Applications to American business schools, including MBA programs, have fallen for five straight years according to this recent WSJ article. Compared to last year, business school applications to US schools are down about 9.1%; whereas they have been rising in other parts of the world.… Read More
Joshua Levine’s recent (WSJ Magazine) piece on John Pawson, — the architect who “elevated nothingness to an art” — is a good read. It’s mostly about the country retreat that he recently completed for himself and his wife in the English countryside, but there’s also… Read More
I came across this map while reading up on Hurricane Dorian: It is a map showing the tracks of every known hurricane in the North Atlantic (1851-2013) and in the Eastern North Pacific (1949-2013). Major hurricanes (category 3 or higher) are shown in yellow and… Read More
A few weeks ago the WSJ published an article about Toronto’s growing tech talent pool, arguing that its base now rivals the top US cities, but that it may not be an entirely good thing for the city’s ecosystem. I wrote about it here. This… Read More
A few years ago I wrote a post talking about “depression babies.” In it, I cited a research paper that looked at the impact of macroeconomic shocks on people’s willingness to take on financial risk in the future. The term “depression babies” stems from the… Read More
The Wall Street Journal’s recent piece about “Silicon Valley invading Toronto” is, in my view, describing a generally positive outcome. We are one of the largest cities in North America (the exact ranking depends on where you draw the urban boundaries). We have more enlightened… Read More
Last week it was announced that WordPress.com (which is what I use for this blog) had purchased Tumblr for around $3 million. This is, of course, after Yahoo had purchased it for $1.1 billion in 2013 and later wrote it down, having never figured out… Read More
The below chart from this morning’s Wall Street Journal is perhaps a good example of our ongoing transformation from an industrial economy to an information economy. Just four stocks — namely Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook — have accounted for 19% of the S&P 500’s… Read More
The State of New York just enacted a new law (on June 14, 2019) requiring that 51% of existing tenants agree to buy their apartments before a building can be converted into a condominium or a cooperative. There was previously no requirement for anyone to… Read More
This recent NY Times article about crowd estimates for Hong Kong’s annual pro-democracy protest is a good follow-up to my post about the number of people who, allegedly, showed up to last month’s NBA Championship parade here in Toronto. For years, Hong Kong has been… Read More
