What we’re reading (8/30)
“United Airlines Scraps Ticket-Change Fees For Domestic Flights In Bid To Win Over Customers” (CNBC). I’m not saying this move is a response to my July 12 post arguing that UAL was a garbage stock, but I can’t rule it out.
“Tech Startup, Trying To Be Amazon For Farms, Runs Into Ag Gians” (Wall Street Journal). “Inside a packed arena last December, 2,700 farmers sipped coffee from paper cups and listened to remarks on the Midwestern economy: incomes down, costs up and bankruptcies rising. The speaker wasn’t a politician or an academic. He was Charles Baron, co-founder of Farmers Business Network, or FBN, a Silicon Valley startup that is trying to build an Amazon-like online marketplace for agricultural supplies.”
“New Yorkers Are Fleeing To The Suburbs: ‘The Demand Is Insane’” (New York Times). The burbs around NYC—in NJ, Westchester County, CT, Long Island—are experiencing “enormous demand” at all price points. In contrast, sales in Manhattan fell 56 percent. The Times attributes this entirely to covid, and doesn’t consider the influence of “riots”/“protests” (depending on your perspective) ongoing in major cities this summer (including here in the Nation’s Capital last night). But either way, as momentum for permanent remote work arrangements builds, will we see a reversal of the several-decades-old urbanization trend?
“TikTok Sale Could Need China’s Approval Under Revised Rules” (The Hill). Brand new “technology export rules” in place as of Friday in China could mean that ByteDance (TikTok’s Chinese owner) could need to get a “license” from the CCP before divesting the U.S. ops of the video app to the likes of MSFT or WMT.
“A Theory Of Natural Computation Through RNA” (arXiv at Cornell University). Indulge yourself in allowing your mind to be blown by this paper. I certainly haven’t read it at length, nor, frankly, do I pretend to understand it, but how about this from the abstract: “[i]t is therefore reasonable to assume that life has evolved - or possibly began with - a universal computer that yet remains to be discovered. The variety of seemingly unrelated computational problems across many scales can potentially be solved using the same RNA-based computation system. Experimental validation of this theory may greatly impact our understanding of memory, cognition, development, cancer, evolution, and the early stages of life.”
