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As a BBC reporter O'Connell interviewed Adam Neumann during the its highflying days when its share value today at $1.22 was $400. The company was about to do in office space rental what Amazon had done to retail and Neumann talked the talk, yet only a few years later the company is filing for bankruptcy.  Money went into valuation at $47 billion it is now $64 million. Billions of dollars wasted. Another example of how capital allocation in the American economy is failing and billions of dollars that are wasted could have been used to rebuild America's crumbling infrastructure and public needs in health and education, fighting climate change.

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Annette Bening  age 65 and Jodie Foster age 60 show up as real athletes in the film "Nyad," which shows Diana Nyad's 110 mile swim from Cuba to Florida in 2013 at age 64. Jodie Foster and Annette Bening say about their role- they were frustrated by so few roles for mature women in Hollywood, so that she wanted to shatter age images in people's heads. Bening trained every day for 1 year under US Olympian Rada Owen. It meant spending 4 to 8 hours in the water.

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Lonely Planet and other travel books contributed to all the travel overcrowding we see today. Tony Wheeler a co-founder has some advice- "go two streets over" and you can avoid a touristy spot for other attractive options. The Washington Post's Andrea Sachs talks to Lonely Planet travel books cofounder Tony Wheeler who started the company with his wife Maureen in 1972 after trips from London to Turkey and Iran by car. Their first book was Across Asia on the Cheap and started a new period of travel using hostels and cheaper accomodations and distant locations not travelled before by earlier generations such as Brazil and Argentina, distant parts of Asia and Africa. Wheeler is now 76 and lives in Melbourne and London. He sold his company in 2011, and it is now run by Red Ventures.

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A look at the Palestine conflict from 1947 to 2023. The British Mandate for Palestine gave Britain a role in administering this part of the Middle East after it took control of the region from the defeated Ottoman Empire in the First World War 1914-1918. The League of Nations set up the Mandate with intention to take the people in this territory to independence. The UN in 1947 gave about 56% of Palestine to the Jewish people and 44% to the Arab people. When the Arab people rejected this UN settlement and Arab neighbors Jordan, Egypt and Syria invaded in 1947 about 70% of the territory went to the new state of Israel. There have been repeated conflicts almost every 7 years since and there are factions within Israel and inside Palestine Arabs who have protracted the dispute, including over holy sites in Jerusalem, without seeking the kind of settlement that won peace for Ireland after hundreds of years of British rule and discrimination. The world with its billions of people in China and India who seek development and billions of people in Africa and Latin America who seek a way out of poverty, has no interest in prolonging small conflicts that distract from the importance of tackling climate change, infrastructure development and education, healthcare, ...

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Jennifer Szalai of NYT writes about books on inequlity and how it is pervading the public consciousness. She writes about the work of English economist Angus Deaton who settled in the US and could not understand how bad inequality has become in the US.

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Infrastructure renovation in Hoboken, New Jersey, on marshy land near the Hudson river, helped it escape the floods that affected New York City a few months back.

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Burning of stubble from the rice harvest to clear land for the next year's cultivation in the Punjab creates 25% of the pollution over New Delhi. Automobile pollution adds more pollutants. This toxic mix of pollutants is trapped by the cooler air during the winter over much of northern India. At one point the pollution index reached 643 in New Delhi, by comparison it was hard to breather with an index of 116 from the wildfires in Canada's northern region that sent smoke all the way into Washington D.C. 

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The question of identity that looms large over the retirement years is explored from personal experience by Stephen Yoder in the WSJ.

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Labour party and Tories party have lost touch with working class people in Britain says The Guardian. The working class itself has more of a base in service sectors as the manufacturing sector has declined. Fewer and fewer leaders in both parties in Britain have a working class background and can identify with workers. 

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HV.1 and EG.5 are the dominant Covid variants in November 2023 each taking up about 25% of cases in the US. Paxlovid works against these variants. The new Pfizer vaccine also works against these Covid variants. More than any single variant the rapid rate of virus evolution, the many mutations, are the chief concern of experts. Overall they combine to produce the threat we face in public health.

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People don't design their own electric motor, then why should they pick stocks when index funds are widely available. Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway says one of the reasons he was economically successful is that he read so much, "read so damn much all my life." He says it is charlatanism to charge three percent to pick stocks and manage other people's money, when index funds can do the job better. He doesn't believe in bitcoin, a sovereign issues money for a reason and it has worked, artificial currency he calls "a stink ball."

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The S&P 500 index gained 5.9% the week of October 29th for its best gain since November 2022. For 2023 it has gained 14%. A jobs report showing less job growth of 150,000 slightly higher unemployment at 3.9% and slowing inflation, led the US Fed to pause raising interest rates. This has created optimism that inflation would gradually decline which is good for the economy.

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Immigration declined in the 1920's so that when FDR became president it was easier to build a working class coalition. After 1965 when president Johnson signed into law a bill that allowed family unification it was seen as not adding significantly to legal immigration. Yet in the period after 1965 millions of immigrants entered the US. This writer says the Democrats have forgotten that FDR built the Democratic worker base when immigration was not an issue. Today the rise in immigration has muddled the Democrats efforts to build back the working class coalition of FDR, with loss of support from workers and non college educated people who see migrants crossing the border as a serious problem.

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Huge orders made in 2023 for new planes from Boeing and Airbus now place India in the top ranks of the world civil aviation market. A large growing middle class is using air travel for business and tourism. The government is investing billions of dollars to build new airports in smaller and midsize cities in addition to Mumbai, New Delhi, Bangalore. A new aircraft industry is also coming up in Gujarat state.

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When it comes to climate change China is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world- more than North America, Europe, South America and Africa combined. It emits about one third of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. When it comes to climate change action China is meeting its 2030 targets 6 years earlier, and it is meeting all the increased use of energy through renewables. Yet there is another side and this is that China is building coal fired plants at a rapid pace to meet its energy needs. Xie Zenhua meets John Kerry at Sunnylands estate in southern California to discuss how China and the US can cooperate on climate change action. No two nations are so critical to meet the challenges posed by climate change from fires to floods and drought.