Posts tagged Bloomberg

Heraud researched the scourges of agriculture: hypoxic dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and Baltic Sea, the colony collapse of bees, soil degradation, and human health problems from allergies to cancers. “Everything tied back to the blind, rampant, broadcast spraying of chemicals,” Heraud says. He and Redden figured they could teach machines to differentiate between crops and weeds, then eliminate the weeds mechanically or with targeted doses of nontoxic substances. The two first considered hot foam, laser beams, electric currents, and boiling water. They’d market the robot to organic farmers, who spend heavily on chemical-free weeding methods including mechanical tillage, which can be both fuel-intensive and damaging to soil. After months of research, they faced a disappointing truth: There was no way around herbicides. “Turns out zapping weeds with electricity or hot liquid requires far more time and energy than chemicals—and it isn’t guaranteed to work,” Heraud says. Those methods might eliminate the visible part of a weed, but not the root. And pulling weeds with mechanical pincers is a far more time-intensive task for a robot than delivering microsquirts of poison. Their challenge became applying the chemicals with precision.

via https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018–01–11/this-army-of-ai-robots-will-feed-the-world

The landscaped lawns and flowering shrubs of Country Garden Holdings Co.’s huge property showroom in southern Malaysia end abruptly at a small wire fence. Beyond, a desert of dirt stretches into the distance, filled with cranes and piling towers that the Chinese developer is using to build a $100 billion city in the sea. While Chinese home buyers have sent prices soaring from Vancouver to Sydney, in this corner of Southeast Asia it’s China’s developers that are swamping the market, pushing prices lower with a glut of hundreds of thousands of new homes. They’re betting that the city of Johor Bahru, bordering Singapore, will eventually become the next Shenzhen. “These Chinese players build by the thousands at one go, and they scare the hell out of everybody,” said Siva Shanker, head of investments at Axis-REIT Managers Bhd. and a former president of the Malaysian Institute of Estate Agents. “God only knows who is going to buy all these units, and when it’s completed, the bigger question is, who is going to stay in them?” The Chinese companies have come to Malaysia as growth in many of their home cities is slowing, forcing some of the world’s biggest builders to look abroad to keep erecting the giant residential complexes that sprouted across China during the boom years. They found a prime spot in this special economic zone, three times the size of Singapore, on the southern tip of the Asian mainland.

via http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016–11–21/–100-billion-chinese-made-city-near-singapore-scares-the-hell-out-of-everybody

Globalization was the driving force behind the growth miracle in emerging markets, lifting millions of people out of poverty over the past few decades. Now, a backlash against how the global income pie has been divided up is increasingly influencing the political affairs of developed markets. Globalization constituted a massive labor supply shock, allowing corporations to tap cheaper workers. The benefit to consumers in advanced economies took the form of downward price pressures on these goods. Along the way, however, the middle classes in developed nations failed to see this rising tide lift their boats. “The biggest losers (other than the very poorest 5 percent), or at least the ‘non-winners,’ of globalization were those between the 75th and 90th percentiles of the global income distribution whose real income gains were essentially nil,” according to Milanovic. “These people, who may be called a global upper-middle class, include many from former Communist countries and Latin America, as well as those citizens of rich countries whose incomes stagnated.” Toby Nangle, co-head of asset allocation at Columbia Threadneedle Asset Management, called this “globalization as an elephant” visual, “the most powerful chart of the last decade.”

via http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016–06–27/get-ready-to-see-this-globalization-elephant-chart-over-and-over-again

“What’s now captured the interest of intellectuals is the elephant chart, the idea that over the past 30 years the winners were emerging market middle classes and the 1 percent in developed markets, but the developed markets’ middle classes were stagnant,” he wrote. “And I think we’ve finally found the correct framework for thinking about intersection of politics and macroeconomic trends.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-27/get-ready-to-see-this-globalization-elephant-chart-over-and-over-again

Here are the criminal indictment and Securities and Exchange Commission complaint against Martin Shkreli, who was arrested today not for jacking up prices for lifesaving drugs, not for buying the only copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album and not listening to it, not for being generally vile on Twitter and in interviews, but just for garden-variety securities fraud. Here’s how the indictment describes the early going at Shkreli’s second hedge fund, MSMB Capital

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015–12–17/martin-shkreli-accused-of-being-surprisingly-good-at-fraud