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☆ Bill Gates’ holiday list: 3 of the best books he read in 2023—plus 2 other recommendations 'just for fun'
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-20 | by ( Tom Huddleston Jr. | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +5 min

Bill Gates is once again marking the holiday season with a list of some of his favorite books he read in the past year. His latest holiday list also includes a series of online economics lectures he calls "fantastic" and a holiday-themed Spotify playlist "just for fun." The book will help you better understand your own body, particularly what it means when you get sick, Gates wrote. The author "used to believe — as many environmental activists do — that she was 'living through humanity's most tragic period,'" Gates wrote. Gates' holiday Spotify playlistGates's 54-song playlist is available on his Spotify profile "just for fun," he wrote.

Persons: Bill Gates, Gates, Siddhartha Mukherjee Mukherjee, Columbia University oncologist, Mukherjee, Hannah Ritchie, Ritchie, Vaclav Smil Smil, he's, Smil, Timothy Taylor Gates, Taylor, King Cole's Organizations: Microsoft, Columbia University, University of Oxford, University of Manitoba, Stanford, Macalester College Locations: U.S

☆ India's Samvardhana Motherson buys Germany's Dr. Schneider for $132 mln
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-24 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

BENGALURU, July 24 (Reuters) - Indian auto parts maker Samvardhana Motherson International (SMIL) (SAMD.NS) said on Monday it made a second acquisition this month, buying Germany's Dr. Schneider Group for 118.3 million euros ($131.6 million). Dr. Schneider Group, a unit of Dr. Schneider Holding, manufactures interior components for vehicles such as panels and lighting. The German company had filed for insolvency in September 2022 due to "a failed operational and financial restructuring", Samvardhana Motherson said in a statement, referring to the acquisition, which was done through an insolvency process. Dr. Schneider Group employs 4,500 people in seven facilities across Germany, Spain, Poland, the U.S., and China, SMIL said. The acquisition adds to SMIL's repertoire of big-ticket purchases to increase its presence in the auto parts manufacturing sector.

Persons: Samvardhana, Dr, Schneider, Samvardhana Motherson, SMIL, Vivek Chaand Sehgal, Varun, Dhanya Ann Thoppil Organizations: Schneider, Schneider Group, Honda Motor, Yachiyo, Sethuraman, Varun Vyas, Thomson Locations: BENGALURU, Germany, Spain, Poland, U.S, China, Japan, Bengaluru

☆ Tech Progress Is Slowing Down
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-16 | by ( Vaclav Smil | ) www.wsj.com time to read: +1 min

Nothing has affected, and warped, modern thinking about the pace of technological invention more than the rapid exponential advances of solid-state electronics. By 2020, microchips had more than 10 million times as many components as the first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, released in 1971. Moore’s law was the foundation for the rapid rise of businesses based on electronic data processing, from PayPal to Amazon to Facebook . It made it possible to go in a lifetime from bulky landline phones to palm-size smartphones. These gains are widely seen today as harbingers of similarly impressive gains in other realms, such as solar cells, batteries, electric cars and even urban farming.

☆ The bubble in predicting the end of the world
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-01 | by ( Edward Chancellor | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +7 min

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says the world faces the “most complex, disparate and cross-cutting set of challenges” he’s ever encountered. In his wittily titled “The End of the World is Just the Beginning”, the geopolitical strategist suggests that a number of countries from Germany to China face insuperable demographic challenges. The threat to America’s global hegemony from China is the subject of Ray Dalio’s “The Changing World Order”. The U.S. stock market bubble has only partially deflated, bond yields around the world trail below inflation, and global property markets are exposed to rising interest rates. The Assyrian who forecast the world would end in 2800 BC was wrong.

☆ Recession-shy investors can turn to capital cycle
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-10 | by ( Edward Chancellor | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +7 min

But another factor is the capital cycle: the amount of investment entering or exiting an industry. Capital spending by energy firms and miners has declined since the investment boom peaked in the middle of the last decade. Capital spending by large European oil companies has fallen from more than twice depreciation in the mid-2010s to less than one times, according to Bernstein. A similar picture emerges in the mining industry, whose capital spending boom also ended around eight years ago. Freeport-McMoRan (FCX.N), one of the world’s largest copper producers, cut capital spending from $7.2 billion in 2014 to $2.1 billion last year.

☆ Climate Change Is Real. Markets, Not Governments, Offer the Cure. - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2022-10-28 | by ( Bret Stephens | Mr. Stephens Is An Opinion Columnist. Mr. Winter Is A Staff Photographer On Assignment In Opinion. | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +32 min

worse-case, highest-carbon-emission scenario.” (The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the U.N. body that assesses climate change.) How do we weigh the risks of underreacting to climate change against the risks of overreacting to it? While he’s not an expert on climate change, he has spent decades thinking deeply about every manner of risk. That’s particularly true if climate change is akin to cancer — manageable or curable in its earlier stages, disastrous in its later ones. Maybe, I realized, in assessing my newfound concerns about climate change, my long-held beliefs might provide a solution — look to the market.

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