secrets of tigers and families & a walkout
CC#27 - Spending less time working, Pickleball and a solar powered homepage
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🍟 ‘It’s a walkout!’ - Inside the fast-food workers’ season of rebellion
What’s life like as a McDonalds employee on a $9.25 hourly wage? The story of a young McDonalds manager in rural America stirring up a rebellion for fair pay.
“We are all leaving,” his petition threatened, “and hope you find employees that want to work for $9.25 an hour.” Nearly all of his two dozen employees had signed it. A few added their own flourishes. “We need a RAISE,” one scribbled next to her signature. “Piss off,” wrote another. (…)
A once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a debilitating recession and trillions in government aid had caused something to shift in the world’s largest economy. Hourly wages for fast food workers rose nearly 14 percent last year, the fastest growth on record. All over America people were quitting jobs at record rates.
A deep dive into history and playbook of Tiger Global - the hedge fund that made 340 investment into venture stage companies in 2021.
While the venture ecosystem has long seen the potential of software and has evangelized the sector's potential to external parties, Tiger effectively said to these investors: You are still thinking too small. We are earlier than you realize, and winners will be orders of magnitude larger than we currently believe.
This seems to be the most fundamental reason behind Tiger's latest update. Though consistently bullish about the tech sector, Coleman and Shleifer seem to have upwardly recalibrated to their expectations. (…) As we noted earlier, Tiger has gone from 3 to 300 deals per year.
👨👩👧👦 Secrets Of The Great Families
Some families have impressive track records, counting multiple outstanding scientists, athletes and artists among their ranks. But what is it that seemingly makes some clans more likely to give rise to geniuses than others? Genetics? Privilege? Or something else entirely?
How do these families keep producing such talent, generation after generation?
The other obvious answer is “genetics!” I think this one is right, but there are some mysteries here that make it less of a slam dunk.
First, don’t genetics dilute quickly? You only share 6.25% of your genes with your great-great-grandfather. But Charles Galton Darwin was a brilliant and distinguished scientist, and his great-grandfather Erasmus Darwin was also a brilliant and distinguished scientist. Can 6.25% of the genome really do that much work?
And the second problem is: what gene do we think Niels and Harald Bohr shared that made one of them a physics Nobelist and the other an Olympic athlete? What gene did Henri and Raymond Poincare share that made one of them a math genius and the other President of France? What gene did George and Freeman Dyson share that made one of them a great composer and the other a quantum physicist? The gene for excellence? Seems suspicious.
I think these challenges are at least partly answerable.
Food for Thought.
🏙 Hillary Schieve, mayor of the American city Reno, wants to leverage the cryptouniverse to generate new income streams for her city. If you make it through the quite extensive ad block at the beginning of the podcast, the interview features some interesting ideas for modern city governments.
Related: How do cities raise money?
📉 Over the last 150 years the percentage of time that people spend at work has reduced from over 50% to less than 20%. What does this mean for the future of the labour market and our economy?
☀️ Can you build a homepage entirely powered by solar energy? Turns out if you are willing to forgo some features, the answer is yes!
Random Stuff.
🏓 Looking for a new sports to start in 2022? Racketsports has got a new rising-star: Pickleball. Participation in this tennis - badminton - ping-pong crossover grew more than 20% from 2019 to 2020.
🤕 Stuff that Works - a platform that crowdsources treatments and collects symptoms, side effects, aggravating factors etc. for all kinds of diseases to let an AI figure out which treatments work best for which disease.
🍻 Apparently Danes figured out the the optimal solution to the ‘getting drunk’ vs. ‘being hangover’ - trade-off. Seems like I moved to good place?!
My Update.
Made it back to Austria in time for Christmas without getting Omicron, got my booster shot and now heading out for a week of skiing and ski touring. Couldn’t be much better ⛷
Merry belated Christmas and happy New Year to all of you! 🎄🎇 Thanks for joining me on this newsletter journey and cheers to 2022 - let’s make it count! 💪🏻