Assorted Links Monday

Will there be no more Christmas shopping on Thanksgiving?

Amazon is making its own containers and bypassing supply chain chaos with chartered ships and long-haul planes:

“Who else would think of putting something going into an obscure port in Washington, and then trucking it down to L.A.? Most people are thinking, well, just bring the ship into L.A. But then you’re experiencing those two-week and three-weeks delay. So Amazon’s really taken advantage of some of the niche strategies I believe that the market needs to employ,” Ferreira said.

Could this be the next big thing in fashion? Mushroom leather:

In 2013 that Danish product designer Jonas Edvard developed organic mushroom textile using mushroom spores and plant fibres. The material was called MYX, from mycelium and it was created using the waste material from commercial oyster mushroom production. After harvesting the mushrooms, Edvard discovered that the remaining material could be shaped and dried out.

China-US decoupling? American companies say ‘not so fast’:

After more than 40 years of China’s “reform and opening up,” are US firms serving as checks on the Chinese government’s totalitarian aims — as Mao Zedong once feared — or are they becoming China’s ideological accomplices? Strategic “decoupling” from China has been a top goal of consecutive American presidents, yet US foreign investment in China is growing alongside assiduous efforts by American companies to appease the Chinese Communist Party

How to be great? Just be good, repeatably:

There’s a false impression that success or notoriety comes with being flashy. This notion comes from the media focusing on outliers, whether it be events or personalities which diverge from the norm. Not only can this encourage people to aim for notoriety just for the sake of it, but it makes the rest of us believe that correlation (of those outliers) is causation; in other words, success of those individuals is due to their offbeat ways. But here’s another storyline: the most sure and therefore the best way to “success” is through consistency.

The effects of major retailers raising their minimum wages:

Could Covid lead to progress: Mass tragedies sometimes have unexpected consequences.

US wages for the lowest earners are growing at the fastest rate since the global financial crisis: