WSJ: “India’s growth rates before and after 1991—when a financial crisis sparked a significant opening up of the economy—provided a real-world demonstration of the benefits of lower tariffs, easier rules and more foreign investment. But since about 2010, average tariff rates have risen about five percentage points. In addition, new standards and certification rules on imports, some of them imposed to keep out low-quality Chinese goods, are constraining imports of goods manufacturers need. These policies have often left manufacturing in the doldrums. Manufacturing’s contribution to India’s gross domestic product has fallen from around 17% two decades ago to 13% in 2023, according to World Bank data. Shoumitro Chatterjee, assistant professor of international economics at Johns Hopkins University, says India could grab a bigger piece of global trade if it used the opportunity provided by Trump’s shakeup to overcome domestic pressure in order to lower and simplify tariffs. “I for one really think this is almost like a ‘91 opportunity for us,” said Chatterjee. “These big reforms only happen when there is some kind of external stimulus for reform.””
FT: “Fitzgerald’s verdict on them at the end of Gatsby has become for many a definitive statement on unaccountable elites today: “They were careless people . . . they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.””
Altair: “AI-powered engineering is a breakthrough, but its value proposition is simple: do more with less. It empowers teams to recycle past experiences, data and expertise to design better products faster – with less effort, less compute power and greater confidence. What brings everything together is the convergence of simulation, data and HPC. No longer standalone technologies, they’re reshaping product design from the ground up together. Welcome to the new paradigm: an AI-powered, zero-prototype world.”
SaaStr on a survey done by Thoma Bravo: “Software spend will grow 19% a year the next 4 years. SaaS will grow 13% a year, still substantial but lower than some Gartner estimates. CIOs and enterprises are about 60% of the way in their digital transformation journey. More than halfway onto the Cloud, but only just. And importantly, The SaaStr + AI Era will drive spending on software overall to 4.0%+ of GDP.” More: “We believe that — when combined with the data that sits within them — AI will benefit enterprise software customers in at least two key ways:
1) Democratize access so that more users can make use of deep business insights built from massive data sets; and 2) Enable customers to make real-time operating decisions at scale, with greater speed, precision and less labor input.”
FT: “Thanks to potential AI breakthroughs, [biohacker Bryan] Johnson, 47, posits that we are part of “the first generation who won’t die”. He recently claimed to have reduced his biological age by five years, to 42, but “the goal is to make my body age 18”. To do this, he’s drawn up a strict regimen that borrows from existing medicine, as well as edgy or little-tested technology, drugs and scientific literature. He’s spending millions to measure everything that might make his body age faster, from water quality to food toxins. He’s also charting every health indicator in his body — from gut microbiomes to night-time erections — as he records his journey back to youth…”The enemy is no longer each other. The enemy is death.””
Zane Hengsperger: “i think we will look back in 25 years and realize that we misallocated time, talent, and capital at an absurd magnitude we built unicorns solving lazy problems like food delivery all while since 2000, US steel production has dropped 34% (108M tons to 71M tons), we lost 5.8M manufacturing jobs, and China now produces 57% of global steel vs our 4%.”
