What I Wrote Last Week
Feeling Grateful On The Last Friday Night Of 2025
Business
Apple Announces Changes to iOS in Japan for Compliance With the Mobile Software Competition Act. The EU can learn something from how the Japanese regulators worked with Apple to strike a balance so that both sides could win and move forward.
Hertz Owns the Hard Part: Asset Management, Fleet Scale, and an Overlooked Autonomous Option. A bull case for Hertz. The author has some points and the business already showed signs of a turnaround, but the stock price is indicating that there is still a long way to go to convince investors. The EV play is interesting, but it’s too far out. And it remains to be seen what the market looks like.
On the other hand, EV is a more convincing bull case for Uber. The company owns the three-sided network and has a great brand. EV fleet owners need demand to justify the investment and create ROI. They need Uber.
AI Construction Costs Can Be an Accounting ‘Black Box’. The reality is worse than what the article describes as some “AI-first” companies engage in accounting schemes to get the infrastructure they want, but keep it off the balance sheet. But eventually, all will be exposed in due time.
How Home Depot sped up its supply chain — and what comes next. Home Depot is taking a page from Amazon’s playbook and doing the hardwork to stay competitive.
Other Stuff I Find Interesting
China’s AI Chip Deficit: Why Huawei Can’t Catch Nvidia and U.S. Export Controls Should Remain. Despite its advantages, China desperately needs more advanced AI chips. Hence, to stay ahead in the AI race, the US is perfectly and strategically right in restricting the sales of chips to its Asian rival. Evidence in the article shows that Huawei cannot produce the same technologically advanced chips as Nvidia. The gap keeps widening, instead of narrowing.
A brief history of Times New Roman. I’d guess The New York Times, not Times of London.
Spooked by AI and Layoffs, White-Collar Workers See Their Security Slip Away. The best way that people lucky enought to still have a good-paying job can do is to upskill. Learn more and do more. I know it’s not really what anybody wants to do: do more for the same salary. But it’s the reality. I fear that the current job market won’t change anytime soon.
Lost Vegas. The city’s charm doesn’t necessarily speak to the current generations the same way it did to previous ones. Furthermore, every establishment wants to nickle and dime visitors, including sky-high resort and parking fees, making a visit to Vegas just financially unattractive. To make matters worse, the city lost a huge revenue stream from Canadian tourists who were still upset with the current administration. The CEO of MGM recently admitted his company made a mistake in price gouging customers. That’s a good sign. But it’s just a drop in the ocean. Vegas needs much more than that.
The Pentagon and A.I. Giants Have a Weakness. Both Need China’s Batteries, Badly. “Chinese battery dominance has long been a problem for industries like auto manufacturing, but now is increasingly being viewed as a national security threat. Currently, U.S. military forces rely on Chinese supply chains for some 6,000 individual battery components across weapons programs, according to Govini, a defense analytics firm. When President Trump came to office, his administration initially froze billions of dollars in Biden-era federal grants for battery manufacturing, lumping batteries in with electric vehicles, solar farms, wind turbines and other clean energy technologies Mr. Trump had sought to de-emphasize. Yet more recently, the administration has come to see battery technology as pivotal for many of the things it cares most about, including A.I. and defense. In interviews, more than a dozen battery-industry executives, lobbyists, military experts and others close to the administration said the White House had taken a growing interest in fostering a domestic battery industry disentangled from China.“
Stats
LinkedIn said it had identified and removed more than 80 million fake accounts at the time of registration. You read that right, 80 million.
Minh Quang Duong 
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