A salad is celebrating its 100th birthday
Cashews, pneumatic tubes and borrowing loads of money are in
Good morning,
I’m writing this from a shepherd’s hut deep in the Devon countryside with no WiFi. By some miracle there is enough 4G to research and send this, or I’d have had to have got this to you using smoke signals or some such. The content would have been a detailed description of a sheep and a poem about foxglove.
There’s something paradoxical about the connectedness that allows us to contribute to the modern economy yet on the flip side keeps us glued to our phones, watching other people live their lives. Sure, the wilderness is great and a phone mast is a bit of an eyesore but if you’re trying to sell watercolours of foxgloves on Etsy, it’s a vital piece of local infrastructure.
It’s like when a tribe, living completely in nature, untouched by the rest of mankind discover a packet Cheetos that have fallen from the helicopter of a passing film crew. There’s no going back and you can’t just deny people Cheetos because they were better off without them. The relentless march of progress.
Thanks for connecting,
Hugo
Chief Smoke Officer
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
Mobile networks are using AI to cope with AI 🤙 - as things currently stand I’m not quite sure what you have to be doing on your phone to use 300GB of data a month. This will change however as generative AI becomes embedded in our handsets. To cope with continuously increasing demand mobile networks are using AI to manage radio frequencies and monitor performance, enabling them to predict when things are going to go wrong.
Workers suing Disney after moving for a cancelled project 🐭 - in 2021 the company told 2000 workers in California to move to Florida or resign. Two hundred and fifty employees dutifully moved, one selling his childhood home. Two years later when Bob Iger returned to the business and went on a cost-cutting spree, the project was cancelled.
KKR to buy European festival operator for €1.3bn 🎶 - Superstruct runs festivals such as Sziget, Boardmasters and Sonar. They’re buying it from Providence Equity Partners who provided some of the seed funding to ex-Live Nation executive James Barton, who started the business.
Pneumatic tube systems are making a comeback 🧪 - for much of the first half of the 20th century documents were sent around a building in plastic tubes that somehow sucked them to the right place. It’s interesting when you look back at fairly clever inventions that were made redundant by solving the problem in a completely different way (i.e. emails). Anyway, they’re being used a lot more in hospitals to transport blood samples.
Demand for cashews is growing 🧀 - I’m an absolute fiend for some roasted and salted cashews but it is the vegan cheese eaters of this world that are driving demand, as they’re used to make dairy-substitute products. As with many expensive commodities there are a number of issues around ethical production which has created a push for more responsible suppliers.
Britvic rejects £3.1bn bid from Carlsberg 🧃 - the Danish brewer is attempting to implement its “beyond beer” diversification strategy but Britvic, the maker of Robinsons and Fruit Shoots, felt the bid undervalued its business. If Fruit Shoots were sold in shops at the same price they were in the playground then I can confirm this to be the case.
Apple delays AI launch in Europe due to data concerns 🔏 - competition rules require companies to ensure interoperability, meaning products should be able to work with stuff outside of their own ecosystem. Their chief concern is that it will risk the privacy of customer data.
Caesar salad will celebrate its 100th birthday this July 🥗 - sorry to disappoint but Julius Caesar was not chowing down on croutons and lettuce a couple of thousand years ago. It was invented in Tijuana in 1924 by Caesar Cardini who was essentially short on ingredients during a Fourth of July rush. There’s nothing like some blended anchovies to celebrate independence, that’s for sure.
Ocado not seeing the permanent shift to online it wants 📉 - when Covid happened online grocers were hopeful consumer habits would change forever. Unfortunately for them, many of us are not quite that organised and have a daily ritual of wandering around the supermarket aimlessly, wondering what to put in our mouths. Shares dropped 12% on the news that two partners were delaying opening more warehouses with its technology.
US borrowing is risking the health of its markets 💰 - it took 200 years for them to borrow their first trillion, they are now borrowing that amount every 100 days. I really can’t get my head around where this goes. They’re able to do it as they’re the world’s reserve currency, other countries can’t get away with it (as Liz Truss discovered) but there must be a point where their credit cards are maxed?
Quote of the week
“I cannot command winds and weather” - Horatio Nelson