May 11th, 2022 | ± 4 minutes
New here? The WC is a random mix of stuff that could make you smarter (or at least help you sound smarter down at the pub). Anything useful / interesting / notable that’s on my mind will get pumped into your inbox every Wednesday.
And yes, we know it means toilet. I’ve had to live with these initials for 43 years.
I’m off today for three kids-free days, so I wrote this yesterday and am probably hungover today.
Let’s go!
Table of Contents
Which assets aren’t sh*tting the bed?
I got this table in an email from Vinovest today.
It got me wondering how other alternative assets are doing in 2022, as the stock market continues to shit the bed (S&P 500 is down 17%, NASDAQ has shed 29%)…
If you’re not following the markets, here’s how things are going:
Everyone’s portfolio right now pic.twitter.com/49qmWJnfnp
— Dr. Parik Patel, BA, CFA, ACCA Esq. (drpatel.eth) (@ParikPatelCFA) May 9, 2022
And here’s how a bunch of alternative assets have performed so far in 2022:
🍷 The Liv-Ex 1000 wine index is up 8.6% on the year, with Burgundy alone posting an 18.6% gain. [Liv-Ex]
🥃 The Whisky Icon 100 index is up 11%, and the Japanese whisky index is up 8.9%. [Rare Whisky 101]
🎸 Vintage concert posters are up 10.8% [Alts Proprietary]
🎵 Vintage vinyl is up 14.4% [Alts Proprietary]
👹 Pokemon cards are up 15.8% [CardLadder]
✅ Our picks are up 11% [Alts Insiders]
Time to hide your superyacht
The superyacht police are on the rampage lately, seizing over $1b worth of the vessels from Russian oligarchs and their buddies. The whole affair is rich in schadenfreude and hilarious to everyone who isn’t a Russian oligarch, but the story of the Amadea (below) is perhaps the most dramatic…
The $325m Amadea, owned by Suleiman Kerimov (or is it?), was docked off the Caribbean island of Sint Maartin when Russian tanks first rolled into Ukraine.
Amadea made a beeline for the safety of a Russian port when Kerimov’s name was added to the sanctions list.
But even superyachts need to stop for gas and Pringles when you’re on an eighteen-day-long road sea trip. As the vessel pulled into Fiji for its $500k tank of fuel, the locals seized the yacht on behalf of the American Yacht Police.
While other oligarchs have made similarly desperate dashes for safety, Kerimov now holds the 8,358 nautical miles record for longest failed escape. (That’s $530k worth of fuel).
Artificial intelligence knows people are racist
Dr. Sophie Nightingale, a researcher at Lancaster University (UK), has released a blockbuster study showing that people trust AI-generated faces more and, what’s worse, are terrible at telling fake people from real people.
But that’s burying the lede. The AI also knew that people are racist and used that knowledge to rig the test.
The program used something called a generative adversarial network (GAN) to show people faces iteratively, finding out what sort of faces look the most trustworthy.
Then it created a bunch of faces it thought people would trust. The result is, well… see below.
So it’s no big surprise that the four most trustworthy faces were all fake, and the four least trustworthy faces were real.
I don’t need a fancy AI to conduct this experiment. Take it away, Family Guy!
Crypto is dead; long live Crypto
So it’s, uh… not been a good six months for crypto.
(But don’t tell that to silicon valley). 244 crypto companies were funded in April 2022 – the highest-ever monthly count. In total, $3B worth of venture money has been pumped into crypto startups.
So what’s the deal? Are VCs a lagging indicator? Are they seeing something the market isn’t?
I think several things can be true at once:
- Crypto startups are exactly what VCs want – hundreds of companies with a 10% chance of returning 100x ROI.
- Crypto is here to stay, and even though the tech is early, groundbreaking use cases will come out of it. We’ll all be crypto-native in a decade.
- The prices of BTC and the S&P have become far more correlated since Covid helped make crypto more mainstream. And Bitcoin is down because the market is down.
I don’t know where the bottom is, but I don’t think we’re too far off it.
Zoom is making you stupid. Or less creative.
Three out of every four American employees prefer to work remotely at least one day a week, and 20% of workdays will still be at home once Covid is in the rearview. But is it a good thing?
A study by Dr. Melanie Brucks from Colombia University shows that people are far less creative when brainstorming ideas over Zoom than they are in person. It apparently focuses communicators on the screen, which prompts a narrower cognitive focus.
Stefan’s working remotely again this week.
