NFL commenced it’s annual NFL draft yesterday. The Jacksonville Jaguars selected Trevor Lawrence, QB of Clemson, as the number one pick. Lawrence has partnered with Blockfolio, a crypto investment app, to invest his estimated $22,630,055 signing bonus in bitcoin, ether, and yes, dogecoin. The announcement was part of a multi-year endorsement agreement Lawrence reached with the cryptocurrency company. A spokesperson for the Blockfolio said that Lawrence’s signing bonus is already worth more than it was on Friday. Blockfolio competes with apps like Coinbase and is trying to reach a younger client base by partnering with Lawrence. FTX, Blockfolio’s parent company, paid $135 million in early April to secure the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena for the next 20 years.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

The six biggest takeaways from the census reapportionment

Harvard study reveals a surprising secret about friendship and happiness

China is betting that the west is in irreversible decline

How humanity gave itself an extra life

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

Women-led startups received just 2.3% of VC funding in 2020

III. Name that Tune!

As I write this email, I am listening to “A Pirate Looks At Forty” by Jimmy Buffett.

James William Buffett is an American singer-songwriter, musician, author, actor, and businessman. He is best known for his music, which often portrays an “island escapism” lifestyle. Born in Pascagoula, Mississippi, Buffett spent part of his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, and later Fairhope, Alabama. As a child, his grandfather exposed him to sailing, and these experiences would influence his music. Buffett began playing the guitar during his first year at Auburn University before transferring to Pearl River Community College and later the University of Southern Mississippi, where he received a BA in history. After graduating from college, Buffett worked as a correspondent for Billboard magazine in Nashville, Tennessee.

Buffett began his musical career in Nashville during the late 1960s as a country artist and recorded his first album, the country-tinged folk-rock record Down to Earth , in 1970. Fellow country singer Jerry Jeff Walker took him to Key West on a busking expedition in 1971. Buffett fell in love with the area and moved to Key West, and began establishing the easy-going beach-bum persona for which he is known. Buffett combined country, rock, folk, calypso, and pop music with tropical lyrics for a sound that Buffett describes as “drunken Caribbean Rock-n-Roll.”

Buffet has released over 30 albums. Eight are Gold, and nine are Platinum or Multiplatinum. He and his Coral Reefer Band played on the White House lawn for then-President Bill Clinton. Fans of Buffett are “Parrot Heads,” and his die-hard patrons will tour with the band and attend various concert locations, similar to “Dead Heads” who followed the Grateful Dead. Buffett is an avid pilot and owns a Dassault Falcon 900 that he often uses for his nonstop concert schedule.

Aside from his music career, Buffett is also a bestselling author and was involved in two restaurant chains, Margaritaville Cafe and Cheeseburger in Paradise. Buffett is one of the world’s wealthiest musicians, with a net worth of over $500 million.

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Episode 48: Changes

Fri, 23 Apr 2021 23:26:00 GMT

What do the climate, marijuana, and the Derek Chauvin verdict all have in common? Changes in society.

DEREK CHAUVIN VERDICT

The city of Minneapolis, our nation, and the world let out a deep exhale once the jury rendered a “guilty” verdict on all counts against Derek Chauvin. Heavily-armed National Guard troops were stationed throughout Minneapolis in anticipation of potential unrest should residents be displeased with the court ruling while also dealing with the fall-out from the shooting death of Daunte Wright. Businesses along St Paul’s University Avenue were boarded up and fortress-ready in preparation for further riots and vandalism. Some owners even crafted hand-lettered signs indicating they are still taking walk-in customers. For many Minneapolis businesses, the pain from the pandemic has been compounded by financial losses suffered during widespread arson, looting, and rioting in response to the murder of George Floyd that caused upwards of $700 million in statewide damage last May.

Guilty, guilty, guilty! After only ten hours of deliberation, twelve jurors rendered a guilty verdict against Derek Chauvin of second-degree and third-degree murder, as well as second-degree manslaughter. It turns out Chauvin was preparing for the worst. His lawyer, Eric Nelson, told TMZ that Chauvin jotted the attorney’s phone number on his palm if he was convicted and sent immediately to jail. The judge revoked Chauvin’s bail, and he was taken into custody and locked away in Minnesota’s only maximum-security prison to await sentencing in about eight weeks. He is being held in a single cell for his safety. Even though Chauvin was found guilty of three counts, under Minnesota statutes, he’ll only be sentenced on the most serious one—second-degree murder—since all the charges stem from one act carried out against one person. That crime carries a maximum sentence of 40 years. Still, experts suggest the maximum he would face is 30 years due to state sentencing guidelines, and judges only depart from them when “substantial and compelling circumstances can be identified and articulated.” For second-degree unintentional murder, guidelines say the presumptive sentence for someone with no criminal record like Chauvin would be 12.5 years. Judges can sentence someone to as little as ten years or as much as 15 years and still be within the advisory range. But in this case, prosecutors are seeking a sentence that goes above the guideline range, called an “upward departure,” citing several aggravating factors, including the fact Chauvin was a uniformed officer acting in a position of authority and that multiple children witnessed his crime. My best guess is the sentencing will be between 20 and 30 years, but the actual time served with good behavior would be two-thirds the sentence (assuming Chauvin lives that long).

Both sides of the case are currently writing legal briefs on aggravating factors, which the judge will review and determine whether they exist. The exact date for sentencing has not been determined, and it’s unclear if Chauvin will make a public statement at that time. He has the right to do so during his sentencing hearing, but the decision is tricky. Judges like to see defendants accept responsibility and show remorse, but anything he says could jeopardize an appeal (which is undoubtedly forthcoming).

The Chauvin guilty verdict is noteworthy and seems to be in line with public opinion. A survey found 71% of Americans agreed Chauvin was guilty, and most Americans surveyed followed at least some coverage of the three-week trial. Historically, there has been only one Minnesota officer convicted of murder on duty. In 2019, ex-Minnesota police officer Mohamed Noor was convicted of third-degree murder over the death of Justine Damond and sentenced to 12 years in prison. Between 2005 and Floyd’s murder last year, only five non-federal law enforcement officers were convicted of murder in an on-duty shooting and not had the conviction later overturned, according to the Henry Wallace Crime Database at Bowling Green State University. Prosecutors in the Chauvin trial deserve credit for putting together a tight case that led to a conviction.

There’s no question the George Floyd murder was inhumane and deserving of public outrage. National media have used the Floyd tragedy and a few other incidents such as the killing of Michael Brown , Breonna Taylor , and, most recently, 15-year-old Makiah Bryant to suggest race plays a primary role in police-related shootings. NPR published a report that revealed police officers have fatally shot at least 135 Black men and women across the country since 2015, with at least 75% of the officers identifying as white. The narrative being white police officers are targeting unarmed black men and women and fatally shooting them.

Crime and police statistics tell a different story. The Washington Post has created a database of every known deadly police shooting in American since 2015. As of April 2021, 6,211 people were shot and killed by law enforcement officers: 46% were white, while 24% were Black. Just 6% of the victims were unarmed, and only 2% of the people killed by an officer were unarmed and Black. Since the beginning of 2015, US law enforcement officers have killed 33 more unarmed white people than unarmed black people. And while it’s true that white people make up the majority of the population (76%) vs. blacks (13%), blacks accounted for 53% of the murder and non-negligent manslaughter arrests in 2018 (the most recent year for which FBI crime data is available), 54% of the all robbery arrests, and 37% of all violent crime arrests. Hispanics account for 17% of the total US population and represent 21% of the murder arrests and 25% of the total violent crime arrests, statistics in line with their representation of the general population. The cause and effect behind these statistics is a complicated issue and multi-faceted; however, it’s clear one factor is undoubtedly at play—the large and growing education/income/wealth gap between races. Still, the data suggest recent campaigns to abolish American policing based on the perception of pervasive and systemic racism are misinformed. The more rational argument is to demand better police training and hold bad actors accountable.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Since the Industrial Revolution, the global annual temperature has increased in total by about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Between 1880—the year that accurate record-keeping began—and1980, it rose on average by 0.13 degrees Fahrenheit every ten years. Since 1981, however, the rate has doubled. The result ? Nine of the ten warmest years since 1880 have occurred since 2005, and the top five warmest years on record have all occurred since 2015. The impacts of global warming are already harming people around the world, from record droughts, heatwaves, and forest fires to violent Hurricanes and rampant floods.

Global warming occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) and other air pollutants collect in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation that have bounced off the earth’s surface. Usually, this radiation would escape into space, but these pollutants, known as greenhouse gases, which can last for years to centuries in the atmosphere, trap the heat and cause the planet to get hotter. Earth’s climate naturally cycles and fluctuates and has done so several times over the last 800,00 years. Still, our current era of global warming is directly related to human activity, specifically to our burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gasoline, and natural gas. In the US, the largest source of greenhouse gases is transportation (29%), followed closely by electricity production (28%) and industrial activity (22%). China is the world’s worst offender in producing greenhouse gases, followed by the US, India, and Russia.

Global CO2 emissions are expected to increase by 5% this year, the most significant jump in more than a decade, according to the International Energy Agency. Carbon emissions decreased by 7% in 2020, but they are increasing again, in large part to the use of coal to produce electricity in rapidly growing Asian countries, but also in the US. It will be the second-largest increase in emissions in history, after the 6% surge that occurred in 2010, following the 2007-2009 Great Recession. According to scientists, to prevent the worst effects of climate change, the world needs to slash emissions by around 50% this decade.

President Biden gave Mother Nature a gift on “Earth Day” this week at the international climate summit. Surrounded by 40 world leaders, Biden dropped an audacious goal of cutting US planet-warming emissions at least 50% below 2005 levels in less than a decade. The figure is nearly double what the US agreed to under the original Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. The US is not on track to achieve the initial goal, so it’s hard to imagine we can exhibit the political will and collective discipline to hit the new, more aggressive target. Still, the roadmap for making this happen includes the following by 2030:

It’s an enormous challenge, and falling short in any one area, the task becomes that much harder. There would be no getting around widespread job losses in the energy sector and spikes in energy prices as we migrated from one energy economy to another. The silver lining is the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions have already fallen roughly 20% since 2005. Much of that decline came as electric utilities retired hundreds of their dirtiest coal plants and shifted to cheaper and cleaner natural gas, wind, and solar power. But one-third of the reductions have come due to the coronavirus pandemic, as business activity slumped. That drop is likely to prove fleeting as pandemic concerns fade and the economy ramps up.

It’s a stretch to think the US can hit the stated goal in 2030, but it’s a more considerable stretch to believe other countries such as China and India will materially cut emissions. Both countries remain more reliant on coal than Biden administration officials wish, and there’s little recourse if they fall short of the pledged targets. The planet’s health and viability depend on government policy and consumer behavior changes. Hopefully, humans find the courage to make these things happen, as Matt Damon didn’t make life on Mars look very appealing.

MARIJUANA

Marijuana lovers worldwide celebrated their national holiday this week on April 20th, otherwise known as 4/20. Some say “420” is code among police officers for “marijuana smoking in progress.” Some note 4/20 is also Adolf Hitler’s birthday, a dubious association. And some go as far as to cite Bob Dylan’s song “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” because 12 multiplied by 35 equals 420. However, the most credible story traces 4/20 to Marin County, California. In 1971, five students at San Rafael High School would meet at 4:20 pm by the campus’ statue of chemist Louis Pasteur to partake in the whacky weed. This group—Steve Capper, David Reddix, Jeffrey Noel, Larry Schwartz, and Mark Gravich would say “420” to each other as code for marijuana. Later, Reddix’s brother helped him get work with Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh as a roadie, so the band is said to have helped popularize the term “420.”

What’s more interesting than the backstory around 4/20 is the rapidly changing opinion of the drug by Americans. More than forty percent of Americans live in states where they can legally purchase marijuana. Pew research found that 91% of US adults now support either legalized recreational or medical marijuana. From 2000 to 2019, the share of Americans saying marijuana should be legal more than doubled . Republicans are warier than Democrats about legalizing marijuana for recreational use, 47% compared to 72%. Age is the most significant gap in views on marijuana use. Adults 75 and older show the slightest support for the legalization of marijuana (32%) vs. adults under age 30 showing overwhelming support (70%). Racial and ethnic differences in views of legalizing marijuana are as follows: About two-thirds of White (63%) and Black (65%) adults say marijuana should be legal for medical and recreational use, compared with smaller shares of Hispanic (42%) and Asian adults (43%).

Our legal system needs to catch up to the views of our citizens when it comes to marijuana. Four in ten US drug arrests in 2018 were for marijuana offenses—92% of which were for possession. These nonviolent crimes disproportionately impact minorities and clog our legal system. A growing number of states have legalized or decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana. But the drug remains illegal under federal law. Marijuana arrests have decreased in the last decade. Still, the incarceration of people for nonviolent offenses involving marijuana possession remains too high, and changes are required.

COVID

The good news is the majority of adults in the US have received at least one vaccine dose. The bad news is the rate of vaccination is falling quickly, as citizens eager to get vaccinated have done so, while people reluctant to get a vaccine are holding out. For the first time in weeks, the 7-day average of vaccine doses administered fell under 3 million per day.

A federal vaccine advisory committee recommended J&J resume distribution of its vaccine in the US. At the same time, regulators plan to add language to the product label warning of the potential for a rare blood-clot condition . Of the 8 million J&J shots administered, only 15 people have experienced blood-clot complications (all women ages 18 - 49), with three dying.

Research indicates that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are highly effective against all coronavirus variants identified so far. The B.1.526 variant , which was first identified in New York in November, now accounts for nearly half of cases in the city.

Three months before the start of the Summer Olympics, Tokyo and other parts of Japan have been put under “ emergency orders ” due to COVID. Under the restrictions, which will be in place until May 11, department stores, malls, theme parks, theaters, museums, and bars and restaurants serving alcohol will close their doors. Tokyo Olympic organizers and the government said they plan to host the games as scheduled, but many citizens support canceling or postponing the event. About 1% of Japan’s population has received a COVID vaccine, compared to over 50% of adults in the US.

OTHER

Caitlyn Jenner, formerly Bruce Jenner, said she plans to run for governor of California. Her announcement comes amidst efforts to organize a recall election against Governor Gavin Newsom. Jenner organizers said they had collected over 2 million signatures, well over the 1.5 million needed to manage the recall election.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

The next great disruption is hybrid work—are we ready?

An American epidemic of ‘Covid Mania’

Sleeping six hours or less linked to higher dementia risk

Key questions about COVID passports

Admit it, you miss office gossip

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- A recent Microsoft study suggests 41% of employees are considering changing employers in the year ahead — double the number from 2019 — and another 46% are likely to move because they can now work remotely.

III. Name that Tune!

As I write this email, I am listening to “Changes” by Tupac Shakur.

Tupac Amaru Shakur, born Lesane Parish Crooks in Manhattan, was an American rapper and actor. At the age of 13, Tupac relocated with his family to Baltimore and then a few years later to Marin City, outside San Francisco. By the time Tupac released his debut album 2Pacalypse Now in 1991, at age 20, he had become a central figure in West Coast hip hop, introducing social issues that plagued inner cities in the genre when gangsta rap was dominant in the mainstream.

Tupac is considered a symbol of activism against inequality. However, the icon and his family have a checkered past that belies his posthumous image. One month before Tupac’s birth, his mother was tried in New York City as part of the Panther 21 criminal trial . She was acquitted of over 150 charges. Other family members involved in the Black Panthers’ Liberation Army were convicted of serious crimes and imprisoned. Tupac’s stepfather, Mutulu Shakur , spent four years among the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. Tupac would find himself in legal trouble in 1993 when he and three other men were charged in New York with sexual assault. He was convicted of first-degree sexual abuse but acquitted of associated sodomy and gun charges. He was sentenced to 18 months to 4.5 years in prison, with the judge labeling Tupac’s actions as “brutal violence against a helpless woman.”

Tupac recorded “Changes” in 1992, but the song didn’t release until after his death. The song cleverly samples the 1986 hit “The Way It Is” by Bruce Hornsby and the Range, and the lyrics speak to racism, police brutality, drugs, and gang violence. Tupac also mentions the possibility of a black president of the US, claiming “we ain’t ready.” Further, the last verse of the song refers to Tupac imaging himself shot to death, mimicking the sound of the gun with the phrase “rat-a-tat-tat-tat-tat.” His prophecy would become true. On the night of September 7th, 1996, a late-model Cadillac sedan pulled up to the passenger side of Tupac’s car on Las Vegas Boulevard and fired shots, hitting him in the leg, arm, and twice in the chest. Shakur was taken to the hospital and placed on life support, and died on September 13th at age 25.

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Episode 47: Save a Prayer

Fri, 16 Apr 2021 23:17:00 GMT

There was another mass shooting this week. Last night a gunman killed eight people at a FedEx facility near Indianapolis’s main airport before committing suicide. Police revealed the shooter as 19-year-old Brandon Hole, who previously worked at the facility and was known to federal and local authorities before the attack. According to three law enforcement sources, a family member of the suspected shooter reached out to police, warning about the suspect’s potential for violence. The gunman arrived at the site around 11 pm, exited his car, and opened fire at the parking lot before entering the building. Hours after the killing spree, family members of employees at the facility were still corralled at a nearby Holiday Inn, waiting to hear from their loved ones. Save a prayer for the families who learned today they lost a loved one to senseless violence.

DEREK CHAUVIN TRIAL

Former Police Officer Derek Chauvin, 45, is charged with murder and manslaughter in George Floyd’s death after the 46-year-old was arrested on suspicion of passing a counterfeit $20 at a neighborhood market last May.

The prosecutors say Floyd died because Chauvin’s knee was pressed against Floyd’s neck for 9.5 minutes as he lay on the pavement, his hands cuffed behind him and his face jammed against the ground. Law enforcement veterans inside and outside the Minneapolis department testified for the prosecution that Chauvin used excessive force and went against his training. At the same time, medical experts said Floyd died of asphyxia, or lack of oxygen, due to Chauvin’s hold and duration.

The defense team for Derek Chauvin rested its case yesterday. Over two days, the defense team called several witnesses who testified that Floyd’s death was caused by drug use, heart disease, or carbon monoxide poisoning. Floyd had high blood pressure and narrowed arteries, and fentanyl and methamphetamine were found in his system. Former Maryland chief medical examiner David Fowler testified that it was his medical opinion that Mr. Floyd suffered cardiac arrhythmia, which was contributed to by his underlying health conditions. He said he would have listed the cause of Floyd’s death as “undetermined.”

Before the jury was brought in yesterday, Chauvin informed the judge he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right not to testify. The trial is in recess until Monday morning, at which point closing arguments will commence. Judge Peter Cahill reminded the 14 jurors they will be sequestered starting Monday and said: “If I were you, I would plan for long and hope for short.”

Chauvin faces three charges, those being second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. The terms homicide, murder, and manslaughter get used interchangeably, but it’s essential to understand the distinction of each term.

All killings of human beings are homicides. Many homicides, such as murder and manslaughter, violate criminal laws. Others, such as killing in self-defense, or killing during war-time battle, are not criminal and considered “justified killings.” All murders are criminal homicides, and there are three degrees:

Manslaughter generally means an illegal killing that falls short of murder, and there was no intent to kill. Some states break manslaughter charges into voluntary and involuntary. Others break them down into different degrees, just like murder. The difference between third-degree murder and manslaughter often depends on the defendant’s state of mind at the killing time. In Minnesota, for example, someone can be convicted of manslaughter in the second degree if they knew they were unreasonably risking someone else’s life and took that chance. This charge is different from third-degree murder, where the person must act with a depraved mind and malice (wanton disregard for human life).

The bar for a murder charge is high in these matters. There has been only one Minnesota officer to be convicted of murder on duty. In 2019, ex-Minnesota police officer Mohamed Noor was convicted of third-degree murder over the death of Justine Damond. Damond had called 911 to report a possible sexual assault in progress in the alley near her home but was shot by Noon, who fired through the open window of the police car. Noor was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

POLITICS

The Biden administration announced sanctions against Russia for interfering in US elections, transnational corruption, targeting dissidents abroad, violation of other countries’ sovereignty, and the SolarWinds cyber attack. The US government will ban American financial institutions from purchasing new bonds from the Russian finance ministry, central bank, or sovereign-wealth fund after June 14. The executive order also allows the US government to sanction any part of the Russian economy, which will make US firms think twice about doing business in Russia. The plan’s weakness is that US traders will still be able to access Russian debt in secondary bond markets.

On a Tuesday call with Mr. Putin, the President suggested a summit meeting in a third country in the coming months. The Kremlin said the sanctions could blow up Mr. Biden’s offer, but don’t count on it. The Russian economy is struggling and economic sanctions will hamper recovery. Meanwhile, Russia has deployed tens of thousands of troops and heavy weapons near Ukraine, and its intentions remain unclear. Russia summoned the US Ambassador to Moscow, and a foreign ministry spokeswoman warned, “Washington must realize that the degradation of bilateral relations will have to be paid for. The responsibility for what is happening lies entirely with the United States.”

COVID

The FDA temporarily paused the J&J vaccine in the US over blood-clotting concerns. Six women developed blood clots after receiving the J&J vaccine, and one died. Pfizer and Moderna declined requests from J&J to join them in investigating the incidence and risks of blood clots in COVID vaccines. AstraZeneca, whose vaccine has been dispersed in fits and starts in the EU, following similar blood clot concerns , agreed to join forces to investigate the issue. Blood clots are considered a very rare side effect of all vaccines (1 in 1 million), with your chance of being hit by lighting twice as likely. Still, the vaccine is on hold, and a CDC advisory panel meets next week to discuss potentially resuming the shot’s use.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said that people who receive the company’s vaccine might need a booster shot after 12 months or “an annual re-vaccination.” Experts say that additional shots may be required going forward due to the appearance of new coronavirus variants. Moderna is developing a booster for its vaccine, and J&J has previously stated that its vaccine may need to be administered annually. Of course, it’s still possible to get COVID after being vaccinated—there have been 5,800 confirmed coronavirus cases post-vaccination, including 396 who needed hospital treatment and 74 who died. That’s 0.0077% of the total vaccinations or one out of every 12,931 people.

ECONOMY & MARKETS

The U.S. economy and stock market are on fire. The S&P 500 notched a record close, its 22nd of the year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 34,000 for the first time after strong earnings and upbeat economic data sent stocks climbing. First-quarter earnings season kicked off in earnest this week, and on Thursday, several big banks reported profits that exceeded forecasts. The KBW Nasdaq Bank Index, which tracks shares of the largest lenders, is up 25% so far this year, compared to 11% gains for both major indexes. Many investors believe the rollout of Covid-19 vaccines and plentiful government spending mean stocks have room to keep rising.

Unemployment claims declined to the lowest level since the coronavirus pandemic struck last spring, adding to signs the U.S. economic revival is picking up speed. Jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell to 576,000 last week from 769,000 a week earlier. That is the lowest weekly figure since March 2020. Claims remain higher than the pre-pandemic levels of around 220,000, but economists expect they will continue to drop as the recovery accelerates. U.S. Employers added 916,000 jobs in March, and the jobless rate edged down to 6%, from 6.2% in February. U.S. retail sales surged 9.8% in March from the month before, the most significant monthly gain since last May.

Coinbase ( COIN ) made history on Wednesday as the first significant crypto company to go public. The NYT called it “crypto’s coming-out party.” At the start of its first trading day, the cryptocurrency exchange platform’s valuation neared $100 billion midweek before pulling back to a more modest $67 billion. For Q1, the cryptocurrency exchange made a profit of $730–$800 million on ~$1.8 billion in revenue. However, competition is heating up. Many traditional brokerages are working to integrate bitcoin and ethereum trading on their platforms if they haven’t already. For this reason, expect to see more crypto companies going public and more merchants offering crypto payment options.

At the local level, Nashville continues to roar with investment. GM announced a $2.4 billion Spring Hill electric vehicle battery plant. This investment represents the largest one-time business investment in Tennessee history and will create 1,300 full-time jobs . GM has an aggressive goal of making only electric-powered vehicles by 2035. Oracle formalized plans to bring 8,500 jobs , with an average salary of $110,000, and a $1.2 billion investment to Music City. Of course, both announcements follow Amazon’s commitment to Nashville and plans for 5,000 jobs through a $230 million investment in a new operations hub.

OTHER NEWS

In the most significant update to Google Earth since 2017, Timelapse is a global, zoomable video that shows how our planet has changed since 1984. With Timelapse in Google Earth, 24 million satellite photos from the past 37 years have been compiled into an interactive 4D experience. Google partnered with organizations including NASA and the US Geological Survey’s Landsat program to collect images from 1984-2020 of every location on earth. Now anyone can watch time unfold and witness nearly four decades of planetary change. To explore Timelapse in Google Earth, go to g.co/Timelapse — you can use the handy search bar to choose any place on the planet where you want to see time in motion.

I. Below are the articles I found interesting the past week:

Jeff Bezos final letter to shareholders before he steps down as CEO

The price of lumber is up 193% and about to spike even higher

Magic mushroom compound at least as good as anti-depressant medication

Doing vs being: Practical lessons on building an agile culture

Laugh more, lead better

II. Stats that made me go WOW!

- Amazon hired 500,000 employees last year and now directly employs 1.3 million people around the world.

- According to the CDC, over 87,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 12 months, a record since the 1990s. The number of opioid deaths surged 29% higher than in the previous 12-month period.

III. Name that Tune!

As I write this email, I am listening to “Save a Prayer” by Duran Duran.

Duran Duran is an English new wave band formed in Birmingham, England, in 1978. Keyboardist Nick Rhodes created the band, but the most well-known members are lead singer Simon Le Bon and bass guitarist John Taylor. The video age catapulted the group into the mainstream with the introduction of the 24-hour music channel MTV, helping Duran Duran sell over 100 million records worldwide and securing them as one of the most successful acts of all time. Many of their music videos were shot on 35mm film, which gave a much more polished look than other videos of the period. They also collaborated with professional film directors to take the quality a step further.

Duran Duran released the song “Save a Prayer” in 1982 with the debut of the album Rio . Russell Mulcahy directed the music video among the jungles, beaches, and temples of Sri Lanka. Scenes were filmed atop an ancient rock fortress, among the ruins of a Buddhist temple and the island’s southern coastline, with Simon Le Bon appearing in a Speedo. In other words, it had a little something for everyone.

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