Weekend Briefing No. 601
The Western Happiness Paradox -- America Is Getting Safer -- How Amazon Built AWS
Welcome to the weekend.
Prime Numbers
82.1 — America's increasingly tall trucks have contributed to an 82.1% jump in pedestrian deaths from vehicles between 2009 to 2021, largely due to larger blind spots created by rollover protection features that ironically make some trucks have worse visibility than military tanks.
12 — Taylor Swift demonstrated her obsession with numbers by announcing her 12th album at 12:12 a.m. after posting exactly 12 photos on Instagram, leaving industry insiders wondering if she'll embrace or skip the number 13 for her next release.
3 — The average top 40 UK song has shrunk to just 3 minutes, 12 seconds in 2019 compared to around four minutes in the early 2000s due to streaming and TikTok's influence.
The Western Happiness Paradox
While global well-being reaches historic highs with 93% of people worldwide no longer suffering, wealthy Western nations are experiencing a shocking decline in life satisfaction despite economic prosperity. Countries like Kosovo, Vietnam, and Paraguay report surging happiness levels, but American and Canadian thriving rates have plummeted from 67% to 49% since 2007, revealing a devastating disconnect between material success and social health. The culprit appears to be Western society's aggressive embrace of hyper-individualism and secular self-expression values since the 1960s, which has systematically dismantled the community bonds and spiritual meaning that actually drive human flourishing. Young progressives are hit hardest, with 57% of very liberal college students reporting poor mental health compared to 35% of conservatives, suggesting that the very values meant to liberate us may be destroying our capacity for happiness. New York Times (8 minutes)
America Is Getting Safer
Two-thirds of Americans believe crime increased in 2024, yet FBI data reveals the opposite: it was America's safest year since the 1960s. Violent crime dropped to just 349 incidents per 100,000 people—the lowest since 1969—while murder rates plummeted by nearly 15 percent in the fastest decline ever recorded. Despite having 84 million more residents than in 1992, America actually experienced 747,000 fewer violent crimes, demonstrating that safety has improved dramatically even as population grew. The disconnect between this historic achievement and public perception highlights how media coverage shapes reality more than actual statistics do. Popular Information (8 minutes)
How Amazon Built AWS
Amazon's transformation from near-bankruptcy in 2000 to controlling 39% of the internet's infrastructure wasn't planned—it emerged from desperate attempts to fix a "monolithic codebase" that froze during holiday shopping seasons. When Jeff Bezos mandated that all internal teams communicate only through hardened APIs in 2003, he accidentally created the building blocks for cloud computing, turning Amazon into a collection of independent services that could eventually be sold to outsiders. The real breakthrough came when AWS launched S3 storage for pennies per month in 2006, enabling startups like Dropbox and Instagram to build without massive upfront server costs, while traditional vendors like Oracle remained locked into 80% margin licensing models. This "unconstrained market" strategy of sacrificing short-term profits for massive scale ultimately made AWS more profitable than Amazon's entire retail business, proving that sometimes the best innovations come from solving your own operational nightmares. Acquired Briefing (16 minutes)
American Auto Manufacturing
Protectionists claim American automaking collapsed under globalization's weight, but this narrative rests on four fundamental myths that distort both history and policy. (1) The U.S. auto industry never actually collapsed, (2) Detroit's decline wasn't caused by globalization, (3) Japanese imports didn't nearly destroy the sector in the 1980s, and (4) protectionist tariffs didn't save it. When these misconceptions are stripped away, the real story reveals that American automaking adapted and evolved rather than withered, making current protectionist policies both misguided and historically illiterate. Understanding this accurate history demolishes the case for trade barriers and reveals why tariff-based approaches will likely fail to achieve their intended goals. Economic Innovation Group (14 minutes)
IRL Job Interviews
Companies like Google and Cisco are abandoning virtual interviews and returning to face-to-face meetings because candidates are increasingly using AI to cheat their way through technical assessments. What started as efficiency-driven remote hiring has become an arms race where job seekers deploy deepfakes, off-screen AI assistants, and even complete identity theft to land positions they're unqualified for. The FBI has identified thousands of North Korean scammers posing as American workers to infiltrate U.S. tech companies, while Gartner predicts that by 2028, one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be completely fabricated. This digital deception epidemic is forcing employers to embrace the "retro" solution of actually meeting candidates in person—proving that sometimes the oldest technology is the most fraud-resistant. Wall Street Journal (6 minutes)
Judges and AI
While lawyers face sanctions for submitting AI-generated fake cases, judges are now quietly using the same technology to draft orders and summarize cases—with far less accountability when things go wrong. Federal judges in Texas and California are embracing AI as a "thought partner" for routine tasks, but recent cases show hallucinated evidence slipping through and becoming official court rulings that can't simply be reversed like a lawyer's filing. Unlike attorneys who must explain their AI mistakes under threat of sanctions, judges face no such transparency requirements, as demonstrated by a Mississippi federal judge who refused to explain obvious AI errors in his civil rights decision. This judicial AI adoption creates a dangerous asymmetry where the consequences of mistakes are highest precisely where oversight is weakest. MIT Technology Review (7 minutes)
From Olympian to Drug Kingpin
Most people assume Olympic athletes who fail to medal simply fade into obscurity, but Ryan Wedding transformed his snowboarding disappointment into a billion-dollar drug empire. After placing 24th at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics, this Thunder Bay native leveraged his clean image and international connections to become one of the world's most wanted fugitives, eventually running 60 tons of cocaine annually for El Chapo's Sinaloa Cartel. His journey from cherubic snowboarder to ruthless kingpin reveals how athletic discipline, when redirected toward criminal enterprise, can create monsters who order executions with the same focus they once applied to perfecting their sport. Now on the FBI's Most Wanted list with a $10 million bounty, Wedding's story shows that the hunger for greatness doesn't disappear when dreams die—it just finds darker outlets. Toronto Life (12 minutes)
Should We Work Together?
Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.
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Weekend Wisdom
August creates as she slumbers, replete and satisfied. - Joseph Wood Krutch