What I wrote last week
Three things a company can to hire great new entry-level staff and integrate them successfully
Business Unlimited Ultimate+ For Iphone
Business
Consumer Trends 2022: Mid-Year Update. An interesting study on consumer behavior by Coefficient Capital. One thing that stood out as terrifying to me is that 39% of the surveyed folks sayed they’d vote for Donald Trump if he runs for President in 2024
($) 71 Cities and Towns Are Paying Tech Workers to Abandon Silicon Valley. It’s Working. Local economies need bodies, tax revenue, consumption and entrepreneurship. Without these incentive programs, smaller cities have little chance to stand out and be the next destination for highly skilled workers. I really hope that somebody will conduct a wide range study on how effective such programs are.
From $25 billion to $167 million: How a major crypto lender collapsed and dragged many investors down with it. You live by the hype, you die when it dies. A rude reckoning for crypto traders
($) CFPB to Push Banks to Cover More Payment-Services Scams. Up to now, banks only have to repay the money that customers lost in fraudulently induced transactions. If the report is true, banks will soon have to provide more protection for consumers, investigate more transactions and potentially have to repay the money lost in scams that were even authorized by the end users. I welcome the proposal. Fraud is the number one concern when it comes to real time payment. Zelle, to the industry insiders, is littered with frauds. Having the regulatory push from the CFPB will force major banks to take more actions to protect the end users. On the flip side, more oversight may curtail the investment and interest in real time payment from financial institutions. But I think it’s a risk worth taking.
Target puts the squeeze on suppliers after inventories pile up. Relying on major retailers boosts a supplier’s scale tremendously, but also means that an abrupt change can seriously hurt the supplier’s margin. Dealing with expensive excessive inventory, retail giants like Target or Walmart pressures their suppliers to hold what they previously committed to take on and eat the cost. These suppliers are likely to swallow this bitter pill since a lot of future business is on the line here
Lessons from Germany’s Midsize Giants. A great collection of great mid-size companies from Germany that have the same formula to success as Aldi. I believe you get more value from reading this article and studying these companies than from a lot of business strategy textbooks at school
Other stuff I find interesting
The 2022 13-Inch MacBook Air. John Gruber’s review is excellent, as usual. I have to admit that it nudges me towards buying one later this year
($) Afghan Economy Crumbles Since Taliban Takeover. The economy collapsed. Demand evaporated. Financial support from other countries was cut off. 90% of the citizens don’t eat sufficiently while half of the population face acute hunger. The Talibans do not know how to run the country. What a catastrophe!
($) MBS’s $500 Billion Desert Dream Just Keeps Getting Weirder. “MBS, as he’s known abroad, was in the early stages of one of the largest and most difficult construction projects in history, which involves turning an expanse of desert the size of Belgium into a high-tech city-region called Neom. Starting with a budget of $500 billion, MBS bills Neom as a showpiece that will transform Saudi Arabia’s economy and serve as a testbed for technologies that could revolutionize daily life.” As I read this article, I couldn’t help but feel sad. The amount of money and resources poured into this grandiose project fueled by the ambition, if not delusion, of one powerful man could have helped a lot of unfortunate people around the world.
Case Study 8: How Hertz Paid Accenture $32 Million for a Website That Never Went Live. It’s mind-blowing that Accenture couldn’t even deliver the responsive design and decent security features after receiving a lot of money from Hertz. I don’t know how complicated Hertz wanted their website and mobile application to be nor do I know how the office politics involved is. But based on the description of the requested elements, I have a feeling that a $2 million to a Vietnamese ads agency would get the job done.
U.S. Wind Energy Is (Finally) Venturing Offshore. “Capturing offshore wind in the U.S. has long been an uphill battle, with various stumbling blocks in the terrain. Objections from fisheries, skepticism from conservationists and tenuous support from tourism have all stalled development in the past decade. That is, until May of 2021, when the U.S. Department of the Interior approved construction of a sprawling wind facility several miles off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.”
Stats
Forests Now Cover 2% of Iceland, a 6-fold increase since the 1990s
Since 2012, the SEC has awarded $1.3 billion to 278 whistleblowers
YouTube has 5,500 channels in the US with more than 1 million subscribers in 2021
Minh Quang Duong 