The moral problem, such as it is, on Wall Street isn’t that people are kind of looking to do bad things. That’s not at all what people are doing. I think they would rather do good things if they could make as much money doing the good things as doing the bad things. But they’re looking to make money.
We live in a society in which the elites have maybe more power than they have ever had, a greater share of the wealth than they had in a very long time. But it’s not clear they feel much in the way of obligation to society.
There’s a natural tendency for people to tell the story of their lives, of their success, forgetting all the accident that was involved, all the help they got, all the gratitude they should feel.
Boomtown, USA [H/T Will] (LINK)
Freight Startups Attract Silicon Valley’s Attention (LINK)
EVEN if you expect everything to be bigger in Texas, the north Texas branch of the Nebraska Furniture Mart, near Dallas, is a shock. The megastore, which is owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is the size of ten American football fields and employs 2,300 staff. Around 70 delivery trucks arrive every day and 20,000 visitors descend each Saturday. Mr Buffett predicts that the store, which opened only in May, will have a turnover of $1 billion in its first year.Longform Podcast #152: Carol Loomis [H/T Abnormal Returns] (LINK)
Freight Startups Attract Silicon Valley’s Attention (LINK)
Jet.com Runs Into Turbulence With Retailers (LINK)
Toby Carlisle's analysis of Movado (LINK)
A summary of Markel's Q2 (LINK)
The Brooklyn Investor on Mondelez International (LINK)
The great filter - by Matt Ridley (LINK)
Book of the day (praised by Ridley in the article above): The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life