A Controversial Take:
Stop Hacking Humans
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/stop-hacking-humans
From cradle to grave, surrogacy to smartphones to gender surgery to euthanasia, Americans are using technology to shortcut human nature — and shortchange ourselves. Here is a new agenda for turning technology away from hacking humans and toward healing them.
Warren Buffett’s 2024 Annual Letter to Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders
https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2024ltr.pdf
The U.S. Treasury, of all places, had already received silent warnings of Berkshire’s destiny. In 1965, the company did not pay a dime of income tax, an embarrassment that had generally prevailed at the company for a decade. That sort of economic behavior may be understandable for glamorous startups, but it’s a blinking yellow light when it happens at a venerable pillar of American industry. Berkshire was headed for the ash can.
Fast forward 60 years and imagine the surprise at the Treasury when that same company – still operating under the name of Berkshire Hathaway – paid far more in corporate income tax than the U.S. government had ever received from any company – even the American tech titans that commanded market values in the trillions.
To be precise, Berkshire last year made four payments to the IRS that totaled $26.8 billion. That’s about 5% of what all of corporate America paid.
Warren Buffett Dismisses Concerns About Cash Holdings
https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/warren-buffett-dismisses-concerns-about-cash-holdings
The Secret That Colleges Should Stop Keeping
https://www.yahoo.com/news/secret-colleges-stop-keeping-130000330.html
In survey after survey, Americans say that the cost of getting a degree just keeps rising.
But this basic fact of life is not a fact at all. In reality, Americans are paying less for college, on average, than they were a decade ago. Since the 2014–15 school year, the cost of attending a public four-year university has fallen by 21 percent, before adjusting for inflation, according to College Board data analyzed by Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. (Nearly three-quarters of American college students attend a public institution.) The cost of attending a private university has risen in raw terms over the same time period, but is down 12 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. Once tax benefits are factored in, according to a recent Brookings Institution analysis, the average American is paying the same amount for tuition as they were in the 1990s.