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Week of 11/6

A Cronkite moment in Ukraine?

Author

Will Nelson
November 06, 2023

Week of 11/6/23

Prepared by Will Nelson for Tom Donohue

Stories that drove last week

  • Big updates in Ukraine

  • Biden and a 28 nation coalition look to regulate AI

  • Israeli conflict in flux

Reader note: I am trying something a little different this week with more summaries and more takeaways from the article. Please let me know if you prefer this or simple a collection of headline and links!

Domestic News

  • Economics

    1. Markets

      1. Equities

        1. S&P 500 (+4.6% last week)

        2. NASDAQ (+5.3% last week)

        3. DJI (+3.44% last week)

      2. Interest Rates

        1. Fed Funds Effective Rate: 5.33% (3.08% 1 year ago)

          1. Fed paused rate hikes last week

        2. Average mortgage: 8.022%

    2. Big Stories

      1. National Association of Realtors loses landmark case regarding real estate commissions

        1. This ruling may prompt a reevaluation of partnerships with traditional real estate firms, as the industry braces for a transformation in commission structures and increased scrutiny under antitrust laws.

      2. SEC stock buyback rule is slapped down

        1. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce successfully challenged the SEC’s rule on stock buybacks, with the court recognizing the rule as arbitrary and underscoring the need for a balanced regulatory approach.

      3. OpenAI Developer Day is Today

        1. Expected that they will create a program where anyone can custom tune and share their own agent (custom model) with documents to reference, plugs-ins, welcome messages, and demo prompts

Global News

Reading List (now with summaries!)

  • Charlie Munger’s first podcast interview in 99 years [Acquired Podcast] (Youtube: 66 Minutes)

    • On the power of brands:

      • “We found out fairly quickly that we could raise the price [on See’s Candies] every year by 10% and nobody cared. We didn't make the volumes go up or anything like that. [We] just made the profits go up. So we've been raising the price by 10% a year for all these forty years or so.

    • On betting big on your best ideas:

      • "When you know you have an edge, you should bet heavily. They don't teach that in business school. It's insane — of course you have to bet heavily on your best bets!"

    • On how Berkshire treats its subsidiaries:

      • "Our people know that we're not trying to discard them to the highest bid. If some asshole investment banker offers us 20x earnings for some lousy business [that we own], we don't sell."

      • "If it's a halfway decent business, we never sell anything. That gives us this reputation [for] staying with things, which helps us."

    • On the types of companies that he likes to study:

      • "I only study two kinds of companies: #1. I'm enough of a Ben Graham follower that if something is really cheap, even though it's a crappy company, I'm willing to consider buying it — for a while, anyway. I do that occasionally. I've done it with great success a time or two ... but it's not like I've done it a hundred times."

      • "#2. The great brand companies, of course, are good — [if] you can them at the right price. The whole trick is to get them on the few rare occasions when they're really cheap."

  • Deepmind Co-Founder pushes back on downplaying AI risk [Paywall] (Bloomberg)

    • Meta’s chief AI scientist said some industry leaders were hyping doomsday scenarios about AI to restrict open-source and centralize ownership/control of the technology

    • Demis (Deepmind) called LeCun's criticisms "preposterous". He believes more discussion is needed about how to ensure advanced AI systems are robust and beneficial

  1. Don't ask your barber if you need a haircut.

  2. "I can fix the $32 trillion US debt problem in 5 minutes. You pass a law that when there's a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members congress are ineligible for re-election" - Warren Buffett

  3. 33% of British criminals were dying en route to Australia in the 1700s.

    Britain switched from paying sea captains for every passenger who walked on the ship to paying them for every passenger who walked off.
    Immediately, the survival rate shot up to 99%.

  4. "Never attribute to conspiracy what is more easily explained by incentives and incompetence." - Naval Ravikant

  5. "If you reward profits alone, it's the dumbest thing you could do.

    Employees will quit advertising and start shrinking the business" - Buffett

  6. If video games teach us one thing: If you want to motivate humans, frequent rewards are more addicting than one-off rewards.

  7. "I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther. - Munger

  8. If the person tells you why their city, relationship, or job is great - take it with a pinch of salt.

    If they tell you why it's terrible - take it like a handful of gold.
    If someone swims upstream against their identity or incentives, it probably holds some deep truth to it.

  9. "Incentives are like magnets. An invisible but powerful pull." - @awilkinson

  10. Skinner's Law:

    If procrastinating, 2 ways to solve it:
    Option 1 - Make the pain of inaction > Pain of action
    Option 2 - Make the pleasure of action > Pleasure of inaction
    The person with a gun to their head or crack cocaine at the finish line doesn't need motivation.