ITK Daily | January 24

Happy Tuesday.

Here’s today’s ITK Daily.

To be ITK, know this:

The ultimate contrarian indicator to start the year: Amid the improved mood in Davos are two big worries, either of which could see the bear market reassert itself.?WSJ

In ’20 Days in Mariupol’ doc, the horrors of war illuminated?AP

Ukraine is not a proxy war: It is Kyiv – not the West – which has set Ukraine’s war aims.?Lawrence Freedman

FT: ‘Free the leopards!’: Tank dispute heightens Germany’s isolation over Ukraine

‘We need action’: Time runs out for Ukraine as allied countries debate sending tanks: Kyiv says it needs more armor as it prepares for major offensives this spring.?Politico

+ The fighting in Ukraine this spring will rely heavily on tanks on both sides of the line, and after a year of hard combat, Kyiv is desperate for more modern Western models to allow them to overwhelm the hundreds of Russian tanks and armored vehicles lying in wait.

WP: Germany tank decision coming ‘soon,’ defense minister says

The Russian draft-dodgers who fled to Alaska in a dinghy: Sergei and Maksim eluded military sentries and braved a gale to avoid fighting in the war in Ukraine.?1843 Magazine

Norway holding Wagner deserter, will not deport to Russia: DW reports a former member of the private militia escaped to Norway seeking asylum. He is under tight security over fears for his life.

AP: Russia, Estonia expel ambassadors amid ‘destroyed’ relations

+ Estonia had called for "parity" in the number of staff at the embassies in Tallinn and Moscow. Russia branded this an "unfriendly move."

Erdo?an says Turkey won’t support Sweden’s NATO bid: Politico reports: ‘That’s not happening,’ the Turkish president said of Sweden’s NATO bid following protests in Stockholm where a Quran was burned.

Germany: 5 charged with treason in suspected terror plot: DW reports public prosecutors said suspects with ties to the far-right Reichsbürger scene had planned to create "civil war-like conditions" in Germany. They are also accused of plotting to kidnap the health minister.

France and Germany reach a deceptive rapprochement: Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz made a show of symbolism on Sunday in Paris for the 60th anniversary of the Elysée Treaty, but they didn't come up with any strong proposals on support for Ukraine, European defense or the energy crisis.?Le Monde

+ The Franco-German Council of Ministers, coupled with the celebration of the 60th?anniversary of the friendship treaty between the two countries on Sunday, January 22 in Paris proved to be a nothing burger.

+ Although the day did not produce a clear and strong Franco-German initiative concerning the war in Ukraine, it was rich in symbols and historical references.

+ More broadly on the industrial front, Berlin, like Paris, intends to support European industry in the face of the Inflation Reduction Act – a support plan worth nearly $400 billion (€368 billion) put in place by the United States to help its companies.

+ Scholz cautiously stated that he and Macron share the objectives of making the necessary investments to ensure that Europe becomes "a global hub for the technologies of the future" and the first climate-neutral continent in the world.?

French bakers protest as beloved baguette faces threat from rising costs: AFP reports dressed in aprons and brandishing baguettes, hundreds of bakers demonstrated in the streets of Paris on Monday to warn that the country's beloved bread and croissant makers were under threat from surging electricity and raw material costs.

New Zealand’s Chris Hipkins vows to focus on inflation ‘pandemic’ and ‘fairer’ tax system: Incoming prime minister echoes Jacinda Ardern’s promise to cut back Labour’s agenda to focus on the cost of living issues.?Guardian

Australia to buy deep sea mines as China deterrent: The Times reports Australia is to lace its coast with powerful sea mines to deter China and other potential attackers from sending warships and submarines into the nation’s waters. Today the government confirmed what will be the nation’s first major investment in underwater explosives since the Vietnam War era.

US weapons industry unprepared for a China conflict, report says: The war in Ukraine highlights the inability of US arms companies to replenish the military’s stocks.?WSJ

Where is Xi Jinping? COVID failures are keeping the Chinese leader away from Lunar New Year celebrations.?Katie Stallard

+ "So perhaps it is no wonder Xi opted to stay in Beijing this year – rather than to confront the consequences of his policies for himself."

China tightens grip as dominant LNG buyer with long-term deals: Nikkei reports Sinopec leads way with Chinese companies locking in 40% of recent contracts.

Indonesia boosts South China Sea security ahead of energy project: Nikkei reports an oil and gas development near Natuna Islands could spur tension with China.

China Belt and Road dreams fade in Germany's industrial heartland: Geopolitical tensions derail Duisburg's hopes of trade bonanza.?Nikkei

Turbans or helmets? Indian army purchase revives debate over Sikh headgear.?WP

+ A plan by the Indian army to purchase 12,730 ballistic helmets designed specially for Sikhs has drawn criticism from the topmost religious leaders in Sikhism, sparking the latest debate for a community that has long tried to navigate the dueling mandates of its religion and secular authorities.

+ The helmet has a bulge to accommodate a Sikh soldier’s topknot, and its designers say it would offer protection against small-arms fire and be compatible with mounted night vision goggles, cameras and communication systems that Sikh soldiers previously could not use with their turbans.

+ “Will Pakistan give a [pledge] that their snipers will stop targeting our Sikh troops if they wear turbans?” asked retired Lt. Gen. K.J. Singh, referring to India’s neighboring archenemy.

Burkina Faso confirms asking France to withdraw troops: Le Monde reports Frane confirmed it had received a note from Burkina Faso about the end of the agreement between the two countries but insisted it was waiting on further clarifications.

Bloomberg: Sierra Leone enacts law to keep 30% posts for women in power

+ Women hold 12% of parliamentary seats and few cabinet posts.

+ The Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Act, which President Julius Maada Bio signed into law Thursday, calls for a 30% minimum quota of women in parliament and cabinet.

Proposed Brazil-Argentina common currency is met with doubts?AP

+ Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva told reporters Monday, though, that a common currency would reduce a harmful dependence on the US dollar.

Trump’s MAGA forces threaten to upend vote for RNC chair: AP reports Trump hasn’t made a public endorsement, but he and his team are privately advocating for RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel’s reelection bid. Still, many Trump loyalists blame McDaniel, the niece of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, for some of the party’s recent struggles.

Donald Trump will stop in New Hampshire ahead of his South Carolina rally: NBC News reports they will kick off Trump's first large public events since announcing his 2024 presidential run.

+ Trump has added a stop in New Hampshire Saturday morning ahead of his rally that evening in South Carolina.

US Sen. Sherrod Brown hires campaign manager as he gears up for 2024 reelection contest: CPD reports Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) has hired a former communications aide to manage his 2024 reelection campaign, a major formal step toward preparing for what’s expected to be one of the country’s most closely watched Senate races.

‘Fox News in Spanish’: Inside an upstart media company’s big plans to impact the 2024 election: Ahead of the campaign, Americano Media wants to sway Hispanic opinion toward the GOP.?Politico

DC Mayor to Biden: Your teleworking employees are killing my city: Washington has the highest work-from-home rate of any major city. With an empty downtown, the city faces a real risk of economic peril.?Politico

+ According to census data, Washington has the highest work-from-home rate in the country.

Boeing’s DC powerbroker rebuilds clout after fallout from 737 Max crash?Bloomberg

+ Affable rainmaker woos powerbrokers and avoids media limelight.

+ Planemaker scored a win in DC with the 737 Max certification deal.

Rivian’s chief lobbyist is leaving the EV startup: WSJ reports Jim Chen is set to be the latest in a string of executives to leave the company.

The corporate cafeteria is broken. So how to feed workers??Even as the sprawling dining halls of old struggle with emptier workplaces, food is still important to employees, particularly the young. Many companies are reinventing the company meal.?NYT

+ “The world of the traditional big cafeteria is dead,” said Fedele Bauccio, who in 1987 co-founded Bon Appétit Management Company, which runs food service at hundreds of museums, universities and companies like LinkedIn. “They are just too expensive to maintain, and not flexible enough.”

+ Food has become such an important recruitment and retention tool that some applicants for remote jobs are even offered credits with food delivery companies, or generous weekly lunch stipends — benefits that may be especially prized as inflation drives up food costs.

+ Some businesses have abandoned cafeterias altogether in favor of subsidizing food delivery. An app called Relish by ezCater aggregates a variety of restaurant orders from employees and delivers them all at the same time, in uniform packaging, so everyone can eat together. It uses a network of more than 104,000 restaurants in every state, selected based on their ability to reliably feed large groups.

Wonking out: Give me that gold time religion?Paul Krugman

+ I have a hypothesis — and it’s no more than that, although I encourage others to see if there’s a way to confirm or refute it. Here it goes: Cryptocurrencies, as I’ve long said, were buoyed by a combination of technobabble and libertarian derp. Well, libertarian derp will always be with us. But investors are losing faith in fashionable technobabble. They still want their pet rocks, but crypto’s plunges and scandals are causing some of them to return to pet rocks with centuries of tradition behind them — that is, gold, the pet rock of ages.

Genesis demise marks end of era for crypto’s pseudo-banks: WSJ reports the risk in the crypto-lending sector was poorly managed, subjecting users to heavy losses after an epic boom.

SBF, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the spectacular hangover after the art world’s NFT gold rush: Auction houses and talent agencies thought the Web3 works were a fast track to billions. They might have pulled it off if it weren’t for a global crypto meltdown.?Vanity Fair

Salesforce?had a market capitalization of $151 billion at Friday’s close, down from a peak of more than $300 billion in 2021.

Elliott Management takes big stake in Salesforce: WSJ reports the activist investor makes a multibillion-dollar investment in the business-software provider.

WSJ: Spotify to cut 6% of workforce in latest tech layoff

Microsoft confirms ‘multibillion-dollar investment’ in ChatGPT maker OpenAI: FT reports the agreement represents a bet on the transformative nature of artificial intelligence on the company’s future business.

+ In a company blog post tweeted by CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft announced a "multiyear, multibillion dollar investment to accelerate AI breakthroughs" that would be "broadly shared with the world."

Almost 30% of professionals say they’ve tried ChatGPT at work: Drafting emails and generating pieces of code are some of the most popular uses among white-collar workers.?Bloomberg

+ ChatGPT will become the “calculator for writing,” says one top Stanford University economist.?

+ Marketing professionals have been particularly keen to test-drive the tool: 37% said they’ve used AI at work. Tech workers weren’t far behind, at 35%. Consultants followed with 30%.

+ Many are using the technology to draft emails, generate ideas, write and troubleshoot bits of code and summarize research or meeting notes.??

M&M’s ditches ‘spokescandies’ for Maya Rudolph after backlash over new look: Comedian will take their place as the brand’s spokesperson and star in the candy’s upcoming Super Bowl advertisement.?WSJ

+ On Monday, M&M’s, which Mars Wrigley owns, made the surprise announcement that it would halt the use of the “polarizing” characters.

Life as a 21st-century trucker: Technology, corporate greed, and supply-chain chaos are transforming life behind the wheel of a big rig. I went on the road to find exactly how.?Wired

+ A law passed in 2012 dictates that truckers work a maximum 14-hour workday, spending no more than 11 hours behind the wheel with three hours of rest time. If they violate this law, they risk being yanked from the road and fined, and might mess up their carrier’s safety rating, which could deter customers, creditors, and insurers

+ The newer trucks are so computerized that they provide what might be termed “AI helicopter parenting”: a development supposedly meant to increase safety and fuel efficiency.

+ Each state-of-the-art Peterbilt in the Petro lot is equipped with at least 10 computers that govern everything from steering to braking, reducing many truckers to what are known in the industry as zombified “steering-wheel holders.”

+ Of the 3.5 million people who work as truck drivers in the US, 75 percent are over 40, roughly 40 percent are not white, and at most 10 percent are women.?

+ The industry is made up of thousands of mostly small-fleet owners—95 percent of them with 20 trucks or fewer—but dominated by about two dozen giant companies that serve as its gatekeepers.

+ US truckers spend great swaths of their lives waiting at warehouses for their trailers to be loaded and unloaded. Of the 11 hours they’re allotted each day for driving, they spend an average of four and a half idling in line.

+ This is a core reason why truckers find the cameras and computers so galling: More than any projected future of self-driving trucks, these technologies threaten not just their livelihoods but their innermost sense of self.

Honda + GS Yuasa to launch EV battery joint venture: Nikkei reports the automaker taps Japanese battery maker as it moves to end gasoline car sales.

FT: Sharpie maker Newell Brands cuts 13% of office positions

Is micromanaging your life with an app really a good idea??Jira, Monday, Todoist, Trello–the internet is full of project management tools promising to simplify your life. But who do they really work for??Vice

+ In life, you have two types of people: Those who organize their time, and those who run around chasing it like headless chickens.

+ Though they’re almost everywhere in our personal lives, organizational tools like Trello, Notion or Todoist originated in the world of corporate management. A lot of them are based on the Gantt chart, designed between 1910 and 1915 by mechanical engineer and management consultant Henry Gantt, to increase productivity and optimize industrial workflow.

+?Another popular model is the Kanban method, first introduced as part of Toyota’s production system in the 1950s.

+ “Most people are actually really bad at planning and executing stuff. If you look at our data, there’s this snowball effect where people keep adding tasks for today, don't complete them and move them to tomorrow, then they have a thousand tasks for a single day.”

Kim Kardashian’s Harvard Business School lecture made the internet lose its mind?Fortune

She seems more Wharton, IMO.

Bloomberg: Remote work saves global commuters 72 minutes a day, study Finds

+ Chinese lead with 102 minutes saved, US workers save 55 minutes.

+ Extra time devoted to work, leisure, and caregiving, study says.

When it comes to marriage and money, opposites attract: Spouses reshape each others’ financial behavior, for richer and poorer, marriage research suggests.?WSJ

‘Not soulless blocks of rice’: the secret world of Japan’s robot sushi chefs?Guardian

+ Purists may protest, but automation has made it possible to take sushi out of the exclusive, and expensive, realm of Sukiyabashi Jiro et al and turn it into a fast food to rival burgers and fried chicken.

+ Mass consumption of sushi has only been made possible by evolving technology, coupled with a cultural shift from gastro exclusivity.

+ The rule is that sushi should be in front of the customer no more than three minutes after the order has come in. Yellow and red lamps light up to warn chefs that an order still hasn’t gone out.

+ “Our world is about automation and achieving the exact same level of service in all of our restaurants, where people can eat sushi at an affordable price. The other [world] is about the individual touch by chefs who have gone through years of training. I think those two sushi worlds can coexist.”

‘Dry January’ in France? The answer is still: Non.?WP

+ In France, people tend to view the Dry January health challenge at best as a puzzling foreign concept and at worst as a Trojan horse that could threaten the country’s jobs and cultural identity.

Why you should reject an upgrade to a hotel’s presidential suite: Insights from Monocle’s Tyler Br?lé include why the city that never sleeps is still in its stretchy-pants phase, Japan isn’t what it used to be, and why Zurich beats London.?Bloomberg

+ "We talk a lot about corporate responsibility and the importance of vitality in cities and look what is happening by not encouraging people back to the workplace. It’s not just decimating?your investment in your office, but it’s decimating the entire city center."

+ The French government briefly flirted with launching a Dry January campaign in 2020. It would have been in line with the government’s sponsorship of Smoke-Free November. But officials abandoned the plan under pressure from winemakers.

+ Out of a half-million jobs in France directly linked to the alcohol sector, as many as 150,000 may disappear within the next decade, the wine industry warns.

Hilderbabes take Nantucket: This month, hundreds of Elin Hilderbrand’s fans flocked to her freezing cold island to dance, shop, do yoga and drink espresso martinis with their favorite author. Why??NYT

+ "bookcation"

AP: Lorne Michaels of ‘SNL’ to be honored at PEN America gala

Detroit filmmaker makes Motor City a presence at 2023 Sundance Film Festival?DFP

+ “To Live and Die and Live”

+ a "stunningly beautiful love letter to Detroit."

+ To Live And Die And Live Deadline Hollywood interview

Juventus shares slump after ranking penalty for false accounting: Bloomberg reports shares of Juventus Football Club SpA slumped in Milan after Italy’s football federation penalized the billionaire Agnelli family’s team by cutting its points standing following an investigation into accounting practices.

+ The Federal Appeal Court of the FIGC, Italy’s football federation, handed down a 15-point reduction in the team’s Serie A ranking this season because of how it accounted for player transfers, according to a statement late Friday.?

The evolution of Patrick Mahomes into a football man in full: On the verge of his second NFL MVP award and a win away from his fifth straight AFC championship game, the Chiefs quarterback answered every possible question in 2022 and became a better version of himself.?The Ringer

+ In five seasons as a starter, his?lowest?season-long completion percentage is 65.9 percent; his fewest TDs thrown is 26; his career high in interceptions is 13; his career high in sacks is 28; his career low in rushing yards is 218.

+ He is a unicorn. He is one of one.

Roger Penske moves closer to shot at winning Le Mans?AP

+ The one hole in the Team Penske trophy case can only be filled by the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Winning the most prestigious sports car race in the world is on Penske’s bucket list as his 86th birthday draws near.

Enjoy the ride + plan accordingly.

-Marc?

Marc A. Ross | Chief Communications Strategist @ Caraca

Caracal produces ITK Daily.

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