2….

1. S&P Tech Ratio to S&P Above 2000

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2. AAPL Has Bought Back 44% of Its Stock in 12 Years

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3. Banks Playing a Smaller and Smaller Role-Torsten Slok Apollo

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4. Stablecoins Passing Visa Transactions Volume

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5. Ethereum ETF +57% in One-Month…$1B Inflows

Ether Sees $1B Inflows to ETFs

Ethereum 5-Year Chart.

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6. Renter Households Have Increased by 1.6M Since 2023

7. NYC Stops Hiring

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8. 179 Weapons Systems Supplying Europe Military vs. 33 for U.S

Barrons The result is a hodgepodge of 179 weapons systems supplying European militaries, compared with 33 in the U.S., where the top four contractors soak up more than half of Pentagon procurement, according to Morningstar research. “Joint procurement will be the key to expanding Europe’s defense base,” Muharremi says. https://www.barrons.com/articles/europes-defense-stocks-cool-2-buck-trend-1dc8e6c2?mod=past_editions

Arms Production Across Europe

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9. U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds-SF Chronicle

By Jess Lander,Staff WriterAug 13, 2025

A new Gallup report reveals that only 54% of American adults reporting drinking alcohol in 2025. 

The percentage of Americans who report drinking alcohol has hit a nearly 90-year low, according to a recent Gallup poll.

The results of Gallup’s annual Consumption Habits survey, released Wednesday, revealed that only 54% of U.S. adults reported drinking alcohol in 2025. This figure represents a three-year decline from 67% in 2022, and falls below the previous record low of 55% in 1958.

Another record low from the 2025 poll: Only 24% of drinkers said they had a drink in the past 24 hours, down from 32% two years ago.

Gallup’s survey of roughly 1,000 U.S. residents, which the company has conducted since 1939, was consistent with other reports on declining alcohol consumption and sales. While there are many contributing factors to the slump — cause for deep concern within California’s $55 billion wine industry — Gallup’s data largely points to the shift in how Americans view alcohol’s effects on health. For the first time since 2001, a majority of Americans surveyed — 53%, up from 45% in 2024 — said they believe drinking in moderation, defined as one or two drinks a day, is bad for their health. In 2018, just 28% of Americans surveyed believed alcohol had negative health impacts. 

Perception has changed drastically since the 1990s, when a “60 Minutes” episode about the French Paradox — the belief that a stereotypical French diet heavy on butter, cheese and wine lowers the risk of heart disease — launched a decades-long wine boom. Gallup added questions about beliefs on alcohol’s impact on health in 2001: Through 2011, the percentage of people who believed alcohol was bad for them “hovered near 25%,” states the Gallup report, “roughly equal to those who considered drinking beneficial.” 

Yet since then, “the medical research has turned,” said Gallup expert Lydia Saad, who authored the report. Today, only 6% of respondents said they believe alcohol is good for one’s health, another survey low. The shift has occurred as new studies have called the French Paradox hypothesis into question, offering evidence that alcohol has negative impacts on health and can even increase the risk of several types of cancer. In 2023, the World Health Organization declared that no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health, and earlier this year, the U.S. surgeon general​​issued an advisory that stated alcohol is the third leading preventable cause of cancer in America. The U.S. Dietary Guidelines could follow suit this year with a potential change to its recommendation on alcohol consumption. The Gallup report likens alcohol’s decline to tobacco’s in the 1960s after the U.S. surgeon general’s warnings, which “marked the start of a long-term decline in smoking.”

“We’re seeing how quickly Americans have absorbed the information that drinking is likely bad for your health,” said Saad. “The more these findings are reinforced by health authorities, doctors, the federal government, the more likely it is that people who have resisted thus far in believing alcohol is bad for their health may change their minds.”

Moreover, Saad said that while “people who say drinking is bad for your health are still drinking,” the data reveals that many are cutting back. The average number of drinks consumed over the past seven days is 2.8, down from 3.8 drinks a year ago and the lowest figure since 1996. Forty percent of drinkers said it had been a week since they last consumed alcohol — a 25-year high. Those concerned about alcohol’s health effects are having fewer drinks on average than those who aren’t, the data shows. 

Read on for other key takeaways from Gallup’s report on alcohol consumption.

 https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/wine/article/drink-alcohol-americans-poll-20812180.

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10. What Made Einstein a Genius Wasn’t His IQ

Psychology Today Why Einstein’s brilliance owed more to method, curiosity, and work than IQ. T. Alexander Puutio Ph.D.

 Key points

• Raw intelligence is common; genius emerges when it’s systematically developed.

• We overrate talent because it’s visible and underrate the hidden work behind it.

• Genius can be cultivated through productive skepticism and deliberate practice, even if its a slow process.

Émile Zola, the French novelist, once quipped: “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”

The very same can be said about geniuses, and, in fact, it should be said much more often than it is.

Our fixation on thinking about intelligence as a feature induces a harmful kind of myopia that does nothing to help us run our engines better. When we look at geniuses like Einstein, what they had going on inside their craniums was only the beginning.

Think of it this way. If genius were a cake, Einstein would have had a bigger kitchen. What he still needed was the right ingredients, the right process, and the willingness to bake. And not just bake, but to make something exquisite.

The work, it turns out, matters much more than the raw brainpower. Without it, we would never have heard of Einstein at all.

Why intelligence doesn’t always germinate into performance

Intelligence is not as rare a commodity as we tend to think.

Statistically speaking, there are likely hundreds of Einstein-level minds walking among us today. There were likely just as many when our earliest ancestors roamed the plains, when their collective intelligence amounted to little more than sharper bits of obsidian and an improved way of roasting meat.

When thinking about geniuses of yore, we often fall for a post-hoc fallacy: We see extraordinary people and their accomplishments, and we attribute those accomplishments entirely to the intelligence they harbor. What we don’t see is the grind behind the scenes and the years of reading, tinkering, failing, and recalibrating, and the failures they’ve left behind. We underweight the work, and in doing so, we miss the true lesson that the rare glimpses of true genius we see could teach us.

Psychologist Françoys Gagné offers a useful lens for why we don’t generate more Einsteins and da Vincis than we do. He divides human abilities into two broad categories: natural abilities and systematically developed ones. We tend to notice the first, the obvious talent, but the second is invisible to us. That invisibility creates the double bind where we overemphasize natural talent because it’s salient, and we underemphasize systematic development because it’s hidden. As a result, we copy the wrong things.

Worse still, those who do find their way to systematic development often struggle to explain it to others. In fact, we often keep them as far away from teaching their methods as we can, and only want to hear of the outcomes instead. Einstein and da Vinci are perfect examples.

What Einstein and da Vinci actually did differently

Einstein, though widely revered today, was no star student in the conventional sense. He disliked rote memorization and distrusted the authoritarian style of teaching that had been passed down since Comenius coined the term didactics in the 17th century.

Instead, he gravitated toward teachers and peers who matched his yearning for independent thought. One such influence was his “Olympia Academy,” a self-made discussion group with fellows Maurice Solovine, a philosophy student, and Conrad Habicht, who was a mathematician and Einstein’s neighbor. Together, they read voraciously across fields, debating philosophy, science, and literature. They weaponized curiosity for no other reason than the joy of it, and that’s how Einstein first encountered Ernst Mach’s The Science of Mechanics, along with other concepts without which we would not be talking of his genius today.

For da Vinci, the formative influence wasn’t in books but in pure, unstructured experimentation. In Andrea del Verrocchio’s workshop, he learned a restless, cross-disciplinary way of working where switching from sculpture to painting to hydraulics without warning; leaving projects half-finished when a new obsession seized him was the norm. Pope Leo reportedly sighed, “Alas, this man will never finish a thing,” while Michelangelo openly mocked him for his unorthodox approach to work and learning. But that habit of wandering into new domains was precisely what fueled da Vinci’s breakthroughs.

In both men, you see the same threads: non-orthodoxy, early exposure to experimentation, and an almost aggressive curiosity. The same pattern runs through Richard Feynman’s safe-cracking physics, Alan Turing’s chess-playing machines, and countless others.

And yet, when we try to “recreate” genius today, we do the opposite. We hand out standardized textbooks, map out linear career paths, and treat curiosity as a distraction rather than the primary fuel for what we hope to come out at the end. Good luck to all involved.

Could you become a genius too?

The question isn’t as naive as it sounds.

We dismiss the thought because we’ve bought the myth that genius is a feature, an inborn gift, rather than a result. Many will even tell you that geniuses are born, not made. But the truth is that genius is cultivated, and, better yet, the cultivation process is accessible to almost everyone.

Adopting productive skepticism and weaponizing your curiosity will build a mind capable of surprising things. Even if your engine runs slower than Einstein’s, remember: This is not a race. Einstein himself took decades to reach his greatest insights, and in some cases, he was wrong.

A good place to start is the work ethic. You can borrow the tools, try your own thought experiments like Einstein, and explore fields you know nothing about like da Vinci. You could even chase ideas you have no immediate use for, just to create space for lateral thinking in the future.

I can’t promise you’ll solve quantum dynamics any better than Einstein did, but I can promise this. If you commit to the same kind of practice, you’ll end up in the rarest labor pool of all, the fellowship of people who are doing the work that creates genius. And that, more than IQ points, is what changes the world.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/curiosity-code/202508/what-made-einstein-a-genius-wasnt-his-iq

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