February 13 2024
February 13 2024
Trust the Science
1 US significantly lags Chinese shipbuilding capacity
2 Tech companies axe 34k jobs since start of year
3 New Years gym membership bump did not occur
4 Chinese e-commerce firm Temu spends millions on Super Bowl ads
5 DoD holds hackathon to combat enemy drones
2/13/1633 Galileo arrives in Rome to face charges of heresy
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1 US significantly lags Chinese shipbuilding capacity
China emerged as a global power by turning itself into the world’s factory floor. It is expanding that power, and its military might, with another striking industrial feat: becoming the world’s shipyard. More than half of the world’s commercial shipbuilding output came from China last year—making it the top global shipmaker by a wide margin. The once-prolific shipyards of the West that helped forge empires, expand trade and win wars have shriveled. Europe accounts for just 5% of the world’s output, while the U.S. contributes next to nothing. Most of what China doesn’t build comes from South Korea and Japan.
This shipbuilding empire is a symbol of China’s historic transformation from an inward-looking continental nation to a maritime power. But it is more than that. It is a pivotal strategic asset for Beijing as Chinese leader Xi Jinping tries to reshape the world order in peacetime and prepares to prevail over his nation’s rivals during war.
“History demonstrates a clear pattern: No great naval power has ever existed without also being a dominant commercial maritime power, encompassing both shipbuilding and global shipping,” Del Toro said late last year.
WSJ
2 Tech companies axe 34,000 jobs since start of year in pivot to AI
Tech companies have axed 34,000 jobs this year as they rejig their workforces to invest in new areas such as generative artificial intelligence to power their next phase of growth. Microsoft, Snap, eBay and PayPal have each scrapped hundreds or thousands of roles since the start of January, according to the website Layoffs.fyi, which tracks the attrition in the industry. A total of 138 tech companies have laid off staff this year. The losses are smaller than the start of 2023 when Big Tech groups including Meta, Amazon and Microsoft axed roles following an exuberant period of over-investment during the pandemic. Overall, 263,000 jobs were cut across the tech sector in 2023, Layoffs.fyi data showed.
FT
3 New Years gym membership bump did not occur in 2024
A post-pandemic growth spurt for gyms in the US came to an abrupt halt in January, usually the busiest month of the year. Foot traffic to major gyms was flat from January 2023, according to mobile phone location data for 10 chains tracked by Placer.ai. January visits rose more than 40% in each of the past two years at the clubs, which include both closely held ones like Equinox Holdings Inc. and listed ones like Planet Fitness Inc. and Xponential Fitness Inc. The slow start may signal a tough year ahead if traffic doesn’t expand. Planet Fitness, seen as a proxy for the industry as it’s the largest listed chain, usually adds about 400,000 members in January, about a quarter of its 1.7 million yearly sign ups, Chief Financial Officer Tom Fitzgerald said at a conference last month.
Bloomberg
4 Chinese e-commerce firm Temu spends millions on Super Bowl ads to woo back US shoppers
Symbolic of US-China decoupling
Temu spent big at the Super Bowl on Sunday night, airing its advertisement six times and offering $10 million in giveaways as it hopes to reinvigorate wavering US growth. Observed sales fell 12.5% month-on-month in December and 4.8% in January, a sharp drop from the Chinese e-commerce app’s growth of more than 50% in mid-2023, according to Bloomberg Second Measure data tracking a subset of US credit and debit card transactions. Overall US retail sales rose in December.
Temu’s Super Bowl spend may have run into the tens of millions of dollars — a 30-second commercial during Sunday night’s game cost about $7 million. Web searches for the app spiked when its ads aired, according to Google Trends data, but searches have been steadily declining since early July.
Bloomberg
5 DoD holds hackathon focused on combating enemy drones
More than a dozen coders handpicked from across the U.S. Department of Defense spent a week chipping away at data and software challenges associated with swatting down drones in the Greater Middle East, Central Command said. The effort, dubbed Sandtrap, produced prototypes that improved the speed and accuracy of unmanned aerial system countermeasures, according to a Feb. 9 announcement from CENTCOM, the Pentagon’s combatant command whose area of responsibility includes Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Defense News
2/13/1633 Galileo arrives in Rome to face charges of heresy
On February 13, 1633, Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrives in Rome to face charges of heresy for advocating Copernican theory, which holds that the Earth revolves around the Sun. According to some reports, Galileo conducted his research by dropping objects of different weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. From 1592 to 1630, Galileo was a math professor at the University of Padua, where he developed a telescope that enabled him to observe lunar mountains and craters, the four largest moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. He also discovered that the Milky Way was made up of stars. Galileo’s research led him to become an advocate of the work of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543). However, the Copernican theory of a sun-centered solar system conflicted with the teachings of the powerful Roman Catholic Church, which essentially ruled Italy at the time. Church teachings contended that Earth, not the sun, was at the center of the universe. Today, Galileo is recognized for making important contributions to the study of motion and astronomy. His work influenced later scientists such as the English mathematician and physicist Sir Isaac Newton, who developed the law of universal gravitation. In 1992, the Vatican formally acknowledged its mistake in condemning Galileo.
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