Happy Saturday, y'all! Super fun issue this week with some bizarre happenings at a solar observatory in New Mexico, a trader who built a real $5 billion position when he thought he was practicing on a demo platform, and a chilling (no pun intended) story of an alpine vacation gone very, very wrong.
If you’re an avid skier (or just love breathtakingly beautiful places) then you’ve probably considered skiing the Alps at least once. This incredible story is about one such trip that went wrong in every conceivable way. 10 experienced skiers set out for a 5-hour day of cross-country skiing and only 3 survived. Poor decisions, equipment failures, and suddenly extreme weather cost most of the group their lives, and makes this one a MUST READ. Also, there’s a narrated version on the page so you can listen to it if you prefer. Riveting stuff, and some of the best narrative non-fiction I’ve read in a while.
If you’ve been a Daveslist reader for a while, then you’ve probably seen me recommend Sapiens and Homo Deus as required reading. This article is from Harari’s latest book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century and it looks like he’s hit another home run. We are facing a rate of change that no other group of humans has had to face in history. How we adapt to it will make all the difference in the world.
I can remember this being the promise when computers became mainstream in the 1980s. Unfortunately, the magnificent gains in productivity led to the exact opposite effect. Now your boss gets pissed if you don’t respond to an email at 9 o'clock at night.
Why would the FBI suddenly evacuate and shut down a solar observatory? Of course the internet thinks it’s aliens, but I have to admit that my first thought was that they detected the precursor to another (frankly overdue) Carrington Event. The sun has been more active since the detection of two massive sun spots last year, and even a glancing blow from a coronal mass ejection could be catastrophic to the microcircuitry our modern world relies upon.
The director of the observatory said yesterday that they didn’t find aliens, that all the data will be shared publicly, and that he doesn’t know why the FBI was involved. The observatory is still shuttered due to “ongoing security concerns”, and the FBI has no comment.
Just because the solar observatory in New Mexico didn’t detect aliens doesn’t mean nobody did. This is a pretty incredible story about the potential for AI and how its power can be leveraged to find millions of needles in billions of haystacks.
I had to read this one a couple times. I’m no stranger to trading errors (I had a couple cost me five-figures in my early career), but thinking that you’re trading on a demo platform when you’re actually placing live trades is the sort of nightmare that would wake me up screaming. This kid dug himself a serious hole thinking he was doing it with funny money, but what he did when he realized it was for real was so brazen I still have a hard time believing it. Even worse - it looks like they’re not going to let him keep the money.
SpaceX dropped a bit of a bomb this week with the announcement that a space tourist will be doing a lap around the moon in their Big Falcon Rocket as soon as the next couple months. So who’s going? You’ll have to wait until Monday to find out.
So cool. There’s just something about a radical design that works that brings a smile to your face. I can’t ever see myself living in one of these, but I’d happily spend a weekend in one.
If you’ve ever wondered where offshore banking came from, or you’ve heard of Bretton Woods and didn’t know what it was, or you’re just curious where they got the plot for a classic James Bond movie, then this is the article for you. It’s long, but you’ll learn A LOT about how the world of money works.
That’s it for this week, y'all. Let me know what you thought about this week’s links with a THUMBS UP or DOWN below. As usual, feel free to share with anyone else who might enjoy it.
Have a fantastic weekend, stay safe, and I’ll see you next Saturday!
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