You have to understand something about all the Ozempic scare stories - the entire weight loss industry is in meltdown right now. They made bank selling crap that didn’t work which you kept buying because it didn’t work and you blamed yourself. A one shot medical fix ruins them.
Ah yes, Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings, which has sold over 150 million copies, and The Hobbit which has sold another 100 million (ranking them 2nd and 3rd respectively in top-selling novels of all time), who created over 14 distinct languages and alphabets for Middle-earth before writing his novels, who was fluent in Danish, Dutch, French, German, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Latin, Lombardic, Middle/Old English, Old Norse, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, and Welsh, who, while serving in WWI, developed a secret code to update his wife about his location to bypass British army mail censorship, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature…..
Yes, surely, he is a weak thinker.
You hear all the time that third places are disappearing, but are they? Consider:
-The number of coffee shops and indie bookstores in the US has grown consistently for at least 20 years
-Library operating hours have generally ticked up throughout the same period
-Growth in investment in parks in US cities has outpaced inflation since at least 2007, and downtown & suburban parks in particular have become better programmed
-We're in a golden age for restaurants (the frequently-viral observation that food quality and diversity in small cities has improved is 100% correct). Americans eat out more than ever before and have many more restaurant options
-Recreational trails, which hardly existed fifty years ago, continue to grow in mileage and quality at a rapid pace everywhere in the country
To the extent that people do less socializing at these places, I think it's a demand problem, not supply. There's plenty of places to hang, we'd just rather be on our phones.
@SCHDaccumulator The S&P is market cap weighted to the top companies so it’s not like your money is being equally split by 500 (unless you buy an equal weighted etf)