Tuesday, September 24, 2024

On Our Virtual Route 66 (Final Quarter End Edition): On The Possibilities

Our team pulled together a snapshot courtesy of the team at the Information and The World Bank as we will go dark until after the November Elections here in the United States: 

Five Ways the World Bank Group Will Achieve “Mission 300”

Smart money and digital media don’t always mix well. Just ask KKR. Five years after the private equity firm, together with the Canada Pension Plan, bought a roughly 49% stake in German media giant Axel Springer, parent of Business Insider and Politico, the two investors are fleeing the scene.

That might be hyperbolic. Technically what’s happening is that Axel Springer is breaking in two. KKR and the Canadians will walk away with about 85% of Axel’s classified ads business, the most profitable part of the company. The media properties, which also include German newspaper Bild, will stay behind in the existing company. Axel Springer will become 100% owned by Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner, vice chair Friede Springer and Axel Sven Springer, a grandchild of the founder. KKR and the Canadians seem to be getting the better part of the deal.

As CEOs like to do, Döpfner cast this restructuring as the realization of a dream. Some might see it as more like a nightmare in the making. With KKR’s backing, Axel Springer was able to buy Politico at a $1 billion valuation, among a bunch of other purchases. But acquisitions are likely off the table going forward as Axel Springer won’t have KKR or the financial comfort afforded by its classified ads business. Döpfner noted that the media business accounts for only a third of the profits of the current company despite generating half the revenue. 

And that media business is operating in an increasingly brutal industry. Google, Meta Platforms and Amazon are steadily swallowing up most of the digital ad business, leaving less and less for small firms to fight over. Just look at BuzzFeed, once a high-flying darling of digital media, which is practically burning the furniture to stay alive as its market capitalization hovers around $100 million. Yet new startups continue to sprout, from Puck to Semafor to The Free Press. BI and Politico both have subscription businesses, to be sure, which may insulate them somewhat from advertising pressures, but selling new subscriptions isn’t easy either.

Axel Springer proudly announced today that since the 2019 buyout, its revenues have risen 30% to nearly 4 billion euros. Someone needs to break it to Döpfner that 30% growth over five years isn’t exactly something to brag about, particularly when the company has made a number of acquisitions that surely inflated the revenue. 

Döfner, of course, was upbeat today. He told employees in a note posted online that his plan was for the media company to be “faster, more agile and less bureaucratic” and to “harness the power of artificial intelligence” quicker than rivals. That’s what you call looking at the glass as half-full. 

🕶️ Snap unveils new AI-powered glasses

🧠 Neuralink's breakthrough vision restoration implant gets FDA approval

🎬 First major agreement between AI startup and Hollywood studio

🙃 LinkedIn is training AI on user data by default

📜 California passes actor protection laws on AI clones

🫣 Apple pauses iPadOS 18 rollout for M4 iPad Pro after bricking complaints

🍎 iPhone 16 demand so weak that employees can already buy it on discount

🧬 Scientists store human genome on crystal which can last billions of years

🪖 Palmer Luckey partners with Microsoft to turn US soldiers into Starship Troopers

🎮 Nintendo sues Palworld for patent infringement

🛒 Amazon debuts an AI assistant for sellers, Project Amelia

🫠 YouTube confirms pause screens will now display ads

 👀 Qualcomm wants to buy Intel LINK

  • Qualcomm recently approached Intel about a potential acquisition, which would be significant given Intel's historical dominance in the chip industry with its x86 processor technology.
  • The Wall Street Journal reported the news, which was corroborated by The New York Times, noting that Qualcomm has yet to make an official offer for the company.
  • If the acquisition happens and passes regulatory approval, it would be a major victory for Qualcomm, especially as Intel is currently struggling with financial losses, strategic shifts, and increased competition.

🚚 Fedex uses AI to deliver 'high-quality service' after firing 22,000 humans LINK

  • FedEx is implementing an AI transformation that uses a model called "Shipment Eligibility Orchestrator" to handle tasks previously done by humans, following the firing of 22,000 employees globally.
  • This AI model dynamically routes packages in real-time and has been applied to prioritize shipments such as high-priority healthcare deliveries.
  • Despite technological advancements and cost-cutting measures, FedEx reported a decline in revenue and net profit in Q1 2025, worsened by weaker-than-expected U.S. domestic package market demand.

🤷‍♂️ Cards Against Humanity takes SpaceX to court over trespassing LINK

  • Cards Against Humanity is suing SpaceX for $15 million, alleging that SpaceX trespassed on and damaged its property in Texas by using it without permission for six months.
  • The property was originally purchased by Cards Against Humanity in 2017 as a stunt to obstruct former President Donald Trump's wall construction efforts, and the alleged trespassing has reportedly harmed the company's customer relationships.
  • The lawsuit claims SpaceX's construction activities, including clearing vegetation and compacting soil, have changed the environment and damaged Cards Against Humanity's land, while also creating a false impression of association between the two companies.

🏴‍☠️ Snowflake hacker remains active and uncaught LINK

  • A hacker who impacted up to 165 companies this summer is still active and has recently targeted new organizations, as reported by a cybersecurity expert from Google's Alphabet Inc.
  • The hacker, previously involved in breaching Snowflake Inc., is now targeting American firms in various industries and critical infrastructure organizations in Russia and Bangladesh.
  • Despite boasting about the attacks to journalists, the hacker has evaded law enforcement, illustrating the difficulty of combating international cybercrime because of anonymizing tools and a growing market for stolen credentials.
 

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Meta has a major opportunity to win the AI hardware race.LINK

NASA has a fine plan for deorbiting the ISS—unless Russia gets in the way.LINK

SEC seeks sanctions against Elon Musk over Twitter investigation.LINK

After X’s ban in Brazil, Tumblr reports ~350% user growth.LINK

Google calls for halting use of WHOIS for TLS domain verifications.LINK

MIT engineers develop 3D-printed glass bricks for sustainable construction.LINK

Secret calculator hack brings ChatGPT to the TI-84, enabling easy cheating.LINK

Why social media companies keep copying each other.LINK

 

Latest research and tools

Kamal Proxy: a minimal HTTP proxy that facilitates zero-downtime deployments by allowing web applications to update without interrupting current traffic, requiring no specific cooperation from the application itself. LINK

AIQ: a no-frills command-line interface that enables users to label text streams, train text classifiers, embed texts, and classify them using locally run models or APIs, streamlining the text processing and machine learning pipeline. LINK

SSHFS-Win: allows Windows users to mount and work with remote filesystems via SSH directly in Explorer, using a simple network drive approach for easy access and management. LINK

 




Bloomberg

 

China’s ‘cheap car’ problem

By Olivia Rudgard

If you’ve spent most of your life driving an internal-combustion car, pressing down on an EV accelerator for the first time is hard to describe. “It just goes,” says Kevin Wood, who lives in Hampshire, UK, and bought his first electric car last year. Wood took the leap of faith after discovering he could lease an EV through his employer, with a tax break to boot.

Then Wood took a second leap of faith: He chose an Atto 3, made by China’s BYD Co. Ten months later, he remains impressed by the SUV’s range, handling, comfortable seats, trunk space and voice-controlled sunroof. Wood calls it “genuinely a lovely car to drive.” 

Wood had never heard of BYD before test-driving the Atto — but BYD has its sights set on drivers like Wood. Less than two years after entering the EU and UK markets, the carmaker is pursuing a rapid expansion in both, replete with TV and billboard spots, prime placement at auto shows, and sponsorship of the Euro 2024 football tournament. By the end of next year, BYD plans to double its UK sales and service locations from 60 to 120.

Those ambitions are riling politicians. The EU could soon hit Chinese carmakers with additional duties of 17% to 36.3%, on top of the 10% tariff that exporters from China are already subject to. The UK could follow suit.

But even without tariffs, companies like BYD face an uphill battle in the region. Consumers remain EV-skeptical, and there’s evidence that they’re particularly skeptical of cars made in China.

“[Chinese EVs] can have reviews saying that they are actually very good quality,” says Bert Lijnen, an automotive consultant at Nielsen IQ who has researched consumers’ misgivings about China. “But what do you do about this perception about the country?”

The BYD Seal on a test drive outside London. Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg

Wood’s car choice makes him something of an outlier. Despite outselling Tesla globally in 2023, BYD sold just under 16,000 cars in Europe. It has sold fewer than 4,000 in the UK. Most of the company’s sales still come from China, where BYD prices its EVs aggressively: An Atto 3 goes for about 137,300 yuan ($19,000), while a Seal starts at 179,800 yuan ($25,000) and a no-frills Seagull costs just 72,000 yuan ($10,100).BYD isn’t pushing the same pricing in the UK and Europe — the Seal costs just under £46,000 ($60,000) in the UK — but its reputation for cheap cars means would-be buyers are wary. Some 74% of respondents to a Bloomberg Intelligence survey expressed concern about buying a Chinese car, citing quality (25%), safety (14%) and Chinese technology (17%). 

In a survey of consumers in Belgium, Lijnen found that those least likely to buy a Chinese car most often cited distrust of the country rather than specific concerns about the vehicles. Part of his research involved showing consumers ads for Chinese cars while obscuring their country of origin. The responses were often positive, until the cars were revealed as Chinese. 

Get an EV enthusiast behind the wheel of a BYD, though, and many of those reputational concerns dissipate, says Linda Grave, founder of UK-based charging consultancy EV Driver Ltd.

“A lot of people are saying the BYD Seal and the Dolphin are representing exceptionally good value for money, and the build seems to be particularly good,” Grave says. “That whole feeling inside the car… It feels like you get an awful lot for your money.”

Smart features in the Seal include a screen that rotates from portrait to landscape and a panoramic roof. Photographer: Jose Sarmento Matos/Bloomberg

Some of BYD’s fate in the UK and Europe will depend on its future pricing. The US and Canada have slapped tariffs of over 100% on Chinese EVs, effectively eliminating themselves as markets. In the EU, on the other hand, Lijnen says it’s unclear whether BYD and other Chinese brands will absorb the cost of tariffs or pass them on to buyers.

But even with a price advantage, BYD may find that improving its reputation among European car buyers is essential to its expansion goals. Japanese and then Korean cars were also greeted with skepticism in the bloc, until consumers realized Toyota and Kia were making decent cars. Today, a quarter of new cars sold in Europe come from an Asian brand

BYD could also benefit from the rapidly evolving EV landscape, in which it joins other upstart carmakers and a slew of new model names from established marques. Many consumers no longer clock which companies or countries are behind which vehicles: Land Rover is owned by an Indian company, MG is now Chinese, and Vauxhall is French.

“Most people don’t think about it that much and they aren’t that aware,” Plummer says. “I think if the product is good and the brand is something that they can find a connection with, then that overcomes the origin.”

 

This week we learned

  1. Lower interest rates could help rooftop solar. The Fed’s 50-basis-point rate cut means that a $30,000 home solar system would cost about $3,000 less over the course of a 20-year loan.

  2. The US is cracking down on HFC smugglers. Since the start of this fiscal year, customs agents have confiscated 211,000 metric tons of planet-warming chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons.

  3. Microsoft is bringing back Three Mile Island. Constellation Energy will invest $1.6 billion to restart the dormant reactor, whose output will be sold to Microsoft to meet its data centers’ AI-driven power demand.

  4. The “Doomsday glacier” is a ticking clock. Tidal action on the underside of the Thwaites Glacier in the Antarctic will “inexorably” accelerate melting this century, according to new research. 

  5. Wildfire is harshing the vibe for California cannabis. As insurers pull back from the state due to growing wildfire risk, pot farmers increasingly find themselves confronting catastrophe on their own.

  6. A “dead tree” emoji is on the way. Pitched to raise awareness of climate change, the “leafless tree” joins six other new emojis that will begin appearing on phones in the first half of 2025. 

  7. AI is driving a resurgence of gas plants in the US... To meet demand from data centers, factories and EVs, energy companies are planning new natural gas-fired power generation at the fastest pace in years.

  8. ...while gas plants in the UK are barely switched on. Running hours for gas-fired power plants in the country are at the lowest since at least 2017 as wind, solar and imports from Norway and France flood the grid. 

  9. “Summer of Heat” didn’t stop Citigroup. During activists’ three-month protest at the bank’s headquarters, Citi helped arrange $4.2 billion of bonds for fossil fuel companies, up from $2.8 billion last summer. 

Climate activists and New York Police Department officers during a protest outside of Citigroup Inc. headquarters in New York, on June 10. Photographer: Jeenah Moon/Bloomberg

Worth your time

China is by far the world’s biggest electric car market, with EVs and hybrids accounting for 34% of the 22 million passenger vehicles sold last year. But an exclusive Bloomberg Green analysis paints a less-than-rosy picture of the country’s EV landscape, one where demand is concentrated in wealthy coastal areas and megacities and penetration lags in the poorer, rural areas where about 800 million Chinese people live. 

Photographer: NurPhoto/NurPhoto

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Future in focus

A vehicle charging station on display at the Electric Vehicle Innovation Summit. Pawan Singh / The National
A vehicle charging station on display at the Electric Vehicle Innovation Summit. Pawan Singh / The National

EV optimism | Report says despite short-term challenges for electronic vehicle adoption, the Middle East is primed for success

Something to Tok about | One of the world's most influential social media platforms faces tough questioning in court

A step behind | The new-age risk bankers are struggling to mitigate

Business Extra | How Kamala Harris or Donald Trump might affect Middle East technology aspirations


Predicting the future: Signal or noise?

The research team at New York University Abu Dhabi
The research team at New York University Abu Dhabi

As the song goes, it's not easy being green. With that in mind, experts say a UAE study putting green algae under the microscope to boost the fight against cancer could yield tremendous results and potential benefits.

This is a signal: Sometimes it's the smallest of things that can give us the biggest clues as to how and why things happen. That sort of thinking, though it might seem obvious in hindsight, is critical for those seeking to deliver life-saving solutions for the most deadly diseases in the world. Not every endeavour like that of New York University Abu Dhabi will yield positive results, but it's equally important that the research not be overlooked. This mentality will also help preserve certain aspects of our environment that otherwise might have been destroyed.  

Are 3 Cups Of Coffee Healthy?

A new study suggests that the more coffee you drink, the more health benefits you'll experience. But the data shows there's much more to consider.

Welcome to the positive corner of the internet. Every weekday, we make sense of the confusing world of wellness by analyzing the headlines, simplifying the latest research, and offering quick tips designed to make you healthier in less than 5 minutes. If you were forwarded this message, you can get the free daily email here.

Today’s Health Upgrade

  • The 3 cups of coffee study

  • Can you age 4 years overnight?

  • Warmer body, bigger muscles

 
 

Arnold’s Podcast

 
 

Want more stories from Arnold? Every day, Arnold’s Pump Club Podcast opens with a story, perspective, and wisdom from Arnold that you won’t find in the newsletter. And, you’ll hear a recap of the day’s items. You can subscribe on AppleSpotifyGoogle, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

 
 

Fact or Fiction 
3 Cups Of Coffee Per Day Keeps Disease Away

A new study about the world’s favorite beverage has us thinking far beyond the results of a single study.

Scientists found that those who drink three cups of coffee per day (consuming about 200 to 300 milligrams of caffeine) have up to a 48 percent lower risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, or stroke. 

This isn’t the first time coffee has been linked to impressive health benefits, and it won’t be the last. In a world of sensationalized over-selling, coffee could be considered the original superfoods. Coffee is a strong source of polyphenols and chlorogenic acid, which have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties that fight against the buildup of free radicals that can cause disease, help with glucose and lipid metabolism, and help lower blood pressure. 

However, the most recent study (like so many others) is observational. That doesn’t mean the data is worthless; it's just that you can’t draw clear cause and effect. Because the research includes so much information (around 200,000 people met the study’s conditions), the data hints at something worth considering. 

Is the coffee making a difference, or is there something fundamentally healthier about coffee drinkers?

We’ve shared that coffee drinkers tend to move about 1,000 steps more daily than non-coffee drinkers. The latest study suggests that coffee drinkers also eat more vegetables, consume less processed food, have less saturated fat, and tend to live to older ages.

To be fair, before drawing conclusions in the current study, the researchers accounted for behaviors that tend to be associated with better health, such as physical activity, BMI, and blood pressure. Still, it’s hard to suggest that caffeine or coffee alone is the cause of the positive outcomes.

At the same time, some parts of the research made us raise an eyebrow and think coffee could, in fact, be protective of your health. The researchers analyzed 168 individual metabolites, which are measurements in your blood that indicate better or worse health. Nearly 50 percent of the metabolites were improved in people who drank coffee compared to those who didn’t. 

In particular, coffee drinkers (and those who consume more caffeine, which includes tea drinkers) experienced a significant reduction in dangerous cholesterol (VLDL) that is most closely associated with cardiovascular disease. 

And that wasn’t the only interesting metabolite that shifted. Coffee drinkers also had lower levels of saturated fatty acids and higher levels of histidine — both are indicators of a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. 

The foundational behaviors of a healthier life are still movement, good nutrition, quality sleep, lower stress, and social connection. No amount of coffee or caffeine will change that. But there does appear to be something about coffee that provides additional health benefits and cardiovascular protection. 

Together With Eight Sleep 
Can You Age 4 Years Overnight?

Exercise and diet get all the attention, but solving sleep is easily one of the healthiest things you can do for your body. 

Research suggests that sleep deficiency — which can be anything less than 6 to 7 hours per night — is linked to many chronic health problems, including heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, strokeobesity, and depression.

We don’t believe in ranking healthy behaviors, but it’s easy to argue that while a few days off from exercise and a few bad meals won’t do much harm, as little as one or two nights of bad sleep can have a dramatic effect on your mood, energy, productivity, hunger, emotion, and decision-making. That’s why many scientists argue that getting consistent quality rest is the foundation of good health. 

One study even suggests that just two nights of bad sleep can make you feel more than 4 years old than your actual age. 

Some have twisted this to make it seem that you’re actually aging — but that’s not what’s happening. The study looked at sleep deprivation and measured how participants felt, but it didn’t assess cellular aging. Still, most of us aren’t aware of what’s happening day-by-day on a inside our body, but we do know how we feel. And no one wants to feel older or less energized. 

If you want to sleep better, start by setting consistent bed times, cutting off food 2 to 3 hours before you sleep, making your room as dark as possible, and limiting technology an hour before bed.

While those changes take time, there is one easy button that can instantly improve your rest. 

The Eight Sleep Pod is scientifically proven to help you fall asleep faster, stay asleep longer, and have a better night of sleep. It’s easy to make big claims, but much harder to have studies to back it up — and Eight Sleep has both.