NOW LIVE ON WhoWhatWhy
by The WhoWhatWhy Team
Following the candidates and the controversies with a WhoWhatWhy view. Want beauty contests and horse races? You won’t find them here. The stories which help you make a real judgment? Here’s where you start.
WHO
Steve Wozniak: ‘US Would Look Like Dubai if it Didn’t Spend All its Money on Military’
The founder of Apple—no, the other founder of Apple—visited the gleaming, oil-fueled city-state of Dubai and let loose during a wide-ranging interview with ArabianBusiness.com. “Woz” was duly impressed by the tiny emirate’s towering skyline and modern infrastructure. Of course, some of the money the US has spent on the military has helped guarantee Dubai’s success. And Dubai, along with the Gulf Cooperation Council, is spending some of that success in the supermarket of American weaponry.
Snapchat CEO Warns “Easy Money Policy” Has Created The Tech Bubble, “Matter Of Time Til It Bursts”
Evan Spiegel is the 24-year-old CEO of Snapchat—a quintessential Silicon Valley “unicorn” company. A “unicorn” is any pre-IPO tech company with a valuation of over $1 billion. Most unicorns have raised hundreds of millions of dollars without ever turning a profit or, in many cases, ever showing revenue. And some, like Uber, are decacorns, meaning their valuation has surpassed $10 billion based solely on fundraising and perception. Now Spiegel is warning about the “abnormal market conditions” created by the Fed’s low interest rate policy and how it is stoking this crazy tech bubble.
WHAT
Military Tributes at Baseball games: True Honors or Hollow Gestures?
The Washington Post digs deep into the motivations and the money behind the now-ubiquitous presence of military ceremonies and celebrations at major sporting events in the United States. What began on 9/11 with the playing of “God Bless America” during the seventh inning stretch has stretched into an emerging scandal involving a pay-for-reverence scheme between various branches of the military and big sports franchises. And some are questioning both the recruiting angle and desensitization effect of turning these paid ceremonies into rote exercises in futility.
WHY
Why We’d Be Better Off if Napoleon Never Lost at Waterloo
Here is a fun, well-developed counterfactual argument by award-winning historian, and noted Napoleon expert, Andrew Roberts. He postulates a far better outcome for the world if Napoleon had not been defeated by Wellington at Waterloo. Roberts sees Napoleon as a bulwark of meritocracy and, had he not been usurped by Waterloo, he might’ve held fast against reactionary powers in Europe that stopped the march of liberal constitutionalist movements around the continent.
Sign Up
Like what you see? Sign up to subscribe.
