Kashmir, FoBO, Brain Drain, and Orania
1st of July 2024
Hello,
Here's what I’ve published on the blog:
Here's the best of what I have published on Medium (free to access from this email):
Here's the cool stuff I have learned:
The biggest natural gas fields in the world are mostly in Russia and Iran, and one in the Netherlands.
Skardu is a magnificent city in Kashmir and a major touristic destination for trekking.
The Westermarck effect is a hypothesis proposing that human beings are not attracted to those they’ve lived with “as siblings” before the age of 6.
FoBO was invented at the same time as FoMO (Fear of Missing Out) but it means the Fear of Better Options, preventing one from committing due to having too many options. A great allegory for the current dating market.
Museum fatigue is the name given to the effect describing exactly what you think it is.
Daughter from California is a phrase used to describe a situation in which a disengaged relative insists on prolonging a patient's life at a hospital as if they felt guilty for not having been more present.
The Australian billionaire Clive Palmer is building a replica of the Titanic which he’ll launch as a cruise.
The US ran an anti-Chinese vaccine campaign in the Philippines as payback for Chinese’ propaganda (in China) about the American origin of COVID.
Great Bloomberg article about the rise of Bernard Arnault. He bought a bunch of luxury brands and consolidated them into the LVMH group.
This Russian-made documentary tells the rise of Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s de facto ruler.
Niall Ferguson is drawing parallels between the late 1980s Soviet Union and contemporary America, believing that “we are the Soviets now” in the Cold War against China. It’s unclear if Europe wants/is capable of a Cold War with China too.
Orania is a private Afrikaans city in South Africa.
Belgium’s intelligence agency is the oldest in the world and was established in 1830 to protect the new state against a reaction from the Netherlands it had just taken its independence from.
WFH is persisting which is causing many problems to the office real estate market.
Energy companies are among the most profitable companies in the world so I always wondered why they were subsidized by governments. Turns out they aren’t.
Maybe you remember a study that came out in the early 2010s saying that Afghanistan had hundreds of billions of minerals in its soil. Well, the Taliban have begun handing out permits to exploit them.
The Trade Openness Index measures the most trading countries on earth by adding the sum of exports and imports and dividing it by GDP.
The reason why we’re not inventing new things anymore is that we don’t have enough kids.
I’ve read the report of the World Travel and Tourism Council for future touristic trends, among which stand sustainable travel, luxury travel, and increased spending. As much as materialism drove economic dynamism in the second half of the 20th century, travel seems to be the main economic drive of this one.
The Matthew Effect describes the vicious/virtuous cycle of economic accumulation.
Spain, Greece, and Portugal are growing faster than northern economies but as the article suggests, it’s especially thanks to foreigners who moved there to build companies in the wake of WFH and the digitalization of everything. Maybe the key to a prosperous economy isn’t “better reforms” but simply sending productive entrepreneurs to the struggling regions. Speaking of brain drain…
The US is disproportionally benefiting from other countries’ brain drain. Source.
Don’t forget to check my ultimate book list as I am adding new titles every month!
Also, I’ve merged and updated the business and finance resources on the blog into “money resources”.
Have a great summer!
Aure :)
I just read your summary of the genetic lottery, very thought provoking, I had a paradigm shift in my thinking too, so thank you.😎