🐤 Putting in work

🏦 Markets: Wednesday was another positive day for the Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500, though with gains far more modest than earlier in the week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost a fraction of a percent by the closing bell.

With nearly half of the companies listed on the S&P 500 expected to have released their first-quarter earnings reports by the end of the week, the data has been responsible for much of the movement on Wall Street recently.
Tesla was among yesterday’s big winners, with its sagging stock price scoring a whopping 12% boost.

📱 Targeting TikTok: After Congress passed a bill aimed at compelling Chinese-owned ByteDance to sell TikTok under the threat of banning the popular social media app nationwide, President Joe Biden signed the measure into law. The House passed the legislation by a wide margin on Saturday followed by a 79-18 vote in the Senate a few days later. With Biden’s signature, ByteDance will have a year to divest TikTok, but the company confirmed its intention to launch a court challenge of what it referred to as an “unconstitutional law.”

🏆 Bush is back: Winning the Heisman Trophy is among the highest achievements any collegiate athlete can receive, but for former USC running back Reggie Bush, the experience was tainted by allegations that he received improper benefits. Back in 2010, he forfeited the trophy, but this week Heisman Trust President Michael Comerford confirmed that the organization decided to reinstate the honor after considering “the enormous changes in college athletics over the last several years.”

👤 No comment: Reddit has weathered quite a bit of negative commentary over the past year over increased cost to API developers, which prompted protests by moderators of some of its most popular subreddits. Now the company is seeking to amplify comments with a refresh of its mobile app. Reddit indicated that changes to the overall look and user experience will be minimal, with the biggest update being that comments will now load faster. There’s also a new icon allowing users to directly access a post’s top comment.

🗲 Growing the grid: California has long been at the forefront of the renewable energy movement, which has provided a steady supply for its power grid. But with a 2035 deadline looming for the phase-out of gas-powered vehicles, there’s a growing demand for electricity across the state. A pair of University of California-Davis researchers recently determined that almost two-thirds of existing lines don’t have a sufficient capacity to deliver the expected amount of power. Required upgrades could cost the state as much as $20 billion.

On a basic level, you probably understand what worker productivity is, i.e., a broad measurement of the output generated by the workforce. But unless you’ve got an economics degree, you might not fully realize how integral this somewhat nebulous factor is within the larger economic system.

And, despite a year spent fretting over inflation, high interest rates, and a potentially looming recession, 2023 was a good year for productivity.

Cause and effect

As the jobs market approached pre-pandemic normalcy last year, the stars began to align for an improvement in worker productivity — and sure enough, that’s exactly what experts found. There are several ways to boost output, and two of the most prominent appeared to be responsible for the impressive results recorded last year.

For starters, a long period of low unemployment has increased the pressure on employers to raise wages, but by doing so they’ve had to figure out ways to justify the cost through increased productivity.

The second factor is technology, which has long played a role in increasing productivity but has accelerated tremendously in recent years.

But will it last?

There are still some fundamental questions about the health of the U.S. economy, with the inflation rate still stubbornly high and the Federal Reserve unwilling to make a commitment about interest rates. Nevertheless, consultant Rich Lesser explained, both productivity and wages remain high.

“Right now most companies don’t feel like they have anywhere near the pricing power that they had a year or two ago,” he explained. “And yet wages continue to go up 3 or 4 percent.”

In some cases, as with fast-food chains required to implement $20 minimum hourly wages, productivity comes at the expense of jobs. Many of these businesses have laid off workers in favor of implementing self-service kiosks.

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Public radio has pretty much always had the image of a stuffy (maybe even boring) source of news, with a few lighthearted and entertaining programs — “Car Talk,” anyone? — thrown into the mix. But NPR was generally seen as a reliable network with a loyal base of listeners in communities nationwide.

That foundation is now showing some serious cracks, though, and much of it has been exposed in response to an article written by long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner.

An identity crisis

In a piece that resulted in his suspension and ultimately prompted him to resign earlier this month, Berliner severely criticized NPR for adopting a far-left ideological bias that alienated all but a small sliver of the American population.

Although newly named NPR President Katherine Maher issued a statement touting the network’s journalistic independence, there’s no denying the fact that listeners are tuning out in droves. That might be in part due to the diminishing relevance of radio in general, but NPR Chief Financial Officer Daphne Kwon recently described the situation in stark terms.

“We’re slipping in our ability to impact America, not just in broadcast, but also in the growing world of on-demand audio.”

Former NPR exec Eric Nuzum opined that “public radio has five to seven years to reimagine itself before it’s simply unsustainable.”

Maher’s objective

The new president came into the position with a vision to “reach audiences on new and existing platforms,” and a few NPR programs have seen success as podcasts.

But Maher has come under fire in the wake of Berliner’s article over previous statements that seem to bolster his concerns about institutionalized ideological biases.

With an audience that has shrunk from about 60 million in 2020 to around 42 million today, it’s clear that everyone from Maher down has some tough challenges ahead.

You don’t have to look any further than the stock market ticker to see that a number of once-promising EV automakers are tanking — and even Tesla isn’t immune to Wall Street sell-offs.

Some of that is due to the waning public interest in electric vehicles, but there’s also an international factor at play: namely, China.

Ramping up production

Although many Western consumers associate China with a wide array of inexpensive imported goods, automobiles generally haven’t been on that list. But in the age of EVs, that perception is rapidly changing.

Take a look at these stats:

• China produced more than half of all EVs sold worldwide last year.
• The 1.2 million it exported in 2023 was 80% higher than the previous year.
• 60% of all global EV sales throughout last year were in China.

The EV industry is currently valued at about $2.6 trillion, so it’s no surprise that China wants a big piece of that action. And with its EVs generally much cheaper than rivals from other countries, it’s also not a shock that they’ve become popular in other countries around the world.

The West plays catchup

Although many of China’s exported EVs end up elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe has rapidly become one of the biggest markets for these vehicles. This means automakers that are more widely recognized by Western consumers are now struggling, and often failing, to keep up with the frantic pace at which these vehicles are flooding the market.

That trend is only expected to accelerate as Chinese automakers open factories outside of the country. The most notable is BYD, a brand that temporarily overtook Tesla as the world’s biggest EV company last year and is slated to begin building up to 150,000 vehicles a year in Thailand starting this year.

What do cats read when they use the bathroom?

Litter-ature.