Beautifully written and researched analysis of status seeking games we play by @wstorr

He defines status as a proof of being of value to a group and much of human life as comprised of 3 varieties of status-striving and thus 3 varieties of game

1. dominance
2. virtue
3. success In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. Mafias and armies are dominance games.

Just settling into @Grocery_Story for my work-related holiday read. Fascinating and well-researched read on the evolution of the grocery retail business in North America. Will be posting my highlights here. 1902: Combining 2+ stages of product development (vertical integration) wasn’t entirely new in turn-of-the-century America, but Kroger’s introduction of in-house bakeries was the first instance of it in the grocery retail business, lowering the price of its bread from 6c to 2.5c

Fascinating book written by ⁦@ruhlman from inside the operations of a local grocery store, learning from its owners going about their business, receiving and merchandising food and contemplating the evolution of the food system and the central role played by the supermarket 9000 SKUs: “The country’s first grocery stores, in the late 19th early 20th centuries, carried about 200 products. During the final decades of the 20th century the number of SKUs exploded. The avg supermarket had fewer than 9,000 items in 1975. By 2008 that number had quintupled”

Great note on Amazon vs Walmart from ⁦@zackkanter⁩ 🙌 zackkanter.com/2019/03/13/wha… “ in the world of infinite shelf space – and platforms to fill them – the limiting reagent for Amazon’s growth would not be its website traffic, or its ability to fulfill orders, or the number of SKUs available to sell; it would be its own bureaucracy”

(Highlights from Expectations Investing by @mjmauboussin. As @fdestin points out, there are a lot of interesting parallels between public and private market investing.) If you invest without expecting future cash flows, then you might as well collect art or play the slot machines.

Just finished Better Than You Know by @mjmauboussin. Definitely one of the best books I have read thus far on investing. FWIW, sharing my highlights. (1) Perhaps the single greatest error in the investment business is a failure to distinguish between the knowledge of a company’s fundamentals and the expectations implied by the market price.