10 Items from the Week | 16 Dec 24
News from the past week, and a few other things.
👋 Hello Reader, I hope you had a great week (and weekend). I’m a little late in getting this one out.
1. Recent Immigration Surge Has Been Largest in U.S. History
The immigration surge of the past few years has been the largest in U.S. history, surpassing the great immigration boom of the late 1800s and early 1900s, according to a New York Times analysis of government data. Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people. That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850:
2. Biden commutes nearly 1,500 sentences in sweeping clemency grant
President Joe Biden is commuting the sentences of nearly 1,500 people and pardoning 39 more convicted of nonviolent crimes, the White House announced on Thursday, describing it as “the largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.” Unlike executive orders, clemency decisions cannot be reversed by a president’s successor, so they are among the few actions Biden can take now with the knowledge that Trump will not undo them.
Highest rates of pardons and commutations by a President:
3. The End Game in Ukraine
No matter who won the presidential election, the war in Ukraine was likely to end next year. Both Ukraine and Russia are running out of troops and struggling to call up more young men for the front lines. That reality always meant that 2025 would be a year of negotiations. Donald Trump’s victory will hasten those peace talks. During the campaign, Trump promised to end the war in Ukraine even before his inauguration. Maybe that was a bit of exaggeration. But it’s clear he wants negotiations to begin soon. That’s bad news for Ukraine. Russian forces are advancing in the east. They’ve also reclaimed some of the Russian territory that Ukraine captured this past summer. Ukraine still has weapons, but its troops are spread thin. Intelligence agencies think it will run out of soldiers soon.
4. Taiwan says China has launched biggest maritime operation in decades
Defense officials in Taiwan say China has deployed nearly 90 naval and coast guard vessels in waters stretching from islands in the south of Japan to the South China Sea. The deployment is the largest to regional waters in almost three decades, Taiwanese officials say, and part of what appears to be a military exercise.
5. Prices Won’t Stop Falling in China, and Beijing Is Grasping for Solutions
Chinese leaders this week pledged to do more to stimulate the economy, including by cutting interest rates and boosting government borrowing. But pressure is building on Beijing to take even more forceful action to prevent a downward spiral of deflation that becomes self-reinforcing, potentially landing China in a longer-term recession. Prices for goods leaving Chinese factories have fallen year-over-year for 26 consecutive months, dropping 2.5% in November from a year earlier, and there is little sign of them turning up again soon. China’s gross domestic product deflator, a broader gauge of price levels across the economy, has been in negative territory for six consecutive quarters, the longest stretch since the late 1990s.
6. Getting a college degree doesn’t guarantee a good job like it used to
market, but if you’re a recent college grad with a shiny new diploma, your reality might not be matching up with the overall mood. According to the latest data from the New York Fed, the unemployment rate for recent grads (ages 22–27 with a bachelor’s or higher) climbed to 5.3% in September — the highest in over two years and up 90 basis points from last year. That’s more than double the 2.5% rate for all college graduates (ages 22–65), and it’s also significantly worse than the rate for the wider workforce, breaking a multi-decade period in which recent college grads generally had lower levels of unemployment.
7. Why my new audiobook “The Software Engineer's Guidebook” is everywhere except on Audible
Audible’s audiobook monopoly and monopolistic practices - Audible is a model example of a Big Tech company with an invisible de facto monopoly of a market. Customers are happy, but authors and publishers are not. I suddenly find myself directly impacted by such practices that go unchallenged, and which won’t change without competition or regulation. Now is a good time to talk about that. So, why is the audiobook of The Software Engineer's Guidebook not on Audible? Originally, I really wanted to avoid supporting a business that treats authors and publishers like only a monopolistic company can. But it’s clear that most of my readers prefer to listen on Audible. For this reason, I’ve made the book available on Audible, although I recommend purchasing it anywhere except there. However, Audible’s unusually slow approval process means my audiobook isn’t even available on Amazon’s platform, yet. I submitted the book to Audible at the same time as I did for every other platform, six days ago. In a sign that Audible is way too comfortable in its position, they can take up to 25 days to approve new books in busy times like now – though the official estimate from Amazon is 14 business days (3 weeks). So, it will be on sale there when approval happens, likely either late 2024, or early 2025.
Amazon’s monopolistic pricing with Kindle and Audible
“Take rate” refers to the percentage of revenue a platform takes from merchants selling on it. Take rate examples:
2.9% + $0.30: the take rate Stripe charges per transaction
10%: the take rate that Substack charges (the newsletter platform this publication uses)
30%: the take rate Apple’s App Store and Google Play charges. This is the take rate that the EU is investigating, and which Epic Games has noisily contested.
30% + data transfer fees: the take rate Amazon Kindle charges for e-books priced at $9.99 or below. Data transfer fees refer to the cost of 3G or 4G connection to download the book – which fee is free for the customer, but is deducted from the publisher.
40%: the take rate Amazon.com charges for physical goods sold on their platform, such as books
50-60%: the take rate book stores typically charge when selling physical books
When it comes to audiobooks, Audible has alarmingly high take rates:
60%: take rate for audiobooks that are exclusively on Audible, meaning they cannot be sold anywhere else.
75%: the take rate for non-exclusive audiobooks.
A 75% take rate means authors need to sell 3x as much worth of revenue on Audible to make the same revenue as on any other platform.
NOTE: I am a huge fan of audio books…and had no idea the rates Audible charges. Yikes!
8. How Helicopter Parenting Got More Intense
You can’t find a better explanation of the rise of helicopter parenting, and how, when, and why that morphed into “intensive parenting” than this New York Times podcast, which is inspired by the Surgeon General’s report on parental burnout. Michael Barbaro, host of “The Daily,” interviews Claire Cain Miller, the Times reporter covering family issues (and the mom of kids 8 and 12). Cain Miller defines intensive parenting as “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor intensive and financially expensive.” Plain old hovering is so 1999! To be intensive, she says, a parent walking with their kid in the fall wouldn’t just admire the pretty leaves. They’d say, “Look, the leaves are changing. Do you know what drives that?” and turn it into a lesson. How did we get to this point?
NOTE: First parents thought they were always supposed to be protecting their children. Then they thought they were always supposed to be teaching their children.
9. U.K. Bans Puberty Blockers for Teens Indefinitely
Britain is to ban indefinitely the use of puberty blockers for young people under 18 with gender dysphoria, except in clinical trials, the government said on Wednesday, making permanent a set of temporary restrictions put in place earlier this year.
10. Your Home-Insurance Bill Has Only One Way to Go: Up
Higher home-insurance rates are here to stay, while homeowners in many areas face an increasing risk of nonrenewals, reduced coverage and expensive policy conditions, from paying for a new roof to cutting down trees. For tens of millions of Americans, home insurance will never be the same, insurers and analysts say. To account for the changes, insurers are increasingly penalizing storm-prone areas in Texas and Colorado, as well as Midwestern states such as Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin, analysts said. Eye-watering premiums and coverage cancellations, once largely confined to the troubled markets of Florida, Louisiana and California, are spreading.
And a few others…
North America
The revenge of the company town: Elon Musk, the new Baron of Bastrop
The billionaire is using the sheer force of his will and wealth to reshape an area in the Lone Star State — whether the locals like it or not.
Europe
If you’ve got it, don’t flaunt it in Sweden
The new law allows police to seize expensive goods even from people who are not under investigation for a crime, if they cannot prove they acquired them lawfully. Police could arrest a teenager sporting a gold watch, or someone driving a Porsche who they know is on the dole, and confiscate their swag. The idea is to undermine gang leaders who recruit youngsters by dangling such wares.
Middle East
A visual timeline of the stunning offensive that ended Assad’s regime
Shots rang over the presidential palace. People tore Assad posters off public walls. Syrians chanted “We are One,” as rebel forces arrived in Damascus on Sunday and announced the end of the Assad family’s brutal 53-year rule. “I have never dreamed of this moment in my entire life,” said Amer Hafez, 36, from Damascus. “All what we were told is that they will stay in power forever.” A lightning offensive, led by the armed Islamist faction Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, swept through Aleppo, Hama, Daraa and Homs in just eleven days, dislodging Bashar al-Assad’s iron grip over Syria after a 13-year civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions. Experts credit former al-Qaeda commander Abu Mohammed al-Jolani with recruiting a temporary coalition of fighters to end a four-year stalemate with regime forces and propelling HTS to unprecedented success.
12 Days That Changed Syria: The Rebel Offensive in Visuals
In just two weeks, rebel forces tore across Syria, shattering the stalemate left by more than a decade of civil war and bringing an end to more than five decades of brutal rule by the Assad dynasty. The pace of the advance was as dizzying as its implications. Here’s how it unfolded in photos, videos and maps.
NOTE: Great overview of how it all unfolded.
Africa
Rage Grows Over a Spate of Brutal Murders of Women in Kenya
A series of brutal murders in Kenya in recent months, documented by the police and human rights groups, has stunned a nation where anger over violence against women and girls has prompted nationwide protests. Calls are intensifying for the authorities to do more to stop the killings. The police say that 97 women were murdered from August to October this year, a staggering toll even in Kenya, where femicide has long been endemic. In July, sacks containing the body parts of women believed to have been murdered by a serial killer were discovered in a dump in the capital, Nairobi.
Government
The Postal Service’s electric mail trucks are way behind schedule
A multibillion-dollar program to buy electric vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service is far behind its original schedule, plagued by manufacturing mishaps and supplier infighting that threaten a cornerstone of outgoing President Joe Biden’s fight against climate change. The Postal Service is slated to purchase 60,000 “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles,” or NGDVs — mostly electric — from defense contractor Oshkosh, which has a long history of producing military and heavy industrial vehicles, but not postal trucks. Congress provided $3 billion for the nearly $10 billion project in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, one of Biden’s chief legislative accomplishments. But as of November, the Postal Service had received only 93 of the Oshkosh trucks, the agency told The Washington Post — far fewer than the 3,000 expected by now. Significant manufacturing difficulties that were not disclosed to the Postal Service for more than a year have stymied production, according to internal company records and four people with knowledge of the events, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisals.
Economy
Dollar Stores Are Flashing a Warning Sign About Lower-Income Consumers
Inflation has eased, wage growth has been decent and Americans on average still have more in savings than they used to prepandemic. Some might even say the economy has reached a much-vaunted “soft landing.” Low-income consumers, though, aren’t feeling any of that.Dollar stores, a bellwether for that group’s spending, started seeing signs of belt-tightening from their core consumers earlier this year. That trend has only continued into the latest quarter.
Business
MSNBC and CNN Fight to Dig Out of a Postelection Ratings Hole
Cable news loyalists have grown a lot less loyal—to MSNBC and CNN, at least. While viewers are flocking to Fox News in the wake of Donald Trump’s election win last month, ratings for MSNBC and CNN have tumbled. The declines are far worse than what happened the last time Trump won, in 2016. MSNBC averaged 603,000 prime-time viewers from the day after the election through Dec. 8, down by more than half from the network’s year-to-date average through the election, according to Nielsen data. CNN was down 46%, to 401,000 viewers. Meanwhile, Fox News was up 12%, averaging about 2.7 million viewers. MSNBC and CNN both reported dips for the month following the 2016 election, but they weren’t nearly as steep. CNN’s drop was off a higher baseline.
Netflix’s Extraordinary Parental Leave Was Part of Its Culture. That’s Over.
Netflix made headlines nearly a decade ago when it unveiled one of corporate America’s most generous parental-leave benefits, pledging to give new moms and dads unlimited time off in their child’s first year. It was a promise Netflix couldn’t keep. The policy was in line with a core company value, “freedom and responsibility,” the idea that employees can be trusted to set their own boundaries. But more staffers than expected took full advantage of the benefit, and Netflix ultimately found it unsustainable. The company has spent the past few years walking back the leave policy, issuing vague and sometimes conflicting guidance internally without explicitly retracting the one-year benefit, according to internal communications reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, as well as interviews with current and former employees. Taking more than six months of leave is now widely understood to be an unwise career move.
Crypto
Behind Bitcoin’s Rally Is a Simple Fact: Supplies Are Limited
Bitcoin investors celebrated last week after the price of the world’s largest cryptocurrency hit $100,000 for the first time. Believers say the rally will continue because of a key technical feature of bitcoin: There is a limit to the number of bitcoins that can ever be created. The computer code behind bitcoin imposes a hard cap of 21 million bitcoins. So far, about 19.8 million bitcoins have been created, and it will take more than a century to create the rest, a process that will become increasingly difficult over time. Proponents of bitcoin argue that its scarcity will fuel rising prices as buyers scramble to acquire the last new coins to come online, or to buy existing coins from people fortunate enough to own bitcoin already. It is the same argument for buying Gutenberg Bibles, limited-edition baseball cards and beachfront real estate: There is a finite supply.
Technology
Quantum Computing Inches Closer to Reality After Another Google Breakthrough
On Monday, Google unveiled a new quantum computer that may end this back-and-forth race with traditional machines and that points to a future in which quantum computers could drive advances in areas like drug discovery and artificial intelligence. Google said its quantum computer, based on a computer chip called Willow, needed less than five minutes to perform a mathematical calculation that one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers could not complete in 10 septillion years, a length of time that exceeds the age of the known universe. A traditional computer like a laptop or a smartphone stores numbers in silicon chips and manipulates those numbers, adding them, multiplying them and so on. It performs these calculations by processing “bits” of information. Each bit holds either a 1 or a 0. But a quantum computer defies common sense. It relies on the mind-bending ways that some objects behave at the subatomic level or when exposed to extreme cold, like the exotic metal that Google chills to nearly 460 degrees below zero inside its quantum computer. Quantum bits, or “qubits,” behave very differently from normal bits. A single object can behave like two separate objects at the same time when it is either extremely small or extremely cold. By harnessing that behavior, scientists can build a qubit that holds a combination of 1 and 0. This means that two qubits can hold four values at once. And as the number of qubits grows, a quantum computer becomes exponentially more powerful.
Education
Is your master’s degree useless?
On both sides of the Atlantic, choice of subject is the single biggest factor determining whether a master’s boosts earnings. In America returns are especially large in computer science and in engineering. They are slightly smaller in other science subjects, in part because an undergraduate degree in these already bumps up salaries by quite a lot. Teachers who bag graduate degrees in education tend to earn more, even if wages for the profession as a whole are fairly low, because many American school districts automatically raise the pay of those who have them. More striking are the large negative returns in some subjects. British men who complete master’s degrees in politics earn 10% less in their mid-30s than peers who do the same subject at undergraduate level only. For history the hit to earnings is around 20%; for English it is close to 30% (see chart 1). Many of the people on these courses are targeting careers that they know will be low-earning, but which they think they will enjoy, explains Dr Britton. But some drift into advanced study because they have not yet decided what profession to pursue. It should probably not be a surprise that these people tend to earn less in the medium term than peers who have rocketed straight from bachelor’s courses into jobs.
NOTE: One day remind me to tell you my full thoughts on transactional versus transformational value of college.
Food & Drink
The FDA does not know what chemicals are added to foods
The idea that American children are being poisoned by the food industry, with the blessing of regulators, sounds like classic conspiracy theory. But when that is the stated belief of the man who may soon become America’s secretary of health, it is sensible to ask whether there is something to it. Robert F. Kennedy junior, Donald Trump’s choice for the job, wants to get rid of the entire nutrition division of the Food and Drug Administration, which he has accused of allowing toxic chemicals in foods. On that he may, or may not, have a point. The real story is that nobody knows. Mr Kennedy’s ire has to do with the hands-off way in which the FDA regulates food additives such as artificial flavours, colours and preservatives. It allows food companies themselves to decide whether such chemicals are safe, and whether they want to notify the FDA about them at all. They are not required to list all ingredients on food labels. For example, a chemical concocted in the lab may appear on a pack of biscuits as “flavouring”. Behind this is a loophole in the food-safety law from 1958 that put the FDA in charge of vetting food ingredients. A sensible exemption from full FDA assessment was carved out for things like vinegar and spices, which were put in a category called “generally recognised as safe” (GRAS). In the decades that followed, the number of chemicals concocted to make foods crunchier, tastier and longer-lasting shot up—along with waiting times for review by the FDA. Food companies began to sneak some novel ingredients through the GRAS loophole, helped by vague rules. To resolve the backlog, the FDA did not get funding to hire more staff. Instead, in 1997, it increased the GRAS loophole to the size of the Hoover dam, changing the rules so food companies no longer had to tell the FDA about ingredients they deemed safe.
Scientists are learning why ultra-processed foods are bad for you
With the invention of tinned goods and pasteurisation in the 19th century, food alchemy became possible on an industrial scale. Processing innovations made food cheaper, more convenient and plentiful. According to the UN, the average daily food supply available for a person in the rich world increased by over 20% between 1961 and 2021, to 3,500 kilocalories. In that time, obesity rates have more than tripled; today, nearly one in three people globally is obese or overweight. Now concerns are growing that the heavy processing used to cook up cheap, tasty nibbles may itself be harmful. A particular target is “ultra-processed foods” (upfs), a relatively recent label put forward by Carlos Monteiro, a Brazilian scientist. Robert F. Kennedy junior, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of health, has likened processed food to “poison” and promised to reduce the share of UPFs in American diets. In November 2023 Colombia imposed a tax on highly processed foods and drinks. Authorities in Brazil, Canada and Peru have advised the public to limit consumption of these foods. In Britain parliamentarians are investigating the effects of UPFs on people’s health. At the heart of the debate is a question: are upfs unhealthy because their nutritional content is poor, or does the processing somehow pose risks in itself? New research may soon provide answers that could reformulate what people eat. People on the ultra-processed diet ate about 500 more calories per day than those on the unprocessed one. They also ate faster and gained an average of 1kg (2.2 pounds) over two weeks. On the other diet, participants lost a similar amount of weight. Dr Hall says that, though the study was short and conducted in an artificial setting, the results suggest that excess amounts of salt, sugar and fats might not be fully to blame for the ill effects of processed food.
Coffee price surges to highest on record
Coffee drinkers may soon see their morning treat get more expensive, as the price of coffee on international commodity markets has hit its highest level on record. On Tuesday, the price for Arabica beans, which account for most global production, topped $3.44 a pound (0.45kg), having jumped more than 80% this year. The cost of Robusta beans, meanwhile, hit a fresh high in September. It comes as coffee traders expect crops to shrink after the world's two largest producers, Brazil and Vietnam, were hit by bad weather and the drink's popularity continues to grow.
Entertainment
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Grand Total: A Record $2 Billion
For the last 21 months, Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been the biggest thing in music — a phenomenon that has engulfed pop culture, dominated news coverage and boosted local economies around the world. Now we know exactly how big. Through its 149th and final show, which took place in Vancouver, British Columbia, on Sunday, Swift’s tour sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets. That’s two billion and change — double the gross ticket sales of any other concert tour in history and an extraordinary new benchmark for a white-hot international concert business.
41 New Holiday Movies! See Hallmark’s Christmas Movie Schedule 2024
This year, Hallmark is going all out by premiering 41 original holiday movies – 32 through Hallmark Channel’s Countdown to Christmas and nine through Hallmark Mystery’s Miracles of Christmas – to ring in the yuletide season. From a Kansas City Chiefs romance, to three brothers trying their best to raise a young boy, to a librarian who gets thrust into an undercover FBI heist, to a spoiled princess forced to prove her royal worth in bootcamp, chances are there’s a movie for everyone to get into the holiday spirit.
NOTE: Yes, that’s right, 41 new movies…on top of all the others that have been previously released. Where will you find the time?
For Fun
This Canadian is the new world champion of spreadsheets, and he has the belt to prove it
It was down to the final 30 seconds at the Microsoft Excel World Championships in Las Vegas, and the crowd was going wild. Canada's Michael Jarman was in the lead, his eyes fixed on the scoreboard, desperately hoping nobody would come up from behind and snatch victory from his grasp. When the clock ran out, Jarman leapt from his computer and threw his hands up in celebration, as the spectators in the HyperX Arena erupted in cheers. Jarman, a Toronto financial modelling director, unseated Australia's three-time winner Andrew (The Annihilator) Ngai on Dec. 4 to become the undisputed world champion of managing spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel. "It was an amazing feeling," Jarman told As It Happens guest host Peter Armstring. "It's definitely, you know, a really great memory for me, and will be for a long time."
NOTE: Enjoy the video here:
This Christmas, Give Your Loved One a Box of Unopened Mail. What Could Go Wrong?
More people are turning their backs on gift-giving tradition and instead ordering pick-and-mix style mystery boxes of unopened, unclaimed mail. The concept has become a popular way to amp up the surprise factor at gift exchanges. The only potential downside: Things can go from fun to weird in a hurry. The mystery-box phenomenon is a child of the pandemic. In early 2021, Rebecca Dallman and Jena Butler were looking for a new venture after Covid halted their commercial cleaning business. After scrolling through an online auction site, they bought a pallet of undeliverable and unclaimed mail. Some big-box retailers and online stores rely on third-party logistics companies to deal with packages that can’t be delivered because the recipient moved, there was an incorrect address or no one claimed the mail, among other reasons. Those companies sometimes turn around and sell the packages online. Originally Butler and Dallman planned to open the mail and list the contents for sale online. But they were quickly deterred by how much work would go into opening the packages, sorting the contents, taking attractive pictures, listing the products and then shipping them. “We had a lot of ‘What do we do with this?’ type of moments,” Butler said. “But we had a lot of laughs. It was a blast.” They hosted a garage sale to sell some of the items. One of the attendees pointed to the pallet of unopened packages and asked how much it would cost to buy one. “I told him that we don’t know what’s inside of them, but he said that would be the fun of it,” Butler said. He bought a handful of packages for $8, as did several other customers. Since then, Dallman and Butler have sold more than 90,000 boxes—each containing at least six packages—built social-media accounts with more than a million followers combined, and are now gearing up for their busiest holiday season yet.
The next generation of great strategists aren’t bothering with chess or poker
Years ago, after-hours poker supplanted corner-office chess as the way white-collar workers sharpened their wits against one another. But tomorrow’s leaders are battling one another on more ethereal planes — on Plains, in fact. Along with Islands, Swamps, Mountains, and Forests. “Magic: The Gathering,” the trading-card game that Vice President-elect JD Vance said he grew up playing, is supplanting poker as the casual yet competitive strategy game of knowledge workers everywhere. The fantasy-themed game, invented by mathematician Richard Garfield in 1991, has maintained a devoted following. But in the game’s third decade, it’s seen strong growth marked by a series of “Magic”-is-having-a-moment media trend pieces. In 2022, “Magic” earned nearly $1.1 billion, becoming toy giant Hasbro’s first billion-dollar brand. “Magic" is not just a strategy game; it might be the strategy game. In a 2019 study, titled “Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete,” “Magic” was called “the most computationally complex real-world game known in literature.” The premise of the game is simple and not unlike chess. Instead of two generals commanding identical and opposite 16-unit armies, “Magic” features two or more wizards “casting” spell cards at each other, using magical energy “tapped” from land cards they control. Like poker, “Magic” can be played in different formats; just as poker has five-card draw and Texas hold ’em, “Magic” has Standard and Commander. But unlike poker, “Magic”’s strategy challenges don’t begin when 52-card playing decks are shuffled up and dealt. Players choose from a massive pool of 28,878 unique cards, millions of which have been printed since the game’s introduction. “Magic” publisher Wizards of the Coast maintains different sets of rules and legal card lists for different casual and competitive formats.
Have a great week!
The Curator
Two resources to help you be a more discerning reader:
AllSides - https://www.allsides.com/unbiased-balanced-news
Media Bias Chart - https://www.adfontesmedia.com/
Caveat: Even these resources/charts are biased. Who says that the system they use to describe news sources is accurate? Still, hopefully you find them useful as a basic guide or for comparison.