Hello! Scientists in the US are expected to announce that they have, for the first time ever in a multi-decade effort, produced a nuclear fusion reaction with a net energy gain. Today we're exploring:
Long COVID
It’s been almost three years since the WHO declared that COVID-19 was a global health emergency and, whilst life has largely returned to normal for many — with Biden declaring in September that the pandemic ‘is over’ — industries like the arts, entertainment and hospitality are still struggling to fully recover.
Closures at restaurants, theaters, cinemas, hotels, and concert venues show up dramatically in the data from the BLS, as employment in the arts and entertainment industry cratered, down ~52% from January to May 2020. That was the sharpest of any sector, followed closely by the accommodation and food services industry, which shed nearly 7 million jobs over the same few months.
Understandably, these industries have taken the longest to bounce back to near pre-pandemic levels too, but they aren't the only ones still suffering. Although much smaller in size relatively, the mining and logging industry is in the worst shape, with employment still down 7% compared to Feb 2020.
Some industries however, were more elastic. Total employment in some white-collar industries recovered to its previous peak before the end of 2021, and the transport & warehousing industry has boomed — with employment up 12% on Feb 2020 figures. For the US economy as a whole, total nonfarm employment numbers surpassed their Feb 2020 peak this summer.
Competition crush?
Microsoft’s chances of completing its ~$69bn deal to acquire Activision Blizzard look increasingly like a coin flip, as US regulators seek to block the deal due to concerns over competition.
As the company behind video game mega-franchises like Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and Overwatch, as well as simple-but-addictive games like Candy Crush, Activision is a prized jewel in the world of gaming. In the last decade they've grown significantly, but not just through selling more games — a majority of Activision's revenue comes from in-game micro-transactions, subscriptions and other sales.
SUM(Activision,Xbox)=$$$
Though known by some mainly for Word, Excel and Teams, Microsoft is already a major player in the gaming world through Xbox. Acquiring Activision would give the software giant a pool of mega-hits to anchor its entire future gaming strategy around.
That strategy is likely to revolve around the Xbox Game Pass, a subscription that allows users to play hundreds of games for just one monthly fee. As cloud gaming — where you essentially “stream” the game to your device without needing expensive hardware — matures and expands, Microsoft is betting that game makers, not device developers, will be kings.
And that is, predominantly, what regulators are worried about — if the deal goes through, Microsoft may limit access to Activision Blizzard games exclusively to Game Pass subscribers or players in the Xbox / Microsoft ecosystem.
Every year, debates break out around when it’s acceptable to give in to the season and let the tidal wave of Christmas tunes wash over you — but now it’s official: we’re all deep into the Christmas classics.
Christmas classics
Listeners don't seem afraid to dig out Mariah Carey’s Christmas cracker early, with All I Want for Christmas Is You breaking into Spotify's top 200 early in November — routinely racking up 2, 3 or 4 million streams before we even turned our calendars. The only Christmas song in the Spotify ‘one billion’ club, AIWFCIY is likely raking in $25,000+ per day in Spotify royalty fees — though Carey will have to split those with publishers, labels and other rights-holders.
Other hits like Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree and Wham’s Last Christmas aren’t too far behind either with 5.9m and 6.1m daily streams, respectively, for the most recent data point. Some non-festive favorites like Harry Styles’s As It Was and Sam Smith's Unholy are still lingering in the top 10, but non-seasonal songs are quickly becoming the minority — 6 of the top 10 spots are already occupied by Christmas classics.
Fun fact for holiday hitmakers: don’t be disheartened if your Xmas offering doesn’t take off immediately, All I Want For Christmas Is You only reached number 1 in the US in 2019, 25 years after its release in 1994.
• The proportion of people who have no formal religious affiliation has stayed steady in the US, at 20%.
• Bad news for bot-assisted homework submitters: OpenAI are working on a way to watermark ChatGPT text. Catch up on our ChatGPT story from last Friday here.
• Most finance teams feel that things can be better – but knowing what best practice looks like isn’t easy. Get The State of Payment Operations (free PDF) to see what the best of the best are doing.**
• Getir just added super-fast delivery rivals Gorillas to their cart in a $1.2bn acquisition deal.
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• Fascinating data from The Economist showing that World Cup upsets have been far more-common at this year’s tournament in Qatar.
• Great analysis of baby names which shows that gender-neutral names are at an all-time high in the US.
Quick cut: Which new proposal from Elon Musk are we charting about here? [Answer below].
