Entrepreneurship – Page 17 – artdiamondblog.com

Unsound Trucking Firm “Blew Through” $700 Million of Federal Covid “Bailout” Loan

(p. A4) The Treasury Department erred in giving a loan to a troubled trucking company as part of a 2020 Covid-19 rescue package and should refrain from similar sector-specific loan programs in the future, according to a new congressional report.

Yellow, a trucking company, received a $700 million loan from the Treasury Department as part of an aid program for private industries included in bipartisan legislation known as the Cares Act enacted early in the pandemic.

But Treasury had to skirt the program’s rules to make the loan, the report said. The agency designated Yellow—then known as YRC Worldwide—as critical to national security even though the company didn’t meet the standard for that designation, the report said.

. . .

In exchange for the loan, Treasury received a roughly 30% stake in the company.

. . .

At the time of the loan the company was rated noninvestment grade by Moody’s Investors Service and was at risk of bankruptcy, according to the report.

. . .

In recent months, Yellow has again suffered from the broader freight slowdown.

. . .

Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said the union is abiding by the terms of its contract with the company.

“After decades of gross mismanagement, Yellow blew through a $700 million bailout from the federal government, and now it wants workers to foot the bill,” O’Brien said in a statement.

For the full story, see:

David Harrison. “Treasury Faulted for Loan to Troubled Trucking Firm.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, June 28, 2023): A4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 27, 2023, and has the title “Treasury Shouldn’t Have Given Pandemic Aid to Trucking Company, Report Finds.”)

As Worms Return to Arctic, Some Life Forms Will Thrive and Others Will Not

(p. A1) Worms are on the move, and people are nervous.

That’s because they’re taking over territory in the Far North that’s been wormless since the last ice age.

. . .

Because of changes in the chemistry and physics of the ground, grasses and shrubby plants tend to thrive, taking over from tundra mosses and lichens. That’s good news for the lemmings and voles that favor such plants, according to Hanna Jonsson, an ecology researcher at Umea University. But probably not good for other herbivores that might not adapt easily to a change in available food.

For the full story, see:

Sofia Quaglia. “Worms Haven’t Lived in the Arctic Since the Last Ice Age. But Now, They’re Back.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 15, 2023): A10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 14, 2023, and has the title “Some Squirmy Stowaways Got to the Arctic. And They Like It There.”)

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Seeks to Bury Merging Firms in Paperwork

(p. A13) The Federal Trade Commission is trying to make it harder for companies to merge by burying them in paperwork. The FTC’s proposed overhaul of a critical part of the U.S. merger review process would increase the average time to prepare a merger filing from 37 hours to 144. According to the agency’s calculations, that’s roughly $350 million in added costs for an estimated 7,100 filings a year, which would be a boon for lawyers but a burden for businesses.

The one-size-fits-all proposal to add dozens of hours of paperwork per deal—regardless of competitive concerns—is an overreach by the FTC and the Justice Department’s antitrust division that will disproportionately chill investments at the lower end of the reporting threshold.

For the full commentary, see:

Christopher Williams and Henry Hauser. “Antitrust Officials Pile on the Paperwork.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 5, 2023): A13.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 4, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

New 98% Reflective White Paint Can End Global Warming

(p. A1) In 2020, Dr. Ruan and his team unveiled their creation: a type of white paint that can act as a reflector, bouncing 95 percent of the sun’s rays away from the Earth’s surface, up through the atmosphere and into deep space. A few months later, they announced an even more potent formulation that increased sunlight reflection to 98 percent.

The paint’s properties are almost superheroic. It can make surfaces as much as eight degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ambient air temperatures at midday, and up to 19 degrees cooler at night, reducing temperatures inside build-(p. A12)ings and decreasing air-conditioning needs by as much as 40 percent. It is cool to the touch, even under a blazing sun, Dr. Ruan said. Unlike air-conditioners, the paint doesn’t need any energy to work, and it doesn’t warm the outside air.

. . .

. . ., scientists have been urgently working to develop reflective materials, including different types of coatings and films, that could passively cool the Earth. The materials rely on principles of physics that allow thermal energy to travel from Earth along specific wavelengths through what’s known as the transparency or sky window in the atmosphere, and out into deep space.

Jeremy Munday, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis, who researches clean technology, said this redirection would barely affect space. The sun already emits more than a billion times more heat than the Earth, he said, and this method merely reflects heat already generated by the sun. “It’d be like pouring a cup of regular water into the ocean,” Dr. Munday said.

He calculated that if materials such as Purdue’s ultra-white paint were to coat between 1 percent and 2 percent of the Earth’s surface, slightly more than half the size of the Sahara, the planet would no longer absorb more heat than it was emitting, and global temperatures would stop rising.

. . .

While humans in such hot and picturesque places as Santorini and the aptly named Casablanca have long used white paint to cool dwellings, and municipalities are increasingly looking to paint rooftops white, Dr. Ruan said commercial white paints generally reflect 80 percent to 90 percent of sunlight. This means they still absorb 10 percent to 20 percent of the heat, which in turn warms surfaces and the ambient air. The Purdue paint, by comparison, absorbs so much less solar heat and radiates so much more heat into deep space that it cools surfaces to below-ambient temperatures.

For the full story, see:

Cara Buckley. “A Coat of Paint May Hold a Key To a Cool Planet.” The New York Times (Thursday, July 13, 2023): A1 & A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 12, 2023, and has the title “To Help Cool a Hot Planet, the Whitest of White Coats.”)

Langlois’s Entrepreneurs Allowed the Masses to Flourish in Spite of Chandler’s Corporatism

(p. D7)Students of business have long argued about why managerial capitalism arose and what led to its demise. At the heart of this debate is an age-old conundrum: What should the boundaries of a corporation be? What goods and services should it produce and which should it buy from others? Executives stake careers on such questions, but economists, historians and social critics have tried to answer them as well.

It is in such a context that Richard Langlois offers “The Corporation and the Twentieth Century,” a monumental history of American business during the eventful decades when managers ruled. Among much else, he makes the argument that firms embraced managerial capitalism in response to the century’s cataclysmic events and the heavy-handed government intercessions they prompted. When the crises and related policies finally fell away, we saw the resurgence of the focused, entrepreneurial enterprise that predominates today.

Mr. Langlois, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut, pushes back in particular against the explanation laid out by Alfred Chandler, the father of American business history, in his great work, “The Visible Hand” (1977).

. . .

Once established, managerial capitalism took on a life of its own. “The hierarchy itself,” Chandler wrote, “became a source of permanence, power, and continued growth.”

But Mr. Langlois tells a different story, contending that managerial capitalism didn’t truly flourish until later. He notes that, despite a wave of mergers, most large firms in the early 20th century were still controlled by their owners, thanks to the extensive shareholdings of financiers such as John D. Rockefeller or investment banks such as J.P. Morgan—owners not especially known as silent partners. The real heyday of the managers was yet to come.

Enter the reform-minded Progressive movement, which aimed to curtail the excesses of just such tycoons. Easily distinguished from today’s progressives by their capital letter and lack of stated pronouns, the Progressives held that scientific techniques had solved the problems of industrial management and would do likewise for those of government administration, which was to be entrusted to “experts.”

These Progressives brought with them a hubristic “managerial model of the world” that called forth a managerial form of capitalism, one designed to clasp the meddlesome hand of government. The ensuing era of federal regulation offered big business relief from haphazard and potentially more radical state regulation, but it also shifted power over firms toward Washington and the federal judiciary.

The ground was thus laid for managerial capitalism to be turbocharged by “the great catastrophes” of World War I, the Depression and World War II.

. . .

(p. D8) Mr. Langlois recognizes that the deregulating spirit of the 1970s was part of a change in the Zeitgeist. He describes, for example, how the Bay Area’s hippie ethos intersected with the rise of the personal computer. The resulting digital revolution upended corporate hierarchies and changed much of America’s output from the physical to the intangible. Ascendant tech firms ushered in a new entrepreneurial paradigm. The center of business gravity shifted from Manhattan boardrooms and Midwestern factories to the freewheeling West Coast.

Vietnam and inflation, meanwhile, sapped faith in government as well as in the dollar, and a series of countries (lately China) would soon replace the U.S. as the world’s factory. The unbundling of corporations was accelerated by low-cost overseas manufacturing and by the new “barbarians at the gate” from Wall Street.

. . .

The questions at the heart of “The Corporation and the Twentieth Century” . . . serve as the engine of a remarkable alternative history of what Henry Luce famously called the American Century. It’s a work propelled by vast learning, a focus on business and a consistent point of view in favor of free markets.

For the full review see:

Daniel Akst. “BOOKSHELF; The Rise and Fall of Managers.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, July 1, 2023): C7-C8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 30, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Corporation and the Twentieth Century’ Review: The Rise and Fall of Managers.”)

The book under review is:

Langlois, Richard N. The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

At Disney World, Cheerful Main Street Strikes Back Against Dark Elitist Star Wars Hotel

Star Wars was never a good fit with the optimistic good-will of Walter Elias Disney, the entrepreneurial dreamer from Marceline, Missouri. I smiled when I read the story quoted below.

(p. A1) Disney bet big that superfans would pay thousands of dollars to spend two days in the ultimate Star Wars experience. It’s going the way of the Death Star.

Part hotel, part immersive role-playing experience, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser will close in September [2023], less than two years after opening with great fanfare. The hotel transports visitors to the world of the popular film franchise over two nights. Guest cabins resemble a spaceship, with views of outer space projected on screens designed to mimic windows.

Stays in the Starcruiser don’t come cheap: A family of four can expect to spend $6,000 and up, depending on the type of cabin chosen and visit dates. Travel agents and industry insiders say the high price contributed to gradually weakening demand after the property opened.

Walt Disney Co. has tested its theme park fans’ budgets in recent years, hiking the price of tickets, hotels and food at its attractions. Those higher prices and operational changes have drawn the ire of some of the Disney parks’ most loyal customers, including people who purchase expensive annual passes to visit the parks multiple times each year. Under Disney Chief Executive Robert Iger, Disney’s parks division has started scaling back some pandemic-era changes that upset longtime fans, . . .

. . .

(p. A2) A Disney spokeswoman attributed the Galactic Starcruiser’s cost to the way it thoroughly immerses guests in a fantasy world.

. . .

The Galactic Starcruiser’s steep price tag was a hard sell for even some of the most ardent Star Wars devotees, fans and travel industry analysts say.

. . .

“This premium, boutique experience gave us the opportunity to try new things on a smaller scale of 100 rooms, and as we prepare for its final voyage, we will take what we’ve learned to create future experiences that can reach more of our guests and fans,” a Disney spokeswoman said in an email Thursday [May 18, 2023].

While aboard the Starcruiser, visitors interact with costumed Disney employees, completing missions on the ship. Singers dressed as aliens give performances at dinner.

. . .

The attraction won an outstanding achievement for brand experience award from the Themed Entertainment Association, one of the industry’s top honors.

. . .

The hotel was expensive to operate in large part because of the so-called cast members who played roles in the immersive experience, said Dennis Speigel, founder and CEO of International Theme Park Services, which consults on projects at amusement parks.

For the full story, see:

Jacob Passy and Allison Pohle. “The Empire Strikes Out At the Star Wars Hotel.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, May 20, 2023): A1-A2.

(Note: ellipses, bracketed year, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 19, 2023, and has the title “Disney’s Star Wars Hotel Was Too Much—Even for Star Wars Fans.”)

Government Infrastructure Serves Elite More Than Ordinary Citizens

(p. A1) In a country where major industry and political fortunes alike are often tied to a vast, interwoven rail system, India has lavished public resources on new trains, but its purse strings have been much tighter when it comes to ensuring the safety of those already racing along its tracks.

Those decisions loomed large on Sunday [June 4, 2023] in the aftermath of a devastating train wreck that killed at least 275 people in eastern India.

. . .

Over the past years, India has been polishing its long-ramshackle infrastructure as never before, and its railways, which are at the heart of the world’s fifth-largest economy, have been a prime beneficiary. The government spent almost $30 billion on the rail system during the past fiscal year, up 15 percent from the year before.

But the amount spent on basic track maintenance and other safety measures has been falling. A report last year by India’s auditor general, an independent office, found that less money was being allocated for track renewal work and that officials had not even spent the full (p. A11) amount set aside.

. . .

. . . most of Mr. Modi’s initiatives have been aimed not at the basic steps needed to get trains from Point A to Point B without mishap, but at improving speed and comfort. He regularly extols higher-fare new electric Vande Bharat trains connecting bigger cities and has made an early priority of a Japanese-style bullet train, though it can do nothing to improve the lives of the country’s ordinary passengers.

For the full commentary, see:

Alex Travelli. “Rail Funding In India Put Upkeep Last.” The New York Times (Monday, June 5, 2023): A1 & A11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 18, 2023, and has the title “Money for Show Horses, Not Work Horses, on India’s Rails.”)

Rage That Transplant Medicine Stagnates

The essay quoted below provides one more example of why we should unbind medical entrepreneurs to allow them to bring us more and faster cures.

(p. 8) Today, I will explain to my healthy transplanted heart why, in what may be a matter of days or weeks at best, she — well, we — will die.

. . .

Organ transplantation is mired in stagnant science and antiquated, imprecise medicine that fails patients and organ donors.

. . .

Over the last almost four decades a toxic triad of immunosuppressive medicines — calcineurin inhibitors, antimetabolites, steroids — has remained essentially the same with limited exceptions. These transplant drugs (which must be taken once or twice daily for life, since rejection is an ongoing risk and the immune system will always regard a donor organ as a foreign invader) cause secondary diseases and dangerous conditions, including diabetes, uncontrollable high blood pressure, kidney damage and failure, serious infections and cancers. The negative impact on recipients is not offset by effectiveness: the current transplant medicine regimen does not work well over time to protect donor organs from immune attack and destruction.

. . .

I am speaking for my transplant cardiologist, the finest physician I have ever known, who sat across from me last month and cried into his palms when he told me I had incurable cancer.

For the full essay, see:

Amy Silverstein. “My Donor Heart And I Will Die Soon.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, April 23, 2023): 8.

(Note: ellipsis added; in the original, the word “we” in the first sentence is in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date April 18, 2023, and has the title “My Transplanted Heart and I Will Die Soon.”)

In Blackberry Movie “The Excitement of Disruption and the Thrill of Creation Become Tangible”

(p. C9) In Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry” — a wonky workplace comedy that slowly shades into tragedy — the emergence of the smartphone isn’t greeted with fizzing fireworks and popping champagne corks. Instead, Johnson and his co-writer, Matthew Miller (adapting Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s 2015 book “Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry”), have fashioned a tale of scrabbling toward success that tempers its humor with an oddly moving wistfulness.

. . .

. . ., we’re in Waterloo, Ontario, in 1996, where Mike Lazaridis (a perfect Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (Johnson) — best friends and co-founders of a small tech company called Research in Motion (RIM) — are trying to sell a product they call PocketLink, a revolutionary combination of cellphone, email device and pager.

. . .

The corporate types don’t understand Mike and Doug’s invention, but a predatory salesman named Jim Balsillie (a fantastic Glenn Howerton), gets it. Recently fired and fired up, Jim sees the device’s potential, making a deal to acquire part of RIM in exchange for cash and expertise. Doug, a man-child invariably accessorized with a headband and a bewildered look, is doubtful; Mike, assisted by a shock of prematurely gray hair, is wiser. He knows that they’ll need an intermediary to succeed.

Reveling in a vibe — hopeful, testy, undisciplined — that’s an ideal match for its subject, “BlackBerry” finds much of its humor in Jim’s resolve to fashion productive employees from RIM’s ebulliently geeky staff, who look and act like middle schoolers and converse in a hybrid of tech-speak and movie quotes. It’s all Vogon poetry to Jim; but as Jared Raab’s restless camera careens around the chaotic work space, the excitement of disruption and the thrill of creation become tangible.

For the full movie review, see:

Jeannette Catsoulis. “When Geeks Clash With Suits, They’re All Thumbs.” The New York Times (Friday, May 12, 2023): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the movie review has the date May 11, 2023, and has the title “‘BlackBerry’ Review: Big Dreams, Little Keyboards.”)

The book that is the basis of the movie under review in the passages quoted above is:

McNish, Jacquie, and Sean Silcoff. Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of Blackberry. New York: Flatiron Books, 2015.

Innovative Farmers Can Adapt to Scarcer Water

(p. D4) The Colorado River, Arizona’s largest water source, is so low that last month, for the first time in history, the federal government proposed cutting water allotments to three states that rely on the river, including Arizona. Climate change is parching soil and depleting aquifers already taxed by corporate agriculture. Large swaths of Arizona farmland are devoted to water-hungry crops like lettuce and hay, grown to feed livestock as far away as Saudi Arabia.

. . .

Drawing on lessons she learned at the Urban Farm, a Phoenix-based business that teaches home gardeners how to grow food in a dry climate, Ms. Norton turned her backyard “from bare-bones, dead-ground scratch” into a lush mix of garden and orchard. She’d be open to raising chickens as well, if not for the presence of predators like coyotes, roadrunners and rattlesnakes.

What appears wild is the result of careful planning. A mulberry tree provides shade for the dragon fruit growing around its trunk. The drip tape that waters apricot, plum and apple trees also irrigates Mexican primrose flowers and sweet potato vines below.

“These grapes are strategically placed to keep the afternoon sun off these young trees,” Ms. Norton said. “I take the leaves and give them to a lady four doors down. She uses them to make dolmas.”

Ms. Norton is an ardent member of the Phoenix area’s sprawling gardening community. She is now general manager of the Urban Farm, and owns a seed business with its founder, Greg Peterson.

. . .

A primary goal of gardeners like Ms. Norton is to naturally rejuvenate soil degraded by synthetic fertilizers and neglect. Zach Brooks started the Arizona Worm Farm to help.

Nearly halfway into a 10-year plan to establish a fully sustainable, off-the-grid farm, Mr. Brooks sees his project as proof of how quickly damaged land can be restored using natural methods. It includes gardens and a food forest, a dense collection of plants that support one another, comprising mostly fruits and vegetables. Together, they provide produce for a small farm store and meals for his 20 employees.

. . .

As challenging as it is to farm and garden around Phoenix, Sterling Johnson said it’s (p. D5) even more so in Ajo, about 100 miles south, which is even hotter and dryer.

“If we can do it out here,” he said, “we think you can do it anywhere.”

For the full story, see:

Brett Anderson and Adam Riding. “Feeding a Region As Water Runs Out.” The New York Times (Wednesday, May 10, 2023): D4-D5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 8, 2023, and has the title “In Parched Arizona, the Produce Gardens Bloom.”)

“They Just Invest in How to Navigate This Bureaucracy”

(p. A1) Capella Space, a San Francisco-based start-up, is building a fleet of small, inexpensive satellites that can track enemy troops as they move at night, or under cloud cover that traditional optical satellites cannot see through.

Fortem Technologies, a small aerospace company in Utah, wants to supply the Pentagon with a new type of unmanned aircraft that can disable enemy drones.

HawkEye 360, a Virginia-based firm, has used private equity funds to launch its own satellites that use radio waves emitted by communications equipment and other electronic devices to detect the presence of enemy troop concentrations.

Each of these systems is getting real-world testing in the war in Ukraine, earning praise from top government officials there and validating investors who have been pouring money into the field.

But they are facing a stiff challenge on another field of battle: the Pentagon’s slow-moving, risk-averse military procurement bureaucracy.

When it comes to drones, satellites, artificial intelligence and other fields, start-up companies frequently offer the Pentagon cheaper, faster and more flexible options than the weapons systems produced by the handful of giant contractors the Pentagon normally relies on.

But while the military has provided small grants and short-term contracts to many start-ups, those agreements often expire too quickly and are not large enough for young companies to meet their payrolls — or grow as rapidly as their venture capital investors expect. Several have been forced to lay people off, delaying progress on new technologies and war-fighting tools.

. . .

(p. A8) From the early months of the war, SpaceX’s Starlink, the Elon Musk-founded satellite internet service, had played a critical role for frontline Ukrainian troops. But small drones and a denser collection of satellites are also helping to provide the capacity for pervasive surveillance, allowing Ukraine to identify and track threats and targets constantly.

A new generation of cheaper and more precise attack drones carrying bombs can loiter in the air autonomously until they find their targets. Artificial intelligence-backed computer systems can fuse this collected data and other feeds to make targeting decisions, faster than any human.

The Ukrainians have also innovated a great deal themselves, impressing Pentagon officials as they have converted commercial drones, for example, into mini bombers.

Taken together, said Thomas X. Hammes, who studies war-fighting history at the Pentagon-backed National Defense University, the developments represent a “genuine military revolution,” and one that is happening much more quickly than the shift from infantry that traveled by foot in World War I to the motorized and mechanized armies of World War II.

. . .

(p. A9) Perhaps the most revolutionary use of American technology in Ukraine has been the application of software that uses artificial intelligence, made by Palantir, to help with targeting efforts. The company’s chief executive, Alex Karp, traveled to Ukraine last year to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“If you go into battle with old school technology,” Mr. Karp said this year at an event to discuss artificial intelligence tools in warfare, “and you have an adversary that knows how to install and implement digitalized targeting in A.I., you obviously are at a massive disadvantage.”

Some experts say that artificial intelligence, which has been used in Ukraine to help sift through the massive loads of data being accumulated from surveillance, will ultimately prove as disruptive to the nature of war-fighting as nuclear weapons.

. . .

For Primer, the small artificial-intelligence firm based in downtown San Francisco, it was a breakthrough moment.

Not long after the war in Ukraine started, its engineers, working with Western allies, tapped into a tidal wave of intercepted Russian radio communications. It used advanced software to clean up the crackly sound, automatically translated the conversations, and most importantly, isolated moments when Russian soldiers in Ukraine were discussing weapons systems, locations and other tactically important information.

This same work would have taken hundreds of intelligence analysts to identify the few relevant clues in the mass of radio traffic. Now it was happening in a matter of minutes.

The findings were quickly matched up with other so-called open source intelligence streams, like geolocation data pulled from social media accounts, giving updates on the location of troops or equipment, that could be matched with surveillance video from drones or images from satellites.

“It’s getting situational awareness,” said Sean Gourley, the founder of Primer.

Yet at the same time, the Pentagon was still deciding when to move ahead with major purchases of its technology. The company was burning through its cash reserves too quickly, so Mr. Gourley laid off engineers and other staff members.

“These engineers are great at creating solutions to solve these problems, which is what matters,” Mr. Gourley said. “But there is the uncertainty: When is this contract going to close? It’s very, very hard to justify that spend.”

Mr. Gourley said he decided instead to invest more money in a government relations push, hiring a former top aide to the Senate Armed Services Committee to help the company promote its business in Washington.

“The big defense companies, they don’t really kind of invest in the tech,” he said. “They just invest in how to navigate this bureaucracy. That kind of sucks, but that’s how you’ve got to play this game.”

In interviews, nearly a dozen top executives of technology-oriented companies shared stories of stalled efforts or frustration.

For the full story, see:

Eric Lipton. “Pentagon Is Slow At Signing Deals With Innovators.” The New York Times (Monday, May 22, 2023): A1 & A8-A9.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 21, 2023, and has the title “Start-Ups Bring Silicon Valley Ethos to a Lumbering Military-Industrial Complex.”)