'8 Billion Human Beings'
What You Need To Know
Today’s posts that caught my eye:
Strike by 48,000 University of California academic workers causes systemwide disruptions.
The combined methane emissions of 15 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies are higher than those of several of the world’s largest countries.
People who fly private jets don’t want to return to airlines. But it’s costing them a lot more than it used to.
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The World
G20 leaders to agree on communiqué rejecting ‘era of war’: G20 leaders will state that today’s era “must not be of war” at a summit in Bali, according to a draft communiqué agreed by diplomats. The draft statement seen by the Financial Times, and confirmed by a western delegation official, says that “most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed it is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy,” after days of negotiations between officials from western countries and Russia and China. The communiqué, which was agreed by national delegates on Monday night but must still be signed off by G20 leaders at a summit that began Tuesday morning, says: “The use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible. The peaceful resolution of conflicts, efforts to address crises, as well as diplomacy and dialogue, are vital. Today’s era must not be of war.” (Financial Times)
Xi Biden meeting: US leader promises 'no new Cold War' with China. He also said he did not believe China would invade Taiwan. It was the first in-person meeting between the two superpower leaders since Mr Biden took office. The pair also discussed North Korea and Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the talks in Bali, a day before the G20 summit on the Indonesian island. (BBC)
Who accompanied Chinese President Xi Jinping for face-to-face talks with Joe Biden? Chinese delegation, including some of Xi’s most trusted aides, offers a rare insight into Beijing’s foreign policy. Meanwhile, the US delegation included Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Treasury chief Janet Yellen and senior security officials. (South China Morning Post)
CIA director meets Russian counterpart as US denies secret peace talks. The CIA director, Bill Burns, met his Russian counterpart in Ankara on Monday in a rare high-level meeting, but the US insists it is not engaged in secret peace talks with Moscow without Ukrainian officials being present. The meeting in the Turkish capital with the head of Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, Sergei Naryshkin, followed speculation that some senior US figures would like Ukraine to enter negotiations with the Kremlin to end the war. US officials said the main purpose of the encounter was to convey “a message on the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons by Russia” and to discuss the cases of Americans held in detention in the country. (The Guardian)
United States men's national team coach Gregg Berhalter said that he and his team will continue to push the team's "Be the Change" message while in Qatar, even as FIFA has told participants not to raise awareness about the host country's treatment of migrant workers and the LGBTQIA+ community. Those two issues have been highlighted from the moment that the Persian Gulf nation was awarded the World Cup back in 2010. Same-sex relationships are against the law in Qatar, and migrant workers, some of whom built the stadiums that will be used in the World Cup, have had to endure extremely difficult working and living conditions. (ESPN)
Afghan supreme leader orders full implementation of sharia law. (Agence France-Presse)
As flu hospitalizations surge in the U.S., the Southeast is the hardest hit. (CNBC)
The combined methane emissions of 15 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies are higher than those of several of the world’s largest countries, including Russia, Canada and Australia, according to a new study. The analysis from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Changing Markets Foundation found that emissions by the companies – five meat and 10 dairy corporations – equate to more than 80% of the European Union’s entire methane footprint and account for 11.1% of the world’s livestock-related methane emissions. (The Guardian)
The cleanest drinking water is recycled. Recycled wastewater is not only as safe to drink as conventional potable water, it may even be less toxic than many sources of water we already drink daily, Stanford University engineers have discovered. (Stanford Report)
Pandemic terrorism risk is being overlooked, warns leading geneticist. Kevin Esvelt at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says the ability to take the DNA sequence of a virus from a database, turn it into a living virus and intentionally infect people with it is an extremely serious threat. He has now published a roadmap to help counter this kind of bioterrorism. (New Scientist)
The conservative Club for Growth is sending a warning shot at former President Donald Trump on the eve of his expected 2024 campaign launch — and indicating it might back his chief potential rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The anti-tax organization, which was once a staunch Trump ally but over the last year has broken with him, on Monday provided POLITICO with a polling memo showing the former president trailing DeSantis by double digits in one-on-one matchups in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two states on the GOP nominating calendar. The surveys also show DeSantis leading Trump by wide margins in Florida, their shared home state, and Georgia, which is holding a Dec. 6 runoff for one of its Senate seats. (Politico)
Texas Republicans prefer Ron DeSantis to Donald Trump for 2024, new GOP poll finds. DeSantis was the top choice, with 43% of respondents saying they would vote for him if the primary election were held today. Trump came in second place with 32%. (Texas Tribune)
Click thru:
A federal appeals court issued an injunction halting President Biden’s student debt cancellation plan, further clouding the future of the president’s promise to eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in debt for tens of millions of people. (New York Times)
Strike by 48,000 University of California academic workers causes systemwide disruptions: Workers are calling for better pay and benefits for teaching assistants, postdoctoral scholars, graduate student researchers, tutors and fellows. (Los Angeles Times)
Today is the United Nations’ best estimate on when we’ll reach 8 billion human beings. In the time it takes you to read this paragraph, the world’s population grew by around 20 people. While the Earth’s population is growing quickly, the growth rate is starting to slow down. Eventually, it will start falling and our societies will shrink. Humanity is changing day by day in ways we can’t perceive over short periods, but in ways that will reshape our world over the coming century. (ABC Australia)
Economy
A radical shift in China’s property and pandemic policies: On November 11 officials released 20 measures adjusting zero-covid policies to make them a little less onerous and costly to administer. On November 13 China’s central bank and banking regulator circulated 16 measures to relieve the credit crunch in the property industry, restart construction on stalled projects and prevent a fresh wave of defaults. Together the measures amount to the biggest shift in Chinese policymaking in years. The Hang Seng China Enterprise index of mainland firms listed in Hong Kong is up by 21% so far this month. Another index tracking Chinese developers rose by 13% on November 14th alone. (The Economist)
China’s economic recovery mixed as industrial output grows, retail sales fall: Industrial production in China rose by 5 per cent in October from a year earlier, but retail sales fell by 0.5 per cent last month. (South China Morning Post)
Japan GDP shrank annualized 1.2% in Q3 amid weak yen, inflation: Consumption, capital investment slowed while import surge led economy contracted. (Nikkei Asia Review)
The ESG generation gap: Millennials and Boomers split on their investing goals. A new survey of investors released by Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Rock Center for Corporate Governance, and the Hoover Institution revealed sharp differences along generational lines, with younger shareholders saying they are far more eager to have fund managers pursue ESG objectives — and also far more willing to risk higher losses in the process. (Stanford Report)
Women and family health startup Maven raises $90 million for post-Roe v. Wade world. Maven, the women and family health startup that saw a business spike after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade, has raised another $90 million from investors, including the venture arm of CVS Health. The company reached unicorn status last August right before the bottom dropped out of the tech sector, but has now raised its valuation again to $1.35 billion though the latest round was slightly smaller than the previous one. (CNBC)
The Transportation Department said that it had fined a half-dozen airlines a total of more than $7 million for failing to provide timely refunds to customers. The department’s intervention contributed to the airlines’ issuing more than $600 million in refunds, it said. (New York Times)
Alibaba's Singles Day, or 11.11 shopping festival, has plateaued. The fabricated e-commerce holiday saw sales that were "in line with last year’s [gross merchandise value] performance despite macro challenges and Covid-related impact," the company reported on Friday. Alibaba has never before been vague about how much it's sold on Singles Day since launching it back in 2009 to mark the informal holiday for singles in China. The company has always been very proud about how many sales records it sets and analysts often view the figures as a measure of the strength of the Chinese consumer. By the numbers: The company sold $84.5 billion worth of goods in 2021 — which is still massive compared to $33.9 billion in Cyber Week sales in the U.S. last year (from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday). (Axios)
Technology
Amazon plans to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week, in what would be the largest job cuts in the company’s history. The cuts will focus on Amazon’s devices organization, including the voice assistant Alexa, as well as at its retail division and in human resources, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The number of layoffs remains fluid and is likely to roll out team by team rather than all at once as each business finishes plans, one person said. But if it stays around 10,000, it would represent roughly 3 percent of Amazon’s corporate employees and less than 1 percent of its global work force of more than 1.5 million, which is primarily composed of hourly workers. (New York Times)
Sea Ltd., Southeast Asia’s largest internet company by revenue and market value, has laid off more than 7,000 employees, or around 10% of its workforce, over the past six months. Sea, a Nasdaq-listed company, had been seen as one of Southeast Asia’s tech success stories, commended for its operation of an e-commerce app, Shopee, and a videogame business, Garena. (The Information)
Elon Musk has fired at least a couple of engineers who have publicly criticized him on Twitter, in one case announcing the firing in a tweet. (Bloomberg)
Google agreed to pay a total of $391.5 million to 40 US states to resolve a probe into controversial location-tracking practices that the Alphabet Inc. unit says it already discarded several years ago, in what state officials are calling the largest such privacy settlement in US history. Google will “significantly improve” its location-tracking disclosures and user controls starting next year as part of the deal. (Bloomberg)
Cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance is proposing the creation of a rescue fund that would save otherwise healthy crypto companies from failure, aiming to stave off the cascading effects of last week’s implosion of FTX, the world’s third-largest crypto exchange. Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao posted on Twitter that his company would create “an industry recovery fund, to help projects who are otherwise strong, but in a liquidity crisis.” (Associated Press)
SoftBank disclosed a $100 million venture capital investment in crypto broker FTX and said it would not face a material markdown in the value of its stake in the struggling crypto brokerage. CFO Yoshimitsu Goto said his $100 billion Vision Fund invested in FTX in what he described as a minor stake in the company as FTX’s overall valuation ballooned up to $32 billion in September only to see it collapse this past week. (MarketWatch)
Smart Links
People who fly private jets don’t want to return to airlines. But it’s costing them a lot more than it used to. (CNBC)
TSMC shares rise after Berkshire Hathaway discloses stake purchase. (Financial Times)
NBA is sued by fired referees who refused COVID vaccines. (Reuters)
NYC will pay at least $600 million to give migrants shelter and schooling. (Bloomberg)
Twitter’s potential collapse could wipe out vast records of recent human history. (MIT Technology Review)
Malaysia built a WFH paradise. Now it just needs people to turn up. (Rest of World)
Picasso’s ‘Guitar on a Table,’ Long Held by MoMA, Sells for $37.1 Million at Sotheby’s. (Wall Street Journal)
Good News
Science is fun:
She found long-lost love letters hidden in her attic. Then the hunt began for their owner. Anna Prillaman found the letters tucked in a small closet she discovered after moving some furniture. (Washington Post)
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