I’m reading a history of elite college admissions, and it’s incredibly funny. Apparently late 19th/early 20th century Harvard was best known for football (yes, their football coach was paid better than any of the professors). Around this time, there was a series of novels about a fictional Yale football player. Hundreds of stories. They sold up to 200k copies weekly. The past is a foreign country.

Paul Verhoeven's genius is that he made a movie enjoyable on multiple levels. Yes, you can view it as a ham-fisted sendup of a kind of militarism that hadn't existed in US culture for decades. But media-literate audiences can also have fun with the movie's deeper message. Just going by the evidence the movie gives us, humanity really is locked in an existential struggle with the Bugs, and the system does put lots of resources into winning that (they have accountability—the Sky Marshal steps down after a botched invasion).

Airlines must have the highest ratio of "fun to think about and write about" to "fun to actually invest in" of any industry. ~4500 words on airline unit economics, dropping tomorrow

thediff.co/#/portal/signup

Also in today's newsletter: Silicon Valley Bank was, based on the market value of their assets, technically insolvent last quarter and is now levered 185:1. I don't expect a bank run; banks don't technically *need* equity, they just need depositors to have a good reason not to flee, and an equity cushion is a great reason. On the other hand, pretty weird situation.

Via vox.com/future-perfect…

This is new! And actually makes sense, as a catastrophic mistake. This is presumably the "poorly labeled fiat account" I mean, what happened next only makes sense if neither Alameda nor FTX *ever had a balance sheet* and never had any internal controls.

Market's open today! Story time, via amzn.to/3pFalVg That book is partly an addiction memoir, but it's also a book about working as a trader for various funds. The role of a trader can range from simple execution to being a human switchboard to sometimes taking advantage of short-term opportunities.

Last year, I spent the first day of my end-of-year vacation reading about Intel. Robert Noyce had briefly worked as an actuary, and he said one of the surprising things he learned was that people have some control over exactly when they die. Not a lot, but some. I read that on December 24th. On Christmas, I FaceTimed with my dad, who was in the hospital. He said Merry Christmas to everyone, and my kids all said Merry Christmas back. It was a short call; he wasn't strong enough to hold up his iPad for very long. He died the next morning.

Lots of info here on how rich people avoid paying income taxes (by not having income, by giving away money, and by paying other taxes that offset federal taxes).

https://twitter.com/eisingerj/status/1402189341930176513

Since this is how the tax code is designed, it's not really new information. (I do wonder if Raj Chetty is going to have a very stern Zoom call with his researchers telling them to please be more discreet with their files.)

Before you read the tech CEOs’ prepared statements, it’s good to meditate on the part of Zero to One about how every bad company pretends it has competitive advantages and every good company pretends it’s existentially threatened on all sides. Reading the exhibits is kind of funny. The top tech CEOs in the world took a break to answer questions about whether or not they’re monopolies, then returned to their day job of trying to utterly crush one another’s companies.

There’s a special class of books that are so good you’re jealous of anyone who gets to read them for the first time. What’s on your list? I forgot I tweeted this, and when I grabbed my phone and saw 20 twitter alerts I was sure I’d been Cancelled.

1/100 Let's talk about globalization! It has "global" right there in the name, so it's obviously about every country. But really, globalization is about just one country. Unfortunately, we don't know which one. Either America or China, for very different reasons. 2. Globalization is synonymous with America in the sense that it describes how the world changed from 1946 onward, i.e. after America conquered all of the world except a weird communist rump state, which inevitably collapsed.