Business
Gen Z Wants to Build Credit. It Has Few Options. A couple of things here. I do think that young people should have easier access to credit. A lot of people don’t live close to a branch and it’s hard to get approved for an unsecured credit card online without a long history. Some banks are conservative in underwriting these young prospects. On the other hand, the public needs to understand that an unsecured credit card is a risk. And risk needs to be priced accordingly. Banks exist to generate profits. That’s a fact. To underwrite riskier prospects, banks need to apply appropriate interest rates and rewards. You can’t expect to have easy approval, low interest rates and rich rewards if you are somebody with a short credit history.
Banks chase AI-fueled efficiencies. The banks mentioned in this article are behemoths. As you can imagine, there is no lack of inefficiencies in their operations. As a result, it’s not hard to improve on efficiencies. However, is every gain attributed to AI? And how much should a company push the envelope and squeeze out of its employees? When a publicly traded company does a layoff, it will have to explain to investors why and more importantly, that the layoff is not a signal for slowed growth or financial struggle. AI provides a perfect excuse to lay off employees without setting off investors. But it’s not always true that banks do find earth-shattering efficiency gains from AI. I doubt that.
American Airlines Lost $114 Million—But For Once, They May Have Convinced Wall Street Their Plan Finally Makes Sense. A great post on American Airlines.
Most Americans are traveling less. But luxury hotel bookings are soaring. “While many Americans have pulled back on hotel spending, so much so that the sector is facing some of its biggest declines since the pandemic, the wealthiest continue to spend on luxury stays. They’re benefiting from the run-up in stock markets and higher home values and shelling out for high-end hotels as part of elaborate vacations. In all, the top 10 percent of Americans — who make $250,000 or more a year — now account for just about half of all spending, up from about 35 percent in the early 1990s, according to Moody Analytics.”
Other Stuff I Find Interesting
AI Is Juicing the Economy. Is It Making American Workers More Productive? I don’t think anyone is 100% certain on what AI will mean for our economy and society. Some are saying it has a significant impact while others deem such an impact to be marginal. In its current form, I don’t think AI will be as impactful as its ardent proponents believe. I am not saying there is no benefit or gain. I just doubt that it’s life-changing.
A Zen monk’s guide to the best gardens in Tokyo. Filed under the “I’ll dig it up once I book that long-anticipated trip to Japan that I will definitely do” folder.
Malawi’s new farmhand: AI that speaks the local language. A wonderful story on how technology, even one as hyped as AI, helps people in developing countries, especially those that are not tech savvy.
South Korea’s fishermen keep dying. Is climate change to blame? It’s debatable to say definitively that climate change contributes to the dire state of the Korean fishing industry, but fishermen no longer have an easy catch. They have to travel further and further, into more dangerous seas, and the increased risks are reflected on the number of deaths and accidents recently. For good measure, no young Koreans want to enter the industry. And how can you blame them? Poor risk-reward ratio is hardly an appeal. I feel when a phenomenon like this happens, we can see the consequences of climate change and how powerless we are against Mother Nature. It’d not be easy to turn the tide, if that’s even a possibility at all.
Diamond Blankets Will Keep Future Chips Cool. “Rather than allowing heat to build up, what if we could spread it out right from the start, inside the chip?—diluting it like a cup of boiling water dropped into a swimming pool. Spreading out the heat would lower the temperature of the most critical devices and circuits and let the other time-tested cooling technologies work more efficiently. To do that, we’d have to introduce a highly thermally conductive material inside the IC, mere nanometers from the transistors, without messing up any of their very precise and sensitive properties. Enter an unexpected material—diamond. In some ways, diamond is ideal. It’s one of the most thermally conductive materials on the planet—many times more efficient than copper—yet it’s also electrically insulating. However, integrating it into chips is tricky: Until recently we knew how to grow it only at circuit-slagging temperatures in excess of 1,000 °C. e can now grow a form of diamond suitable for spreading heat, directly atop semiconductor devices at low enough temperatures that even the most delicate interconnects inside advanced chips will survive. To be clear, this isn’t the kind of diamond you see in jewelry, which is a large single crystal. Our diamonds are a polycrystalline coating no more than a couple of micrometers thick.“
Stats
Bilt has more than 5MM homes and over 45,000 merchants
OnlyFans has paid $25 billion to creators since 2016
Minh Quang Duong 
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