Books Read - Q3 2021

Previously: Q1 2021 book reviews, Q2 2021 book reviews, our 2020 Book Review Compendium, 2019 book compendium and 2018 book compendium, and pre-2018 book compendium.

• Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food (3.5/5) Looking for a book to give to normies about the highest-impact steps to take to improve health. Author Cate Shanahan's two key points: avoiding sugar and avoiding seed oils. (Same as Mangan's key points.) She mentions that the president of the Culinary Institute of America challenged her in 2012 about her criticism of canola oil, saying that she was spreading misinformation (!). Charles Henning told her that "We have to feed the masses. There's just not enough olive oil for everyone." She has consulted on diet for NBA teams and found that "twenty-six of the twenty-nine five star hotels on the NBA tour use vegetable oils or blends in place of olive oil for pizza sauces, salad dressings, hollandaise, marinades, mashed potatoes, baked goods-you name it." This is the principal-agent problem in action. No one is going to give you expensive, wholesome ingredients if they can sneak inferior ones past you without you noticing. Mangan pointed out something alarming about seed oils the other day: "human adipose tissue linoleic acid has a half-life of 1-2 years"! She mentions Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price, a book which I have had on my list but have not read yet. She also mentions Fighting the Food Giants by Paul Stitt. Other highlights: "Reorienting our financial priorities around healthy eating rebuilds our family's genetic wealth and is the best investment we can make." "Find the best ingredients grown on the richest soil in the most wholesome, sustainable manner" "Pungent vegetables like celery, peppers, broccoli, arugula, and garlic contain more antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals per bite than starchy vegetables..." "Traditional life seemed to revolve around collecting and concentrating nutrition." "Today at every stage in the process of producing food, we do things differently than our sturdy, self-sufficient ancestors did." "[T]he guy driving the Porsche Carerra to the surgical suite to thread another stent into another artery of another patient is almost guaranteed to be thirty years, or more, behind in his knowledge of nutrition and its role in the etiology of the arterial disease that, indirectly, paid for his house..." "There's no drug to raise HDL but there are drugs to lower LDL: the statins." "Processed foods made with vegetable oils are also the foods typically loaded with sugar, so cutting vegetable oil automatically helps you to cut sugar intake." Epigenetics: "DNA seems capable of collecting information-through the language of food-about changing conditions in the outside world, enacting alteration based on that information, and documenting both the collected data and its response for the benefit of subsequent generations." Margarine: "one molecule away from plastic". Omega 3 supplements: "Consuming purchased supplements entails risk of exposure to unacceptably oxidized oil. Get your omega-3 fix from real foods, like sushi, oysters, grass-fed butter, raw nuts (especially walnuts) and seeds, and lots of green leafy vegetables." "My preferred method of omega-3 supplementation is with flax seeds that you grind fresh before using."
• The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence (3/5) Thinking about inflation lately, since we are living through another major inflation. Robert Samuelson thinks of 1960-2010 as a half century that was "one long economic cycle dominated by inflation's rise and fall". During the first half with constant inflation, "large price increases were the norm, like a rain that never stopped. Sometimes it was a pitter-patter, sometimes a downpour. But it was almost always raining. From week to week, people couldn't know the cost of their groceries, utility bills, appliances, dry cleaning, toothpaste, and pizza. People couldn't predict whether their wages and salaries would keep pace. People couldn't plan; their savings were at risk. And no one seemed capable of controlling inflation." Issues with inflation and accounting: "As inflation rose, companies' sales and profits grew rapidly. Managers believed they were doing better than they were; they paid less attention to the many small daily operational matters that improve efficiency. From 1964 to 1974, after tax profits jumped from $41 billion to $95 billion." Here's something funny: "Inconvenient bursts of inflation were blamed on onetime events: spending for the Vietnam War or global surges in oil prices." Crooked moron Lyndon Johnson tried to "persuade and bully" people not to raise prices: "When egg prices rose in the spring of 1966 and Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman told him that not much could be done, Johnson had the Surgeon General issue alerts as to the hazards of cholesterol in eggs."
  
• Whiskey Rebels: The Story of a Frontier Uprising (3/5) Picked up a used copy of this; the author Leland Baldwin (1897-1981) seems interesting. (He once observed that colonies were 'funhouse mirrors' of their mother countries' cultures.) Good description of the Whiskey Rebellion: "Washington sent an army of same size he used against the British during Revolutionary War to decimate the Appalachia Scotch-Irish who thought it was outrageous they were being forced to pay for the British colonies' war against England." Other books by LDB: The Story of The Americas; The Keelboat Age on Western Waters; Pittsburgh: The Story of a City, 1780-1865; Recent American History. Summary in his words: "The Revolution was over, and a federal government was already consolidating the fruits of victory in the hands of the Eastern moneyed classes. The West, perfectly aware of this fact, complained bitterly that it had been induced to pour out the blood of its men, women, and children simply to enrich speculators and manufacturers. The Indian Raids still continued against the outlying settlements; speculators had engrossed the best lands and demanded extravagant prices for them..." "The Whiskey Insurrection was one of the signposts that market the cleavage amidst the people, particularly between the agrarians and the rising industrial and mercantile class. Probably the thinking members of both sides did not fail to note this. The anger of the dominant elements against the West showed the hollowness of their tirades in favor of Liberty - at least from the equalitarian standpoint - and laid them open to the accusation of wanting independence so that they could rule without British interference." "The westerner of the seventeen-nineties saw more or less clearly that it was the economy of the frontier individualist that was being undermined. With the limited vision incident to any decade he thought he had his back to the wall making his last stand against plutocratic individualism. As a matter of fact Armageddon, that mythical struggle that is always coming but never arrives, was as far in the future as ever. There was too much cheap land farther west to make it worth while to stand and fight to the bitter end." Regarding the hunting-gathering Indians, Pittsburgh lawyer Hugh Brackenridge said, "I consider the earth as given to man in common, and each should use his share, so as not to exclude others, and should be restricted to that mode of using it, which is most favourable to the support of the greatest numbers, and consequently productive of the greatest sum of happiness; that is, the cultivation of the soil." Per LDB: "The cure for Indian troubles favored by the frontiersmen was extermination of the Indians, and from this policy they rarely deviated either in theory or practice. In their minds it was a simple problem of choosing which race should survive, and they did not hesitate to choose. There has never been a time in the westward advance when the pioneers ceased to echo the early cry of the Pennsylvania squatters that 'it was against laws of God and nature that so much land should lie idle while so many Christians wanted it to work on and to raise their bread.'" "For years the West had urged a land tax as the most equitable method of taxation. The purpose in this was twofold: first, the East would bear the greatest burden, since land there was more valuable on account of superior improvements and proximity to markets; and second, it was hoped that the taxing of the western land held by speculators would force them to sell it at reasonable rates and thus hasten the development of the West. Now it was perfectly apparent to the westerner... that the laying of the excise was a clever move on the part of the eastern plutocracy to escape a land tax..."
• Oxygen: The molecule that made the world (4/5) Science writer author Nick Lane also wrote Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the meaning of life, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, and The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life. He is quite interested in mitochondria and aging. "If organic remains are buried rather than eaten, then the complete re-uptake of oxygen by consumers is prevented. The left-over oxygen accumulates in the atmosphere. Almost all our precious oxygen is derived from a 3-billion-year mismatch between the amount of oxygen generated by the primary producers and the amount used up by consumers. The vast amount of dead organic matter buried in the rocks dwarfs the total carbon content of the living world." The "unparalleled rate of coal formation in the Carboniferous and early Permian" (90% of world reserves) was caused by "an exceptionally high rate of lignin production, and exceptionally low rate of lignin breakdown, and nearly perfect conditions for preserving organic matter." As below, so above - this would have caused a significant increase in the oxygen concentration of the atmosphere. "Rising oxygen levels may therefore have favored confederations of cells, from which grew the most efficient energy system for powering life - numerous mitochondria per cell - and the first stirrings of cellular organization. If so, it is quite possible that a tendency to huddle together as clumps of cells, to alleviate the toxicity of oxygen, was an impetus to the evolution of multicellular life." "[O]xygen releases much more energy from food than do sulphur, nitrogen, or iron compounds acting as oxidants and is an order of magnitude better than fermentation. The consequences of this simple fact are startling. In particular, the length of any food chain is determined by the amount of energy lost from one level of the chain to the next. This, in turn, depends on the efficiency of energy metabolism. [...] food chains must be very short in the absence of oxygen. [But with oxygen powered respiration,] carnivorous food chains pay and the predator is born. The dominant position of predators in modern ecosystems is not possible without oxygen. It is no fluke that the Cambrian animals were the Earth's first real predators." Oxygen dissolves better in cold water and in fresh water: "giant amphipods will be among the first species to disappear if global temperatures rise, or if oxygen levels decline." Quotes something interesting from Free Radicals in Biology and Medicine: "plants and animals existing in the Carboniferous times must presumably have had enhanced antioxidant defenses." "An average adult... gets though nearly a quarter of a litre of oxygen every minute. If only 1 per cent of this leaks away to form superoxide radicals, we would still produce 1.7 kilograms of superoxide each year." A way to measure the damage caused by free radicals is the rate of excretion of oxidized DNA building blocks in the urine (e.g. 8-OHdG). So, "the damage done by breathing for one year is equivalent to a whole-body radiation dose of 1 sievert (or 1 joule energy per kilogram)." "The genes that protect against radiation are not only the same as those that protect against oxygen toxicity, but are also the same as many of those that protect against other types of physical stress such as heat, infection, heavy metals, or toxins. [...] The reason for this cross-protection is that many different physical stresses all funnel in to a single common damage process in the cell, so all can be withstood through common protective mechanisms. This shared pathology is a rise in oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is defined as an imbalance between free-radical production and antioxidant protection. However, it is not just a pathological state, but also acts as a signal to the cell that it is under threat." "The integration of protective mechanisms against oxidative stress raises the possibility that life might have evolved ways of dealing with oxygen toxicity long before there was any oxygen in the atmosphere - ionizing radiation alone might do the trick." His theory of aging: "The impression that ageing is programmed is strongest in animals that undergo 'catastrophic' senescence. The most famous example is the Pacific salmon, though there are several others..." "Some sort of oxidative stress is a necessary signal for cells to marshal their genetic response to physiological stress. If we block oxidative stress, we may make ourselves more vulnerable to infection. Seen in this light, it is quite conceivable that we are 'refractory' to large doses of dietary antioxidants because they interfere with our response to stress." He says: "I suggest that there is a trade-off between oxidative stress as a signalling pathway that musters our defences against infection, and oxidative stress as a cause of ageing. In effect, the diseases of old age are the price we pay for the way in which we are set up to handle infections and other forms of stress in our youth." "Infectious diseases cause a rise in oxidative stress, which is largely responsible for coordinating our genetic response to the infection. As we age, mitochondrial respiration also causes a rise in oxidative stress, which activates essentially the same genes through a common mechanism that involves transcription factors like NFkB. Unlike infections, however, ageing is not easily reversed: mitochondrial damage accumulated continuously. The stress response and inflammation therefore persist, and this creates a harsh environment for the expression of 'normal' genes. The expression of normal genes in an oxidized environment is the basis of their negative pleiotropic effects in old age." "As we have seen, antioxidants rarely cure diseases, let alone ageing. Of the many possible explanations for this - perhaps they are not potent enough, or do not get to the right place in the right amount at the right time - the most inherently believable is that free radicals are only part of the problem." Antioxidants "cannot halt mitochondrial leakage, and cells are refractory to overloading with antioxidants, lest they smother the powerful genetic response to injury."
  
• The Soul of a Chef: The Journey Toward Perfection (4/5) We reviewed author Michael Ruhlman's The Making of a Chef in Q2. This is volume 2 in his series on professional cooking, and he writes about a 10 day Certified Master Chef exam, plus profiles chefs Michael Symon and Thomas Keller (of French Laundry and Per Se). For literary nonfiction, I would put him right with Peter Hessler among the generation that followed John McPhee. It is interesting to piece together how he got his writing career off the ground. His first book was Boys Themselves, about his all-boys day school in Cleveland. Then he hit on cooking and attended the CIA for cooking school for the Making of a Chef, which has led to a bonanza of cooking related book opportunities, many as co-authorships with famous chefs. He got in touch with a woman in Cleveland who he had heard was "one of the best-connected people in the food world with regard to knowing great chefs." It turned out that she was helping Thomas Keller put together a book: "we were going to go with a cookbook writer, but Thomas wants a real story, so we were thinking about getting a real writer."A reviewer of his first book likened his manner to John McPhee, and she said, "Oh, John McPhee. That's who someone suggested we get to do the cookbook." His thought: "John McPhee, the nonfiction writer's nonfiction writer, the literary journalist's icon, hero, guru, unreachable deity toward whom one could only strive." He gets the job, and what is interesting about researching and writing that book is, "Less that a year earlier I was making brown sauce in the American Bounty restaurant at the Culinary Institute of America, and now I was about to be given entree into the kitchen of the French Laundry, to interview its cooks and purveyors, taste anything I wanted, watch the cooking, try to get inside the mind of this unusual chef, and eat several times at this place, one of the best restaurants in America." When he was there 20 years ago, the tasting menu was $65 and now it's $350. Keller believed in butter: "butter, butter, butter, give me more butter." "After the reduction sauces of nouvelle arrived on the scene, and the country grew concerned about the amount of fat it ate, bearnaise and its associates all but vanished. Keller served it with reverence." As a friend of CBS says, "French cooking is the art of maximizing the highest tolerance in a dish for consumption of butter." "One of the things you learn in culinary school and working in restaurants is that everything, but everything gets a sauce. Nothing is complete without a sauce. You will never at a good restaurant be served a piece of meat until it has been sauced. Appetizers, salads, pastas, entrees, and desserts always, always got some form of sauce. Sauce is so pervasive sometimes it's the only thing you get, in which case it's called soup. Sauces are a big deal, the main flavor enhancer, the seasoning, the moisture, the counterpoint. Because meat based sauces, sauces that begin as stock, are not easy and are easily ruined or bad - thick and pasty, tasteless, gummy, gunky, muddy, scorched, oversalted, underskimmed, fatty, greasy, wrong consistency, wrong color, insufficiently strained, cloudy - because so much could go wrong with a sauce, sauce was the true test of a cook, proof of the chef's subtlety and grace." The business of restaurants - Michael Symon talking about serving boring filet mignon: "Who's more stupid: them for eating it or me for not serving it when they ask?" Symon wasn't generous with sauces - but when Ruhlman would point out a "dry" dish, he'd say, "I know, we sell more wine that way!" Ruhlman reminiscing about CIA training: "I learned efficiency of movement to minimize wasted energy and time, and the idea of efficiency of movement extended to intellectual work. I began to value speed of movement more than ever before."
• Wooden Boats: In Pursuit of the Perfect Craft at an American Boatyard (4/5) After writing his cooking book, he moves to Martha's Vineyard, where two boat builders Nat and Ross "are doing in Vineyard Haven what everyone thinks is happening in Maine but isn't". "Rarely was a working class so well enmeshed with an upper class, the wealthy and well heeled who paid for their product, as in the world of wooden boats. In few places anywhere did the rich and successful and famous revere the working class more than in this world." "[W]ooden boats, when they're being sold, are invariably old and tired and leak like hell. That's why they're being sol! No one sells a beautiful wooden boat in excellent condition that's great to sail - he'd be a fool. Boats like that, people keep: that's why they have them in the first place. What happens is that someone neglects a great wooden boat for too many years, and when it gets to be too expensive and too much of a headache to repair, then he sells it." "Old wooden boats you're forever repairing: broken ribs, water raining through the deck onto the bunks, seeping inexorably through the cracks... Fiberglass doesn't leak. Fiberglass doesn't rot. If you neglect wood, the wood resents it. Fiberglass couldn't care less. Wood is humanities and the arts, fiberglass is science. Wood is emotion, fiberglass is reason. And yet a few people kept building boats out of wood in the modern 1960s and even in the 1970s - oddballs, back-to-nature hippies, and eccentrics who just happened to like them. Wooden boats often stick around for a long time, and those tired old wooden boats were cheap for impecunious yachties willing to do a whole lot of work on them, willing to spend more time working than sailing, if they were lucky enough to do any sailing at all (often, floating was as far as they got)." "But as the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, so many things were being made of plastic [that] 'plastic' turned into a metaphor for cheapness [and] impermanence...wood was the opposite." The G&B boat builders had a man in Suriname sourcing wood: "He kept an eye out for pieces of wood that were curved. A strong curved piece of wood is useless to a carpenter, a cabinetmaker, a house builder, but it's treasure to a boatwright. A boat is composed mainly of curves, and if a piece of wood has grown with a curve in it, that curve will be stronger than one manipulated by bending or sawing." Constraints: "Fiberglass boats often have true curves, but that isn't a given. You can make a fiberglass boat in any shape you want, unlike a traditional wooden boat. Thus many designers do make them any shape, most often enlarging the belly unnaturally to create more sleeping space below. The shape of a wooden boat is limited by how far wood can bend." When this book was written, Maine and Washington state were the states with the highest number of wooden boat building and designing firms. The west coast wooden boat center was Port Townsend, WA, on the Olympic Peninsula. Martha's Vineyard: "There's a level of culture here that you don't find in other places with money." "The thing about building boats of wood is you never really get as good as you want to be at it. Furniture makers approach perfection. Their joints get tighter and tighter, and the pieces are more perfect. And boats are the same way. The more you do it, the better you get. But you don't take a piece of furniture and thrash it around in salt water and sunshine. If a furniture maker took his dining room table and went out and rowed it around in the harbor, and then let it sit out in the sunshine for a couple years, what would be left?" "With [a wooden] boat, all the pieces are gathered from all over the world and put together by artists. With a [fiberglass] boat, it comes in a big barrel from New Jersey. The value of a wooden boat goes up every year like a house's. The value of a plastic boat goes down every year like a car's." "[Cedar] is the least expensive good-quality wood you can buy. It's light, durable, rot resistant." "When Nat hikes through a forest, he sees boats." "[T]he workman is, or should be, invested in his toolbox; he therefore instructs every new apprentice to build his own box as his first order of duty, and he points him to the scraps of topical hardwoods stacked against the wall beside the wood-burning stove." "Jon ran into a problem as soon as he tried to get material for his newsletter. Boatbuilders are not typically the most loquacious of people - they build boats, they don't contribute to newsletters." "Not only did Nat have the good fortune to find and stay on the perfect spot of earth for what he wanted to do, he also had the good luck to meet another man who had found the smart thing and who shared his appreciation of the elemental appeal and fundamental sense of traditional wooden vessels."
  
• House: A Memoir (3/5) Another Ruhlman book. This time he buys a 100 year old house in a leafy suburb of Cleveland (his hometown) and deals with having it restored. Describing Cleveland Heights: "The houses here had been created largely in the first three decades of the century-spacious Tudors, humble but elegant Colonials, Queen Annes, Beaux Arts, quintessential bungalows, Prairie, Victorian - virtually every style of residential architecture from those decades was represented here, neighboring one another, along with a few nineteenth century farmhouses. On a twenty minute bike ride, you might see a sizeable swath of residential architectural history, homes built with the materials that were mainly taken for granted when they were used - first-growth timber, blocks of quarried sandstone that had been hand carved. Even the bricks had a patina and warmth that distinguished them. The operative fact was that the structures built during or before the 1920s had a textural richness in their details - the mullions, the eaves, the gables - and had an integrity in their materials, not of which existed anymore." "Hiring a moving company for the first time was a definitive indication of adulthood. I'd always thought of U-Haul as an unfortunate but necessary fact of life... I am confident in marking my adulthood not at or before my marriage, not at the birth of either of my children, not at the publication of my first book, but rather at the desire and ability to hire a moving company."
  
• Eat a Peach: A Memoir (2/5) I've been enjoying food writing so much lately (Bill Buford, Michael Ruhlman) that I thought I would give David Chang's memoir a chance. I've heard good things about his restaurants (e.g. Momofuku) in New York and Los Angeles, but this book was pretty bad. Unlike the high-functioning Ruhlman or Buford, Chang is (or was) a depressed drug abuser. He had a good vision for what to cook and sell, but a messy personal life and not great business sense. His goal was to be a popular cook at all costs rather than some other more balanced and sensible goal. He also had quite a bit of racial resentment from being a second generation Asian immigrant.
  
• World Made by Hand: A Novel (4/5) This is architectural critic James Howard Kunstler's 2008 novel about peak oil. It takes place in an upstate New York town that has reverted to an agrarian economy with most of the (remaining) population working in food production after energy scarcity and a nuclear attack collapses the country. It is the first in what ended up being a four part series of novels. Here's a funny one-star review by a bugman: "Welcome to the town of Union Grove, New York, where the men are brutal, the women are subservient, and non-white people don’t exist." This paragraph is classic Kunstler: "It was hard to imagine that we used to cultivate lawns. My yard was now a raised bed garden. It was geometrical, a cruciform pattern, the beds transacted on the diagonal as well, with brick paths carefully laid. With our many material privations, it was not possible to live without beauty anymore. I spent a lot of time in my garden, and the feel of being in it was as important to me as the vegetable I grew. At the center, I built a birdbath out of stacked granite blocks with a concave piece of slate on top that caught the rain. The birds seemed satisfied with it and it was pleasant to look at. I would have preferred a statue of the goddess Diana in the manner of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, but I hadn't managed to scrounge one up." Another: "The old high school complex itself was a 1970s-vintage modernist monstrosity, a U-shaped set of low-slung rectilinear boxes like ten thousand other schools around the nation from the period. Seeing the building usually made me deeply sad and even a little angry, the way that refrigerator in my garden did. Its vision of yesterday's tomorrow seemed pitiful. Children like my Daniel and Genna had sat in those very box buildings under buzzing fluorescent lights listening to their science teachers prattle about the wonders of space travel and gene splicing..." Or: "I went and hit the power button on the old stereo. In doing it, I was conscious of putting something behind me: the expectation that things would ever be normal again. There was a kind of relief in it. I also turned off the electric lights so they wouldn't come on and scare anybody again."
• Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization (4/5) See full review on CBS. First in a series of tobacco books for a reading program.
  
• In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (3.5/5) This is Nathaniel Philbrick's (author of Mayflower, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye) story of the sinking of a Nantucket whaleship in 1820 in the south Pacific. It was attacked by a whale that it was hunting! The sailors were in trouble when their ship sank and they were left with three creaky, smaller whaleboats far from land and without good navigation equipment or much knowledge of Pacific islands. So much trouble that they end up resorting to cannibalism on two of the boats that were rescued. (One didn't make it.) Highlights: "Nantucket's shipowners could be as fierce in their own bloodless way as any whaleman. They might 'act the Quaker," but that didn't keep them from pursuing profits with a lethal enthusiasm. In Moby-Dick, one of the Pequod's owners is Bildad, a pious Quaker whose religious scruples do not prevent him from extorting cruelly long lays from the crew (he offers Ishmael a 1/777 lay!). With his bible in one hand and ledgerbook in the other, Bildad resembles a lean, Quakerly John D. Rockefeller..." "[T]he forecastle had its merits. Its isolation (the only way to enter it was from a hatchway in the deck) meant that its occupants could create their own world. When he sailed on a merchant voyage in the 1830s, Richard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, preferred the cameraderie of the forecastle to steerage..." "[I]n 1848 came the discovery of gold in California. Hundreds of Nantucketers surrendered to the lure of easy wealth in the West. Abandoning careers as whalemen, they shipped out as passengers bound for San Francisco, packed into the same ships in which they had once pursued the mighty sperm whale. The Golden Gate became the burial ground of countless Nantucket whaleships, abandoned by their crews and left to rot on the mudflats. Long before Edwin Drake struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859, Nantucket's economic fate had been determined. Over the next twenty years, the island's population would shrink from ten thousand to three thousand."
• The Rediscovery of Tobacco: Smoking, Vaping, and the Creative Destruction of the Cigarette (4/5) Second book in our tobacco reading program. Author Jacob Grier is a Portland coffee shop commie (see physique), pro-BLM, but he's staunchly pro-smokers' rights and he even smokes cigars himself. He makes an interesting point: "the cigarette's domination of the 20th century is a glaring anomaly." Prior to the mass production of the cigarette in 1895, people used tobacco in all kinds of ways, most of which did not involve inhalation of smoke into the lungs: cigars, snuff, and chaw, for example. He asks, "Could smoking in the twenty-first century come to resemble the diversity of tobacco use in the past? Could tobacco follow the trajectory of goods like coffee and beer, rebounding from corporate consolidation to enter a new age of appreciation for quality and variety?" Cigarette smoke has a lower pH than pipe or cigar smoke, which makes it possible to inhale it into the lungs. "This inhalation encourages a different pattern of use. Smokers of cigars and pipes absorb nicotine more gradually. Cigarette smokers become accustomed instead to sharp peaks of stimulation, creating cravings that can only be satisfied by frequently re-upping with another smoke. The unfamiliar potency of the cigarette brought on dependence in the smokers who took it up. Although this was not initially an intentional design feature of cigarettes, it was a boon to producers. Through accidents of agriculture and processing they created the most effective and addictive nicotine delivery vehicle ever devised. 'The cigarette was to tobacco as the hypodermic syringe was to opiates.'" It was WWI, and providing cigarettes to men in the trenches, that really made cigarettes and that made western governments supporters of Big Tobacco. By 1922, cigarettes were outselling loose leaf and plug tobacco in the U.S. Grier's idea is that cigarettes are the problem and other forms of nicotine delivery have a much better risk-reward tradeoff. He calls it "Slow Tobacco": "The [cigarette] is made for a five-minute work break... A pipe or cigar, in contrast, requires a commitment of time. [...] The need to slow down and savor the tobacco, appreciating its subtle nuances, is part of the appeal. For people who decide to experiment with Slow Tobacco, we might go so far as to offer advice mirroring Michael Pollan's for eating, urging most importantly to avoid the deadly and addictive trap of cigarettes: 'Smoke tobacco, if you choose. Not too often. Mostly cigars and pipes.'" He looks at meta-analyses of smoking risk. "Heavy cigar smokers and cigar smokers who also smoke cigarettes suffer the highest risks. Of the studies that examined men smoking one-to-two cigars per day, none reported statistically significant increases in risk for all-cause mortality or heart disease, and only one reported a statistically significant increase for cancer." "For people who smoke infrequently and do not consciously inhale, the dose-response relationship for smoking-related cancers suggests that any elevation in risk must be quite low." He points out that Obamacare insurers are only allowed to discriminate against smokers (which is ridiculous) and that HHS regulation defines "tobacco use" as four or more times per week. Mentions The Cult of Statistical Significance, a book by two economists, which argues, "Researchers run their regressions, or they review the published literature, and the only question they ask is whether an effect exists." "Yes or no, they say, and then they stop. They have ceased asking the scientific question 'How much is the effect?" And they have therefore ceased being interested in the pragmatic questions that follow: 'What Difference Does the Effect Make?' and 'Who Cares?' They have become, as we put it, 'sizeless'." He goes through a history of bogus claims that anti-smoking researchers have made in recent years, like "thirdhand smoke". "Prominent anti-tobacco researchers have adopted a thoroughly ends-justify-the-means approach to science. They will promote any finding that helps delegitimize tobacco use, no matter how far-fetched or unsupported by the evidence." As part of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement with states, the big tobacco companies were required "to dismantle pro-industry organizations and fund anti-smoking research." So the situation is like climate change (formerly global warming) research, where only one side is funded, and there's no pushback against the zealous ideologues. There's a good chapter (Bootleggers and Baptists) about how the MSA in 1998 was fantastic for big tobacco, "structured in ways that converted the tobacco companies into a legally protected cartel." "All fifty states passed laws requiring cigarette companies that were not part of the MSA to either join the agreement or pay penalties..." "There's no doubt that the largest financial stakeholder in our industry is our state governments," said a tobacco executive. Another helpful regulation was the Tobacco Control Act of 2009, which gave the FDA regulatory authority. Its anti-competitive measure is the one that requires the FDA to review new tobacco products before they are introduced for sale. (Products sold before 2007 are grandfathered in.) "The Tobacco Control Act essentially froze the market for cigarettes, protecting Marlboro's market share." The bootlegger and baptist dynamic is that "Big Tobacco benefits by raising the costs faced by these potential competitors, and the moral case for regulation is provided by anti-smoking groups, many of them funded in part by cigarette makers' own MSA payments." There's a Scandinavian tobacco usage paradox: "Tobacco use in Sweden and Norway is still robust; it has simply shifted to forms that are much safer than cigarettes. The Scandinavian experience shows that significant gains in public health can be achieved by persuading people to give up smoking even if they don't give up tobacco or nicotine altogether." "The methods of production used in making snus render it chemically distinct from older American-style chewing tobacco and other oral tobaccos... Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Swedish snus producers developed standards to minimize carcinogenic constituents created by microbial growth and fire-curing of tobacco. Contemporary snus is made with air-cured tobacco leaves and a steam heating process that results in much lower concentrations of nitrosamines..." We were just talking about how paradoxes are refutations. "Snus became available in the United States fairly recently, though it remains a very niche part of the tobacco market. This is likely due to its association with chewing tobacco, since the differences between chew and snus are not obvious to the casual consumer. The FDA also forbids snus companies from marketing their product as a lower risk alternative to cigarettes..." He concludes the book: "The electronic cigarette may turn out to be the most significant innovation in the nicotine market since the Bonsack machine automated cigarette rolling in the 1880s. Vaping arose while mainstream tobacco control activists obsessed over trivial ideas like changing the colors of cigarette packaging; that it arose at all is thanks to a decade of permissionless innovation..."
  

Wednesday Night Links

• SARS-1 died out before it could get very far, but not before inspiring a whole program of research that, in the end, proved deeply advantageous to most of the SARS-1 genotype. Prominent virologists, entire governments and NGOs all fell under the mysterious spell of SARS, fantasising for years about its genes and embarking upon lunatic hunts for more SARS virions in remote Chinese caves. Ultimately, they succeeded in producing and releasing to the world a modified and enhanced version of SARS, SARS-2, which is 80% similar to the original SARS-1 genome. All those genes free to replicate widely once more. This new virus has an extended phenotype of its own, of course. It has hypnotised our whole world. A vast part of our pharmaceutical industry now works for the virus, producing genetic instructions for its most critical anatomical feature, its masterpiece, the spike protein. Most of our governments want nothing more than to inject instructions for spike into all of mankind. Not only does our slavish replication of virus RNA represent a victory for SARS-2 in itself. As with MDV, injecting instructions for legacy spike into billions of humans also facilitates spread in ways we did not anticipate and still do not fully understand. The worldwide public health establishment fought for a year to prevent the development of far more effective natural immunity to SARS-2, thus ensuring a clear path for the insane spike protein injections and their infection enhancements. And then there is all of the worshipful research on SARS-2, ever eager to cede this virus magical properties. Top to bottom, this is the behaviour of the extended SARS-2 phenotype. If you think this taking things too far, consider the grant proposal that the notorious EcoHealth Alliance, headed by Peter Daszak, submitted to DARPA in 2018. These are the famous American NGO collaborators with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the proposal represents a direct window onto the program of research that gave us second-edition new-and-improved SARS. The proposed “research” activities involve activities so obviously reckless that they border on evil: Relentless bat sampling in Yunnan caves thought to be the approximate origin of SARS, creating samples of chimeric SARS-related coronaviruses optimised to infect humans, introducing these optimised viruses to humanised mice so they might actually infect cells, spraying of aerosolised spike proteins or virus vectors into caves to “boost” bat immunity – these and more are what the scientists associated with EcoHealth Alliance proposed to do. It is at base a bizarre kind of scientised worship of SARS and its infectiousness, and beyond that an effort of the lingering extended phenotype of SARS-1 to resurrect itself in some form and return to human hosts. It succeeded. [eugyppius] 
• The vaccines gave billions of people antibodies to legacy spike proteins, including anti-NTD neutralising antibodies and anti-NTD enhancing antibodies. Delta is evolving to escape the neutralising antibodies, but not the enhancing antibodies. Which is what you would expect. We have sown antibodies against one viral protein in the lungs of half of mankind, and that protein has now evolved slight modifications to use those antibodies to its advantage where it can, and to escape the rest. Remember, we are still talking about a single domain in the complex spike protein: There are other antibodies to RBD that still disadvantage Delta. The net effect is still that all of these antibodies, added together – particularly those against the RBD – hurt rather than help. There are, however, Delta strains with key escape RBD mutations. The authors of this preprint find that four such mutations, already out there in various Delta sub-strains, are sufficient for Delta to evade the anti-RBD antibodies more or less completely. [eugyppius] 
• We found no significant difference in cycle threshold values between vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic groups infected with SARS-CoV-2 Delta. Given the substantial proportion of asymptomatic vaccine breakthrough cases with high viral levels, interventions, including masking and testing, should be considered for all in settings with elevated COVID-19 transmission. [medrxiv]
  
• As I lighted the first bowl, what struck me was the heat. Without much moisture, the ribbons burned fast and sharp. Yet as I drew more slowly, a deep, earthen husk spread into my mouth, at once pungent and delicate, with floral hints that drifted above a rich and savory base. Over the next week in Italy, I smoked little else. Dario kept a brick of the tobacco at home, wrapped in golden paper with the words “Pur Semois” stamped on top, beside a drawing of a 1950s man and the name “Vincent Manil.” Before I left, I snapped a photo of the label, planning to buy some at home. This, Dario warned me, would be difficult. The tobacco was hand-prepared in the Semois Valley of Belgium and was nearly impossible to find anywhere else. [NY Times]
• After a plumber told me about his hectic day, I advised him to ask for a raise. I informed him of the generous signing bonuses plumbers were receiving for job hopping. And that’s been my advice to every person I speak with who is doing the heavy lifting in today’s economy—ask for a raise or promotion. And for business owners with overwhelming backlogs, I suggest increasing prices until some sense of control is regained, or business is lost. A travel ball parent who owns a home restoration company told me that’s exactly what he’s been doing. He said he can’t keep up with his workflow and is so far behind he’s raising prices and turning away business. And for what it’s worth, he said if you’re in the market for new cabinets, good luck! [Cinnamond] 
• We present a 20-week study of our clinical experience with a multi-component over-the-counter (OTC) “core formulation” regimen used in a multiply exposed, high risk population. The OTC core supplementation formulations used include zinc and zinc ionophores; vitamins C, D3 and E; and l-lysine. Analysis of clinical outcome data from our sample of 113 subjects − comprised of roughly equal sized regimen-compliant (test) and non-compliant (control) groups meeting equivalent inclusion criteria of age and overall health, including prevalence of COVID-19 comorbidities − demonstrates a strong statistical significance in favor of use of the core formulations. The statistical analysis exhibits significance even with an assumption of a sub-15%, even as low as a sub-5%, post-exposure symptom-presentation rate. [link]
• Uncertainty about the demand outlook means capital expenditure discipline. That in turn means rents stay high and more of it can be returned to shareholders. It’s like tobacco! What is amazing about the 10% dividend yield is that MMP's 30 year debt yields 3.8% with 9.6% dividend yield. It is strikingly similar to the equity risk premium at Altria, whose 30 year debt yields 4% with 7.7% dividend yield on the stock. See how low Magellan's dividend yield got at the peak of the midstream boom in 2014-2015. It was yielding under 3% - yet their debt was yielding closer to 5%. Wow: if you had followed the equity risk premium as a signal to chose between owning the stock or the bonds, you would have been in their debt instead of their stock given the -200 bps spread. Now with a +580 bps spread it seems to make more sense to own the stock. [CBS]
• One key requirement for our EV of the Year—in addition to fun, value, and mission fulfillment—is that it make electric vehicles more desirable to buyers to a degree that moves the industry forward. That's where the Mach-E stands out from the 10 other vehicles we evaluated. At long last, an automaker has given us an EV that competes head to head with Tesla on design, performance, price, and range, and it neither looks nor feels like it was built in a tent. It's the perfect vehicle to rewrite preconceptions that were formed when the vast majority of EVs were too small, too slow, too expensive to buy yet too cheap to live with, and hobbled by too-short range and too-spotty public infrastructure that wouldn't allow them to venture far from home. Plus, the Mach-E has the driving dynamics and design to push new buyers past mere acceptance of EV technology to excitement. [Car and Driver]
• An 18th century French banker and philosopher named Richard Cantillon noticed an early version of this phenomenon in a book he wrote called ‘An Essay on Economic Theory.’ His basic theory was that who benefits when the state prints a bunch of money is based on the institutional setup of that state. In the 18th century, this meant that the closer you were to the king and the wealthy, the more you benefitted, and the further away you were, the more you were harmed. Money, in other words, is not neutral. This general observation, that money printing has distributional consequences that operate through the price system, is known as the “Cantillon Effect.” [Matt Stoller]
• I'm a believer in the taking advantage of the net issuance anomaly (i.e. companies retiring debt and repurchasing shares outperform those raising capital). Where does the anomaly show up today? Industries with companies that are returning capital to investors are banks, tobacco, energy, miners, pipelines. Industries that are raising capital are electric vehicles and many types of growth and tech - especially considering stock based compensation. (Although some tech is negative issuance, e.g. Apple.) The net issuance anomaly is related to our Sector Rotation Value Strategy. One logical mechanism which would cause the net issuers to under-perform is that they are in the "over-investment" part of their industry cycle. They take the proceeds of their equity and debt issuances, and they expand capacity, driving each other's economic rents down. [CBS]
• Thought I would thread something quick on ETF economics to dissuade those of you thinking about launching your own ETF. As many of you know, all registered investment companies (RIC's) operate through a separate trust, which is governed by a board of directors and has its own counsel. An ETF is a RIC just like a mutual fund. Setting up a trust is very expensive.  Operating a trust is very expensive. Which is why small, single fund operators like Goobs typically rent someone else's trust to launch their product(s), in this case Advisor Shares'.  I have been on seven different trusts in 16 years. Here is a standard proforma P&L of renting someone else's trust.  The typical ETF breaks even at around $30mm in AUM.  In other words, at anything below $30mm, in this case, you as manager cut a check back to the trust for operating costs. In this example, between $10-12mm in AUM means you pay about $150,000 per year for the privilege of running an ETF.  Obviously, without a distribution plan to get to $30mm+, this becomes a fool's errand (trust me on this one). My guess is Goobs is planning on converting (gradually) many of his run-of-the-mill equity allocations to this ETF.  Instead of Ross choosing the Schwab drop-down ETF model for Mrs. Havercamp, he will just jam her into this steaming pile of garbage. [Peter DeCaprio]
• Ishmael doesn't tell us a whole lot more about how lays worked; there was no need to for purposes of the story.  But fortunately for the curious, the system is very well explicated in a scholarly, highly detailed study of the nineteenth-century whaling industry, In Pursuit of Leviathan, by Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman, and Karin Gleiter, published in 1997 by the University of Chicago as part of the National Bureau of Economic Research Series on Long-Term Factors in Economic Development. First, to clear up one misconception, the lays were not sequentially numbered from the largest share to the smallest.  In other words, the system didn't involve person A getting a 10th, B getting an 11th, C getting a 12th, and so on, until every last investor and sailor was accounted for.  For one thing, such a system would never work mathematically -- you would exceed 100% by the time you got to the 26th share. Instead, the numbers of the lays jumped.  For example, in the November 1843 voyage of the Abigail of New Bedford, the "shortest" lay (i.e., the largest share in compensation) was, unsurprisingly, the captain's, at 16 -- meaning one sixteenth (or 0.0625) of the profits, assuming there were any.   The first mate's lay was 29, the second mate's 50, the third mate's 72.  The cooper -- typically, one of the most important artisans on a whale ship -- got the 55th lay.  Each of the harpooneers (a/k/a "boatsteerers") got the 95th lay.  All the remaining lays were well above 100.  Added up, the lays totaled about three tenths, which left about seven tenths for the "owners," who could probably be more accurately referred to as partners. According to In Pursuit, a 70-30 split of the profits between the owners/partners, on one hand, and the captain and crew, on the other, was typical.  In addition, looking at data from over a thousand whaling voyages out of New Bedford, the authors of In Pursuit found that the distribution of lays followed a pattern: captains tended to get lays in the mid-teens, first mates in the 20s, second mates in the 30s or 40s, third mates in the 50s or 60s, etc. [ahab-beckons]
  

Monday Morning Links

•  [E]nergy usage is going to keep rising, led by China, the US and India, while energy transitions tend to both take a very long time and never actually end. We just pile new sources on top of old. The world still uses much the same amount of traditional biomass (wood etc) as it did 100 years ago. Even after many years of efforts, coal, oil and gas still make up 80 per cent of our global energy mix, pretty much exactly the same number as a decade ago. We are running to stand still. [FT]
• The recent rally in oil stocks has been “the biggest dead-cat bounce in history,” said Jampel, who’s also the co-chief investment officer of HITE Hedge, which oversees about $650 million in all for clients. [Bloomberg]
• Over the next few quarters, Dorchester may be able to pay distributions that are the highest it has paid since 2008. At current strip prices, Dorchester could pay a quarterly average of $0.60 per unit between Q3 2021 and the end of 2022. Longer term I am still assuming slightly lower commodity prices (such as $65 WTI oil). At that oil price, Dorchester's estimated value is around $19 to $19.50 per unit, while it should be able to sustain distributions of around $0.50 per quarter. [DMLP]
  
• Crop harvesting, in essence, is a statistical process. It’s powered by the lack of overlap in the probability distributions of the physical traits of different parts of a plant. Crops that can’t be harvested in this way remain extremely labor intensive and expensive to produce. Strawberries, for instance, must be picked by hand due to their fragile nature. As a result, strawberries upwards of $2.00 per pound, and labor makes up about 40-60% of their production cost. For comparison, corn (which is harvested mechanically) costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 11 cents per pound, and labor consists of just over 1% of its production costs. Timber harvesting provides an interesting example as well. Trees are harvested mechanically, but NOT via simple repetitive movements or a filter-like process. Instead, large boom-mounted saws cut down trees one at a time, using human-like movements (reach out, grasp tree, engage saw, move tree to truck). Thus despite being mechanized, timber harvesting doesn’t seem to have seen the same gains in labor productivity that other parts of agriculture have - between 1950 and 1980, rather than decreasing, Oregon’s logging employment moved more or less in concert with it’s volume of wood harvested. [link]
• Many of the waterfront hamlets of the Istrian peninsula—a piece of land now split among Italy, Slovenia and Croatia—were once Venetian possessions. Even now, they are marked architecturally by distinctive campanile, or bell-towers, as well as by the sort of sinuously sloping windows, many garlanded by vines, seen in some of Muggia’s private houses. Since the fall of the Venetian Empire in the late 18th century, the region was largely under the aegis of the Austrian Habsburgs, who based their maritime operations from the splendid limestone city of Trieste (now in Italy). In the 20th century, the region was variously carved up between Italy and what was then Yugoslavia. Briefly, in the postwar years, from 1947-1954, it was legally its own territory, the Free Territory of Trieste, stretching from the town of Duino, a little over 10 miles northwest from Trieste, all the way to Novigrad, in what is now Croatia. Two sets of national borders now divide the peninsula. But, for the people who live and work in the geographically fluid region, the Istrian peninsula still retains a distinct, unified character. [WSJ]
• You can find quality craft beer flowing in Astoria and Warrenton any day of the year, but every February, stouts take center stage. During Stout Month, Fort George Brewery, Rogue, Astoria Brewing Company, Buoy Beer Company and other participating Astoria & Warrenton bars and brewpubs offer expanded and limited-time selections of this notoriously strong, dark and delicious beer. You can embrace Astoria’s dark side by visiting anytime during Stout Month, or plan your trip around the Festival of the Dark Arts for a weekend of dark beer, dark arts and other shenanigans at Fort George Brewery. [link]
• Settled people do not belong only to each other: they belong to a place, and out of that sense of shared roots there grow the farm, the village and the city. Vegetation cults are the oldest and most deeply rooted in the unconscious, since they are the cults that drive out the totemism of the hunter-gatherer, and celebrate the earth itself, as the willing accomplice in our bid to stay put. The new farming economy, and the city grows from it, generated a sense of holiness of the planted crop, and in particular of the staple food – which is grass, usually in the form of corn or rice – and the vine that wraps the trees above it. Such, surely, is the prehistory of the bread and wine of the Eucharist. [Roger Scruton]
  
• French/civil law countries seem to be systematically inferior to common law countries for investing, because this paper finds that civil law is less protective of minority shareholders, specifically in the legal treatment with respect to looting by insiders. I do not understand why investors tolerate these legal regimes where the rules of the game put them at a disadvantage. The goal of investing is to receive coupons, payments of cash, not annual reports with nicely escalating accounts (that you will never touch). Investing in Brazil or China is like buying a noncumulative preferred stock. They are trick securities, unsafe at almost any price. [CBS]
• As part of our re-nicotinization research, we may at some point write a blog post on the costs vs benefits of using nicotine. Potentially beneficial aspects of nicotine that you can find via anecdote or actual research are: cognitive enhancer / nootropic, energy booster, appetite suppressant, anti-depressant / mood enhancer, sociability enhancer, "protective action against nigrostriatal damage" (Parkinson’s disease), and competition with coronavirus for ACE2 receptors. Potentially harmful aspects of nicotine are vasoconstriction, tachycardia / other cardiovascular effects, and up-regulation of ACE2 receptor expression (offsetting factor for coronavirus risk risk). Another aspect to consider would be whether tolerance / adaptation / receptor up-regulation mean that there is truly a net benefit from consuming nicotine. (There is the same question regarding net benefit given tolerance and adaptation with caffeine.) [CBS]
  

Review of Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately

The first book in our tobacco reading program is Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization by Iain Gately. 

Tobacco originated in South America in the Andes (present day Peru and Ecuador) and was probably first cultivated by humans as long as 7,000 years ago. It spread throughout the Americas and by the time Europeans made contact with the continent in the 15th century it was used by every group of Indians. Some highlights from the book:

• The preferred implement for smoking tobacco [among South American Indians] was the cigar, which could be of prodigious size, especially those prepared by shamans, where examples of a meter or more in length are not uncommon. These were made from rolls of cured tobacco, often wrapped around a stick or the rib of a banana leaf.
• Cigars were offered as tokens of welcome and friendship. They were smoked for relaxation and as self-administered medicine. They were employed to keep evil spirits and thunderstorms at bay. Such was their ubiquity in South American society that it is impossible to isolate a single or prime reason for smoking. The question "Why Smoke?" could have been answered effectively and truthfully with "Because we are humans."
• Following tobacco's historical progress from its center of origin northwards into Central America, methods of consumption became less diverse, with smoking gaining at the expense of other tobacco habits. The earliest historical record of tobacco use in Central America resides among the artifacts of the Mayans, a sophisticated metropolitan civilization that flourished between about 2000 BC and AD 900. The Mayans farmed tobacco and considered its consumption to be not only a form of pleasure, but also a ritual of immense significance. At least two of their principal gods were habitual smokers.
• Archaeological evidence, in the form of a primitive pipe, indicates that tobacco had reached the northern part of the American continent prior to 2500 BC. Its prehistorical use appears to have been near universal, from the swamps and deserts in the south, through the forests and across the great plains to the limits of tree growth in the north. With the exception of the frozen tundra of Alaska and Canada, wherever there were men, tobacco was consumed. Some tribes who practiced no other form of agriculture planted and cared for tobacco. The Tlingit Indians, an Alaskan tribe of hunter-gatherers, took a break from hunting and gathering to cultivate tobacco. Similarly some of the plains tribes, including the Blackfoot and the Crow, to whom growing vegetables was anathema, planted and nourished the weed.
• Smoking was a defining habit of the diverse tribes and civilizations that occupied pre-Colombian North America. Every one of its cultures, living and vanished, used tobacco. In some cases, the only mementos civilizations have left to posterity have been their smoking apparatus. Not only was tobacco use common to all the inhabitants of North America, but they seem to have been unanimous in their selection of the pipe for its enjoyment.
• This existing [cannabis] smoking tradition assisted tobacco's absorption into African culture. By the 1600s, every tribe the Europeans encountered on the continent were devotees of [tobacco]. Even the bushmen of the Kalahari desert, who scorned belongings other than their hunting bows and the ostrich eggs in which they transported water, took tobacco... The Africans' penchant for tobacco even shocked the English, whose consumption of [it] was considered amazing by fellow Europeans.
• [In 1619] John Rolfe made the greatest ever innovation in the history of tobacco use by introducing the concept of brands. He named Virginia's product Orinoco, a word, at that time, suffused with the mysteries of Eldorado as described by Sir Walter Raleigh. Lighter in both color and flavor than its Spanish and Portuguese competitors, it burned with a unique and delicate fragrance... Brands per se had existed since Roman times, principally for medicines, weapons, and wines. However, the concept that identity could improve worth so perfectly fitted tobacco that branding was reinvented by the tobacco trade. Although Rolfe did no more than attach a name to Jamestown's only product, this small step raised it above the level of a commodity. A single evocative word ensured Virginian tobacco was remembered and preferred by the consumer. The English loved Orinoco, or the concept. By 1620 it commanded a premium over every other sort of tobacco.
  
• James I, who must have felt that tobacco had only appeared in the British Isles to vex him, issued proclamations in 1620, 1621, and from his deathbed in 1624 forbidding the domestic production of tobacco. As the same time he legislated against tobacco smuggling, for the weed flooded into England over every unguarded inch of coastline. James's subjects took as much notice of his proclamations as they had of his Counterblaste. His son King Charles I was forced to issue a similar prohibition in 1633... Needless to say the best way Charles could think of protecting the health of his wanton subjects was by ensuring they could only smoke tobacco that had been properly taxed.
• When the plague visited Holland, Dutch physicians put their faith in tobacco, and, if their accounts are to be believed, it was rewarded. Isbard von Diemerbroek, writing as the Black Death raged at Nijmegen in 1636, declared: "As I have proved by long experience, tobacco is the most effective means of avoiding the plague, providing the leaf is in good condition... One day, when I was visiting one of [its] victims, the reek of the pestilence seemed to overpower me, and I felt all the symptoms of infection - dizziness, nausea, fear: I cut my visit short and hurried home, where I smoked six or seven pipes of tobacco. I was myself once more, and able to go out again the same day.
• [I]f European governments had any official view on tobacco, it was biased towards its potential as a source of income. Why allow religious sentiment to interfere with such a lucrative substance? Some European countries, including Austria, whose capital, Vienna, was besieged by the now smoking Ottomans in 1683, actually encouraged the nascent smoking habit. Emperor Leopold I introduced a national monopoly on tobacco's sale, with the aim of ensuring it was as widely available as possible throughout his realm.
• Tobacco's influence over English learning extended beyond the classroom. It reacquired an association it had enjoyed among the Aztecs, whereby smoking was identified with meditation. As, to English eyes, smoke was drunk, it must therefore nourish something, but as it had no substance, this therefore could only be the spirit. Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist since Aristotle, smoked incessantly. Whether this habit contributed or not to his inventive genius is impossible to determine, for Newton smoked from his infancy until his death bed. 
• Napoleon's personal tobacco habit was snuffing, the favorite pastime of the ancien regime. He took a kilo of snuff each week, the equivalent to a hundred-a-day cigarette habit. 
• Gone were the silver mines of Peru, Mexico had finally broken free after years of lawlessness, taking Florida and California with it. Cuba, the 'Pearl of the Antilles' had to be humored lest it ran away as well. Cuban tobacco production flourished with the arrival of free trade. Havana cigars found a ready market in Europe, where it had been discovered that cigars kept their freshness better on a long sea voyage than bulk tobacco, resulting in a preference for Cuban cigars over cigars rolled in Spain with the same weed.
• Despite the ubiquity of smoking in the wild west, and rising demand for Cuban cigars along the east coast, the principal tobacco habit in the United States was smokeless. For every man who lit a cigar or inhaled from the sacred calumet, ten more took their tobacco raw. [This is early 19th C America.]
• As cigarettes progressed from being a foreign novelty to a common Parisian habit, they came to the attention of France's state tobacco monopoly, SEITA, which had survived, or been reinstated, through the course of a revolution, a republic, and a tyranny. Its then beneficiary, Louis Napoleon III, was happy to see Frenchmen smoking. "This vice brings in one hundred million francs in taxes every year," he remarked when asked to take action against the habit. "I will certainly forbid it at once - as soon as you can name a virtue that brings in as much revenue."
• Victorian writers also formulated romantic and universal answers to the question of "Why smoke?" Charles Kingsley... following in the footsteps of other children's writers who celebrated the weed in print, presented tobacco's virtues thus: "A lone man's companion, a bachelor's friend, a hungry man's food, a sad man's cordial, a wakeful man's sleep, and a chilly man's fire."
• Although cigarettes were the principal beneficiary of Hollywood,  other tobacco habits were also represented on screen in accordance with the prevailing conventions of literature. What a character smoked on film was a visual clue to their personality and background. The Victorian hierarchy of taste continued to be applied. A pipe smoker was a thinker, or a dependable member of the middle class. [...] Cigars were a celluloid power symbol...
• The tendency of men in power to smoke cigars was noted and this habit too became aspirational. And so tobacco continued its triumphal march. By 1930, as Count Corti, a tobacco historian observed, most people in industrialized societies smoked: 'a glance at the statistics proves convincingly that the non-smokers are a feeble and ever dwindling minority. The hopeless nature of their struggle becomes plain when we remember that all countries, whatever their form of government, now encourage and facilitate the passion for smoking in every conceivable way, merely for the sake of the revenue which it produces.
• [By the 1970s...] the smoking debate had arrived at a philosophical crossroads. Both the British and American governments were holding back from taking further measures against their subjects and citizens. They had been warned, regulated, and taxed. It would be a breach of the social contract to impose further on individual rights. Cigarettes killed people, but so did cars, and, for that matter, eating too much. The fundamental liberal principle of democratic government - that state intervention should be limited to occasions when an individual's behavior might damage others, and not if they only risked themselves - stood firm in the Anglo-Saxon world.
  

As a re-nicotinization investor, the ubiquity of tobacco usage - enjoyed in some form by every human society where it has ever been introduced - is very reassuring. This universality surpasses other widely-desired but not quite ubiquitous intoxicants like ethanol and cannabis. The human body is wired to enjoy nicotine, and that is not going to change on our investing time frame. It's Lindy.  

A key theme of this book is the ever-swinging pendulum in developed countries from moral panic over tobacco to acceptance. Some of these changes have coincided with changes in fashion in the form of usage of nicotine: snuffing, smoking (cigars/pipes/cigarettes), or chewing.

Because the cost of goods for tobacco products is so low and the enjoyment (consumer surplus) is so high, a reasonable retail price can provide room for quite high tax revenue to governments while still providing an attractive profit margin to a manufacturer and a retailer. Because the capital reinvestment requirement of tobacco or nicotine businesses is low, but the regulatory burden is high and there are powerful brand effects (social proof, usage displayed in public) these businesses can enjoy a moat and have high margins and very high return on capital.

Naive linear extrapolation predicted that cigarettes were doomed because usage dropped from 21% of adults in 2005 to 14% in 2019. (And only 8% of 18-24 year olds.) But notice that huge numbers of high school students used tobacco products when e-cigarettes became widely available. Nothing about human biology has changed that would make people not want to use nicotine. The desire is there but it has been suppressed because of cigarettes and lung cancer. 

There are now far safer ways of consuming nicotine than cigarettes - vaping and oral nicotine products. It would make all the sense in the world if nicotine made a huge resurgence due to two reinforcing factors coinciding at the same time: a reversal of the moral panic pendulum plus a change in fashion of usage. 

Imagine if instead of "dying," big tobacco experienced say 50% revenue growth over the next decade as nicotine consumption went from 14% back to 21% of the population. All that would be needed would be re-nicotinization, which is a Lindy bet, and regulatory capture of the FDA by big tobacco. The investment return could be spectacular given that the increased profit would likely be accompanied by multiple expansion.

4/5

P.S. As part of our re-nicotinization research, we may at some point write a blog post on the costs vs benefits of using nicotine. Potentially beneficial aspects of nicotine that you can find via anecdote or actual research are: cognitive enhancer / nootropic, energy booster, appetite suppressant, anti-depressant / mood enhancer, sociability enhancer, "protective action against nigrostriatal damage" (Parkinson’s disease), and competition with coronavirus for ACE2 receptors. Potentially harmful aspects of nicotine are vasoconstriction, tachycardia / other cardiovascular effects, and up-regulation of ACE2 receptor expression (offsetting factor for coronavirus risk risk). Another aspect to consider would be whether tolerance / adaptation / receptor up-regulation mean that there is truly a net benefit from consuming nicotine. (There is the same question regarding net benefit given tolerance and adaptation with caffeine.)

And in relation to the enhancing qualities, we cannot help but notice another theme which we will call, "great tobacco users in history." This book mentioned Newton, Napoleon, Darwin, and Edison, but we are seeing this in modern times as well.

Friday Morning Links

• Although time-varying, the average discount for US value stocks over the period July 1963–June 2021 is about 21%, or put another way, US growth stocks typically sport a price-to-book value ratio about five times that of value stocks. From January 2007 to September 2020, the relative valuation moved from the most expensive quartile (specifically, the 22nd most expensive percentile) to the cheapest percentile in history (100th percentile); this revaluation explains more than 100% of value’s underperformance through September 2020. In other words, net of this downward revaluation relative to growth, value would have beat growth by a respectable margin. [Research Affiliates]
• Based on current strip pricing, the Company will be in a position to continue to distribute special dividends, the size of which will depend upon the magnitude of excess FCF generated by elevated commodity prices in 2022 and beyond, and the relative return offered by other FCF allocation opportunities. On current strip, 2022 FCF is estimated to be $2.5 billion which represents over $7.50/diluted share and a 19% free cash yield based on a $40 share price.[Tourmaline]
• New video from a Florida Highway Patrol car shows a state trooper run from a disabled vehicle they were responding to on Interstate 4 as it is being slammed into by a Tesla on auto-pilot. The FHP released the video Thursday of the August crash when a state trooper responded to a disabled vehicle in Orange County. According to the crash report, the trooper was out of his car to help move the other vehicle out of the road when the Tesla failed to move over. [link]
• “I don’t think there’s long-term viability for five or six thousand private forms of money,” Mr. Gensler said in a virtual event hosted by the Washington Post. “So in the meantime I think it’s worthwhile to have an investor-protection regime placed around this.” [WSJ]
• In order to promote market competition, four firms were created from the American Tobacco Company's assets: American Tobacco Company, R. J. Reynolds, Liggett & Myers, and Lorillard. The monopoly became an oligopoly. In 1938 Thurman Arnold in the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division began hosting hearings in the Temporary National Economic Committee to determine whether the four companies were further engaged together in monopolistic practices. That committee found that 3 of the 4 companies were guilty of the charges presented to the court. [United States v. American Tobacco Co.]
• Many commentators and consultancies expect increasing fuel efficiency and the growing adoption of electric vehicles to cause refined produce demand to structurally decline. But this clearly isn’t happening. Trends toward suburbanization and the widespread avoidance of mass transit have offset these variables. Continued population and economic growth will also keep upward pressure on demand. These countervailing trends remain underappreciated by the market. [MMP]
• Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, about my raging non-alcoholism. “When you extinguish a learned habit, it doesn’t disappear,” Koob said. “All you’re doing is replacing that habit with a different habit.” Volkow compared my behavior to a binge. “It’s an automatic compulsive behavior,” she said. (Volkow is Leon Trotsky’s great-granddaughter and was raised in Mexico City, in the house where her great-grandfather was assassinated, in 1940.) [New Yorker]
• Summers does not buy the notion that current inflation is the result of temporary bottlenecks. Whenever demand exceeds supply, the inflation that results is made up of a series of bottlenecks, each apparently temporary:  “If you thought demand was running hot relative to supply, you would expect there would be bottlenecks. You’d expect inflation to feed through selectively. And there is every reason to think we are going to see new bottlenecks. I read a story today that there is a bottleneck in Christmas decorations. Toilet paper is back to being a bottleneck. Thanksgiving turkeys. There will be new bottlenecks: the history of the ’60s and ’70s was that there was always a specific structural explanation for price increases.” [FT]
• The Company stands behind the high quality of its PMTA, which we believe established that the products’ continued marketing would be “appropriate for the protection of public health,” the standard established by the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009. These products are crucial to improving public health by helping adult smokers migrate to less harmful products. TPB will continue to engage with the FDA and other stakeholders as we consider options moving forward, including a formal appeal of the decision and potential legal relief. The PMTA denied by this MDO included an in-depth toxicological review, a clinical study, and studies on patterns and likelihood of use. We believe the data demonstrated that TPB products do not appeal to never users, youth, or former users and that a significant majority of users of TPB products had completely ceased use of combustible cigarettes. The scientific literature on lower-risk nicotine delivery systems shows that these products can significantly improve public health by providing alternatives that are much less harmful than combustible cigarettes. “While we believe the FDA’s current conclusion is misguided, we will continue our dialogue with the agency in search of a path forward,” said Larry Wexler, President and CEO, Turning Point Brands. “As we explore options for appealing this decision, we are hopeful that the agency reaffirms its commitment to science-based decision making and to its announced Comprehensive Plan, which includes fully transitioning adult consumers down the continuum of risk in order to reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with combustible cigarette use by preserving the diverse vapor market.” [TPB]
• Yole estimates that the addition of one battery electric vehicle on the road is comparable to the electricity demand of a small family home. The calculation is based on an EV energy efficiency of 14-18 kWh/100km and daily driving distance of 60-80km, which comes to around 8-11 kWh/d. This compares with average daily household consumption of 10-15kWh. [link]
• There is a compelling case to be made for favoring value stocks today. Among those, the energy sector remains the most compelling by a long shot. In addition to being cheap, it’s really the only sector within the broad market where insiders continue to be very bullish (the broad market, in contrast, continues to be sold by the smartest of the smart money). So it would appear that insiders believe oil prices are likely to breakout above critical resistance represented by the upper trend line of its long-term downtrend channel. It’s also very encouraging to see commercial hedgers in crude oil futures actually cover their short positions (or hedge less) as oil prices rise. This is fairly unusual. Just by glancing at the chart below, it’s apparent that hedgers typically add to shorts (hedge more of their production) when prices rise and vice versa. The fact that they are actually adding exposure as prices have risen over the past year or so would appear to be a signal that they, too, are betting on a breakout higher in oil prices. [Felder]
  
• Imagine if Boston and Mexico City had a love child — that’s Buenos Aires (BA). It has the charm and character of Boston and the dense population of Mexico City. BA is a world-class city with 13 million people. That’s almost 35,000 inhabitants per square mile! It’s big for sure, but we found it both friendly and pretty clean. We booked a room in the San Telmo neighborhood, and spent our time in BA taking pictures of the architecture and relaxing in restaurants. [link]
• "Wind is not produced on peak. This last summer, when we went across the summer peak, I had 3,000 megawatts of capacity of wind. How much did I have on the summer peak, back in August? No, no, no, I didn't have zero. I had a total of 63 out of 3,000. And we're investing all of this money in wind..." [CBS]
  

Thursday Night Links

• Before I was famous I had a whole bunch of jobs where all I needed was boots. People would look right past me, or if they did look at me, it was with a mean look. But when I got famous, people would look at me and smile and wonder where they knew me from. If they flat-out recognized me, they'd laugh and dance like they'd won a prize, and I'd just stand there and smile and feel warmth from their love. So the fame made the world, which is a real cold place, a little less cold. And as for my gambling, it's true I lost it all a few times. But that's because I always took the long shot and it never came in. But I still have some time before I cross that river. And if you're at the table and you're rolling them bones, then there's no money in playing it safe. You have to take all your chips and put them on double six and watch as every eye goes to you and then to those red dice doing their wild dance and freezing time before finding the cruel green felt. I've been lucky. [Norm Macdonald]
  
• Not only was he funny, he was as based as you could be and still be a working comedian. And he had the courage of his lack of convictions: recall his bit long ago, at some ESPN awards show, with an audience largely composed of black athletes, at which he said (I’m quoting from memory here…) to Charles Woodson — the University of Michigan defensive back who had just won the Heisman Trophy — “well, they can’t take that away from you…unless you kill your ex-wife and a waiter.” The horrified looks on the faces of audience members said it all: blacks and whites alike largely suspected that O.J. had, literally, gotten away with murder, but to say it publicly in front of black athletes and the white people who worship them?  That was unforgivable. [Sailer]
• I have long known in my gut that usual measures of social wealth, most of all GDP, are fraudulent, in that they falsely identify value where there is none. I have intuited we were all being lied to, and that those who assured us that ever more value was being generated by our society by what appear to be objectively valueless activities were, at best, hiding something. This outstanding book, by left-wing economist Mariana Mazzucato, explains what is being hidden, what hard truths are being avoided, and what she thinks we should do about it. And while I don’t agree with all her prescriptions, or with her rosy view of government competency, the first step on the path to self-improvement is admitting you have a problem. [link] 
  
• The bigger picture things carbon capture, hydrogen, those are – those are harder steps for us to take one because our infrastructure's really not designed for those. It's obviously much easier for natural gas Transportation Company to be talking about hydrogen. It doesn't really fit with the liquids pipeline. The returns on many of those projects are not attractive right now. When we look at them, we're not a research and development company, we're an operating company. I don't think our investors want us to make large investments in speculative investments that may have good returns seven or eight years ago, if everything goes as planned. And so that's why we're kind of viewing ourselves in a low capital environment, which isn't a bad thing. We're not anticipating declines in EBIDA over time even though we're not spending a lot of capital. So if we – our expectation is, if we have a stable, slightly growing EBIDA stream and we're using our available cash for equity buybacks, which is our preferred return of capital method at this point, then we can be growing our cash flow per unit, which I think in the long-term is what investors want. And so that's what we're focused on. And buybacks are still our preferred method. We've talked about increasing distributions; we've talked about special distributions. Special distributions are laid out on the list. Buybacks are our preferred method. I won't rule out an increase in a distribution at some point, but that's – that's our view of capital allocation priorities right now. [MMP]
• For more than 20 years, Swedish Match has been a pioneer in the transformation of its business model away from combustible tobacco, starting with the divestiture of its cigarette business in 1999, and later with its divestitures of pipe tobacco, premium cigars, and its non-US machine made cigar business. After conducting a thorough strategic review of its businesses, today’s announcement of the planned separation of the US cigar business marks the next chapter in this transformation, where smokefree products such as nicotine pouches and snus will play the leading role in building a stronger Swedish Match in line with societal trends. The intended separation of the cigar business provides even greater focus on building Swedish Match’s presence in the growing modern oral category, while also providing opportunities and greater flexibility for the stand-alone cigar business to execute its own strategic plans toward delivering strong value as an independent company. [Swedish Match]
• The analyses that I have seen are pretty complacent about EBITDA. They take a >$3 billion level as a given and then assume that since CBB and CNSL's debt (which both trade close to par) create those enterprises at >5x EBITDA, FTR will do the same. The problem is that if the ice cube continues to melt, not only will EBITDA be lower, but it will probably be worth a lower multiple. In the 2x2 matrix of unsecured recoveries above, there's really only a line of realistic outcomes: low EBITDA, low multiple; or high EBITDA, high multiple. Unless you can have reason to believe that the decline in customer losses is about to stop, there does not seem to be a margin of safety in the unsecured debt. If 13% of customers (net - more after figuring churn) left over the past two years, they probably went somewhere, since they are not likely just canceling their internet entirely. There must be competitors in Frontier's markets that are better or cheaper and are eating their lunch. For all we know, the most alert or savvy customers are the ones who just left and it is the beginning of an S-curve of the slower to react customers leaving too. [CBS]
• Although the benefits of primary COVID-19 vaccination clearly outweigh the risks, there could be risks if boosters are widely introduced too soon, or too frequently, especially with vaccines that can have immune-mediated side-effects (such as myocarditis, which is more common after the second dose of some mRNA vaccines,3 or Guillain-Barre syndrome, which has been associated with adenovirus-vectored COVID-19 vaccines4). If unnecessary boosting causes significant adverse reactions, there could be implications for vaccine acceptance that go beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Thus, widespread boosting should be undertaken only if there is clear evidence that it is appropriate. [Lancet]
• As such, it may now finally be time to get bullish on green bud. The stocks have been absolutely hammered recently. This appears to have washed out the bullish sentiment towards the entire group that was engendered by the bubble in the stocks a few years ago. Furthermore, the washout in sentiment has sucked a group of very profitable and rapidly growing companies into its vortex even though they continue to post stellar results and their future is only getting brighter. [Felder]
• Here are some examples I followed over the past decade: modern art, war, corporate governance, health care and big pharma, government, and fractional reserve banking. Having to go to college to get a job instead of taking an IQ test and getting applied vocational training is a Scam. That's 2/3 of GDP right there! You're going to pay a tax every time that you as principal have an agent doing something for you or when you have to engage with something that is a societal Scam. The size of the tax depends on the relative bargaining power - e.g. your alternatives - and your knowledge and ability to monitor the agent or your ability to use your own agency to get around the scam. On the far extreme, we have a literal tax, income tax, where we have no bargaining power and we get nothing in exchange for our single largest annual outlay. [CBS]
  

Tuesday Night Links

• In 1998, on O’Brien’s late-night show, Macdonald moved over a seat to make room for “Melrose Place” actress Courtney Thorne-Smith. Then he took over her segment. She was trying to promote her new movie, “Chairman of the Board,” with Carrot Top. “I bet board is spelled B-O-R-E-D,” Macdonald snapped at one point, leaving the host doubled over in laughter. [WaPo]
  
• In a life of busyness and ambushes on our attention, dog walks air out the brain. Sometimes they might seem like an inconvenience, but only in the way G. K. Chesterton defined inconvenience—an adventure wrongly considered. Considered correctly, the daily dog walks are a regimen of escape and pause. They enlarge our sympathies and sweeten our disposition. They pry open the day when it balls up into a little fist. The walk is the basic unit of the human-and-dog commerce of unconditional love. We take care of George and George takes care of us. No matter how awful the day, or how awful I am behaving at any given moment, George doesn’t care. He finds me smoldering in my chair and dashes to my lap. Every dog is a rescue dog. [The Atlantic]
• We’ve made significant progress in the months since, working diligently to better understand these products and, as of today, taking action on about 93% of the total timely-submitted applications. This includes issuing Marketing Denial Orders (MDO) for more than 946,000 flavored ENDS products because their applications lacked sufficient evidence that they have a benefit to adult smokers sufficient to overcome the public health threat posed by the well-documented, alarming levels of youth use of such products. [FDA]
• While I’ve occasionally written about the crisis of the day, most of my intellectual output consists in defenses of radical libertarian positions. The Myth of the Rational Voter shows why markets far outshine democracy. The Case Against Education defends the abolition of public education in all its forms. Open Borders calls for full deregulation of immigration. My impending Build, Baby, Build advocates the full deregulation of the housing industry. Even my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids has a libertarian stealth agenda: To get the people who read me, disproportionately libertarian, to be fruitful and multiply. [Econlib]
• “Pittsburgh blue” or “Pittsburgh rare” is the lowest degree of doneness for steak in the United States. It’s meat that’s been thrown on the grill only as a formality—just a second or two on each side, keeping the inside completely raw. This practice originated in the Pittsburgh steel mills of the mid-20th century. Pittsburghers—or is it Pittsburghians?—would bring slabs of meat to work and slap those babies onto blast furnaces, which were kept at temperatures over 1000 degrees Celsius. The outside of the steak would instantly char, while the inside would remain cold and raw. [link]
• At US$67 WTI, Cenovus was projected to generate CAD$7.5 billion of operating cash flow and CAD$5.7 billion of free cash flow. The recent increase in oil price (to $75/bbl) should significantly augment the cash flow if it holds up. The current market capitalization is CAD$23.6 billion and the net debt is CAD$13 billion for a total enterprise value of CAD $37 billion. (Or $30 billion in USD.) So, the FCF/EV yield before the latest increase in the oil price was around 15%. Also impressive with the mature Canadian oil sands giants is the level of FCF conversion. If Cenovus spends $1.8 billion on capital expenditure and has $7.5 billion (or more) in operating cash flow, that is 75% FCF/OCF conversion which isn't bad. Conoco got a lot of CVE stock when the 2017 acquisition took place (Conoco owns 10%), and they are selling it. When Cenovus was spun off in 2009, it traded for $25. Thanks to the long commodity bear market, it trades for a little more than a third of that price more than a decade later. Something else you may notice is that the enterprise value of Cenovus per barrel of net 2P reserves is about US$6. [CBS]
• He was offered nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) in nicotine patches (21 mg/day) and inhalators (15mg cartridges, six cartridges/day). He also used e-cigarettes continually (one 3 ml cartridge/day, 18mg/ml) instead of his normal cigarettes. In addition to parenteral nicotine, he inhaled 120-150 mg of nicotine daily after also borrowing e-cigarettes and inhalators from other patients. [NLM]
• I advocate reading books in cluster – the author can be the clustering factor, it can be the topic, it can be the historical period – but you really get into a person’s mind if you re-read everything they’ve done within the span of a few weeks or months, and then watch them on YouTube, and just try to think about and write out notes, “What am I going to ask them?” One of the very best ways to read is to have your own podcast. You want to start with a problem or question when you’re reading. And again you want to read books together in groups, and you want one of the early books to make the whole thing real or emotionally vivid to you. If you travel to a place that’ll do it automatically, but if you’re not travelling you want the book to do it, so your early book choice is quite important. [MR]
• Gensler fashions himself a progressive. He’s the first SEC chief to fully reject the “chairman” title in favor of the gender-neutral “chair.” (Mary Schapiro, the agency’s first female head, is still listed as chairman in her official bio.) He had his team contact The Wall Street Journal to ask for a correction when it used the old title, which the paper refused to make on grounds of editorial style. Gensler also resolutely refers to Satoshi Nakamoto, the unknown creator or creators of bitcoin, as “she” — as well as “Nakamoto-san,” out of reverence for the innovation. [NY Mag]
• I think people take comfort in compartmentalizing specific signs that inflation is getting out of control by attaching a unique explanation to each event. It’s as though the specificity of each explanation eliminates the risk of things evolving into a trend. The spike in used car prices is because of the chip shortage. Grocery prices are higher because of meat processors. Housing prices are exploding because of migration from the cities. Labor costs are soaring because people are being paid to stay home. Uber prices are double or triple what they were because they need to stop hemorrhaging cash. Plastics costs have spiked because of the Texas freeze. Consumer goods prices are up because of logistics. In the end, the water is getting much, much warmer. The frog might take comfort in such specificity, but this chicken is getting out of the pot. [Doomberg]
• I’ve found that there is an instant litmus test for trust in American politics. Any member of the squad, or any member of congress for that matter, could earn my trust tomorrow. And not any sort of fleeting trust, a permanent ride or die trust. The ‘I will take a bullet for you’ trust. To do so does not require any great or impossible action. They could do it in a tweet or an instagram story, and I know tweeting and making instagram stories is not something the squad finds difficult. The only thing any politician has to do to earn my trust is this: Just say just one fucking word of truth about 9/11. [seanpmccarthy]
• The main reason restaurants weren’t already letting you order a single bacon, egg, and cheese from 50 blocks away for almost no charge is that it’s a terrible business model. Expensive, wasteful, labor intensive — you would lose money on every order. The apps promised to solve this problem through algorithmic optimization and scale. This has yet to happen — none of the companies are consistently profitable — but for a while they solved the problem with money. Armed with billions in venture capital, the apps subsidized what had been a low-margin side gig of the restaurant industry until it resembled any other Silicon Valley consumer-gratification machine. [Curbed]
• The current state of George Floyd Square. The attached audio is just one minute of just one of three gun battles in George Floyd Square last night. I have lived adjacent to 38th and Chicago for over 20 years and I, as well as some neighbors I've spoken with, believe last night was the worst night of gunfire ever. But no one was murdered so it doesn't make the news. One person was shot but that doesn't make the news. Perhaps over 100 rounds were fired in 4 hours but that doesn't make the news either. [FB]