Chopper to go
The advent of helicopter-hailing apps – And they may soon give way to flying cars.
(The Economist, 11.07.2019)
RIDE-HAILING APPS are hardly new, and neither are helicopter flights, but the combination of the two is still rare. Uber is among the companies hoping to change that.
Since June 9th frequent users of its app can reserve a seat on an Uber Copter. The new service features a helicopter flight between Lower Manhattan, in New York, and the city’s JFK airport. Skipping rush-hour traffic costs customers between $200 and $225, but saves them a couple of hours. That is how long it can take to drive the distance in heavy traffic; Uber Copter will cover it in 8 minutes.
Uber is not the first to launch such a service. The Airbus-owned Voom Continue Reading
A liquid market
Caps on groundwater use create a new market for water in California. When it comes to allocating scarce resources, markets are hard to beat
(The Economist. 17.08.2019)
A LONG STRETCH of highway running between Los Angeles and San Francisco separates the dry hills to the west from the green plains of the San Joaquin Valley to the east, where much of America’s fruit, nuts and vegetables are grown. Every couple of miles billboards hint at the looming threat to the valley. “Is growing food a waste of water?” one billboard asks. Another simply says, “No Water, no Jobs”.
In the San Joaquin Valley agriculture accounts for 18% of jobs and agriculture runs on water. Most of it comes from local rivers and rainfall, some is imported from the river deltas upstate, and the rest is pumped out of groundwater basins. Continue Reading
Dank stats, bro
Canada’s statisticians survey potheads after cannabis legalisation. More over-45s are getting high, but teenagers are keeping off the grass.
(The Economist, 16.05.2019)
“MADE IN CANADA”, not “made in Colorado”: that is how a Canadian senator described the country’s approach to legalising the recreational use of cannabis in a debate last summer. As lawmakers sought to frame rules that would have the best possible chance of squeezing the illicit market and keeping teenagers off the grass, they looked around the world for evidence. Disappointed by how little they found, they decided to blaze a trail.
That meant establishing a baseline for comparison. Before the new law came into force in October 2018, Statistics Canada started to estimate prices and the size of the illicit market, and to carry out quarterly surveys of Canadians’ cannabis usage. Continue Reading
Looking up?
Publicis buys Epsilon, a data-marketer, for $4.4bn. The deal hints at advertisers’ virtual designs
(The Economist, 20.04.2019)
“WHEN YOU reach for the stars, you might not quite get one,” Leo Burnett once mused, “but you won’t come up with a handful of mud either.” The storied ad man could have been talking of the purchase by Publicis—the French owner of ad agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi, Publicis Media and, yes, Leo Burnett—of Epsilon, an American data-marketing business, announced on April 14th. The $4.4bn deal is the firm’s largest since it was founded in 1926.