Business

Make insurers give you the best deal upfront
A lot has been done to improve the experience of renewing your insurance policies. Insurers are supposed to offer existing customers as good a deal as they do new ones, and your renewal letter tells you how much you paid last year so that you can see if the cost has gone up. And yet the annual dance continues: if you don’t call your insurer and query an increase, shop around or threaten to leave, you will probably end up paying more than you need to. It is a system that still penalises those who stay put.

This is to ban introductory offers. Has The Guardian spoken to – say – The Times where you can sign up for £1 for 6 months, after which you pay full freight? Because that’s exactly the same thing…..

An American oil company connected to Donald Trump is preparing to sink wells in remote Greenland despite not having received permission from the local authorities.

Pissing them off when you’ll need their permission to extract if you do find something seems, well….

Although Greenland stopped issuing new oil licences in 2021 on environmental grounds, a UK company called 80 Mile had secured exploration rights in Jameson Land. Greenland Energy’s corporate filings say it will take a majority stake in the project in exchange for funding the exploration, though it still needs government permission to proceed.

Ah, so they do have a licence. It’s getting the bureaucracy to agree to jots and tittles. That makes more sense. Being able to land kit could well be a seasonable thing, if not now then in 10 months sorta?

As to that arrangement there, this is entirely normal. Two men and a dog get the initial exploration licence, some other company buys into the licence by doing the actual work. Very normie behaviour.

For this, I take inspiration from the famous science fiction author from last century Isaac Asimov. Foreseeing a future in which intelligent robots would be commonplace, he proposed that every robot be irrevocably implanted with Three Laws of Robotics: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law; 3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law.

Asimov’s imagined challenges are with us now. Incredibly powerful AI is being built into humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles and software agents, each of which will make us more efficient but have the potential to wreak enormous harm.

Only the one company could make positronic brains. It was a monopoly. Far from having an AI monopoly we’ve got open source models where any such code could be stripped out – and would be. By teenagers for sport if nothing else.

Sure, sure, maybe it would be nice if this were not so but it is so. Thus we cannot comfort ourselves with this sort of solution. We need another – or to just accept there isn’t one.

Vistry proposed lifting Fitzgerald’s total take-home pay in August 2023, from £3.4m to £5.6m a year, which was 28 times the pay of the average worker.

If the average tea boy is on £200k that will make houses expensive.

In late June the US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick requested a meeting with executives from ASML, a Dutch company that produces chip-making equipment, to share concerns that one of its machines had found its way into China in violation of US-led export restrictions.
ASML denied the accusation. It says it knows the exact location of all 340 of its extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines – laser-powered devices that effectively act as a bottleneck for making the most advanced semiconductors used in AI technology. Not one of them is in China.
But in a way, Lutnick was right to worry. Reports emerged last week that an unnamed Shanghai-based company has worked out how to make its own slightly less advanced version of the huge and extraordinarily complex ASML machines, and aims to produce five of them next year.

You might not make it quite as well, might not be quite as accurate and all that. But nothing that can be done by one set of engiineers cannot then be done by some other set. A technological lead never does last, not unless the boundary itself is continually being pushed further.

The reason is obvious. The grand difficulty of any sort of development is in finding out what can be done at all. Once it’s known that this, this ‘ere, is possible then it’s simpler – note, not simple, but -er – to work out how to do what it is known can be done.

A technological monopoly can exist for several reasons. Law on IP, for example, or it’s so small that no one can be bothered breaking it, or that the leading monopolist keeps inventing new stuff and so recreating the monopoly. But just I’ve made this and no one else has is very different from no one else will make this now I’ve shown it is possible.

He meant that the media group, which owns the Daily Mirror and Daily Express, would reach more readers through a new strategy of quantity over quality.
But eight years later the company has delivered the long-awaited coup de grâce to an approach that has dragged the news group’s share price – and reputation – through the floor.
After years of chasing clicks and shrinking advertising revenues, Piers North, the chief executive since March last year, said this week that the company was “moving away from volume” to focus on original, high-quality output.

Not this specific – the way search is changing means that strategy doesn’t work. Really, I’ve done my time in hte clickbait mines.

It’s that every business strategy dies in the end. The surrounding tech changes therefore what works does.

IBM is on track for its biggest share price slump on record after warning that AI is eating into its business.

More than $68bn (£50bn) was wiped off the company’s value at the start of trading on Tuesday after the company said customers were ploughing money into the AI boom rather than its products.

Eventually – and this may not be that, yet – every technology is replaced by a newer one. Takes a long, long, time – the London Hydraulic Power Company still had an installed base into the 1960s – but it does happen.

Rolls-Royce, the £120bn aerospace giant, fears that Labour’s leadership turmoil will ground its £3bn bid to build engines for the best-selling short-haul passenger jets made by Boeing and Airbus.

The engineering giant had been close to securing vital development funding for the scheme after intensifying discussions with Sir Keir Starmer’s Government, The Telegraph understands.

I mean, sure, if govt’s stupid enough to give away cheap money then why not? But a £120 b business really should be able to fund £3 b on its own…..

The UK’s accounting watchdog has fined and temporarily banned a tiny audit firm for “egregious” failures and “widespread deficiencies” linked to its work in signing off accounts of several companies in Sanjeev Gupta’s metals empire.

King & King and its managing partner Milankumar Patel have been fined a total of £378,184, received a “severe reprimand”, and hit with serious restrictions on audit work after a four-year investigation by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC).

Acshully, there is a surprise here.

Gupta’s sprawling holding company, GFG Alliance, has for years been grappling with the fallout of a far-reaching scandal involving its former lender, Greensill Capital.

I’m astonished he’s managed to keep it all rumbling along this amount of time. But maybe that’s just me and my opinion.

The company has been left reeling after cost overruns on projects and delays to Labour’s £39bn social housing programme, on which Vistry is a crucial housebuilding partner.

Great way to go bust, eh?

A group of “accidental activist” families have succeeded in their efforts to secure the future of their children’s care home after uncovering serious alleged management failures that took the charity to the brink of bankruptcy.

The families launched a campaign after discovering that William Blake House, a residential learning disability care home charity in Northamptonshire, owed £1.5m in unpaid taxes, had paid its former chair £1m in fees, and was close to bankruptcy.

Their campaigning prompted a rare Charity Commission inquiry into alleged financial irregularities at the charity, helped underpin a detailed rescue plan, and outflanked potential takeover bids from private sector rivals.

Administrators confirmed the services will be run by Camphill MK Communities, a learning disability residential care charity that shares a common care ethos with William Blake House and has the backing of the families.

So, err, who is the CEO at Camphill and how rich are they going to get? Common ethos is common ethos, right?

“Farewell,” the flag-waving Chinese children chanted to Donald Trump as he strolled along the red carpet back to Air Force One at the end of his summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing.

The US leader claimed he was leaving with a cluster of “fantastic” trade deals to sell US oil, jets and soya beans to China. That has not been confirmed by his smiling host, but one thing was crystal clear from the two days of meetings: the global balance of power is shifting, from the declining petrostate in the west to the rising electrostate in the east.

Or just the usual lust from a European intellectual – darn them damn Yankees?

Trump flew home to chaos – war with Iran, surging gas prices, spectacular unpopularity, friction with former allies and a 20th-century policy of “energy dominance” that seeks to turn back the clock

US is a net exporter. Higher fossil fuel prices benefits them.

a more useful – and maybe even hopeful – analysis needs to take into account the tectonic changes that are shaking not just the foundations of politics, but the very nature of human power, as the world shifts from molecules to electrons.

Sigh.

History has proven that when the dominant form of energy changes, there is often a shift in the global pecking order. We are now in the midst of one such transition as the epoch of petrol, predominantly produced in the United States, Russia and Gulf states, starts to give way to an era of renewables, overwhelmingly manufactured in China. But the outcome remains contested, and the process could be ugly. The new energy order is winning the economic and technological battle – wind turbines and solar panels were already producing record-cheap electricity even before the Iran war pushed up the costs of gas and oil-fired power plants. But the old petro-interests still have political, military and financial might on their side, and they are using that to try to turn back the energy clock.

Yep, usual European intellectual wankfest. So there’s a new tech in town, is there? Cool! So, the people who will get rich, who will have the power, will be the people who *use* the new tech best. Not who sell it, or make it, but who *use* it. From the failure to grasp that all other errors follow.

Sigh.

As a result, democracies across the planet are now threatened by what might be called fossil fuel fascism – an extremist political movement that breaks laws, spreads lies and threatens violence in an increasingly desperate attempt to maintain markets for oil, gas and coal that would otherwise be replaced by cheaper renewables.

Oh, and a good dose of conspirazoid fantasies of course.

With the Trump administration aggressively meddling in what schools and universities are able to teach, it may not be long until billionaire life stories are taught to US schoolchildren. Who needs to learn about slavery, and how it continues to shape the racial wealth gap, when you can hear the heartwarming story of how a young Mark Zuckerberg called a bunch of his peers “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their data and then went on to build a trillion-dollar company accused of facilitating genocide?

And also, along the way, provides free telecoms for half the species. There are, after all, costs and benefits to most things.

Saudi Aramco profits jump despite conflict in Middle East

Despite? Oil price doublkes (or whatever) and a rise in profits for an oil company is a despite?

But Guardian, numbers, business, etc, etc.

More than 1,000 low-paid workers in Kenya have been abruptly sacked by an outsourcing company contracted by Meta, in what activists said was a shocking move exposing the precariousness of tech jobs in the global south.

Sama, a company based in Nairobi to which Meta outsourced content moderation and AI training work, announced on Thursday that the workers were being laid off after Meta terminated a contract.

Of course the activists want to make sure such workers could not be fired – which means that, of course, they’d never be hired in the first place.

But lefties, eh?

Pet owners across the UK could be banned from buying flea treatment for cats and dogs under new government rules.

Ministers have begun an eight-week consultation on letting only veterinary practitioners or pharmacists give out the potent, pesticide-based flea treatments, to ensure “correct usage”. At the moment, the flea and tick treatments can be bought from any pet shop.

That’s right children, “restrictive practice”. If only vets can sell Advantix then there will be no competitive pressure to reduce the price of Advantix. “Restrictive practice”.

So, Amazon wants low prices on its site. If you’re selling elsewhere cheaper, then you don’t get access to the goodies – promotion, good siting etc – on Amazon. Seems OK to me.

CA claims this means Amazon is forcing higher prices everywhere else. Well, no, not really.

Hundreds of previously redacted records reveal how Amazon has put pressure on independent sellers using its platform into raising their prices on the sites of competitors such as Walmart and Target, so that Amazon can appear to have lower prices, California authorities allege.

Not wholly – the pressure was to lower their prices on Amazon, surely?

“And big picture – the oil and gas industry are never going to build ‘excess production’ so there’ll never be meaningful spare capacity in global fossil fuel supply, which is why whenever there’s a big supply shock it has such catastrophic effects on prices.”

If people build more production then prices fall so that – as always – supply meets demand. That excess production thus turns up as lower priecs for everyone.

This is bad? Doesn’t happen?

Anyone willing to participate in the frenzied response to the Noma news cycle should also be willing to look at the system that creates environments for abuse. Profit margins, unrealistic demands by wealthy guests for luxury and theatre, a media that skips due diligence and the staggering lack of gender parity all play a role. As do the award programmes that hold an undeserved amount of power over chefs and diners.

Until we rejig how we measure greatness, until the kingmaking awards – the Michelin Guide and the World’s 50 Best Restaurants – include some basic labour standards in their criteria, there will be no meaningful change.

So, folks are trying their darndeest to create perfection. OK, so Noma isn’t my idea of it – I’d enjoy a decent backon butty more than spray foams of whatever. But, you know, excellence.

Excellence, near perfection, is difficult. Kitchens have always been difficult places – so many things have to happen at precisely the same time, perfectly.

But apparently that’s not OK if people get shouty with it. We might even call that a rather female response to a rather male environment.

Fortnite makes around $4bn a year in revenue, it is the fourth most played PC game in the world. Epic Games is estimated to have made $6bn in revenue in 2025. But somehow it is spending more than it’s making. Midway through his note, Sweeney tacitly alludes to the fact that one of the company’s biggest costs has been its expensive legal actions against Google and Apple. Not much those developers could have done about that.

OK, I know it’s about the games industry, but teenage resentfulness or what?

But they’ve revenue! How can they lose money?

I’ve been writing about games for 30 years and it has always struck me that the wrong people are running the industry. But now, the stakes are so much higher on each shoddy, short-term bet. Famously, in 1983, the US games industry almost destroyed itself when too many manufacturers and software companies flooded the market with consoles and games that were merely weaker copies of what Atari was doing. Since then I’ve seen trends rise and plummet – arcade-style racing and fighting games, guitar games, toys-to-life games, pet sims, life sims, stealth games, massively multiplayer online games, gangster games, open world adventure games … One or two successful titles, then a glut, then the audience moves on and jobs evaporate.

That’s just how markets work, Matey. In everything.