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| Photograph by Evgeny Vershinin |
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| WHAT WE FOUND |
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| The Powerful Millionaires Hiding in Plain Sight |
| Forget Silicon Valley for a second. The country’s real hidden wealth might be sitting in a strip mall dentist’s office or a waxing salon chain you’ve never heard of. A new book argues these overlooked “Main Street millionaires,” car dealers, urinal cake suppliers, tanning bed distributors, collectively hold more wealth than the entire Forbes 400 combined. One woman built an empire twice, first tanning beds, then waxing salons, after riding one trend right into the next. Meet the stealthy wealthy. › |
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| What Happens When Driverless Cars Break the Law? |
| Police in California pulled a car over for an illegal U-turn, and nobody was driving it. They couldn’t write a ticket either, because their forms had no box for a robot. So who actually pays? The rules for robot drivers. › |
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| MORE GOOD STUFF |
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| Why It’s Possible to Be Optimistic in a World of Bad News |
| Voltaire mocked him mercilessly for it, an old philosopher who dared to claim we live in “the best of all possible worlds,” even while disasters piled up around him. But the joke missed the real point. He wasn’t saying everything’s fine, he was describing how every fix ripples into new problems somewhere else, and that the best world isn’t handed to us, it’s something we have to actively build toward. Three centuries later, it’s basically the same reasoning behind how climate scientists and pandemic planners think today. The original optimist. › |
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| Good Luck Trying to Find a McDonald’s in These Countries |
| When Iceland’s last McDonald’s closed in 2009, thousands queued each day for one final burger. Ten more countries have no Golden Arches either. Some banned it, some shunned it, and one has its own knock-off called Mash Donald’s. The full no-go list. › |
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| ONE TO FOLLOW |
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| @mrballen |
| Former Navy SEAL sharing some of the scariest true crime stories and mysteries to ever exist. |
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| LAST WORD |
| “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” |
| — ALBERT EINSTEIN |
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