Content Style: Thought Starters

Netflix’s latest smash hit was somewhat unexpected. Squid Game, the 9-part series out of South Korea has been described as a combination of Parasite and Hunger Games and currently enjoys a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Just two weeks after its premiere, it has become the #1 Netflix show in 90 counties, including the US.

Google’s Senior VP in charge of Search likes to say that “search is not a solved problem”. There’s no doubt that Google moved the world a lot closer to solving that problem by indexing the world’s information and making it searchable.

Marc Faber is a Swiss economist, who has earned the nickname ‘Dr Doom’. He is known for consistently making bearish calls about upcoming market crashes - some of which have been right but many of which have been wrong. Famously, Faber predicted a market crash in the 1980’s, which eventually was proved correct in 1987, and in the 2000’s was bearish on the US housing market, which came true in the 2008 GFC.

For the past two decades, Israel’s intelligence services have been focused on preventing Iran developing a nuclear weapon. These efforts have introduced the world to a number of new technologies, for example the Stuxnet virus that infected Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, and seen a number of key Iranian scientists assassinated, latest estimates are six nuclear scientists and 17 members of the Iranian missile development team.

After decades of attrition, the union movement is having a moment. In the US, the fight for a $15 minimum wage has reinvigorated the movement and globally, the rise of the gig worker is seeing a new, global movement emerge. A lot of this movement is focused on the food delivery industry.

The promise of lab-grown meat is huge. Ending animal suffering and factory farming, mitigating the worst impacts of our diets on climate change, offering a sustainable and cost-effective way to feed the world’s growing population, and freeing up land used to produce animal feed.

The nature of international commerce has led to incredibly complex supply chains. The cotton shirt that you buy from the local store may be made of cotton grown in India, blended with other cotton in Australia, spun into yarn in Vietnam, woven into cloth in Turkey and then sown and cut in Portugal.

Food delivery apps have been one of the biggest winners from the pandemic, as people around the world were locked down and ordering food from our phones become a staple of day-to-day life. Now it seems some of these food delivery apps are following a path well-worn by food retailers before them, moving into private label.

Every year, history’s greatest investor Warren Buffett writes an annual letter to accompany the Berkshire Hathaway annual report. Last week, Buffett released his 2020 letter. Last year was a tough year for Berkshire, returning 2.4% compared to 18.4% for the S&P 500 index (the risk of not owning tech stocks in 2020…). In this year’s letter, Buffett discusses a number of points about Berkshire specifically and investing generally.

Ghost kitchens are restaurants that have no dine-in and no customer pick-up. They are built exclusively for the food delivery apps - UberEATS, Deliveroo, DoorDash - and are able to achieve lower costs by occupying non-desirable locations and able to create multiple restaurants in one location (i.e. list a Mexican, Chinese and Burger restaurant on the apps, but cook it all out of the same kitchen).

At this point, most people have heard of Shopify. The $140 billion eCommerce platform offers retailers a plug-and-play option to set up their online store. Some of the biggest companies in the world - Google, Hasbro, The Economist, Heinz, Red Bull, Tesla - use Shopify’s platform to enable eCommerce on their website. This article takes a look at Shopify’s strategy to build an ecosystem around their core product and the incentive structure they build for retailers to achieve it.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has been a revolutionary company in a critical industry. Yet, what it has achieved is largely under appreciated (despite the fact that if you’re reading this, you’ve likely benefited from their work). Founded in 1987, TSMC pioneered the ‘foundry’ model of semiconductor production, where TSMC create chips for other customers. This is the model that has allowed companies like AMD and NVIDIA to challenge the semiconductor giants like Samsung and IBM.

COVID has accelerated a number of changes in our society - the rise of online retail, working remotely, adoption of cloud computing. One other change it may have accelerated is universal basic income. Government’s around the world have shielded people from economic shutdowns with direct cash transfers (think Job Keeper and Job Seeker in Australia). For advocates of universal basic income, this gives them a powerful data set to study as they advocate for the benefits of direct cash transfers beyond COVID.

You may not have heard it, but we’re living through a global semiconductor shortage. Perhaps the hardest hit industry is automotive. Demand from the auto industry spiked, just as semiconductor companies like TSMC and Texas Instruments had reallocated their capacity to other, more resilient (they thought) industries.

According to Bill Gates, there are two numbers that matter when it comes to climate change - 51 billion and zero. The first is the tonnes of greenhouse gas added to the atmosphere every year. The second is what it needs to be.

For the past 20 year Technology Review have been publishing a list of the year’s most important technologies. This week they published their list for 2021.

Amazon, like all big companies these days, is collecting so much data. Three current and former employees are blowing the whistle and have reported to Politico that Amazon’s customer data may be at risk. Amazon has pushed back on the claims, calling them inaccurate and unsubstantiated.

The recent power outage in Texas was devastating, with over 4.5 million customers losing power amidst a historic cold snap. The freezing temperatures incapacitated about 40% of the state’s power generation and much of the state was left in the cold and dark.

These forms offer great insight into what some of the biggest investors in the world are buying. Every quarter, funds managing over $100 million are required to publicly disclose what American stocks they own. From this information, we can figure out what they’re buying, what they’re selling and what they’re holding on to.

This article tells the story of a former ByteDance employee, that worked on TikTok’s censorship program and is now blowing the whistle. The employee explains the mechanics of the program, including how the ByteDance Content Quality Centre responded to directives from the Chinese Government’s Cyberspace Administration of China.

UberEATS, DoorDash and GrubHub have ushered in a new era in restaurants. The past few years have seen a rise of ‘ghost kitchens’ (aka cloud kitchens), restaurants with no in-person ordering or in-person dining. These kitchens are set up never to see a customer. Rather, they are optimised for the food delivery platforms.

As Bitcoin continues its steady march upwards (last week it passed $50,000 USD) we’re all going to have to get more familiar with the term ‘Bitcoin Billionaire’. One of the first people in the world to achieve this was Arthur Hayes, the founder of BitMEX, a crypto exchange through which more than $3 trillion has flowed. Hayes has been charged by the US Justice Department for failing to maintain an anti-money laundering program in violation of the Bank Secrecy Act.

The stock market has been designed to encourage activity. Prices updated every second, the steady stream of company announcements, all amplified by a financial media that breathlessly reports the key moments of the day. For everyday people, it is easy to feel like we can’t keep up. The good news is, you can ignore all this frantic activity. Getting rich in the stock market may be for the lazy.

An under-reported story has reached its climax and may usher in the next step in the building space race. Three countries have had space ships travelling in convoy, racing to reach Mars. Two of them, unsurprisingly, are the US and China. The third, is the United Arab Emirates. If successful, all three countries will achieve a first. The UAE’s first foray into deep space, China’s first independent attempt to land on Mars and the US’ first deployment of a Martian helicopter.