Business

Don’t Make the Mistake of Thinking That What’s Now Happening is Mostly About Tariffs. A long tweet worth reading by Ray Dalio, a multibillionaire hedge fund manager and the cofounder of Bridgewater.

At brick-and-mortar powerhouse Walmart, e-commerce turns profitable. Anecdotally, my wife and I have been satisfied with Walmart and Sam’s Club’s delivery services. We use them regularly. The increased frequency and density of orders will help Walmart improve the economics of e-Commerce. And they are doubling down with more stores for Sam’s Club in the pipeline. Soon, this will pose a challenge to Costco and Amazon.

How Tim Cook helped Apple out of Trump’s tariff storm — for now. I mentioned repeatedly on this blog that Tim Cook was the best CEO who could deftly navigate the political waters and he was the one reason why investors should remain bullish on Apple. The next CEO must have this trait. In addition to understanding the Apple culture (has to be an insider), this person’s most important capability is to deal with disruptive political forces.

United Airlines gives two 2025 profit outlooks, calling economy ‘impossible’ to predict. I opened a position on United Airlines a few months ago because I saw the strength in the business and I predicted that it would boom with the summer travel and all international major sports events coming up on the calendar. I was horribly wrong. The Trump administration wrecked my thesis. Now, the airline industry is in a weird position. They don’t know what will happen next. While the domestic segment is weaker than the international outbound segment remains solid, bookings from Europe to the US are down. Let’s see if Trump changes his mind in the summer.

‘We had to buy them’: old emails haunt Mark Zuckerberg in high-stakes trial. If Meta/Facebook can prove that consumers, merchants and the world benefit from them growing Instagram and Whatsapp post-acquisitions, I think it will be a challenging case for the FTC. In the startup world, especially in the case of Instagram, there is no guarantee that it would have ended up where it is now without the enormous resources of Facebook. Worse for the FTC, we have TikTok that has grown so much to rival Facebook. That’s evidence of competition. The low-balled offer from Facebook to settle case indicates they believe in the strength of their argument.

Other Stuff I Find Interesting

Venezuelan migrants relied on clickwork to survive. Now AI is replacing them. It’s mind-blowing to see that clickwork used to be a decent-paying job in Venezuela. Such tasks are prone to being replaced by more complex technologies like AI and indeed it seems like the case here. Always be up-skilling.

Losing International Students Could Devastate Many Colleges. The country will also lose a pipeline of talent for the future. And think about it this way. If you live in a developing country and hope that one day you will study and settle down overseas, will you prefer going somewhere that your family or friends reside? That’s the 2nd or 3rd order effect here.

How alligators are breathing life into Florida’s Everglades. It’s mind-blowing how alligators enrich their living environment and other fellow animals. It’s also interesting how they used to be on endangered species list, yet their population already rebounded.

OpenAI’s new reasoning AI models hallucinate more. Makes you really wonder how it is going to end up for these AI models, giant investments in such models and the companies that keep screaming AI, AI, AI.

Serving More Customers, Delivering Greater Convenience: Walmart’s Data-Driven Approach Expands Delivery to 12 Million More Households. “Rather than relying on traditional boundaries like zip codes, we divide large areas into smaller, more precise hexagonal grids. Think of it like pixels in a digital image — each hexagon is a “tile” packed with real-time data such as slot availability, drive time, store capacity, customer demand and more. This allows us to adjust delivery zones with greater accuracy, ultimately serving more customers across the country.”

Stats

“Bank of America spends $13 billion annually on technology, of which approximately $4 billion will be directed to new technology initiatives in 2025.”

“CBP says latest tariffs have generated $500 million”. The price to pay for this small sum (in the context of the federal budget and spending) is enormous.

11.12% of active credit card accounts were making only the minimum payment