‘The Tuition is Too Damn High’

Found via Mish.

“The Tuition is Too Damn High” is a 10-part series that will run in Wonkblog over the next two weeks exploring the causes and consequences of — and potential fixes for — the skyrocketing costs of higher education. This is part one.

The Upside of Family Ties: The Link Between DNA and ROI

Found via @jasonzweigwsj. I haven’t bought and read this case study yet, but it looks similar to a lot of the points that Tom Russo makes about the types of family-run businesses in which he prefers to invest.

Family-owned businesses perform poorly on most accepted ‘best practices' of good corporate governance, from majority voting to independent chairs. Could it be possible that they have an important lesson to teach publicly-held companies? Yes, say the authors, who discuss their latest research, which indicates that family-owned businesses are not only outperforming publicly-held businesses over time, but they are also leading the way on perhaps the most important best practice of them all: long-term thinking.

Autoimmune Panel Discussion

To get straight to the audio, go HERE.

On Friday I taped an amazing panel discussion show covering all aspects of Autoimmune Disease reversal. It was comprised of Whitney Ross Gray, Sarah Ballantyne, Paul Jaminet and Dr. Terry Wahls. It addresses a variety of Autoimmune Disease symptoms and disroder and is pertinent to a variety of conditions including fatigue, organ system and neurological. It is a must-hear discussion for anyone dealing with these issues... and in my humble opinion.. cover topics that can reveal the protection of health for just about any person. Every person on the panel has reversed AI diseases with the topic covered. Dr. Wahls reversed her Multiple Sclerosis using the protocols discussed!!

If you had to attend a seminar by these 4 people it would cost you hundreds of dollars. here it is for free. Please share this with as many people as possible.

A solo home run: The Slurve is trying to build an authentic, profitable business around email

Found via Abnormal Returns. I think there are some good investment-related newsletters out there, but it seems there is still room for some additional high quality ones to come in at some point. If you know of any good ones that I may be missing, send me an email and let me know about them (valueinvestingworld@gmail.com).

The daily baseball newsletter cuts through the endless sea of sports online. Can email newsletters be to the 2010s a bit of what blogs were to the 2000s?

Right up there with “kill your darlings” and “write what you know” is the classic advice to write for just one person. Kurt Vonnegut called this the “secret of artistic unity.” He believed that “every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind.”

Maybe that’s part of why email newsletters — email! 1993 technology! — seem to have lost none of their power in our increasingly nichified media world. Why settle for hyper-targeted coverage that caters to millennials nostalgic for Dawson’s Creek who may or may not see your work, for example, when you can deliver content to an audience of individuals who feel like you’re writing directly to them, right in their inbox?

Small-batch newsletters may be a throwback to a simpler Internet — surely that’s part of the appeal — but they still work.

…

A newsletter is a branding device, a distribution mechanism — and perhaps even a viable source of revenue.

That’s what Michael Brendan Dougherty is banking on. After political reporting and editing stints at The American Conservative and Business Insider, he decided to quit his job and launch The Slurve, a daily baseball newsletter that began last March on the eve of the 2013 baseball season.

…

“A great newsletter has the personality of an email from a friend and the professionalism of a magazine,”  Dougherty says. “And newsletters are like the oldest format on the Internet in a way, but it has so many virtues.”

For Dougherty, starting a newsletter wasn’t a way to send readers back to the homepage of a larger website; the newsletter in and of itself is the product. That’s by design: It also means the newsletter is the central editorial focus rather than a bland afterthought of copied-and-pasted headlines, the strategy that makes so many news organizations’ daily emails feel a half-step away from spam.

“Originally, I wanted to do it as a blog,” he said. “I tried it and I found it was really hard to get an audience and to fill up enough content for a functioning must-view blog site. You had to be doing it as if it were broadcast all day.”

Instead, Dougherty obsessively tracks the outcome of each day’s baseball games and scours the Internet for quality content. (Dougherty says he drew on his own experience receiving newsletters like The Transom.) The Slurve is delivered seven days a week around 10 a.m., and starts with top news. (An opener from last week: “The big story from the fields last night is that the Cardinals have taken sole possession of first place in the highly entertaining NL Central race.”)

The Slurve also includes box scores and links to recaps from the previous day’s games, injury updates, baseball trivia, and a roundup of the best baseball news and writing from around the Internet. “There’s never been so much good writing about baseball as there is now, but it’s also buried under so much junk,” he says. “I go through an unbelievable stack [of content] and I pick out stories or articles that are provocative that carry a real piece of information. I pick out about 130 to 140 of them every morning. The amount of information is just endless.” (That sample issue linked above features 149 links and over 2,700 words.)

Dougherty also includes a handful of links that aren’t about baseball, which gives readers a sense of his personality, sets the tone for the newsletter, and offers clues as to the kind of audience he’s writing for. (Some of the recent stories he’s shared have to do with Ron Burgundy, Breaking Bad, pizza, and science fiction.)

A subscription costs $4 a month or $36 annually, and Dougherty says he’s already a significant way toward building a full-time income. He won’t say how many subscribers he has, except to say that he’s very pleased with growth since the beginning of the season. “Any one of my customers can fire me any day, but the vast majority of them are sticking with me so far,” he says.

Jeffrey Bezos, Washington Post’s next owner, aims for a new ‘golden era’ at the newspaper

Jeffrey P. Bezos, the next owner of The Washington Post, says he doesn’t have all the answers for what’s ailing the newspaper industry or for the financially challenged news organization he is preparing to buy. But he says he’s eager to start asking questions and conducting experiments in the quest for a new “golden era” at The Post.

In his first interview since his $250 million purchase of The Post was announced in early August, Bezos said his basic approach to operating the business will be similar to the philosophy that has guided him in building Amazon.com from a start-up in 1995 to an Internet colossus with $61 billion in sales last year.

“We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with for 18 years, and they’re the reason we’re successful: Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient,” he said. “If you replace ‘customer’ with ‘reader,’ that approach, that point of view, can be successful at The Post, too.”

MAN AND SUPERMAN: In athletic competitions, what qualifies as a sporting chance? – By Malcolm Gladwell

Thanks to Sean for passing this along.

What we are watching when we watch élite sports, then, is a contest among wildly disparate groups of people, who approach the starting line with an uneven set of genetic endowments and natural advantages. There will be Donald Thomases who barely have to train, and there will be Eero Mäntyrantas, who carry around in their blood, by dumb genetic luck, the ability to finish forty seconds ahead of their competitors. Élite sports supply, as Epstein puts it, a “splendid stage for the fantastic menagerie that is human biological diversity.” The menagerie is what makes sports fascinating. But it has also burdened high-level competition with a contradiction. We want sports to be fair and we take elaborate measures to make sure that no one competitor has an advantage over any other. But how can a fantastic menagerie ever be a contest among equals?

……………..

Related previous posts:

Malcolm Gladwell: COMPLEXITY AND THE TEN-THOUSAND-HOUR RULE

Interview with David Epstein: How Athletes Get Great

What it takes to be great

Related books:

Outliers: The Story of Success

The Sports Gene

The Secret Race

Two must-read books that I've come across over the last month...

1. A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes by Peter Bevelin (also available in Kindle format HERE)

2. The Dao of Capital: Austrian Investing in a Distorted World by Mark Spitznagel (also available in Kindle format HERE)

PBS Nova - Fractals - Hunting the Hidden Dimension

Mysteriously beautiful fractals are shaking up the world of mathematics and deepening our understanding of nature. You may not know it, but fractals, like the air you breathe, are all around you.

Their irregular, repeating shapes are found in cloud formations and tree limbs, in stalks of broccoli and craggy mountain ranges, even in the rhythm of the human heart.

In this documentary film, we takes viewers on a fascinating quest with a group of maverick mathematicians determined to decipher the rules that govern fractal geometry.

Link

Charlie Munger: Lessons From an Investing Giant - By Jason Zweig

One of the least appreciated virtues in investing is courage.

Filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission in March and again this month show the extraordinary gumption of Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

Mr. Munger, who will turn 90 years old next Jan. 1, is a model for individual investors who wonder how they can possibly beat the professionals at their own game. The pros have more information than you, and their trading machines are faster. But you still have an edge over them—so long as you play a different game by your own, more sensible rules.

You can be patient; the pros can't. You don't have to be part of the herd; they do. Above all, you can be brave; they almost never are.

What makes Mr. Munger a model for individual investors?

John Mauldin: How Do I Hate Thee?

When I was growing up, Labor Day always marked the official end of summer, since we started school the next day. These days everyone seems to start school sometime in August, but for those of us of a certain age, the natural annual rhythm is still to see the last few days of August as the end of a carefree summer. So with a nod to your need for a little more summer relaxation, I will try to keep this letter shorter than usual. And with apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I will list a number of reasons why I hate this market and then suggest a few reasons why that should get you excited. We will look at some charts, and I'll briefly comment on them. No deep dives this week, just a survey of the general landscape.