David Fuller and Eoin Treacy's Comment of the Day
Category - Technology

    Gilead Tops List of Drugmakers That Need to Make M&A Splash

    This article by Bailey Lipschultz for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Gilead Sciences Inc. has so far been silent on plans to diversify its pipeline as investors clamor for a repeat of last year’s biotech deal boom.

    The drug developer leads a group of biopharmaceutical companies that Wall Street expects to join in the sector’s acquisition spree. Earlier on Friday, Eli Lilly & Co. snatched up Dermira Inc. and its skin disorder drug for $1.1 billion.

    That news comes as investors and management flock to San Francisco for the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, which kicks off on Monday. The meeting is viewed as the crown jewel of sell-side events and is a hotbed for companies to announce deals and provide product updates.
     

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    Fiat Will Effectively Fund Tesla's German Factory, Baird Says

    This article by Gabrielle Coppola for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk announced in November that Tesla planned to build a plant outside Berlin. The facility is expected to produce Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers starting in 2021.

    Fiat Chrysler is going to launch a new version of its Fiat 500 battery-powered vehicle in Europe this year, along with plug-in hybrid versions of its Jeep Compass, Renegade and Wrangler models. That, combined with the Tesla credits, should make the company compliant with Europe’s emissions rules, CEO Mike Manley told analysts in July.

    While Fiat Chrysler would otherwise struggle to meet new carbon-dioxide emissions standards in Europe, the so-called open-pool option available in the European Union allows automakers to group their fleets together to meet targets.

    Compliance has gotten harder for automakers as consumers have shifted toward gasoline cars, which emit comparatively more CO2, following Volkswagen AG’s diesel-emissions scandal that first erupted in 2015.

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    Sony Shocks CES 2020 With Unveiling of Electric Car

    This article by Michael Cogley for the Telegraph may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    Tech giant Sony shocked attendees at this year’s CES by unveiling a new electric car.

    The Japanese company, which is best known for its PlayStation games consoles and high-end televisions, revealed the Vision S concept saloon.

    The prototype boasts 33 sensors to monitor inside and outside of the car, as well as an ultra-wide monitor which will be used for entertainment and information purposes.

    Sony chief executive Kenichiro Yoshida said that cars will be redefined as a “new entertainment space”.

    “To deepen our understanding of cars in terms of their design and technologies we gave a shape to our vision,” Mr Yoshida told the tech conference in Las Vegas.

    “This prototype embodies our commitment to the future of mobility and contains an array of Sony technologies.”

    The new concept car also features “360 reality audio”, which Mr Yoshida says will give users an “immersive experience”.

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    Tesla Cuts Price on Model 3 Cars Built at New Shanghai Plant

    This article from Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    Tesla plans to increase local sourcing to 100% in Shanghai by the end of the year, from about 30% now, Song said. That should help lower costs as Tesla and other ambitious EV makers face a challenging market in China, where auto sales have been slowing.

    Last month, people familiar with the matter said localization would help Tesla cut prices by 20% or more in 2020. The company has been exempted from a 10% purchase tax for its locally built sedans, posing more of a threat to the likes of NIO, Xpeng and BYD Co.

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    Putin's Hypersonic Nuclear Missile Stirs Fears of Arms Race

    This article by Henry Meyer and Jake Rudnitsky for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    “This is an unprecedented situation in which we see that Russia is technologically ahead of the U.S. and the Pentagon is playing catch-up,” said Nikolai Sokov, a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Nonproliferation. “The U.S. only woke up this year to this technology and has started to throw money at it.”

    Russia successfully tested Avangard in December last year, firing it from a military base in the southern Urals 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) to the Kamchatka peninsula. After a ballistic launch, the Avangard glides toward its target with a high degree of manoeuvrability.

    The difference between the hypersonic weapon and a traditional ballistic missile is that it “disappears and we don’t see it until the effect is delivered,” Hyten said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

    Claims the Avangard can evade any defenses are overblown since it can be shot down in the early ballistic phase of its trajectory, said Golts, the defense analyst. The real breakthrough will come when Russia implements the same technology in another weapon class, like cruise missiles, according to Sokov, the disarmament expert.

    Abandoning New START at this juncture would be a major mistake, Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley warned this month. There’s bipartisan support in the U.S. Congress for extending the agreement, which “has successfully kept the U.S. and Russia out of a modern-day nuclear arms race,” he said on Twitter. “We cannot risk unleashing a new Cold War.”

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    Boeing Capsule Misses Space Station Rendezvous as Crisis Deepens

     This article by Justin Bachman may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

     

    The mishap jeopardizes U.S. plans for human flights as soon as next year by Boeing, which was hired to ferry astronauts to the ISS as part of NASA‘s commercial crew program along with Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Boeing’s failure also deepens the sense of crisis around the aerospace giant as it tries to persuade regulators to end a flying ban on its 737 Max after two deadly crashes.

    Boeing fell 1% to $330.04 at 10:40 a.m. in New York. The stock rose 3.4% this year through Thursday while the S&P 500 advanced 28%. NASA and Boeing officials said they were still trying to understand the cause of the timer failure. It’s too soon to assess the impact on subsequent Boeing space flights, they said. About 50 minutes after liftoff, the Starliner was out of position to begin its orbital insertion burn, the last boost into an orbit so the vehicle could dock at the space station. Had astronauts been on board, they might have been able to correct the problem, Bridenstine said.

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    2020 Outlook The Cloud Has Four Walls

    Thanks to a subscriber for this report from Credit Suisse which may be of interest. Here is a section:

    Chinese Crypto Scam Unwind Suggests Bitcoin Risks Extending Drop

    This article by Olga Kharif and Zheping Huang for Bloomberg may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section: 

    Chainalysis estimates that PlusToken conspirators have sold about 25,000 Bitcoins and another 20,000 Bitcoins are spread out across more than 8,700 anonymous crypto addresses. Additional coins such as Ether were also used to bilk investors.

    “That’s certainly something to consider when you are thinking about where the price is going, at least in the short term,” Kim Grauer, senior economist at Chainalysis said in a phone interview. “It could be, according to our research, continued downward pressure.”
     

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    What Jobs Are Affected by AI?

    This report from Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    These new statistics suggest that the spread of AI will not just amount to “more of the same,” and that the onset of AI will introduce new riddles into speculation about the future of work.

    Given their difference from previous analyses purporting to discuss AI, Michael Webb’s novel procedures demonstrate that we have a lot to learn about artificial intelligence, and that these are extremely early days in our inquiries. What’s coming may not resemble what we have been experiencing or expect to experience.

    Webb’s machine learning statistics suggest AI could bring new patterns of impact across the labor market—ones fundamentally different from those brought by previous technologies.

    It’s clear that past automation analyses—including our own, with its amalgamation of robotics, software, and artificial intelligence—have likely obscured AI’s distinctive impact. Based on expert familiarity, previous analyses have almost certainly been dominated by the ways robotics and software have been able to take over numerous routine, highly structured, and repetitive tasks.13

    These analyses have tended to suggest that automation’s main effects will be to displace work across the middle of the skill and wage spectrum (such as factory workers and office clerks) while leaving the status quo more or less intact for both high-pay and low-pay interpersonal or nonroutine work (such as chemical engineers and home health aides, respectively).

    However, the more refined empirical research presented here suggests that AI’s ability to employ statistics and learning to carry out nonroutine work means that these technologies are set to affect very different parts of the WHAT JOBS ARE AFFECTED BY AI? 23 workforce than previous automation. Most strikingly, it now looks as if whole new classes of well-paid, white-collar workers (who have been less touched by earlier waves of automation) will be the ones most affected by AI.

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    China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West

    This article from the New York Times may be of interest to subscribers. Here is a section:

    The technology, which is also being developed in the United States and elsewhere, is in the early stages of development and can produce rough pictures good enough only to narrow a manhunt or perhaps eliminate suspects. But given the crackdown in Xinjiang, experts on ethics in science worry that China is building a tool that could be used to justify and intensify racial profiling and other state discrimination against Uighurs.

    In the long term, experts say, it may even be possible for the Communist government to feed images produced from a DNA sample into the mass surveillance and facial recognition systems that it is building, tightening its grip on society by improving its ability to track dissidents and protesters as well as criminals.

    Some of this research is taking place in labs run by China’s Ministry of Public Security, and at least two Chinese scientists working with the ministry on the technology have received funding from respected institutions in Europe. International scientific journals have published their findings without examining the origin of the DNA used in the studies or vetting the ethical questions raised by collecting such samples in Xinjiang.

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