What I Wrote Last Week
Business
American Borrowers Are on Shakier Ground. These Charts Show Why. At what point will American borrowers and consumers crumble and can’t take up more debt?
Alexa Is in Millions of Households—and Amazon Is Losing Billions. Andy Jassy is doing the right thing, in my opinion. Focusing on cold hard evidence of profitability, rather than an estimate that every team is motivated to inflate, is better for any business, including Amazon. The second point that stood out to me is that this is again another case in which the rationale makes sense until it is in practice. Alexa is the most popular personal voice assistant software, but for years it hasn’t generated a lot of revenue, if any while costing Amazon billions. Simply because consumers don’t order stuff from Alexa like Amazon’s executives had hoped.
Why Discover is no American Express. It may sound straightforward that American Express cardholders are high spenders and its operation is more international than Discover. To be able to draw that distinction requires a totally different operational model.
N.B.A. Announces Lucrative Rights Deals With Disney, Comcast and Amazon. $77 billion for 11 years is a good deal that reflects the growing popularity of the NBA. Amazon will house some regular season games and the in-season tournament on Prime. Disney will have the rights to the NBA Finals and one Conference Final while NBC will host most regular season games and the NBA All Star Weekend. The other Conference Final will alternate between Prime and Peacock (NBC). Expect these streaming services to get pricier in the future. But when consumers don’t have enough disposable income to pay for all these streaming services, what will they cut? Netflix or sports?
Southwest Airlines Is Ditching Open Seating on Flights. Southwest Airlines’ model doesn’t work any more. It doesn’t necessarily offer cheaper flights than competitors. Very often, it doesn’t sell non-stop flights. Worse, crowded planes make unassigned free seating a horrible experience. It’s not about losing what makes them unique. What’s the point of having something unique if it doesn’t add any value to consumers?
Other Stuff I Find Interesting
Trillions in Hidden Debt Drove China’s Growth. Now It Threatens Its Future. “Economists estimate the size of such off-the-books debt is somewhere between $7 trillion and $11 trillion, about twice the size of China’s central government debt. The total amount isn’t known—likely not even to Beijing, say bankers and economists—because of the opaqueness surrounding the financial arrangements that allowed the debt to balloon.”
Oxygen discovery defies knowledge of the deep ocean. I was taught as a kid that oxygen came from photosynthesis which required sunlight. But scientists from Scottish Association for Marine Science discovered that the sea bed which can be several kilometers deep away from sunlight can also produce oxygen. That is possible because metal nodules on the sea bed work together to create electric currents strong enough to split sea water into molecules. Fascinating.
The Miseducation of America’s Nurse Practitioners. Articles like this tend to pick the most alarming example for the best effect, but it’s concerning that hospitals employ nurse practictioners who are barely trained instead of a medical doctor. I hope somebody from the government or Congress will look into this and hold care providers accountable.
The problem of ‘model collapse’: how a lack of human data limits AI progress. Every AI company promises that it won’t train AI models on user data, not without user consent. At least that’s what they said. But current AI models need more data to advance and to get smarter. As synthetic data makes models worse, where will AI companies get real human data from?
What Gives Poor Kids a Shot at Better Lives? Economists Find an Unexpected Answer. Neighborhoods that have higher employment rates tend to benefit families, including adults and kids, economically.
Stats
As of July 2024, Ethiopia has about 70,000 electric vehicles
The US had 3,748 nuclear warheads as of September 2023
Data centers consumed more than 20% of Ireland’s electricity supply in 2023
35 million tourists visited Rome in 2023
WhatsApp now has 100 million monthly users in the US
IRS collects milestone $1 billion in back taxes from high-wealth taxpayers
Minh Quang Duong 
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