More miscellaneous details

Tag: economics

  • ‘Nowhere on earth is safe’: Trump imposes tariffs on uninhabited islands near Antarctica – The Guardian

    The export figures from Heard Island and McDonald Islands are even more perplexing. The territory does have a fishery but no buildings or human habitation whatsoever. Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.

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  • The stupidest chart you’ll see today – The Economist

    Calculating reciprocal tariffs is hard. It takes years of determined study to get a PhD in trade economics. And you need teams of these types of wonks to come up with policies that will work. Scratch that. All that’s needed is an idiot, an AI chatbot, or some combination of the two. It took no more than a couple of hours after President Donald Trump announced the United States’ new reciprocal tariff rates for the commentariat to work out how exactly they had been arrived at.

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  • A president touting Musk’s cars from the White House shows this: the Tesla boycott really irks him – The Guardian

    Personally I’ve always had my doubts about consumer boycotts, which at best tend to make the non-buyer feel good without achieving very much and at worst hurt ordinary employees with no power to grant whatever the boycotter wants. But Magaworld evidently believes in them, judging by the way Bud Light’s sales plummeted after it featured a trans influencer in a marketing campaign. And while there’s no justification for violence against car dealers, peacefully not buying stuff is the safest form of protest imaginable for anyone fearful of retaliation by this regime. You don’t have to risk getting arrested, fired or deported; you don’t even have to wave a placard. And for all Trump’s talk of campaigners “illegally and collusively” boycotting Tesla, you can’t be sued for not wanting to buy a car. That boycotts get under the president’s skin where nothing else – not court orders, not the barely disguised horror of old allies abroad – seems therefore to make a strange kind of sense. To a president who sees everything in terms of making money, it’s consumers who matter. And now their wrath is spreading well beyond Musk’s companies.

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  • Getting rid of the penny introduces a new problem: nickels – CNN Business

    “Without the penny, the volume of nickels in circulation would have to rise to fill the gap in small-value transactions. Far from saving money, eliminating the penny shifts and amplifies the financial burden,” said American for Common Cents, a pro-penny group funded primarily by Artazn, the company that has the contract to provide the blanks used to make pennies.

    According to the latest annual report from the US Mint, each penny cost 3.7 cents to make, including the 3 cents for production costs, and 0.7 cents per coin for administrative and distribution costs. But each nickel costs 13.8 cents, with 11 cents of production costs and 2.8 cents of administrative and distribution costs.

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  • What’s wrong with Apple now? – Archive Today: Financial Times

    Even after the recent sell-off, the stock’s price/earnings valuation is a third higher than it was back in April. The sales growth and AI issues have come together: consumers have not demonstrated wild enthusiasm for AI-enabled phones in general, and the perception that Apple is lagging behind Android on that tech has grown. This casts doubt on the idea that AI will drive a big iPhone upgrade cycle. As Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson research sums up: “Not only have we not seen any sign of an upgrade cycle … we have seen growing evidence that consumers are unmoved by AI functionality (not just Apple’s but indeed everyone else’s as well). Meanwhile, fully agentic AI, the foundation of any real bull case for Apple, seems further away now than it did even five months ago.”

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  • Bans, fees, taxes. Can anything stop overtourism? – The New York Times

    “The major issue is that for many, many years, we’ve been utilizing an extractive model of tourism that says ‘numbers at any cost,’” said Marina Novelli, the director of the Sustainable Travel and Tourism Advanced Research Center at the University of Nottingham. “Now we are in a situation where all these kinds of things are being implemented, like restricting numbers and tourist taxes as reactive strategies.” … The greatest obstacle to solving overtourism may be the lack of consensus that it is actually a problem. As a source of revenue and employment — globally, tourism generated a record 1.6 trillion dollars in 2024 — travel is an engine for economic growth.

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  • Your memecoin is your slush fund – Noahpinion

    Suppose you wanted to buy a favor from Donald Trump, and he wanted to let you buy a favor from him. How could you do it? You can’t just pay him a giant bribe — that’s illegal. Maybe you could pledge him a bunch of cash for his presidential campaign. But there are campaign finance laws that will get in your way, and even if you succeed, he can only use the money for his campaign, not to buy yachts or whatever else he might like to use the money for. Instead, what you can do is to buy a bunch of TRUMP or MELANIA. When you buy one of those memecoins, you increase the demand for the memecoin. Its price then goes up. This makes Donald Trump richer, without any money actually having to change hands.

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  • Why Starmer and Reeves are pinning their hopes on AI to drive growth in UK – The Guardian

    Underneath all of this is the implication that efficiency – through AI automating certain tasks – means redundancies. The Tony Blair Institute (TBI) has suggested that more than 40% of tasks performed by public sector workers could be automated partly by AI and the government could bank those efficiency gains by “reducing the size of the public-sector workforce accordingly”. TBI also estimates that AI could displace between 1m and 3m private-sector jobs in the UK, though it stresses the net rise in unemployment will be in the low hundreds of thousands because the technology will create new jobs, too. Worried lawyers, finance professionals, coders, graphic designers and copywriters – a handful of sectors that might be affected – will have to take that on faith. This is the flipside of improved productivity.

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  • ‘Mainlined into UK’s veins’: Labour announces huge public rollout of AI – The Guardian

    Under the 50-point AI action plan, an area of Oxfordshire near the headquarters of the UK Atomic Energy Authority at Culham will be designated the first AI growth zone. It will have fast-tracked planning arrangements for data centres as the government seeks to reposition Britain as a place where AI innovators believe they can build trillion-pound companies. Further zones will be created in as-yet-unnamed “de-industrialised areas of the country with access to power”. Multibillion-pound contracts will be signed to build the new public “compute” capacity – the microchips, processing units, memory and cabling that physically enable AI. There will also be a new “supercomputer”, which the government boasts will have sufficient AI power to play itself at chess half a million times a second. Sounding a note of caution, the Ada Lovelace Institute called for “a roadmap for addressing broader AI harms”, and stressed that piloting AI in the public sector “will have real-world impacts on people”.

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  • Amazon’s Temu competitor Haul is an AI image wasteland – Modern Retail

    In Hensell’s view, the proliferation of these shoddy images is indicative of the type of seller Amazon has been recruiting for Haul. “A lot of these Chinese manufacturers, they’re built for volume,” she said. The fact that Amazon has so far allowed these listings to remain up, she went on, is a bad look for brands on Amazon’s dominant marketplace. “It degrades Amazon as a platform when you allow that kind of stuff to happen.”

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  • Introducing Amazon Haul—a broad selection of products $20 or less, with most under $10 – Amazon

    Building on this longstanding partnership, we’re introducing an experience in the Amazon shopping app and mobile website called “Amazon Haul” that provides customers in the U.S. a place to discover even more affordable fashion, home, lifestyle, electronics, and other products with ultra-low prices and typical delivery times of one to two weeks. Amazon Haul offers a wide selection of products—all priced $20 and under—backed by Amazon’s A-to-z Guarantee, which protects customers when they buy in our store whether they are sold by Amazon or one of our selling partners.

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  • ‘They’ve won me over’: chancellor’s constituents welcome budget – The Guardian

    In a vape shop in Bramley town centre, the popular flavours can sell out quickly. The area is a smoking and vaping hotspot – high above the national average – and it is also in chancellor Rachel Reeves’s constituency of Leeds West and Pudsey. “Have you got any blueberry, love?” one customer asked, telling the Guardian that she had been smoking since the age of 11 and was much happier vaping instead. She was not pleased to hear the price of vapes would be going up 2% above the retail prices index, but concluded: “It’s still cheaper than cigs.”

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