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The World
Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner for internal markets, has warned that “something is broken” in transatlantic relations, as Franco-American tensions over Washington’s new Indo-Pacific security pact threaten to spill over into trade and technology. Breton’s comments came after France tried to push Brussels to postpone the high-level US-EU trade and technology council meeting due to take place in Pittsburgh this month in anger at the Biden administration’s handling of its submarine deal with Australia and the UK. “There is of course in Europe a growing feeling that something is broken in our transatlantic relations,” Breton said. (Financial Times)
President Biden poured cold water on the prospect of a UK-US trade deal at his first White House meeting with Boris Johnson last night, as ministers discussed plans to join a North American free-trade pact instead. (The Times)
The end of extra federal unemployment benefits for millions of Americans this month is unlikely to provide a significant boost to the US labor market, according to an analysis by the Financial Times and studies by economists and industry analysts. An FT analysis of monthly data from the US Department of Labor shows that states that ended benefits early did not report faster job growth than those that opted to keep additional aid flowing. “The view that unemployment benefits were restraining labor supply and labor growth is completely misguided,” said Gregory Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics. “It was certainly one factor but it is not the only one.” (Financial Times)
The International Energy Agency called on Russia to send more gas to Europe to help alleviate the energy crisis, becoming the first major international body to address claims by traders and foreign officials that Moscow has restricted supplies. The Paris-based group said that while Russia was fulfilling long-term contracts to European customers it was supplying less gas to Europe than before the pandemic. (Financial Times)
Lithuania's Defense Ministry recommended that consumers avoid buying Chinese mobile phones and advised people to throw away the ones they have now after a government report found the devices had built-in censorship capabilities. (Reuters)
Pelosi's endgame: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) began her infrastructure endgame, pressuring centrists to ultimately support as much social spending as possible while pleading with progressives to pass the roads-and-bridges package preceding it. Neither group can achieve what it wants without the other, their ultimatums be damned. The leaders of both acknowledged the speaker's unique gift for pulling off a deal after separate conversations with Democratic leaders. (Axios)
Shutdown and default odds increase as GOP buckles up to block debt limit hike. Without the support of 10 Republican senators, Democrats will either have to remove the debt ceiling from the bill or risk a government shutdown. (Politico)
Dozens of businesses are going public with their opposition to a new Texas law that bars abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy, a move that follows weeks of debate inside companies about how to respond. Employers including ride-sharing service Lyft Inc., cloud-storage company Box Inc., online fashion retailer Stitch Fix and investment group Trillium Asset Management signed a statement that says “restricting access to comprehensive reproductive care, including abortion, threatens the health, independence, and economic stability of our workers and customers.” Some companies declined to participate. They included Starbucks and Microsoft. (Wall Street Journal)
Health insurance: the days of full covid coverage are over. Insurers are restoring deductibles and co-pays, leaving patients with big bills. Large insurance companies waived cost-sharing for coronavirus care in 2020, but it has sprung back in 2021. (Washington Post)
No bus drivers, custodians, or subs — what’s really behind schools’ staffing shortages? A Colorado school district has fewer than a quarter of its normal supply of cafeteria workers. Efforts to directly hire social workers in New York City schools are leading to shortages among mental health nonprofits that provide in-school services. Some schools in Virginia have shifted to virtual learning after administrators couldn’t find enough substitutes. Interviews with economists, administrators, and employees reveal a complex array of factors causing the school hiring headaches: Fears over health and safety, frustrations over longstanding pay gaps and inequities, and political disagreements over masks and vaccines. Some of these shortages are far more severe than usual, while others existed long before the pandemic. (Education Week)
‘The pay is absolute crap’: Child-care workers are quitting rapidly, a red flag for the economy. Child care employment is still down more than 126,000 positions as workers leave for higher-paying positions as bank tellers, administrative assistants and retail clerks. Parents are struggling to return to work as daycare and after-school programs dwindle. (Washington Post)
Economy
Evergrande to make domestic bond coupon payment, soothing fears. (Reuters)
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler is making clear he is no fan of stablecoins, describing the increasingly popular cryptocurrency whose value is frequently pegged to the U.S. dollar as a danger to investors with questionable long-term viability. “These stablecoins are acting almost like poker chips at the casino right now,” Gensler said. Without stronger oversight, the top Wall Street regulator said, “people get hurt.” (Washington Post)
For some gig workers, losing the flexibility to set their own schedules is equivalent to taking a 17% pay cut, according to new research that explores the wages and work habits of DoorDash drivers. The findings suggest that the ability to set one’s own work schedule has a significant impact on quality of life—not just for gig workers, but for everyone—and that that impact can be expressed in dollars and cents. “There are substantial differences between drivers,” explains Harvard Business School Professor Felix Oberholzer-Gee. “For the top 10% of DoorDash drivers Laura and I studied, losing flexibility is equivalent to a 17 percent pay cut. For the average driver, it is about a third of that value.” (Harvard Business School)
Economics omits global-south researchers: A large proportion of research on economic development does not involve any researchers in the global south. An analysis of nearly 25,000 papers found that 73% had authors that were all based in the global north. Within a subset of more than 15,000 articles explicitly focused on a country or region in the global south, 62% had no authors from that region. (Nature)
The U.N.'s intellectual property agency said that innovation marched forward last year despite the pandemic. Technology, pharmaceuticals and biotech industries boosted their investments, even as hard-hit sectors like transport and travel eased back on spending. The World Intellectual Property Organization, which helps coordinate and approve international patents, trademarks and other intellectual property, also warned that change in the overall “innovation landscape” was happening too slowly. (Associated Press)
Greylock Partners has raised $500 million to focus exclusively on seed deals, a pool of funds that will give the 56-year-old venture capital firm the ability to write large checks at “lean-in valuations” and emphasize its commitment to early-stage investing. (The Information)
Female founders’ share of VC funding falls: For the first eight months of 2021, U.S. startups with solely female founders raised just 2.2% of all venture funding. That’s despite overall venture investment clocking in at record highs. (Crunchbase)
Electric vehicles turn cold in the SPAC market, while fintechs are hot: Roughly 10% of SPAC mergers closing since April 1 involved EV companies, but less than 2% of new SPACs that have filed to go public in the same period are seeking to merge with EV companies, based on our analysis of data compiled by SPAC Research. That follows the poor stock performance of several EV-SPAC combinations over the past 12 months or so. (The Information)
Technology
Apple is working on technology to help diagnose depression and cognitive decline, aiming for tools that could expand the scope of its burgeoning health portfolio. Using an array of sensor data that includes mobility, physical activity, sleep patterns, typing behavior and more, researchers hope they can tease out digital signals associated with the target conditions so that algorithms can be created to detect them reliably. The efforts spring from research partnerships with UCLA, which is studying stress, anxiety and depression, and Biogen, which is studying mild cognitive impairment. (Wall Street Journal)
iOS 15.1 beta lets users store their verifiable health records, including COVID-19 vaccination cards and test results, in the Health app. (MacRumors)
iPhone 13 Pro reviews:
The two ways that Apple could best improve the day-to-day utility of using an iPhone are improving the camera system and improving battery life. And those are exactly where Apple focused its attention for this year’s new iPhones. On the iPhone model comparison page, Apple cites separate battery figures for “Video playback” and “Video playback (streamed)”. That’s something almost everyone does with their phones — stream video. A practical, real-world measure of battery life. Here are the year-over-year streaming video improvements for each of the four iPhones 12 and 13:
iPhone 13 Mini: 13 hours, up from 10 hours last year on the 12 Mini.
iPhone 13: 15 hours, up from 11 hours last year on the regular 12.
iPhone 13 Pro: 20 hours, up from 11 hours last year on the 12 Pro.
iPhone 13 Pro Max: 25 hours, up from 12 hours last year on the 12 Pro Max.
Those are very big improvements for the non-pro iPhone 13 and 13 Mini. But the numbers for the 13 Pro and Pro Max are bananas. The Pro Max more than doubled its battery life for streaming video playback in a year. (!) All four iPhone 13 models are seeing benefits here from the A15 chip. But the Pro models are benefiting from a surprising direction: ProMotion. (Daring Fireball)
Preorders for the iPhone 13 started Friday, and demand is reportedly through the roof. Carriers are desperate to upgrade people to 5G devices, Apple's one of the few companies that doesn't seem to have crippling supply issues, and there's a pink one now! There's even higher demand for the iPhone 13 than for last year's iPhone 12, according to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, one of the more accurate predictors of Apple's plans. And last year was a big one for Apple. (Source Code, CNBC)
Marques Brownlee’s video review. (YouTube)
Microsoft's new Surfaces are leaked ahead of today’s hardware event: Everything we’ve been expecting Microsoft to show off at today’s Surface event looks even more likely to appear. A handful of leaks indicate that the Windows-based Surface Pro X and Surface Pro 8 are on the horizon, as is Microsoft’s Android flagship, the Surface Duo 2. Microsoft’s ultra-portable tablet, the Surface Pro X, was recently cleared by the FCC and passed Energy Star certifications. According to its spec sheet, the Windows tablet has a Qualcomm Snapdragon SQ2 processor, the same custom chip featured in the last Surface Pro X, and 16GB of RAM. There are no details on the Surface Pro X’s design or whether the display will have a 120Hz refresh rate, as has been rumored. (Gizmodo)
No more apologies: Inside Facebook’s push to defend its image. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has signed off on an effort to show users pro-Facebook stories and to distance himself from scandals. The proposal was said to have shocked several executives: Facebook had not previously positioned the News Feed as a place to burnish its own reputation. (New York Times)
Disney won’t have good news when it reports its September quarter in a few weeks time, at least as regards its all-important streaming business. Its flagship service Disney+ will add only “low single digit millions” of subscribers in the quarter, CEO Bob Chapek revealed That suggests maybe three or four million extra subscribers. That’s a big come down from the 12.4 million net adds Disney reported in the July quarter and 8.7 million net adds in the April quarter. (The Information)
Universal Music Group finally went public at a whopping $39 billion valuation. "How UMG's shares fare will say a lot about the value of other music companies," says Hannah Karp, editorial director at Billboard. "It will mean a lot to the music industry overall. Shares for Universal surged 38% Tuesday morning after the company first began trading on the European stock exchange, pushing its valuation close to $46 billion. The rise of subscription streaming has revived the business models of music labels, pushing several to explore IPOs. (Axios)
Smart Links
2022 Best Colleges in the U.S.: Harvard, Stanford, MIT take top rankings. (Wall Street Journal)
China pledges to stop building coal-fired power plants overseas. (Financial Times)
Google to buy NYC office building for $2.1 billion. (Wall Street Journal)
Colleges, employers plan to keep virtual recruiting events this fall. (Ed Scoop)
Fortune names its first female editor in chief. (Fortune)
New Jersey governor signs college cost transparency law. (Higher Ed Dive)
Using internet in retirement boosts cognitive function. (Lancaster University)
How to elevate product design by leveraging neuroscience. (Startup Catalyst Brief)