Which mollusc is being used to make skincare products?
India reach the moon
Hey Comrade,
Big week for India last week who became the first country to successfully land a spacecraft at the south pole of the moon. NASA were able to be sporting about it and congratulated their Indian counterparts. Russia and China however deemed to stay silent. It was particularly sore for Russia who had a crash landing just the week before.
But who owns the moon? In 1967 the United Nations Outer Space Treaty decreed that no country could own the moon. In the 1980s however a man named Dennis Hope had the bright idea only an unemployed man named Dennis could have. The treaty said no 'country' could own the moon, it does not say no individual. He’s been selling plots of land on the moon for $19.99 an acre ever since.
To infinity and beyond,
Hugo
Darth Stuff
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
The Panama Canal is 50% lower than usual 🌊 - the 51 mile waterway is used to shorten journeys between the Pacific and Atlandtic by hundreds of thousands of ships each year. Severe droughts have led to much lower water levels in the canal and authorities have had to restrict the number of ships that can transit for at least 10 months.
Lab-grown diamonds are lab-growing in popularity 💎 - indistinguishable from the nearest thing but lacking the authenticity of coming from a war-torn country, man-made diamonds are having their moment as people look for cheaper alternatives to those provided by the usual suspects. De Beers is struggling already as less people get married and shell out on a big old stone.
Nike get their act together and Earps shirts go on sale ⚽ - there has been some understandable backlash at the fact that the sportswear brand have not made a replica of Earps’ kit available for purchase. It’s hard enough to make kids be goalies as it is, let alone when they can’t get the kit of their hero.
Opening of Oxford Street IKEA has been delayed 🛏️ - Londoners will have to continue their furniture-based pilgrimages to Wembley/Croydon as the refurbishment of the Grade II listed building is taking a bit longer than expected. Oxford Street is trying to find its feet after being inundated by sweet shops during the pandemic. It’s still absolute chaos when you walk down it.
Dunkin’ Donuts moves into the pre-mixed drinks market 😵💫 - in a big boost to day drinking, the coffee shop is going to start selling ‘spiked’ iced teas and coffees. I mean, super impressive to make an already sugary drink more unhealthy but at least it will make the day more interesting for some. Who knows what will happen when Terry from accounts, three Caramel Car Crashes down, tells Susan from HR to “get a grip” at their 9am stand up?
BRICS trading bloc doubles with addition of new members 🌐 - it started as a group of emerging economies in 2009 (Brazil, India, China, Russia, South Africa) after a Goldman Sachs banker coined the term and they thought it sounded cool. There’s a definite them and us playground vibes with the G7 and in 2024 Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, Argentina and the United Arab Emirates will be admitted.
Nvidia shares back to all time high after strong sales figures 📈 - turns out making computer chips during an AI bubble is pretty darn lucrative. Their revenue has doubled in the past three months as technology companies compete to get access to the computing power they need to power their AI-driven ambitions.
Skin nerds are raving about the benefits of snail slime 🐌 - snail mucin, the slime left behind when snails crawl along, is the latest trendy ingredient for skin products. Workers at snail farms in the 1980s noticed their hands were particularly soft and it’s long been popular in South Korea who are known as innovators in the skincare space. Get out into the garden and find yourself some molluscs (don’t do this).
Dataset containing the text of 170,000 books being pirated 📚 - a number of authors have filed a lawsuit claiming that companies like OpenAI have used their books to train their language models without permission. The Atlantic has been able to ascertain that this is the case through access to documents at Meta. I wonder if there will be a Spotify x JSTOR x GPT type situation in the future where you pay for access to a language model that is trained on academic papers and other copyrighted information.
You can now train ChatGPT 3.5 on your own documents 🐉 - OpenAI have made it possible to create a customised model using your own dataset. GPT4 is slower and more expensive due to its scale so this move makes it more viable for companies to create their own bespoke language model that can answer specific question about the corpus of data it owns.
Have a good week!
Other Stuff
Something to listen to
Rum & Redbull - Beenie Man
Something to watch:
How Britain Built its Top Secret MI6 HQ
Quote of the week
"Clarks mi prefer" - Vybz Kartel