Category: Thinks

NYTimes: “Today Nvidia is the unrivaled A.I. chip king and one of the most valuable corporations in the world, while Intel, once the semiconductor superpower, is reeling and getting no lift from the A.I. gold rush. Nvidia’s stock market value, for years a fraction of Intel’s, is now more than $3 trillion, roughly 30 times that of the struggling Silicon Valley icon, which has fallen below $100 billion…The story of how Intel, which recently cut 15,000 jobs, got left behind in A.I. is representative of the broader challenges the company now faces. There were opportunities missed, wayward decisions and poor execution, according to interviews with more than two dozen former Intel managers, board directors and industry analysts. The trail of missteps was a byproduct of a corporate culture born of decades of success and high profits, going back to the 1980s, when Intel’s chips and Microsoft’s software became the twin engines of the fast-growing personal computer industry.”

WSJ: “Companies are connecting large language models to their data with a technique known as retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG. It is an obscure term, but at heart the idea is fairly straightforward: Retrieve a company’s data and use it to augment the work of generative AI…If a company creates an AI-based call-center agent, on the other hand, it will use RAG technology to import the processes, procedures and data used by human agents or operators. The agent’s large language model extracts its answers from that data…Once in place, however, these systems can open up a range of uses that go beyond call-center agents and other now-familiar enterprise AI applications such as writing software code.”

Arnold Kling on his conversation with John Samples: “Facebook saw TikTok as a threat. Facebook’s assumption was that you would want your posts to be seen by friends and family. TikTok assumed that you wanted to be followed by strangers. Facebook felt that it had to compete with TikTok, which meant enabling people to use its service to send messages to strangers. As people used that service to send political messages, this created a lot of dissatisfaction. More recently, by changing the feed algorithm to cut back on political content, Facebook was able to calm things down a bit.”

FT: “In Factorio, from the Czech developer Wube Software, you have crash-landed on an alien planet and your task is to build a rocket so you can escape. This entails single-handedly restaging the Industrial Revolution, from breaking up rocks for crude stone furnaces to refining oil into rocket fuel…The game, which has sold about four million copies over the past eight years, and released its first expansion pack last week, has been nicknamed Cracktorio for its addictiveness. What makes this all the more remarkable is that Factorio makes so little effort to seduce you. It’s a dour and fiddly experience, with graphics that look 20 years old, where taking a shortcut is always punished down the line and in which, if you want to excel, you will spend at least part of your time calculating ratios.”

WSJ: “On “The Rest Is History,” the world’s most popular history podcast, hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook ask some surprising questions. Was the Roman historian Tacitus woke? Is Louis XVI’s bad reputation unfair? Was World War I partly caused by the German Kaiser’s anger at being ridiculed for wearing the wrong shoes at a yacht party? History professors struggle to get students excited about the past. Yet at a recent live show in London, Holland and Sandbrook drew a raucous Gen Z audience with a rock-concert vibe. “The Rest Is History” podcast gets 11 million downloads a month and 1.2 million monthly YouTube views, and seven out of 10 listeners are under 40. People familiar with the show say that it has over 45,000 paying subscribers, who, along with advertising, make it possible for each host to earn nearly $100,000 a month.”

Janan Ganesh: “No other major democracy in the world is anything like as consistently deadlocked. Nor was the US itself in the last century. Its mutation into a 50-50 country (or really a 30-30-40 one, as four in 10 voters often abstain) has been a civic disaster. Why? Because there is no incentive to moderate. If you are guaranteed to be competitive in every national election, even if you nominate a twice-impeached felon, why mend your ways? A major party in 21st-century America is never truly out of power. It will tend to have a chamber of Congress, 20-plus governorships and a good chance of the White House next time, almost regardless of its candidate. Throw in a vast and lucrative media ecosystem, which affords politicos a nice life outside office, and there exists little express reason to behave well. When the state underwrites a financial institution, we fret about “moral hazard”. Here the electorate is the backstop and the parties are the banks.”

Anurag Wadehra: “AI is transforming industries across the board, but merely adopting AI doesn’t automatically set you apart from competitors. In fact, AI will soon become a baseline capability for many businesses. The companies that thrive will be those that can position themselves effectively by showcasing how their AI solutions deliver unique, tangible value. For example, in industries like SaaS, AI-driven features such as predictive analytics or workflow automation are becoming common. To differentiate, your positioning needs to focus on what specific problems your AI solves and how it creates value in a way that competitors can’t replicate.”

Ismar Volic: “Ranked choice collects more information, so math can do more with it. If nobody has won more than 50 percent of the vote, you eliminate the person with the least number of first-place votes — and the votes for that person are transferred down the ballot to the next candidate. This is like saying to the voter, Look, your top choice didn’t make it, but who would you like to give your vote to now, knowing that your person is out? So your ballot still contributes. In this iterative process, math can do a much better job of understanding the collective preferences of the voters. Showing the improvement with a different method is powerful and disarming precisely because it is steeped in logic and reason.”

Steve Huffman: “Reddit is communities and conversation, and we have communities for literally anything that you’re into or going through. So if you have questions, there’s just a high likelihood that Reddit, where people have been talking about everything for almost two decades, has an answer or perspectives on whatever it is. Whether you’re 17 or 70, a nerd or a normie, a man or a woman or anything in between, Reddit has a home for you. I think that’s unique on the Internet…The source of artificial intelligence is actual intelligence, which is what you find on Reddit. And indeed, the Reddit corpus is a significant part of the training of the major foundation models. I think your observation is true, that it does seem like there’s a general lowering of quality on the internet because more content is written by AI. But I think that actually makes Reddit stand out more as the place where there’s all of this human content. What people want is to hear from other people.”

Vinod Khosla: ” I call any technology as important if it’ll eventually get to the Chi-India price, where it will be adapted in India or China, irrespective of climate or not. Solar has reached that and India is deploying solar very heavily, and that’s a great thing. But could India afford technologies today that cost more than their fossil competitors or afford to subsidize them? No. And I do think the West, and West won’t transfer billions of dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars a year to the developing world, but they can get technologies going in their own countries and win the manufacturing battles so they get benefit from these new climate technologies when they get to unsubsidized competitiveness and then deploy them all over the world.”

Ashu Garg speaks to former Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman: “Companies that fail are often those “that can’t handle the truth” about their deepest problems, Frank says. A sales slump may actually stem from a flawed product, not a lackluster sales team. “A lousy salesperson can sell a great product, but a great salesperson cannot sell a lousy one,” he notes. Frank built a reputation as a “confrontational” executive. But confrontational can be misinterpreted, he says.“Being a CEO is a highly confrontational role, but they think that confrontational means grabbing people by the lapels,” Frank told me. “That’s not what I mean by confrontation. Confrontation is about confronting issues and situations that are either not good enough or could be better.” Leadership is about relentlessly confronting reality and having the courage to address what others would rather ignore.”

Larry Summers: “I think that the more I study history, the more I am struck that the major inflection points in history have to do with technology. I did a calculation not long ago, and I calculated that while only 7% of the people who’ve ever lived are alive right now, two-thirds of the GDP that’s ever been produced by human beings was produced during my lifetime. And on reasonable projections, there could be three times as much produced in the next 50 years as there has been through all of human history to this point. So technology, what it means for human productivity—that’s the largest part of what drives history. So I’ve been learning about other technological revolutions. I had never been caused to think appreciably about the transition thousands of years ago from hunter-gatherer society to agricultural society. I’ve thought about the implications of the Renaissance, the implications of the great turn away from a Malthusian dynamic that was represented by the Industrial Revolution. So the first part of it is thinking about technology and what it means in broad ways.”

WSJ: “In the long term, Nvidia is creating what [Jensen] Huang calls its own “AI brain.” That’s the idea that knowledge of how a company works, its business processes and customer interactions need to be collected and turned over to AI. The end goal is to turn that information into an AI that CIOs and CEOs “can just talk to,” Huang said. Nvidia has already started turning all of its private data into an AI, Huang said, adding that “everybody should do that.” In service of that goal, the company is announcing a tool that makes PDF files easier for AI to understand and ingest, Huang said. For the most part, “unstructured data” like emails and PDFs have been difficult for more traditional types of AI to capture. Further down the line, it also means companies will have “large populations of digital workers,” or AI agents, in roles such as marketing, sales, engineering and supply chain, working alongside their human counterparts, Huang said. To get there, everyone—including business technology leaders—needs to learn how to instruct an AI.”

Howard Marks: “There are only really two asset classes: ownership and debt. If someone wants to participate financially in a business, the essential choice is between owning part of it and making a loan to it. I have always felt that most investors do not fully grasp the essential difference between ownership and lending. In fact, they have nothing in common. Owners put their money at risk with no guarantee of a return; they merely expect to share in the residual cash flows and enterprise value from a business. Lenders, on the other hand, finance owners’ activities in exchange for contractual promises of periodic interest and the repayment of principal at the end, meaning the resulting return is known in advance, assuming the borrower makes the payments as promised.”

FT: “Every reader knows the moment when the paths of destiny fork. You must either become a Chucker, steel your nerves and give away old books before they march into the linen cupboards and storm the sofas, the dining table, the guest room, or become a Keeper, accept defeat and move to a larger home, just to accommodate the relentless tide of a personal library gone rogue…A simple principle emerges: intention matters. Booklovers who organise their lives and their homes around their desire to have a research library at hand are seldom overwhelmed in the manner of us amateurs who buy books on impulse, letting a library grow over time.”

Arnold Kling: “At any moment, there are two possible states of the world concerning a nation’s government debt. In the high-confidence state, investors are sure that the government will put its finances in order, and the interest rate is low. In the low-confidence state, investors do not have confidence, the interest rate is high, and this produces an immediate crisis. Either state is self-reinforcing, and the move from the high-confidence state to the crisis state can be sudden.”

Andy Kessler: “Large language models are impressive, but they are still statistical models mimicking human thinking. You can’t just throw cheaper chips at the problem and expect growth. More than Moore’s Law (chips doubling in density every 18 months) is in play. I hate to be the one to throw it, but here’s some cold water on the AI hype cycle…I’m convinced AI will transform our lives for the better, but it isn’t a straight line up.”

Demis Hassabis: ” I hope we look back in 10 years and AlphaFold will have heralded a new golden era of scientific discovery in all these different domains. I hope that we will be adding to that body of work. I think we’re quite unique as one of the big labs in the world that actually doesn’t just talk about using it for science, but is doing it.”

Akash Prakash: “[India’s] IPO markets are wide open, with over 250 listings in the last three years. India is probably the best place to list for a startup today. Most startups are quickly flipping back to an Indian incorporation to enable them to list in our markets. With the flow of retail money into funds and also the continued success of active management, there is enough demand for new listings. However, we must ensure that the pricing of new VC-backed listings is reasonable enough for investors to make money; otherwise, they may choose to stay away. The VC stalwarts also need to keep the pressure on founders to list, ensuring that the liquidity needs of founders and employees cannot be fully met through secondaries. Boards must also ensure that founders understand that in most cases the end goal is a public listing. Remaining private forever is not an option!”

Foreign Affairs: “Today’s wars and the assiduous investments made by the United States and China show that mass is making a comeback, but not at the expense of precision. Indeed, the current age of warfare is collapsing the binary between mass and precision, scale and sophistication. Call it the age of “precise mass.” Militaries find themselves in a new era in which more and more actors can muster uncrewed systems and missiles and gain access to inexpensive satellites and cutting-edge commercially available technology. With these tools, they can more easily conduct surveillance and stage accurate and devastating attacks. Its imperatives already shape warfare in Ukraine and the Middle East, influence dynamics in the Taiwan Strait, and inform planning and procurement in the Pentagon. In the era of precise mass, war will be defined in large part by the deployment of huge numbers of uncrewed systems, whether fully autonomous and powered by artificial intelligence or remote-controlled, from outer space to under the sea. The U.S. military has positioned itself to lead in adapting to these changes in the character of warfare, but it must be ready to adopt innovations quickly and at scale. The pioneering breakthroughs evident in today’s conflicts merely foreshadow how wars will be waged in the years and decades to come as militaries grapple with the imperatives of both mass and precision.”

Economic Times: “Sri City in Andhra Pradesh, Hosur in Tamil Nadu, Dahej and Dholera in Gujarat. Manesar in Haryana, Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh, and Shendra-Bidkin and Navi Mumbai in Maharashtra. These new Gurgaons are promising to be new industrial and population hubs, taking away the pressure from overcongested New Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Ahmedabad. Urban planning and development experts believe these new satellite cities that tap into the overflow from abutting megacities could be the real answer to India’s urban woes.”

NYTimes: “Leadership is an action, not a title. And many of our leaders are paralyzed by broken, perverse incentives that impair their abilities to fulfill institutional missions and mandates. Paradoxically, many leaders feel that any reduction in their visibility brings with it a promise of reward. Increasingly, I worry that well-intentioned boards of directors are selecting rising leaders for safety, appointing executives who have assiduously avoided controversy rather than those most adept at managing it. Then, they counsel toward caution, not conscience…Effective leadership requires managing nuance and complexity, seeing all sides of an issue from the perspective of every stakeholder, and then setting a course, and communicating with clarity, consistent with common values.”

WSJ: “There’s an art to crafting the perfect email intro. Dewane, the Chicago architect who’s orchestrated thousands of introductions, is constantly scanning his mental Rolodex for pairs of contacts who can solve each other’s problems. He usually gets preapproval to reach out from both parties, then turns to his formula. There’s two paragraphs—one for each person. He describes what they do, why he thought of them, and how they’re perfect to connect on this particular thing. He includes hyperlinks to both LinkedIn profiles. And he always puts the person who stands to gain more from the interaction last, queuing them up to initiate contact. “I get kind of paranoid if intros just hang there,” he says. If there’s a big difference in power between the two people, he choreographs the thread even more intricately.”

Daren Acemoglu: “Technological transitions, such as the shift to agriculture or the Industrial Revolution, have always been pivotal moments requiring adaptation and choice. During these transitions, societies make critical choices about how to utilise new technologies, and these choices shape their future trajectory. The current age of AI presents a similar opportunity and requires careful consideration of its potential benefits and risks…While human innovation, creativity, and state capacity remain crucial, the specific skills needed in the 21st century are evolving. Generative AI is likely to automate certain tasks, reducing the value of skills related to information processing, retrieval, and certain types of manual labour. However, human creativity and flexibility will remain central.”

WSJ: “There is one idea that encapsulates the approach to innovation that makes all of it possible—and it’s maybe the closest thing to a grand unified theory of Apple. It’s a philosophy of just four words that describe Apple’s past, present and definitely its future. Four words that help explain why this was the year the company plowed into spatial computing and artificial intelligence. During one of those epochal years when it feels like everything is about to change again, I heard them over and over, in conversation with Apple executives and Cook himself: Not first, but best.”

Steve Correa & Ajay Kelkar: “Reflection and vulnerability are essential in leadership. During a leadership programme, one of us resisted words like “care” and “empathy,” which felt unfamiliar. Yet, these softer qualities strengthened his leadership, helping him connect more deeply with his team. If you want to enhance your coachability, ask yourself: Are you open to feedback, even when it challenges your beliefs? Have you successfully adapted based on past feedback? Improving coachability is a journey of self-reflection, adaptation and daily practice. Embrace this process, and you’ll find leadership growth to be a continuous and rewarding path. Being coachable is often about ‘stopping doing’ rather than ‘starting to do’ a few more things.”

Business Standard: “India’s recent struggles with reform are also, at their root, about land. India has a similarly inflexible land market. In fact, it has no land market as such; land use is determined by bureaucratic diktat, and there is no secure record of ownership. But, unlike China, local governments will also struggle to build land banks or borrow against it. Here, if anyone captures value from land, it is not rentiers but the middlemen linked to politicians and bureaucrats who can influence the change of land use notification. The outcome is that neither the private nor the public sector can easily transform or build on land. Agriculture is low-margin and investment in industry is low in large part as a consequence of these restrictions on land ownership and value extraction.”

Debashis Basu: “Permanent changes being highlighted by stock-market experts, such as a strong banking system, a strong current account, low inflation, a controlled Budget deficit, and a low debt-to-GDP ratio, don’t hold up on closer scrutiny. Now the data shows that the Indian economy remains a cyclical play after all; there has been no fundamental transition to higher income through higher productivity and improved competitiveness. After all, prosperity is not India’s birth right. We need to do the hard work of raising rural incomes through agricultural reforms, make mass manufacturing cheaper, and exports competitive. These are nowhere on the agenda. But the popular narrative is that this is “India’s century” or “India’s era”. If growth reverts to the pre-Covid level, a lot of people may have to temper their rosy optimism.”

FT: “Leading artificial intelligence companies that are racing to develop the cutting-edge technology are tackling a very human challenge: how to give AI models a personality. OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have developed teams focused on improving “model behaviour”, an emerging field that shapes AI systems’ responses and characteristics, impacting how their chatbots come across to users.  Their differing approaches to model behaviour could prove crucial in which group dominates the burgeoning AI market, as they attempt to make their models more responsive and useful to millions of people and businesses around the world. The groups are shaping their models to have characteristics such as being “kind” and “fun”, while also enforcing rules to prevent harm and ensure nuanced interactions.”

Ritesh Banglani: “The venture business model relies on the portfolio effect: In a high-risk sector, you need to fund several companies to generate one large winner. A fund will only find it viable to invest in a new sector when it sees an opportunity to invest in at least 15-20 such startups over a 3-4 year period. Only then will a VC fund invest in the expertise required to evaluate them. A new space attains a critical mass of fundable opportunities when at least 100-200 credible new companies are created in it every year. When this starts to happen in deep technology areas, we will likely see VC money rush into them. Hopefully, we will finally be able to put the moonshot debate to rest then.” TN Hari: “It’s just a matter of time before VCs in India realize that deep-tech bets are no longer as risky, and that they are probably better off with deep tech than going after less risky ideas on a path of diminishing returns. A new generation of VCs, whose partners come from deep science or tech backgrounds, is likely to emerge and help set off the next wave of tech entrepreneurship in India.”

NYTimes: “On one level, “Shark Tank” is your basic reality TV show. The pitches, which last about 45 minutes, are edited to snappy 12- to 15-minute segments with music scored for suspense over tight shots of bug-eyed, sweaty supplicants. Some founders leave the tank defeated, humiliated or in tears. Others leave triumphant with handshake deals. Stories about overcoming struggle and self-doubt feel calibrated to make you cry…But if you watch the show as I did — most of its 15 seasons in one year — you might be struck by something else: the way it reflects the shifting contours of the American economy. The show started in August 2009, in the pit of the Great Recession. Over the next decade and a half, 1,275 people pitched their ideas on air. The comfort food and DVDs featured in those first years were replaced by the rise of online direct-to-consumer businesses, the allure of Silicon Valley and its build-at-all-costs mentality, and then the shock of the pandemic and the ingenuity that came out of it.

WSJ: “Anime is shaping up as the country’s next big export industry, beyond cars and electronics…Japan’s anime and manga, the Japanese word for comics, have created many well-known characters and franchises over the years, such as Pokémon. And it looks to be getting even more mainstream.” More in the Economist.

FT: “[Hilton CEO Chris] Nassetta says he is aware that turning round a company such as Hilton — which has around 8,000 hotels in 126 territories and about 500,000 employees — “takes a village”. “I’m not that special”. He has to manage his ambition with delegating appropriately and realising that “if you don’t stop, take a deep breath, celebrate successes, and give credit where credit is due, people just burn out”. “Earlier in my leadership journey, I probably didn’t take enough time to slow down,” he admits. He says other business leaders often ask him how a company can transform itself. Turnrounds, he notes, fail because of “bad strategy or bad culture”. Good leaders are able to get not just managers onside but also staff lower down the chain. “You need to get people to believe in where you’re going and in you.” He says he attempts the latter by being authentic, hardworking and a good listener, although admits he could always improve.”

Nabeel Qureshi on Palantir: “The big productivity gains of this AI cycle are going to come when AI starts providing leverage to the large companies and businesses of this era – in industries like manufacturing, defense, logistics, healthcare and more. Palantir has spent a decade working with these companies. AI agents will eventually drive many core business workflows, and these agents will rely on read/write access to critical business data. Spending a decade integrating enterprise data is the critical foundation for deploying AI to the enterprise. The opportunity is massive.”

Rohit Krishnan: “Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations conducted a thousand times a day.”

WSJ: “Research shows we lose roughly 3% to 8% of muscle mass per decade after age 30, with a faster decline after 60, while fat mass increases. This can lead to less mobility and a greater risk of falls and injury, plus other long-term effects. The changes mean we need to eat progressively fewer calories as we age to maintain our weight, says Dr. Sarah Nosal, a family-medicine doctor in New York and president-elect of the American Academy of Family Physicians. Muscle tissue stores more water than fat mass does, so we are more susceptible to dehydration as we age, says Nosal. That, plus changes in our enzymes that process alcohol differently and at a lower level, help explain why it often feels harder to recover from a night of drinking the older we get.”

Daron Acemoglu: “Inflation seems under control. The job market remains healthy. Wages, including at the bottom end of the scale, are rising. But this is just a lull. There is a storm approaching, and Americans are not prepared. Barreling toward us are three epochal changes poised to reshape the U.S. economy in coming years: an aging population, the rise of artificial intelligence and the rewiring of the global economy. There should be little surprise in this, since all these are evolving slowly in plain sight. What has not been fully understood is how these changes in combination are likely to transform the lives of working people in ways not seen since the late 1970s, when wage inequality surged and wages at the low end stagnated or even fell. Together, if handled correctly, these challenges could remake work and deliver much higher productivity, wages and opportunities — something the computer revolution promised and never fulfilled.”

Marissa Mayer on a technology that she is secretly excited about: “Carbon nanotubes. They’re made of carbon and they’re tiny, and they’re incredibly strong. If you do a space tether, you can make things that are incredibly light and incredibly strong. Because they’re carbon, you can actually print them. One day you could do 3D printing of a bridge or of a heart. I’m surprised more hasn’t happened with carbon nanotubes.”

WSJ: “Seven children flew into New York in late July to meet with the college counselor they believed would get them into Harvard University or another top-flight U.S. college. Two traveled from Switzerland, two from Australia, one from the United Kingdom. They were there to meet Jamie Beaton, a 29-year-old Rhodes scholar from New Zealand with a reputation as the man who has cracked the code on elite college admissions—and who is Wall Street’s favored partner to mine the rich vein of parental anxiety embedded in the college process. Beaton’s message to the kids distilled: Optimize childhood by starting to build skills and interests years before high school. Strategically choose areas where you can excel—if you aren’t going to be a top performer in an activity, drop it and move to something else. And find ways to be unique, whether through entrepreneurship, scholarship or well-placed PR.”

Amelia Ibarra lists the pillars of HyperFunctional SaaS: “AI Now Table Stakes. And Product Has to Much Better For It. Radical Efficiency, At Least Post-IPO. Automation Everywhere. Multiproduct The New Normal. Customers Demanding Much More Than a 10x Point Solution.”

WSJ: “AI providers and their clients may at least be more aligned than before on pricing and incentives. Providers of generative AI tech have often charged on the SaaS model, sometimes pegged to the number of employees with access to the tech. SaaS in general has been a welcome improvement over previous licensing models that often took many years and billions of dollars for customers to implement. But it isn’t perfect, either. It’s possible to oversubscribe—and pay—for services companies don’t actually wind up using, like leaving a faucet sink running. Instead of an ongoing fee, though, Salesforce is charging $2 per conversation or sales lead for Agentforce. That may help attract customers that wouldn’t have been ready to sign up for AI agents if it meant a new recurring fee for a service that might not turn out to be valuable enough. And for Salesforce, the model creates an incentive to deliver clear and concrete value.”

Tyler Cowen: “One big change is that AI will enable individuals, or very small groups, to run large projects. By directing AIs, they will be able to create entire think tanks, research centers or businesses. The productivity of small groups of people who are very good at directing AIs will go up by an order of magnitude. Philanthropists ought to consider giving more support to such people. Of course that is difficult, because right now there are no simple or obvious ways to measure those skills. But that is precisely why philanthropy might play a useful role. More commercially oriented businesses may shy away from making such investments, both because of risk and because the returns are uncertain. Philanthropists do not have such financial requirements.”

FT: “Global public debt is forecast to exceed $100tn by the end of this year, underscoring the need for tougher action to stabilise borrowing in major economies around the world, the IMF has said. Government debt, which ballooned during the Covid-19 pandemic, has continued to rise as countries embrace higher spending to stimulate economic growth, with the US and China driving the surge, the IMF said in a report…Debt was set to approach 100 per cent of global GDP by the end of the decade, the fund added, warning that major economies’ plans to stabilise borrowing “fall far short of what is needed”.”

Meir Statman: “the combination of risks and potential returns in our life portfolios are similar to their combinations in our investment portfolios. We do well when we have a high tolerance for career and social risks, and a lower tolerance for investment risk. Some returns of individual investments in our portfolios, whether investment or life ones, are likely to be exhilarating while others are likely to be disappointing. But it is the returns of the overall portfolios, whether investments or life, that really matter.”

WSJ: “Researchers around the world are working to grow heart valves, lungs and more from human cells. They have succeeded in bringing some to market such as knee cartilage and skin grafts, but advances for more complicated anatomy have been slow-going for years. Now scientists are gaining ground in tissue engineering that could help a host of people who deal with circulatory-system problems. One of the companies furthest along is Humacyte, a Durham, N.C.-based biotech that makes lab-grown blood vessels, which could help patients with traumatic injuries along with those who use catheters for dialysis or suffer pain from narrowed circulation to the limbs. Using new, lab-grown blood vessels to replace the old would offer surgeons a method drastically different from today’s to help patients whose arteries have been torn in explosions or car crashes, for example.”

NYTimes: “Over the next decade, the world is poised to add the equivalent of Japan’s annual electricity demand to grids each year, driven by surging power needs for new factories, electric vehicles, air-conditioners and data centers, according to the agency’s annual World Energy Outlook, a comprehensive report on global energy trends. In all, the agency now expects global electricity demand to be 6 percent higher in 2035 than it forecast last year.” FT: “A huge increase in the use of air conditioning will have one of the biggest and most unpredictable impacts on the world’s electricity grids in the coming decade, the International Energy Agency has said. Researchers at the IEA, an organisation dedicated to ensuring energy security, said a combination of rising incomes in the developing world and higher temperatures from climate change meant that power used for home air conditioning units would rise by an amount greater than the entire Middle East’s electricity use today.”