Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Shein: Inside the Chinese factories fuelling the company’s success: We found that the beating heart of this empire is a workforce sitting behind sewing machines for around 75 hours a week in contravention of Chinese labour laws. These hours are not unusual in Guangzhou, an industrial hub for rural workers in search of a higher income; or in China, which has long been the world’s unrivalled factory. But they add to a growing list of questions about Shein, once a little-known Chinese-founded company that has become a global behemoth in just over five years. (BBC)
• How You Can See Through Wall Street’s Ritual of Wrong: Over the past 20 years, according to Joachim Klement, an investment strategist at Panmure Liberum in London, the correlation between the forecasts and the market’s actual returns was minimal for the analysts and zero for the strategists. (Wall Street Journal) see also “Nobody Knows Anything,” Wall Street Strategist Edition: Only part of the problem is that these folks are bad at this; the bigger issue is that they do it at all. It’s kinda like Phrenology, the pseudoscience feeling bumps on people’s skull to predict their personality traits. It’s not that there are better or worse phrenologists, but rather, why was anyone doing phrenology? Similarly, there are numerous problems with forecasting (The Big Picture)
• Fake Job Postings Are Becoming a Real Problem: One in five jobs advertised is fake or not filled, according to a new analysis; ‘more soul-crushing than ever’ (Wall Street Journal)
• Price-fixing-as-a-service: The claim against healthcare cost-cruncher MultiPlan. Attorney Jennifer Scullion on allegations of algorithmic suppression of competition (The Register)
• Trump’s Team Is Stocked With Billionaires. Why the Super Rich Are Taking Over Washington: President-elect Donald Trump is adding ultrawealthy people to his administration to reward their loyalty and to shake up the agencies they are about to lead. (Barron’s)
• Fake news is driving us apart amid disaster — but slanted news is slowly drowning our democracy: And our efforts to eradicate fake news could inadvertently exacerbate the problem. (Salon)
• How deductibles and co-pays. wrecked US healthcare: Here’s one key reform that can fix U.S. healthcare. Among all advanced industrial countries, the U.S. goes furthest in using premiums, copays, and deductibles to influence access to care. (Los Angeles Times) see also From Darlings to Prey: Wall Street’s Alligators Snap at Big Insurance: 2024 was a tough year for Big Insurance on Wall Street, as plummeting stock prices and rising investor scrutiny put health insurers in the crosshairs. (Health Care Un-Covered)
• Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location: A hack of location data company Gravy Analytics has revealed which apps are—knowingly or not—being used to collect your information behind the scenes. (404)
• ‘We’re in a New Era’: How Climate Change Is Supercharging Disasters: Extreme weather events — deadly heat waves, floods, fires and hurricanes — are the consequences of a warming planet, scientists say. (New York Times) see also Wildfires and climate change: Human-caused climate change is a significant contributor to the increasing size, intensity, and damage of western U.S. wildfires, and to a lengthening of U.S. fire seasons. (SciLine)
• New DC Think Tank Staffed Entirely By Robots (Seriously) The fake operation has a curious tendency to defend the Pakistan military. (Drop Site)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Jonathan Clements. He has been a personal finance reporter at the Wall Street Journal for over twenty years and has written more than 1,000 columns. Last summer, Jonathan received a terminal diagnosis and announced it at his site. DON’T MISS his discussion of why “Dying is hard work” and what we all need to understand about money, life satisfaction, and planning.
