Ever since we awakened to the fact that death is inevitable, humans have been trying to find ways to live forever. Until recently, our options have been pretty limited. One could choose to believe in some sort of afterlife and wait out the inevitable with varying levels of equanimity, but many of us would probably […]
Over the last couple of years, more than half of all companies that went public came through the back door via mergers with special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). We all know how that has turned out – pretty much what we warned about several years ago in a piece titled How SPACs Reward Everyone Except […]
Getting life insurance is one of those things that responsible adults are supposed to do, like work the same job for 45 years and retire with a gold watch. Who does that anymore? Similarly, the number of people buying into life insurance policies is dropping. Over the last decade, life insurance market penetration decreased by […]
Earlier this month, Alphabet (GOOG) took the air out of its Loon subsidiary, a former moonshot project for deploying internet around the world using high-flying balloons. Apparently, the economics just didn’t work out. No word on how much Google’s parent company spent on Loon, but SoftBank had sunk $125 million into the business in 2019. […]
We’ve talked before about the many types of regenerative medicines under development by a multitude of companies. Investors are pouring money into a burgeoning field of life sciences called longevity of which regenerative medicine is a part of. From printing organs on demand to harvesting them from pigs, there are many promising regenerative medicine technologies […]
Longevity is potentially a trillion-dollar industry – until it isn’t, because we can’t keep the vulnerable safe from the latest pandemic. The Woohoo Flu has us distracted from the longevity thesis for a bit as the medical community scrambles to deal with something we can’t control. A lack of information and a fractured population means […]
Shelly Kagan is Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale, and he teaches a great class about death – PHIL 176: Death. You don’t need to have high SAT scores in order to attend this class, nor do you need to reside in Connecticut. Using the power of the Internet, anyone on this planet can attend his […]
Somewhere in a coffee shop in America, some green-haired millennial is typing away feverishly on their brand new Macbook Air, broadcasting to their Twitter followers about how evil capitalism is. As they pour a dab of pasture-grazed New Zealand cow’s milk into their freshly roasted cup of Guatemalan organic free-trade coffee, they lament their woes […]
In many industries, there’s usually one or two companies that become nearly synonymous with their particular market. One of the most obvious examples is Coca Cola (KO). Think about it: We still refer to a soda as a coke, even though the soft drink manufacturer allegedly abandoned using cocaine in its formulation long ago. In […]
Conan the Barbarian is one of those movies that can teach you a lot about life and death. The philosopher-king of Cimmeria once reflected about what was best in life: “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women.” Poetry on par with the Iliad. A more […]