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Weekend reading: Summer fields of dreams

Good reads from around the Web.

I laughed out loud reading The Escape Artist’s [1] FAQ for City workers who are thinking about attending a summer festival.

Here’s an extract:

Can I catch communism at a festival?

No. Communism is not a communicable disease. Communism is in fact a sub-optimal system for organising the allocation of scarce resources favoured by The Soviet Union and China prior to the 1990s. Unfortunately for the millions of working class people that died as a result.

Festivals are excellent examples of capitalism at work. Like companies, festivals work best when they treat people as humans, are lightly regulated, flexible and run by good people who don’t get too greedy.

Yes, there are plenty of stalls selling…ahem…non-essential items such as healing crystals, whale song CDs and vegetarian sandals…but these are small entrepreneurs providing what people want.

The irony is that many bankers think festivals are full of communists. Yet it is the bankers that work in monolithic faceless bureaucracies supported by The State.

Most banks make decisions with the efficiency of a 1930s Soviet tractor factory.

Many Monevator readers are City workers. A few of you might be offended, but to be honest I suspect you’ll find it funniest of all.

(Besides, he is talking about the other people…)

Do read the full FAQ [1].

From the blogs

Making good use of the things that we find…

Passive investing

Active investing

Other articles

Products of the week: The Telegraph [18] says that the new two-year and three-year fixed rate savings bonds from Paragon Bank [19] are Best Buys. They pay 2.34% and 2.66% respectively.

Mainstream media money

Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view these enable you to click through to read the piece without being a paid subscriber of that site.1 [20]

Passive investing

Active investing

Other stuff worth reading

Book of the week: The algorithms that nowadays attempt to guess our every move occasionally get lucky. So it was this week at Amazon [34], when its software slaves correctly predicted I’d be interested in Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor [35]. True, this take on Warren Buffett’s legendary sidekick is not out until October. But the premise looks good and the author runs a thoughtful blog. One for the wish list.

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  1. Note some articles can only be accessed through the search results if you’re using PC/desktop view (from mobile/tablet view they bring up the firewall/subscription page). To circumvent, switch your mobile browser to use the desktop view. On Chrome for Android: press the menu button followed by “Request Desktop Site”. [ [40]]