Useful chart from MRB plotting a sector’s percent share of total US market capitalisation on the x-axis and percent share of total market earnings on the y-axis.
It of course misses a lot of elements (e.g. growth of earnings, returns etc) but is still worth thinking about.
What if I told you that the idea that “People get fat because they take in more calories than they expend” is wrong?
That is exactly what this post does (in the Snippet tradition of contrarian ideas like here and here).
“Consider using the identical logic to describe, say, why people get wealthy. Economists would (I hope) be embarrassed by a money-balance theory of wealth: People get rich because they take in more money than they spend. Clearly wealthy people did. We know that because they’re wealthy. The increase in wealth is the positive money balance. But this says nothing about how or why they accumulate such wealth. In obesity research, this tautological logic — saying the same thing in two different ways but offering no explanation for either — was allowed to become the central dogmatic truth.“
Then what does cause obesity? “People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.“
You probably know, AlphaGo, the 2016 AI program that dominated the game of Go.
Soon after, a software implementation called Leela was made available, to train human Go players.
Data from 750k Go moves from 1,200+ players between 2015-2019 shows a significant improvement in move quality – especially among younger players (see chart) who are likely more open to learn from Leela.
Fascinating and important read about Russian military logistics and what it means for various strategies in Europe.
“No other European nation uses railroads to the extent that the Russian army does.“
“The rub is that Russian railroads are a wider gauge than the rest of Europe. Only former Soviet nations and Finland still use the Russian standard — this includes the Baltic states.“
Interesting side note – Russia can thank the US for this standard, namely George Washington Whistler (father of the famous painter!). The US was looking out for its European allies all the way back in the 1840s.
In summary – “they are not capable of a sustained ground offensive far beyond Russian railroads without a major logistical halt or a massive mobilization of reserves.“
A fascinating read about Jim Casey – the man who built UPS.
“On August 28, 1907, nineteen-year-old James Emmett “Jim” Casey and his friend Claude Ryan borrowed $100 and founded the American Messenger Company in a six-foot by seven-foot basement office below a Seattle saloon.”
From this grew one of the largest transportation companies – delivering 6.3bn packages globally in 2020.
As with all histories there are some fascinating anecdotes
“Merchants Parcel [an earlier name] considered painting their cars and vans bright yellow to attract attention, or even painting them different colors to make people think the company was larger than it was. But Charlie warned that they should not try to show up their retail customers, who were proud of their brightly decorated delivery vehicles. He had studied the more subtle Pullman brown, the color used on railroad sleeping cars to minimize signs of dust and dirt. Thus the partners decided to go with brown—only slightly modified in today’s UPS brown.“
