According to textbook economics, the stock market’s value reflects what are known as “fundamentals.” An individual company’s current stock price is derived from that firm’s future-earnings potential, and is thus rooted in hard indicators such as profits and market share…
The fundamentals story held up well until the 2008 financial crisis. Within six months of the U.S. banking system’s collapse, the market fell by 46 percent. In response, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to almost zero and pushed money back into the economy by purchasing trillions of dollars in securities from financial institutions… For most of the 2010s, corporate earnings were modest, GDP and productivity growth were low, and the labor market remained weaker than it had been before the crisis. In other words, the fundamentals were not great. Yet the stock market soared. From 2010 to 2019, it tripled in value.
More than half of the S&P 500’s total growth in 2023 and 2024 was driven by the so-called Magnificent Seven companies: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. During those two years alone, Tesla’s value rose by 286 percent, Meta’s by 355 percent, and Nvidia’s by 861 percent. The biggest firms have always been responsible for a disproportionate share of the market’s growth, but never had the gains been so acutely concentrated.
So what the heck is going on?
Thanks to a series of regulatory changes in the late 2000s and early 2010s, about half of fund assets are now held in “passive funds.”… The most common type of passive fund purchases a tiny share of every single stock in an index, such as the S&P 500, proportional to its size.
We have a positive feedback loop here, friends. “Positive” does not mean “good,” it means “self-reinforcing.” A negative feedback loop tends to suppress its own growth: for example, a thermostat raises the heat if the temperature is too low, or raises the A/C if the temperature is too high. An example of a positive feedback loop is a microphone that’s too close to the speakers: it picks up music or speech, plus the sound from the speakers, and feeds that to the speakers, which get louder, and repeat until screech. Unregulated positive feedback loops always end in disaster.
As the “Magnificent Seven” become larger parts of the Fortune 500, passive funds buy more. Which makes the Seven larger, so passive funds buy more. Repeat until… well, I don’t know what will happen. But it will probably be unpleasant.
And good news from Fix the News: Sometimes no news really is good news!
Oil tanker spills have nearly vanished since the 1970s. Half a century ago, spills released an average of 314,000 tonnes of oil into the ocean each year. However, better ship design, stricter regulation, and faster response capacity have turned once-routine disasters into rare events; today, the figure is below 10,000, less than one-thirtieth of its former level.Our World in Data
Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance…
“There are no consistent signs that always arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex. “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.”… The existing protocols are also prone to bias, he says – officers were more likely to find suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance. “The current method actually prevents deception detection,” he says.
Better:
Shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble.
Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit:
Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit.
Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade.
Watch for small, verifiable details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work.
Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors. Geoffrey Bird at University College London and colleagues recently set up a game in which subjects had to reveal true or false statements about themselves. They were also asked to judge each other’s credibility. It turned out that people who were better at telling fibs could also detect others’ tall tales, perhaps because they recognised the tricks.
Observe changes in confidence. Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are losing control.
The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense interrogation. Under this gentle pressure, however, the liar will give themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their responses.
New York’s six month old congestion pricing scheme has produced perhaps the fastest ever environmental improvement of any policy in US history… and it’s also making money.Congestion pricing revenue is on track to reach $500 million this year, “allowing upgrades to the subway, the purchase of several hundred new electric buses and improvements to regional rail.” Guardian
People don’t like abbreviations in texts (and I won’t try to be funny by putting abbrevs here).
Abbreviations in text messages register as insincere to recipients, who then send shorter and fewer responses (if they bother to reply at all). “I was surprised at how significant the negative results were,” David Fang, a doctoral student in behavioral marketing at Stanford University, says. “Abbreviations are quite subtle—they’re not really a blatant transgression. But people can see you’re taking a shortcut and putting less effort into typing, and that triggers a negative perception.”
People described messages with abbreviations as being less sincere than those without any, and indicated that they weren’t inclined to reply.
Interestingly, the effects held true among different age groups—from savvy Gen-Z texters to those who probably didn’t know what half of the abbreviations meant. Though some might think of abbreviations as youthful or hip, young people don’t actually like them. “Younger people dislike abbreviations just as much as older people,” Fang says. “It’s equally negative.”
Crime in the United States has plummeted. So why don’t Americans feel safe? In city after city, violent crime has declined so much that the murder rate in the United States in 2025 may drop to the lowest level since records began in 1960. If those were the good ol’ days, then so are these. NYT
Everyone’s obviously obsessing about Los Angeles right now, but for what it’s worth, here are this year’s murder rates in big US cities as of May 2025:
You know the story of Chicken Little. An acorn fell on her head in the forest, and she thought the sky was falling, and she frightened all the other animals into fearing that the sky was falling. It ended badly.
I found a sequel to this story:
Foxy Loxy is walking along the forest path. He is surprised to see Chicken Little lying in the path on her back, feet pointing at the sky.
Foxy Loxy asks, “Chicken Little! What are you doing?”
Chicken Little replies, “You know that the sky is falling, right?”
Foxy Loxy says, “Yes yes yes, we all know that. But what are you doing there?”
“I’m going to try to hold up the sky.”
“But Chicken Little — you’re just a little chicken! You can’t hold up the sky!”
And Chicken Little replies, “Yes, I know. But you do what you can.”
In 2019, Iceland became one of the first countries to implement a four-day workweek. Today, nearly 90% of Icelandic workers have shifted from a 40- to 36-hour workweek, with no loss in pay. Six years later, research indicates that productivity remained stable or even increased in some sectors, all while workers reported better mental health. Parents reported more equal household sharing responsibilities. WEBC
Cheap little tricks that may make a nice difference. For example:
That’s where it goes:
“If you look for something and it’s not in the first place you look, THAT IS THE PLACE WHERE IT GOES. So when you find it, put it in the first place you looked for it.”
Also: How to argue (from a lawyer); buy the same socks; the restaurant bathroom test; how to talk to new people, etc.
After being named “breakthrough of the year” by Science magazine in 2024, the HIV drug lenacapavir continues to improve. New Phase I trials show the drug maintains protection for a full year after a single dose.The previous twice-yearly formulation has already demonstrated unprecedented 100% effectiveness in preventing infections and its maker Gilead has arranged to make affordable versions accessible across 120 low-income countries. Oh, and The Global Fund says it will fund the rollout of lenacapavirwith or without the help of the US government.MIT, Bhekisisa
America’s radical experiment in emptying youth prisons worked In 2000, over 100,000 young Americans were locked up in juvenile detention facilities. By 2022, that number had plummeted by 75%, with 29 states experiencing even greater declines. The reduction came alongside major drops in youth crime – arrests for serious violent crimes by juveniles have fallen 78% from their peak in the 90s. New York Times
Nine countries eliminated a devastating disease in 2024 Chad got rid of one form of sleeping sickness. Cape Verde and Egypt became malaria-free. Jordan became the first country to eliminate leprosy. Brazil and Timor Leste eliminated elephantiasis, and Vietnam, India, and Pakistan eradicated trachoma, the latter after a 20-year battle: “I can’t explain the jubilation on their faces…Many had tears in their eyes to see this moment in their life.” NPR
Let me pause here for a moment. I am a novelist; I make things up for a living. In my trade, it would be considered malpractice to make up Jarod Koopman. You just do not give your protagonist a set of attributes that includes black belts, vintage trucks, sommelier certificates, tattooed biceps, a wholesome, all-American rural family and a deeply consequential yet uncelebrated and under-remunerated career in global cybercrime. But as Mark Twain said: “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.”
One example of his work:
In November 2021, they traced another stash of bitcoin that had been stolen from Silk Road nine years earlier. The key to the digital wallet was found on a circuit board in a popcorn tin stored in the bathroom closet of a house in Gainesville, Ga. Because of the steep rise in the value of bitcoin, that find delivered $3.36 billion to U.S. taxpayers.
Ten things to keep forever: Birth certificates and adoption papers, death certificates, marriage and divorce records, Social Security cards, military service records including discharge documents, loan payoff statements, year-end pay stubs, retirement or pension records, estate documents, funeral programs. Details on some of these in the article.
It depends: Loan documents, vehicle title, receipts for big-ticket items, home improvement purchase orders / receipts / canceled checks, investment statements.
3-7 years: tax records, medical bills (if tax related).
And more good news from FutureCrunch (now Fix the News):
Animal conservation in the Caribbean is paying off The Caribbean islands have suffered some of the highest extinction rates in modern history. But over the past three decades, conservationists have worked tirelessly to restore 30 islands and have saved 12 species, including the Antiguan racer, one of the world’s rarest snakes, the White Cay iguana, and the Sombrero ground lizard. BBC
From Neil Gross, professor of sociology at Colby College and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center in Washington, DC:
Myth #1: The police can’t prevent crime
Although I can understand why some people might feel this way—if you live in a neighborhood with persistent crime and what seems like an oppressive police presence, say—research shows that the opposite is true. All else being equal, the larger the number of police officers in an area, the less crime there tends to be, at least for many kinds of crime…
And now, preliminary data from the largest US cities show a major drop in homicides for the first half of 2023. (Not for all cities. Violent crime in Washington, DC, for example, including homicide, is up this year.)…
Myth #3: Because of policing’s racist origins, there is nothing we can do to improve it
Policing, for its part, has transformed over the decades, as any historian of the subject can attest, and this is also true along the dimension of race. While stubborn racial disparities remain in use of force, arrest rates for petty offenses, routine traffic stops, internal hiring and promotion, and other aspects of police operations—disparities every department should work to minimize—and while horrific evidence of racial animus continues to surface with disturbing frequency, there can be no serious question that policing in 2023 looks very different than it did in, say, Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, when “Bull” Connor, the notoriously racist public safety commissioner, directed his officers and their dogs to viciously attack civil rights protesters because of his opposition to integration.
And more good news from FutureCrunch (now Fix the News) (bolding is mine):
Europe’s crackdown on air pollution cuts heart disease deaths Europe recorded the largest annual decline in PM2.5—the air pollution most closely linked to harmful health effects—of any region of the world between 2010 and 2019. As a result, deaths in the region from heart disease attributed to pollution fell by 19.2% and from strokes by 25.3%. This amounts to 88,880 fewer heart disease deaths and 34,317 fewer stroke deaths. FT
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