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Stellar Recap | Nov. 28 - Dec. 4

Stellar Recap | Nov. 28 - Dec. 4

Dec 11, 2021

👋 Hello there,

Welcome to another edition of Stellar Recap, a weekly newsletter where I share my latest explorations, discoveries, and updates. Thank you for being here. If you enjoy the newsletter, please share it with a friend. If this message was forwarded to you, make sure to follow me so you don’t miss out on future issues 😊.

💎 Stellar Recap 💎

Stellar Recap

📊 Business, Economics & Personal Finance

  • Preliminary data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that 1 in 23 workers in Colorado quit their jobs during September, pushing the state's overall quit rate to the 4th highest in the nation. Texas ranked first while Hawaii saw the largest single-month leap.

  • Around half of all IPOs that raised over $1 billion and debuted in 2021 are trading below their offering prices.

  • Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, which produces 70% of the world's maple syrup, announced that they would release an additional 50 million pounds of syrup from their strategic reserve due to a 21% spike in global demand and a shortfall in production because of an unusually warm spring. To replenish their reserves, producers will need to tap into around 7 million additional trees in the near future.

  • Inflation rates may reach a record high of 4.3%-4.5% (🔒WSJ) across the Eurozone in November, which would be the fastest annual rise in prices since records began in 1997. Inflation in Germany is much higher than the overall EU average, with estimates as high as 6% (🔒FT) in November.

  • The number of shoppers who made a Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) purchase increased 438% since November 2019 (about 8.2 minutes into the 9.39 minute podcast). PayPal saw a 400% increase in its BNPL program this Black Friday, relative to last year.

  • The share of U.S. workers who work for a company with at least 1,000 employees has fallen for the first time since 2004, while workers who are self-employed as seen the largest increase in 11 years. In October, the self-employed represented 5.9% of U.S. workers, versus 5.4% in February 2020. A study by the Pew showed that female entrepreneurs outnumber males. While female entrepreneurs were less likely to have employees than their male counterparts, female bosses were also less likely to cut payrolls.

  • US gas prices climbed 50% so far this year with the average driver paying $3.40 a gallon for regular gas in November.

  • The unemployment rate for young adults aged 19 to 24 in China is 14.2% but drops to 4.2% among their peers who are aged 25 to 29.

  • The staff at Wirecutter, which was acquired by the New York Times in 2016, organized a 5-day walkout over the holiday weekend over disputes over pay. The union is asking the NYT for a $300,000 increase in pay across the salaries of its 65-person department, which they argue is small given that the company is sitting on $1 billion in cash. The next bargaining date is set for December 6.

  • There 15% fewer Santa Claus entertainers this Christmas season relative to last year but there's been a 121% increase in people who want to hire Santa for events.

  • The Christmas Price Index, which measures the cost of all the items mentioned in the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas," increased 5.7% relative to 2019, the largest increase in eight years.

  • Amazon's labor shortage, partly driven by their attrition rate of around 150% a year, will cost the company an estimated $4 billion in Q4 2021 (29 min. podcast).

  • Elon Musk announced that Tesla was selling a limited edition Cyberwhistle for $50 last Tuesday evening. They sold out almost immediately and can now be purchased on eBay for $200 to $2,250.

  • A cold snap in Europe is driving already expensive energy prices even higher. Scandinavia is at the epicenter with temperatures dipping as low as -35°F. If temperatures continue to plunge, we may be headed from an  "energy crunch to a crisis."

  • The Ford F-series pickup is the bestselling vehicle in the US for the 40th consecutive year.

  • Roughly 45% of households are experiencing some degree of financial hardship because of price increases, with 10% describing their situation as severe.

  • The Denver Broncos are eyeing a sale for the hefty price of $3.8 billion.

  • Supply chain issues have driven up bicycle prices in the US by as much as 54% (🔒WSJ) in September 2021 compared to 2019.

  • Over the past two years, US households have socked away $1.6 trillion in cash savings because of uncertainty about the economy.

  • Demand for private planes and jets have increased 45% (🔒WSJ) worldwide since the start of 2019 while commercial traffic has dropped 24% over the same period.

  • The price of a cryptocurrency named Omicron jumped 900% (🔒Bloomberg) after the WHO named the new Covid-19 variant.

  • The labor-force participation rate edged up to 61.8%, its highest since the start of the pandemic. The unemployment rate also dropped to 4.2% from 4.6%. The Federal Reserve predicted that we wouldn't reach this rate until 2024. These data offer a positive picture in contrast to the jobs report which showed that the economy added just 210,000 jobs, less than half of what was expected (550,000).



🧘 Health

  • The average American would have to travel 125 miles to reach an abortion provider if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Colorado is one of 23 states without any law that protects the right to an abortion.

  • Boston University surveyed mayors of the largest U.S. cities and found that 57% are worried about the long-term consequences of the pandemic on their residents' mental health. Only 2% of mayors were concerned about the impact of remote work on their city and just 7% worried about outmigration.

  • Around 2.2 million Covid vaccines were administered on Wednesday, the mos tin a single day since May.

🎓 Lifelong Learning & Self-improvement

🌴 Lifestyle & Travel

  • The New York Times released a new interactive quiz (🔒NYT) to help you find the best place to live in US based on your preferences.

  • Around 27% (🔒WSJ) of US consumers said that they applied for a credit card in the past 12 months. The uptick in applications could be a sign up pent up travel demand. A survey by Nerdwallet found that 7 out of 10 plan to put travel expenses on a credit car, charging an average $1,471.

  • An analysis by UNWTO estimated that the pandemic cost the global tourism industry $2 trillion in lost revenue in 2021 and that international travel remains 76% below pre-pandemic levels. One of the hardest hit countries is Bali, which had 6.3 million visitors in 2019 and just 43 (🔒WSJ) in 2021.


🗳️ Politics

⏩ Pop Culture, Art & Entertainment

  • Jimmy Donaldson, popular YouTube influencer also known as MrBeast, spent $3.5 million to recreate the set from Squid Game and invite 456 contestants to compete for a chance of winning a $456,000 jackpot. The competition was nonviolent and racked up more than 100 million views in less than a week.

  • Taylor Swift's song "All Too Well" is the longest song to ever hit the number one spot on Billboard's Hot 100, at 10 minutes and 13 seconds, beating out Don Mclean's "American Pie." The Weeknd also broke another Billboard record with their song “Blinding Light,” which became the most popular song in the history of the chart after staying in the Hot 100 for 90 weeks and the top 40 for 86 of those weeks, beating out Chubby Checker’s “The Twist.”

  • Apple released its list of best podcasts in 2021. Best show of the year was "A Slight Change in Plans."

  • Spotify released the most streamed songs and artists around the world. The most-streamed artist was Bad Bunny, for the second year in a row, with over 9.1 billion streams, followed by Taylor Swift, BTS, Drake, and Justin Bieber, respectively. The most streamed song was "drivers license" by Olivia Rodrigo, who also produced the most streamed album. The top podcast was The Joe Rogan Experience. My year in review showed that I spent almost 16% of my entire year streaming Spotify--that's about a quarter of all my time if we assume I'm awake 16 hours a day. As a true testament to my love of podcasts, I'm in the upper 97% percentile of podcast listeners. The podcast that I listened to the most was Marketplace, followed by The Daily and WSJ What's News. More of my favorites are bookmarked here. See my top songs, artist, and genre below. Can you tell that I'm trying to learn Spanish?

  • Also see this criticism of the copywriting and design of Spotify's Wrapped (end of year review). In summary, the copy was corny and the Instagram Story-esque powerpoint presentation with loud graphics took away from the main purpose of Wrapped. Personally, I thought the inability to skip forwards and backwards was the most annoying.

🏡 Real Estate

  • Amazon almost doubled the number of warehouses in their US fulfillment network since the end of 2019, adding over 450 new facilities (🔒WSJ).

  • New data from the Federal Housing and Finance Agency (FHFA) showed that US house prices increased 18.5% from Q3 2020 to Q3 2021. House prices in Idaho showed the highest annual appreciation at 35.8%, followed by Utah (30.3%), Arizona (27.7%), Montana (26%), and Florida (24.8%). Iowa showed the lowest annual appreciation in house prices. The city with the highest price growth was Boise City, ID at 37.3% while Philadelphia showed weakest growth at 9.9%. Note that the S&P's Case-Schiller National Home Price Index has been steadily declining, suggesting a deceleration in house price appreciation in the near future. Note that this is a deceleration and not a crash. Current supply of homes on the market is still far below "normal levels" of inventory (2.4 months versus 4-6 months in the beforetimes). I wouldn't count on foreclosures increasing housing supply either. Active forbearance plans are the at the lowest point in years.

  • Investors bought around 17% of the homes on market in Denver during Q3 2021, up from 9% from last year.

  • Mark Cuban bought Mustang, TX for around $4 million. Apparently, buying large swaths of unincorporated land is popular right now. Cyrpot investors just bought 40 acres of land in Wyoming to build a blockchain city. Thomas Tull, a billionaire from Pittsburgh, shelled out $65 million (🔒WSJ) for roughly 7,000 acres in Idaho. Billionaire Marc Lore is also exploring his options to build a utopian city. If tech millionaires and billionaires are directly buying the land, they're funding them.

  • Entry-level prices for the high-end real estate (top 5% of home prices) in Austin TX just reached $2.34 million (🔒WSJ), up 33% year over year.

  • You can purchase Little Pipe Cay in the Exumas for $100 million (🔒WSJ).

  • Republic Realm paid $4.3 million on virtual real estate in Sandbox.

🌎 Relationships & Society

  • Nearly 51% of people who are currently incarcerated in Colorado prisons will have their cases re-examined for potentially faulty DNA analyses that could have led to wrongful convictions decades ago.

  • China's government undercounted the number of births that occurred in the country between 2000 to 2010 by 11.6 million (🔒Bloomberg) which is about the size of Belgium's entire population. About 57% of the delayed birth registrations were girls, suggesting this was driven by the one-child policy.

  • An Axios/Ipsos poll shows that the government stimulus reduced inequality but inequality in the US has started to creep back up since July 2021 as the Delta variant began spreading and federal support began dwindling. Differences in the share of US adults who have lost pay or income during the prior week by race and ethnicity highlight disparities, showing that 17.8% of Hispanic and 15.6% Black adults have seen a reduction in income compared to only 9.7% of their white counterparts.

  • A study by SafeWise and Cove Home Security found that 64% of consumers reported that they had a package stolen this year, up from 47% in 2020. The Denver metro area ranked the worst in the US for package theft. Colorado ranked 13th for package theft rates nationwide according to the security system company CCTV Camera World.

  • Interpol arrested 1,003 people in connection with online scams like money laundering, gambling, and deception on dating sites. They intercepted $27 million in illicit funds so far.

  • A new analysis of emissions data from the EPA found over 1,000 hot spots for toxic air pollution in the US. Regulators are not required to investigate nearby polluters. The EPA only spends $5 million per year on monitoring pollution and manages a paltry 26 monitoring stations across the country.

  • Americans donated $471.44 billion in 2020, with 28% going to religious institutions. Jeff Bezoz was the top donor at $10.2 billion, followed by MacKenzie Scott who donated $5.7 billion, and Michael Bloomberg who donated $1.6 billion.

  • Hunger and poor nutrition rose 30% in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2020, with 4 in 10 experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity. In the US, 1 in 5 Latinx households skipped meals last year because they were unable to afford meals.

  • Felipe Espinosa (age 85) and María Josefina Cruz (age 93) just became the oldest adults to earn college degrees in Mexico. An interesting fact that I learned in this story is that 38% of people who are illiterate in Mexico are senior citizens.

  • Barbados officially transitioned from constitutional monarchy to republic, 55 years after gaining independence from Britain and 396 years of British rule. One of their first acts as a new republic was to name Rhianna as a national hero and gave her the title "the right excellence." They also declared Feb. 22 national "Rhianna Day."

  • A new study found that race is one of the strongest predictors of the overall range of a person's network of acquaintances, even outranking political ideology. The good news is that the study suggests that some of the sharpest divisions in current society like political affiliation are not as impermeable and hopeless as we might think. On the other hand, people remain largely segregated by race, which limits economic opportunities for historically disadvantaged groups and reinforces social inequities.

  • A November survey of consumers found that 3 out of 4 (🔒WSJ) respondents said their closet is full of clothes that they will never wear again. Only 15% said that they liked their wardrobe as is.

  • India doesn't allow dual citizenship to curb brain drain in the country but the policy is may be resulting in the opposite intended effect: residents are renouncing their citizenship. Approximately 110,000 Indian nationals surrendered their passports from January to September 2021.

  • Around 76% of students who leave professional graduate programs (dentistry, veterinary medicine, and chiropractic medicine) have student debt loads that are larger than their salaries 2 years later. Debt often topped $200,000 for these degrees while median earnings in 2020 for dentists was $164,000 and $99,000 for veterinarians and $71,000 for chiropractors. Student debt loads exceed median wages for 22% of students leaving master's programs and 11% for bachelor's degrees.

🧪 Science & Technology

  • Scientists from Princeton and the University of Washington designed a camera the size of a coarse grain of salt that can produce color images that are as good as cameras that are half a million times its size.

  • The UK fined Clearview AI $22.6 million (🔒NYT) for breaching their data privacy regulations with their controversial facial-recognition software. If the courts uphold the fine, the amount represents 60% of the company's funding to-date.

  • A group of former Google employees are suing parent company Alphabet for breaching their contracts by violating data security policies, which failed to uphold their "don't be evil" pledge.

  • Scientists found fossils of new dinosaur species named the stegouros. It's a small dog-sized creature with a bird-like snout related to the armored ankylosaur and lived 72 million to 75 million years ago. The fossils were uncovered in Chile.

  • Mexican street food vendors, which employed around 1.6 million people according to a government survey conducted in 2018, are on nearly every major delivery platform but virtually absent on Google Maps. A new crowdsourced project aims to list them on the platform to increase foot traffic and help their businesses.

  • An analysis of satellite data showed that urban trees grow leaves and turn green on average 6 days earlier in the spring compared to rural trees, likely driven by the warmer temperatures in cities. That also means they're more susceptible to frost and that the insects that have evolved to pollinate them may not show up in time when they begin to bloom.

  • This is the first year that Colorado has finished the fall season without measurable snow since the National Weather Service began keeping records in 1882. Average fall temperatures along the Front Range in Colorado have increased at least 3.5° F over the last 50 years. This year is unusually warm. Current snowpack in Colorado is 35% to 85% below normal levels at higher elevations.

  • The UK Biobank released de-identified data on 200,000 UK residents' whole genomes and medical data for researchers around the world.

  • TikTok was the most downloaded free iPhone app in 2021 and the top paid app was Procreate Pocket.

  • Companies have been using AI to create translations and subtitles for voices in ads, movies, and TV shows but there is growing concern over the possibility of deepfaking audio.

  • The share of the global population using the internet reached 4.9 billion (🔒WP) or 63% in 2021. Africa still lags all other countries at 33%.

  • The Department of Homeland Security currently has about 1,500 cybersecurity-related vacancies.

Wishing you a productive week

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