Why did a passenger jet break the speed of sound?
The challenges of measuring everything and train sets.
Hello,
It is increasingly possible to track and measure different aspects of our lives. Smartwatches track our sleep and activity, our phones track where we go and how much we use them. You can get all aspects of your health assessed relatively inexpensively. Our connected homes track our energy usage as well as who comes and goes. But who is all of this benefiting?
There’s no doubt that our ability to measure stuff has led to enormous improvements in the plight of humanity. All sorts of health outcomes have improved, generally leading to improved economic output. Athletes are getting faster and stronger as marginal gains are continuously eeked out.
There are however problems with being myopic about the numbers. We like measuring stuff because it gives us a sense of control, the feeling that we know what is going on in the universe. The problem is that there is a lot of stuff that’s very hard to measure and often these are the important things. That business idea you have as you bite into your croissant could not be generated by data.
Data is great when you’re trying to make incremental improvements to something or diagnose problems but rarely does it tell you the answer and it never actually solves the problem. Not every judgement can be made based on what you’ve measured, sometimes you just have to go with the vibe.
Keep it vibey,
Hugo
Commander-in-vibes
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
The Vice website is shutting down ⏱️ - the publication, started as a fringe magazine in 1994 is cutting hundreds of jobs and will publish stories through partner channels. In 2017 Vice was valued at £4.5bn and was for a long time seen as the future of media. Whilst their content was proper out there and exciting, like many digital media organisations they’ve struggled to make their business model stack up.
Mckinsey think tank advised China to ramp up tensions with the US 🇨🇳 - they’ve done it again… the Urban China Initiative which was cofounded by McKinsey recommended policies like pushing foreign companies out of sensitive industries and deepening military-civil ties. Lawmakers in the US have since demanded banning McKinsey from government contracts.
Tony’s Chocolonely sued over the colour purple 🍫 - the manufacturer of Milka a.k.a holiday choccy is taking legal action as they say Tony has copied their packaging colour. Tony did indeed copy the packaging of some major chocolate brands to call out the fact they don’t pay their farmers a living wage. P.S. I’ve been saying ‘Chocoloney’ not ‘Chocolonely’ for years….
Nvidia is now worth 2tn 🐿️ - it shows it is indeed best to be selling shovels in a gold rush. The manufacturer of GPUs has seen an enormous spike in demand since generative AI arrived and the news bumped up global stock markets as everyone hopes it indicates a new era of global growth.
Chemship launches a wind-assisted chemical tanker ⛵ - the sail age 2.0 might be here as a new type of tanker uses wind power to help propel it. Smart vacuum technology quintuples the power of the 16m hire aluminium sails which will dramatically reduce the fuel used by the ship, reducing CO2 emissions by an expected 10%.
Virgin Atlantic flight accidentally breaks the speed of sound ✈️- thanks to a massive jet stream a Boeing 787 hit 835mph (which usually cruise at 600mph). The plane didn’t actually break the sound barrier as it wasn’t moving faster than the air around it but they did arrive 45 minutes early - result!
Fraser Group purchases a bigger stake in Hornby 🚂 - Mike Ashley’s group now owns 8.9% of the maker of model train sets and it’s news to me that it’s a listed company. Hornby also owns Airfix and Scalextric, making them the number one purveyor of man-child stuff.
Big Four drama in Aus continues 🇦🇺 - this time KPMG have been accused of auditing ‘the wrong company’ (Paladin Solutions instead of Paladin Holdings) after an EY audit of KPMG found it to be the case. KPMG rejected these claims a month after their chief executive apologised for rejecting some other claims that they made ‘power maps’ of government departments, which evidence showed they had been doing.
Data centres may have built-in nuclear reactions in the future 🪫 - the demand for computing power only continues to increase and with it so do the energy demands to keep the lights on. Small Modular Reactors may well be the solution to this, which alongside powering cities and towns could power the vast swathes of computing the world will require.
Google will pay Reddit $60m a year for access to its data 🤙 - in another interesting development in the emerging world of content licensing for AI the search engine is buying access to the reams of threads about random stuff to help train its models. They haven’t always seen eye to eye so it's nice they’re all friends now.
Quote of the week
“Don’t think, feel” - Bruce Lee