Business

What if a Grocery Store Was More Like a Farmers’ Market? A cool concept, but is it scalable?

This snack company is trying to change the way you think about chocolate. Kudos to Blue Stripes for thinking outside the box and creating a business from parts of the cacao plant that noone previously wanted.

‘Everybody’s Replaceable’: The New Ways Bosses Talk About Workers. It’s pretty much similar to what happens in NBA. Teams can trade players and cut them at will, but players are expected to be loyal. It’s business and everyone is out looking after themselves. Workers need to do the same.

Apple products transform care at Emory Healthcare. If I were a financial analyst, I’d constantly bug the Investor Relations team of Apple on how big its commercial business is and what the plans are. Case studies like this scream potential to me.

Inside OpenAI’s Stargate Megafactory with Sam Altman. I don’t know if and how OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle will get a decent return on their $500 billion investment, but it’s very impressive what they are building in Abilene, Texas.

Other Stuff I Think Interesting

‘You start to go crazy’: The Australian who survived five years in a Chinese prison. I really like to travel around China because it is a beautiful country rich in history and culture. But I am also concerned about my safety and being a spawn in somebody’s grand scheme. Sometimes I wonder if we, as a species, are ever forgiven for what we did to one another.

Trump Orders Faster Build-Out of Nuclear Power Plants. Nuclear is a great source of energy and we should encourage more buildout. What I am concerned about is that rushing projects can lead to mistakes and mistakes in this area can result in enormous consequences. No-one wants a nuclear tragedy inside the country.

How China Stands in the Way of a U.S.-Vietnam Trade Deal. We are like a shuttlecock hit back and forth by the US and China. There is virtually no way for my home country to please both superpowers by ourselves. The only relief will be when the US and China deescalate and play nice. That, though, doesn’t look very likely.

The weird way that penguin poop might be cooling Antarctica. “They describe how ammonia wafting off the droppings of 60,000 birds contributed to the formation of clouds that might be insulating Antarctica, helping cool down an otherwise rapidly warming continent. Some penguin populations, however, are under serious threat because of climate change. Losing them and their guano could mean fewer clouds and more heating in an already fragile ecosystem, one so full of ice that it will significantly raise sea levels worldwide as it melts.”

Georgia’s beloved shrimp industry grapples with disease and foreign imports. “The main culprit, scientists, shrimpers, and the International Trade Commission agree, is foreign imports: Farm-raised shrimp from Asia and South America have flooded the market in huge quantities, cratering prices and making it impossible for the local industry to compete. Around the same time that foreign competition skyrocketed, U.S. shrimpers started noticing another problem: a mysterious new shrimp disease. Scientists have only recently cracked that case, a condition known as black gill, and they say it’s linked to climate change: New environmental conditions have helped give rise to a new disease, a pattern that’s likely to repeat as the climate keeps warming.”

Stat

Chocolate is a $100+ billion industry globally

Waymo reached 10 million trips