You are reading text right now. It engulfs our lives.
“Between 1900 and 1990, the amount of time the average American spent reading and writing remained broadly consistent: somewhere between one and two hours a day.”
With the advent of the internet and text messaging – this more than doubled to four to five hours.
It is estimated the average internet user sees 490,000 words per day (more than War and Peace!).
As this wonderful contrarian article argues – this might not, as many argue, be all good.
“Every time we read, we inevitably conceptualize the world, in perhaps an ever-increasingly abstract way. And it’s conceivable that we may reach a point where those abstracting effects go too far.“
Article sourced from The Browser – a brilliant resource.
This deck has been doing the rounds the past few weeks.
It is actually a good description of market downturns and how they work.
Especially recommend looking from page 10 onwards – to understand the various stages (P/E reset, earnings revision) and slide 23 – what capitulation looks like.
Based on this feels we are still not there yet.
Interestingly they are also raising a structured equity fund.
Interesting article arguing that state capacity is the real constraint for delivering infrastructure projects, not interest rates.
“The new tunnels for New York’s East Side Access project cost about $4 billion per kilometer, while Paris built a similar project (infill development, went under the Seine, had problems with catacombs) for $230 million per kilometer. Copenhagen, Barcelona, Naples, and Milan were all cheaper still, while South Korea was generally the cheapest, with a tunneling cost around $100 million per kilometer, or perhaps less. That’s quite a difference in state capacity.“
It’s not just tunnelling – NYC spent $39m per station to add elevators, Boston $25m while in Berlin it cost just $2.6m.
Interesting chart via The Browser (a must subscribe) plotting each issue of the New York Review of Books (NYRB) by the gender mix of authors.
“What you are seeing is that there are only twelve issues out of 1228 (1%) to which women have contributed half or more of the articles. Nine of them have appeared within the past three years. Meanwhile there are about 196 issues (16%) to which not a single woman contributed an article.”
