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☕ Zoom's Big L
Crown Crew
August 10, 2023
☕ Good Morning! This is TC, the UK business newsletter that’s as electrifying as a sip of Sprite from McDonald’s.
Today's reading time is 4 minutes.
SCIENCE
SUPER-DISAPPOINTING
Following a gust of replication attempts — the claim that “LK-99” is a superconductor at room temperature is looking unlikely to hold up.
Catch-up: A few weeks back, two papers by researchers in South Korea outlined the process of creating the world's first room-temperature superconductor, LK-99.
In simple terms, LK-99 is supposed to conduct electricity perfectly without any energy loss in the form of heat.
What happened: Since then, researchers in labs around the world are trying to recreate this superconductor.
Experiments suggest the original results were likely due to imprecise measurements + a phase transition in contaminants. Not superconductivity.
Several teams replicated the material and found nothing special about it.
Why it matters: Superconductors hold promise for quantum computing, a more efficient energy grid, producing energy from fusion and more innovation.
Bottom line: None of this is conclusive proof and research continues but the chances of LK-99 being a superconductor are looking slim.
ECONOMY
MORTGAGE PRICE WARS
What happened: FOUR big UK banks just slashed mortgage rates by up to 0.7% which has started a price war
If this feels like deja vu... you're right. This spectacle of mortgage-rate-slideshow is the second sizzle in just three weeks.
Nationwide, HSBC, Halifax and TSB have announced cuts of up to 0.7%.
Smaller lenders like MPowered mortgages are cutting costs as well.
Why it matters: As rates hit record highs this year, these reductions raise hopes of an end to rate hikes.
Yes, but: They are still way out of whack and you shouldn't expect them to go to ultra-low levels anytime soon.
BIG PICTURE
Hawaii battling wildfires. Wildfires roaring throughout Maui, Hawaii this week have killed at least six people, stranded thousands, and reduced much of the historic town to ash.
We-won’t-Work. The co-working company led by Adam Neumann was valued at $47 billion just four years ago warned yesterday there was “substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern,” which in plain English means its finances are in such a deep hole it could soon file for bankruptcy.
Fifty-hop. The music genre that’s said to have begun at a back-to-school party has its 50th birthday this weekend!
TECH
ZOOM ‘S IN HOT WATER
The week isn’t even half over yet and it’s already been a bad one for Zoom...
Driving the news: A recent change in Zoom's terms left customers confused as the app was seeking rights to allow AI training on user content with no opt-out.
Why it matters: The pandemic made Zoom the 24/7 kitchen table for online meetings…
Now users and companies don't want AI algorithms to be trained on internal conversations.
Zoom in: The changes were made back in March. But the issue only spiked last weekend after a post on Hacker News highlighted that the changes appeared to give the company unbounded rights to use content to train its AI systems.
The other side: Zoom says that its AI features are off by default, and account owners can control whether to enable these AI or not.
+ For you: We compiled a list of services train AI models on user data.
BY THE NUMBERS
🚘 2,200. Sports cars produced by the British carmaker Lotus in the first half of 2023. *VROOM VROOM*
🏠 51%. Percentage of people in England and Wales aged 20 to 24 who opted to live with their parents — that’s up 7 points from the figures collected in 2011.
📱 3 billion. Facebook’s monthly active users. All Meta apps, including Instagram and WhatsApp, have a total of 3.88 billion monthly users — almost half the world’s population.
GAMES
PUZZLE SECTION
For today’s puzzle, we have something different — a real astronaut selection test question used by NASA.
Answer and explanation in tomorrow’s edition. See ya!
CROWN PICKS
Call Her Daddy’s host Alex Cooper is starting her own podcast network.
Climate-friendly cows bred to belch less methane.
If you haven’t already seen it: it’s the return of Map Men Map Men Map Map Map Men Men Men.
The man who investigates cheating in marathons and other long-distance races.
Read: How the pandemic lockdowns changed our perception of time.
And finally, a hundred people scream as loud as they can. Or at least, they try to. (strong language warning)