On Our Month-End "Virtual Route 66" : As August Comes To A Close

 

Our team chose the headline above as a reminder about how far we've come as we go dark in our properties through Labor Day Week-End here in the United States--We look forward to the continued privilege to serve:

“What 5 megabytes of computer data looked like in 1966: 62,500 punched cards, taking four days to load.” pic.twitter.com/dwTwLadMKj

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) August 25, 2022

Delaware Judge Rejects Musk’s Twitter Data Request as ‘Absurdly Broad' By Martin Peers | Source: The Information   The Delaware judge hearing Twitter’s lawsuit against Elon Musk ordered Twitter to produce a small subset of data the Tesla CEO has requested but rejected as “absurdly broad” his overall data request, which was aimed at establishing how many of Twitter’s user accounts were bots. “Read literally, defendants’ documents request would require plaintiff to produce trillions upon trillions of data points reflecting all of the data Twitter might possibly store for each of the approximately 200 million accounts included” in its DAU count “every day for nearly three years,” said the Chancery Court chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick. But the chancellor ordered Twitter to produce 9,000 accounts “reviewed in connection” with its audit of last year. She noted that even producing those documents “is no small feat.” The judge added that her “overall impression” was that Twitter had “agreed to produce a tremendous amount of information” to Musk and that such information was “sufficiently broad” to satisfy most of Twitter’s obligations. The decision resolves the latest skirmishes between Twitter and Musk in the leadup to the trial scheduled for October. Twitter is suing Musk to try and enforce Musk’s agreement from the spring to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Peloton Sales Drop, CEO Hints at New Premium Content Strategy By Malique Morris | Source: The Information   Peloton’s sales dropped dramatically in the June quarter despite attempts to restore growth to its early pandemic glory days. The company’s unimpressive results erased  stock gains it saw on Wednesday, when it announced it was ditching its pure direct-to-consumer strategy and selling its wares on Amazon. Revenue fell 28% year-over-year to $679 million in Peloton’s  fiscal fourth quarter as demand for its at-home workout equipment wanes. The sales decline also flies in the face of an earlier attempt to spur growth. Peloton said in April that it was lowering prices for its fitness equipment, a move CEO Barry McCarthy said in May prompted an immediate rise in sales. Peloton’s stock tumbled nearly 20% on Thursday. The Amazon partnership is just one way Peloton is trying to reverse its misfortunes. The company announced earlier this month that ​​it had cut 800 jobs, is raising prices for one of its internet-connected exercise bikes, moving distribution to third-party fulfillment centers and closing a number of its stores. These efforts dragged down profits in the short term. The company’s operating costs surged 110% to $1.1 billion in the final quarter of its fiscal year. While Peloton’s marketing expenses fell 30% during the period, it spent $415 million on restructuring. McCarthy said in a shareholder letter that Peloton is aiming to achieve breakeven on a free cash flow basis in the second half of fiscal 2023. For Peloton to increase its customer base and grow sales, the company will have to “reach the streaming market segment,” McCarthy said on a Thursday earnings call. He said Peloton will make good on a previous promise to investors to pursue a premium content strategy. He suggested that users may get access to different tiers of content depending on how much they pay for Peloton’s app. China and U.S. Close to Deal Allowing SEC Inspection of NY-Listed Chinese Firms By Shai Oster | Source: The Wall Street Journal   China and the U.S. are discussing a deal that would allow Securities and Exchange Commission officials to travel to Hong Kong to inspect the audit records of Chinese companies listed in New York, The Wall Street Journal reported. The deal being discussed could end a years-long impasse which could have forced hundreds of Chinese companies including Alibaba and Pinduoduo to delist for failing to comply with new U.S. disclosure rules. Chinese regulators are already making plans for U.S.-listed Chinese companies to transfer audit working papers and other data to Hong Kong, where regulators from the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board could inspect them, the report said. The apparent concession from the Chinese side marks a surprising departure from their previous stance as they increased steps to keep sensitive company data inside China on national security grounds. Hong Kong, the semi-autonomous city that is part of China could provide a compromise location that doesn’t entail shipping that data to the U.S. Already, companies such as Alibaba have taken measures to protect themselves from a forced delisting by also listing shares in Hong Kong. But the U.S. markets are still by far the biggest in the world, which makes them attractive for foreign firms seeking to raise capital. Chinese Food Delivery Giant Meituan’s Revenue Growth Beats Forecasts By Juro Osawa | Source: The Information   Chinese food delivery giant Meituan reported a 16% increase in revenue for the second quarter, beating analysts’ expectations. Chinese consumers’ demand for deliveries of meals and grocery items remained strong, even as the country’s severe Covid-19 restrictions dealt a serious blow to the economy. Meituan, whose app offers food delivery, online grocery and other on-demand services, is showing a lot more resilience than some other Chinese internet giants amid harsh macroeconomic headwinds. Earlier this month, Alibaba and Tencent, two of China’s biggest tech companies, both reported their first revenue declines since they became public companies. In April and May, Shanghai’s draconian Covid lockdown crippled China’s commercial and logistics hub and created massive challenges for most businesses. In the quarter, Meituan’s revenue rose to 50.9 billion yuan ($7.4 billion) from 43.8 billion a year earlier. As the company continued to reduce costs, its net loss narrowed to 1.12 billion yuan from 3.36 billion yuan a year earlier. IRobot Discloses Saga Behind Amazon Acquisition By Paris Martineau | Source: The Information   The $1.7 billion bid Amazon announced last month to buy iRobot, the company behind the Roomba vacuum, was not Amazon’s first attempt to acquire the company. According to a Thursday securities filing from iRobot, which reveals new details about what happened behind the scenes of the negotiation process, Amazon had previously approached the Rooma maker in November 2016 about a deal. In that earlier approach, Amazon offered to buy iRobot at $60.50 per share, a proposal that iRobot’s leadership ultimately decided undervalued the company. Since then, representatives from the two companies kept in touch, chatting “approximately once per year” on matters unrelated to potential mergers and acquisitions, the filing notes. That changed in May of this year, when an Amazon representative called iRobot CEO Colin Angle to propose a better offer to acquire the company: $64 per share in cash, a price that then represented a 51% premium to iRobot’s last closing price. Angle and other members of iRobot’s management team expressed to Amazon that they believed that offer again undervalued the company, and countered with a purchase price of $70 per share. Around this time, iRobot disclosed to Amazon that it expected that the company’s financial performance in the second quarter “would fall significantly below the low end of the publicly announced guidance range for the second quarter of fiscal year 2022 and would cause full-year 2022 performance to fall significantly below the low end of the publicly announced guidance range for fiscal year 2022.” Amazon was surprised by the disclosure, the filing says, and paused negotiations for a few days to reevaluate the deal. Amazon came back to the table on July 4 to reaffirm its offer price of $64 a share, so long as iRobot agreed to enter into and publicly announce the merger agreement either “prior to or concurrently” with the company’s lackluster second quarter earnings announcement. The negotiations progressed until July 20th, when iRobot revealed to Amazon that the company’s actual second quarter performance was worse than it had previously predicted. The disclosure led Amazon to lower its final offer price to $61 per share, a mere 50 cents more than the 2016 offer that iRobot had originally rejected. Singapore’s Grab Says Revenue Grows 79% in Second Quarter By Shai Oster | Source: The Information   Singapore’s Grab, the ride hailing and delivery app, said second quarter revenue grew 79% to $321 million while losses narrowed 29% to $572 million compared to a year ago. The company also gave a more optimistic forecast for fiscal year revenue of between $1.25 billion to $1.3 billion, at the higher end of previously announced guidance. Despite a bruising war with reguional rival GoTo, Grab, which had gone public in one of the most valued SPAC listings that has since lost some 70% of its value, also predicted that its food and overall delivery business businesses would hit the break even point sooner than previously forecast. Food would break even first quarter of next year instead of the second quarter, and overall delivery would hit that point two quarters earlier in the second quarter of the year. A Message From SVB Your partner in navigating through uncertainty The road ahead may be difficult to see. Which is why now more than ever, you need a financial partner who can guide you through the uncertainty. With four decades of experience helping founders, investors and executives navigate through the ups and downs, SVB will be there throughout your journey, always determined to help you succeed.

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The world’s most powerful rocket – NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) – is being prepared for its first flight. This launch will be the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972 that a human-rated exploration rocket and spacecraft have launched to the Moon.

Recently, the SLS successfully completed a series of “wet dress rehearsals,” which helped validate the timelines and procedures for launch, including loading cryogenic propellant into the rocket’s tanks, performing the launch countdown, and draining the tanks.

With all the pre-flight tests completed, the SLS is ready for its maiden test flight and will be ready to launch soon.

The SLS exploration rocket is a critical element of the Artemis missions – NASA’s long-term plan to bring the United States back to the moon and eventually to Mars.  From the Earth to the Moon and beyond, SLS is the vehicle that will take human spaceflight into the next generation of deep space exploration.  Set aside your disdain for Mark Zuckerberg and his digital Frankensteins for a moment, and consider this question: could the so-called metaverse someday make our dysfunctional online ecosystem better? The Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO, in a rare extended interview aired Thursday with podcaster Joe Rogan, actually made a compelling—if gravely naive—case for the merits of the metaverse.  In Zuckerberg’s vision, this still-nebulous mix of augmented and virtual reality will help create more intimate social experiences, bringing people together (albeit in avatar form) in settings more conducive to friendlier relationships. Rather than passively sniping at each other from the comfort of a keyboard, Zuckerberg foresees a return to more active interactions in his company’s nascent creation.  “I think it’s probably going to be a lot healthier for us,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. “Rather than consuming all this additional context through this tiny little portal we carry around on a phone … I think to have it be able to be overlaid and have kind of people be able to pop in and interact through it, I think that’s going to be powerful.” Zuckerberg went on: “My goal for these next set of platforms, they are going to be more immersive, and hopefully they’ll be more useful—but I don’t necessarily want people to spend more time with computers. I just want the time that people spend with screens to be better. Today, so much of it is you’re just sitting around in this beta state, consuming stuff.”  In some sense, Zuckerberg’s intuition feels refreshing. Our current suite of technological devices has simultaneously made us more digitally connected but physically isolated. A new ecosystem that makes it easier to see and hear each other in a meaningful way should, in theory, help mend our fraying social fabric. Yet Zuckerberg himself, along with fellow tech pioneer Jack Dorsey, showed us Thursday why this utopian vision is more dream than destiny. Despite their initial noble intentions for Facebook and Twitter—namely, providing platforms for making the world more connected—both platforms have evolved into uncontrollable monstrosities, causing damage that their founders never foresaw.  For perspective on the scope of those issues, consider how Zuckerberg told Rogan that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, now spends somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 billion per year on its “community integrity” teams. Those units are responsible for identifying abusive content, removing harmful material, and combating disinformation, among other tasks. The breadth of Meta’s safety, security, and corporate issues are so vast that Zuckerberg admitted he wakes up most mornings and feels like he’s been “punched in the stomach” after looking at the deluge of “not good” messages on his phone. Think that’s what Zuckerberg envisioned in his Harvard dorm room? Dorsey was less elaborate Thursday in his thoughts on Twitter’s state of being, though no less rueful about his creation.  Asked by an apparently random Twitter user whether the platform “has turned out the way you wanted,” Dorsey replied: “The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company.” He went on to state that he wished Twitter had become “a protocol,” commonly defined as decentralized, interoperable tools used to power ubiquitous digital programs, like email and instant messaging.  The comment echoed past gripes by Dorsey about Twitter becoming “owned by Wall Street and the ad model.” While Dorsey hasn’t gone into great detail about these complaints, the obvious implication is that financial motives have overtaken the platform, leading to the amplification of popular-but-divisive content and the unnecessary censorship of speech.  In many ways, Zuckerberg finds himself back at the early days of Facebook, trying to create something from scratch (albeit with billions of dollars and thousands of employees at his disposal this time).  “I just want to make it so that the experiences we’re having aren’t just these passive things,” Zuckerberg told Rogan. Yet the metaverse is already rife with questions about troubling user behavior, ranging from harassment to hate speech to virtual violence. It’s also easy to envision a plethora of impending ethical dilemmas about what kind of interactions will be allowable, how behavior will be policed, and how Meta’s monetary motives will influence its decision-making. Zuckerberg might “just want to make” things, but he should know by now it’s never that simple. ◯ Conflict ◯ Development ◯ Social ◯ Economics ◯ Politics IN THIS WEEK'S EDITION Here's what you need to know: Ukraine agrees to UN nuclear plant mission at tripartite meeting, El Salvador extends state of exception; 50,000 arrested, Myanmar generals move to cement power in attempt to weaken resistance, US pharmacy chains ordered to pay over $650 million in opioid case, the drought is causing China to shut down its factories to save power, hotter summers mean almost all Florida turtles are born female.  Tweet this email  View this email on the web SPECIAL EDITION: UKRAINE Ukraine agrees to UN nuclear plant mission at tripartite meeting. The Ukrainian President has agreed to the parameters of a potential mission of the International Atomic Energy Agency to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, after repeated shelling of the complex raised fears of a nuclear catastrophe. China to send troops to Russia for 'Vostok' exercise. Chinese troops will travel to Russia to take part in joint military exercises led by the host and including India, Belarus, Mongolia, Tajikistan and other countries. Russia points finger at Ukraine in killing of Darya Dugina. Russian intelligence accused Ukrainian special services of carrying out a car bombing that killed Darya Dugina, the daughter of an influential Russian ultra-nationalist who has backed Moscow’s invasion. POLITICS El Salvador extends state of exception; 50,000 arrested. 50,000 people have been locked up since late March for alleged gang ties. Congress has approved another month-long extension of the state of exception that suspends fundamental rights in the name of combatting the country’s powerful gangs. Israel and Turkey to reinstate ambassadors after 4 years. In 2018 diplomatic relations were terminated following the killing of 60 Palestinians by Israeli defence forces. This development will strengthen economic, trade and cultural ties. India to register up to 2.5 million voters in contested Kashmir. India is expected to register as many as 2.5 million new voters in the contested Jammu and Kashmir region. Local political parties said it was an attempt to influence upcoming elections. Police file terrorism charges against Pakistan’s Imran Khan. The terrorism charges follow a speech Khan gave in Islamabad on Saturday, in which he vowed to sue police officers and a judge. He also alleged that a close aide had been tortured after his arrest. Mexico arrests former top prosecutor in 2014 missing students case. Mexican officials made the first high-level arrest in the notorious 2014 disappearance of 43 students, accusing a former top prosecutor of crimes in one of Mexico's worst human rights abuses.  UAE ambassador to Iran to return, 6 years after relations severed. The Emirati and Iranian foreign ministers discussed boosting ties, including sending an ambassador back to Tehran. CONFLICT Myanmar generals move to cement power in attempt to weaken resistance. Coup leader and military government chief Min Aung Hlaing has fired military chiefs and senior politicians to suppress opposition. This comes after six years was recently added to the prison sentence of deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Kenya’s opposition leader rejects the presidential election result as 'null and void'. Protests began even though Raila Odinga urged his supporters to remain peaceful. Demonstrators battled police and burned tyres in the western city of Kisumu, and the capital Nairobi's huge Kibera slum. US: Spike in weapons smuggled to Haiti and the Caribbean. US authorities have seen a spike in weapons smuggled to Haiti and the Caribbean in recent months. They have promised to boost efforts to combat the trade that is fuelling rampant gang violence in the region. NATO will step up forces if Serbia-Kosovo tensions escalate. NATO will increase its peacekeeping force in Kosovo if there is an escalation of tensions with Serbia, on the eve of EU-facilitated talks between the estranged western Balkan neighbours. Multiple bomb, arson attacks rock Thailand’s south. Explosions and fires ripped through at least 17 locations in southern Thailand, in what appeared to be multiple coordinated attacks. The restive region has seen more than 7,300 people killed since 2004. ECONOMICS US pharmacy chains ordered to pay over $650 million in opioid case. Three US pharmacy giants were ordered to pay over $650 million to two Ohio counties, in compensation for their role in the opioid epidemic. Bangladesh raises fuel price by 50% in one week. Bangladesh has blamed rising oil prices on the war in Ukraine. Thousands of people have taken to the streets in protest, as another South Asian nation faces a growing financial crisis. Cuba to allow foreign investment in wholesale and retail trade. The Cuban government will allow foreign investment in domestic wholesale and retail trade for the first time since 1959. The move aims to address critical commodity shortages and boost local industry. German dependence on China growing "at tremendous pace". China's share of German imports rose to 12.4% in the first half of 2022, compared with 3.4% in 2000. The trade deficit leapt to 41 billion euros. China declares first ever drought emergency amid intense heatwave. China has declared the drought emergency amid fears that a period of exceptionally hot and dry weather will lead to significant shortages of water. The drought has wilted crops and left reservoirs at half of their normal water level. SOCIAL Battle for trademarks as brands leave Russia. Following the invasion of Ukraine, many Western brands ceased their activities in Russia but their products or brand names can still be found on the market due to parallel imports and reappropriation of brand identity. Hotter summers mean almost all Florida turtles are born female. Florida’s sea turtles have a worsening gender imbalance due to climate change. Recent heat waves have caused the sand to be so hot that nearly every turtle hatched was female. Chinese internet giants give algorithm data to government. Chinese internet giants including Alibaba, Tiktok-owner ByteDance and Tencent have shared details of their algorithms with China's regulators for the first time.  Female Saudi activist gets record 34 years in prison for critical tweets. Saudi Arabia sentenced the woman to 34 years in prison over her Twitter activity, marking its longest sentence ever for a peaceful activist and launching a fresh wave of fear among the government’s detractors. Pandora announces extended use of lab-made diamonds. The world’s largest jewellery maker is moving ahead with lab-made diamonds, which are more sustainable due to lower carbon emissions. DEVELOPMENT Intergovernmental Conference to draft first ever treaty on ocean biodiversity.The treaty addresses conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in the world’s oceans. Negotiations will address marine genetic resources, environmental impact assessments, capacity-building and the transfer of marine technology.  Nearly half the people in Ethiopia's Tigray in severe need of food aid. The nearly two-year conflict in Ethiopia has left almost half the population of the Tigray region in severe need of food, as aid groups struggle to reach the population because of insufficient fuel supplies. Malawi and Zambia engage in talks to strengthen bilateral relations. The country’s heads of state met at the 42nd Ordinary Summit of SADC and discussed issues of mutual interest designed to enhance trade. World Bank deploys $20.7 billion in post-pandemic support, Latin America and the Caribbean Region. As the regions continue to deal with the negative impact of the pandemic, the World Bank has deployed $20.7 billion in support. This brings total support to Latin America and the Caribbean to $50 billion since 2020. CHART: The drought is causing China to shut down its factories to save power. In last week's Future Trends, Argentina's central bank raised the key interest rate by? 50.8% 64.5% 69.5% 71% FREE DOWNLOAD Ecological Threat Report 2021 Get the data behind the global threats amplified by climate change, from food and water risk to rapid population growth and natural disasters.