This country is now the world's largest opium producer
And a look at the impact TikTok has on events and places.
Hello,
St Peter’s church in Bethnal Green announced the cancellation of their weekly carols on Columbia Road after 7000 people turned up. Half of London had seen the heartwarming scene of people bobbing about to We Three Kings on TikTok and wanted in on the action. Unfortunately, neither the narrow street nor the organisers were ready for this influx.
It makes you wonder how many undiscovered cool things there are in the world and how long they’ll remain untouched. The moment someone sets up an ice cream stand on a pristine yet quiet beach there’s an incentive to get busy on the old Tok.
You can’t blame people, we’ve all been somewhere busy and angrily thought to ourselves “what are all these people doing here?” as you stand there, being there.
Maybe we all just need to be a bit more confident in branching out and leading the way. It’s not like there are no other carol services. Although inevitably every town in the country will now have a church trying to make their street carols a thing, and they won’t be a thing.
Deck the halls,
Hugo
The Stuff of Christmas Past
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
World’s poorest countries spend most of their money on interest payments 🌍 - 3.3 billion people are living in countries that spend more on servicing debt than on education and healthcare. The entire planet is facing a debt crisis (collectively we owe $307 trillion (“to who?” you might quite rightly ask), but the problem is much worse for countries that cannot just print money like the US and UK.
Cardboard getting more expensive is a good thing 📦 - because people are buying more stuff, supplies of cardboard have decreased which means producers are raising prices. Prices for your benchmark 42-pound unbleached kraft linerboard are set to rise by about 8%. Anyway, the cardboard box industry is a whole thing, read about it here.
Netflix releases viewing figures for the first time 📺 - it’s that time of year when various platforms announce what everyone has been watching or listening to. Netflix has joined the party with a less than impressive dataset which doesn’t give a lot away, as Alphaville makes clear in this sarcy bit of analysis. My main takeaway is the amount of nonsense on Netflix.
OpenAI to pay AxelSpringer for its content 🤝 - they’ve agreed to an eight-figure sum that will enable the technology company to access near real-time information from the German publisher to train its models and provide users with access to the news. Language models pose a deep threat but an equal opportunity to publishers due to their ability to distribute content. New content is required for the models so it is in the interest of companies like OpenAI to make the economics stack up.
OpenAI suspends ByteDance’s account 🪞 - with one hand they giveth, with the other they taketh awayeth. The suspension comes as the owner of TikTok is suspected of using OpenAI’s model to reverse engineer its own Large Language Model (LLM) which is both frowned upon and against their terms of service. Whilst the ‘For you’ feed in TikTok is a trailblazer in deploying AI, ByteDance is well behind in the current LLM race.
Myanmar takes over Afghanistan as the world’s largest opium producer 🧑🌾 - Poppy cultivation dropped by 95% after a ban by the Taliban - making it one of many Taliban bans. Meanwhile, the civil war in Myanmar has seen production skyrocket as a critical source of income for insurgent groups.
Inside the wonderful world of Lego 🏗️ - Lego has always had an air of wholesomeness about it. I mean coloured bricks, entertainment that doesn’t involve a screen, construction, Denmark - what’s not to love? Sean Hollister dives into the process of creating a Lego set through the lens (if you’ll pardon the pun) of the creation of the new Polaroid Lego set.
Deals that show private equity works 🤑 - the cartoon villains of finance aren’t having a great time at the moment as high-interest rates make what they do quite hard. There are a couple of examples over the past decade however like Burger King and VMWare that show how well things can go when PE is done right.
Campari buys Courvoisier for $1.2billion 🥃 - in the words of Giggs the execs at the Italian drinks house will be ‘Corvoiser fillin up eight glasses, VIP shit.’ It will majorly increase the conglomerate's presence in the US which accounts for 55% of Corvorsier’s sales. If they manage to do what they did with Aperol, the future is looking bright for the cognac brand.
Trainline shares benefit from government ditching state app plan 🚂 - Great British Rail has been struggling to gain momentum generally so making the app when the existing ticketing providers are actually half decent. Two-thirds of digital tickets are bought through Trainline and so would have been the most impacted by a long way if the government had made their own version.
Quote of the week
“Tell me what you want, what you really really want” - Spice Girls