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6 Major companies reported weaker showing than 2016 at this time.
Business
New Loonie Low
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The loonie might go as low as 70 cents to the U.S. dollar in 2017, according to experts.
Right now it’s around 73 cents, a 14-month low.
The fall of the loonie is tied to the same old things: a strong period for the U.S. economy, interest rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve, and oil prices that are expected to stay low.
However, business in the U.S. isn’t doing amazing: This week, the U.S. PMI was below the forcast level, and construction spending contracted very slightly.
Meanwhile, Canadian manufacturing is doing well. Their PMI reported a 6-year high this week.
Oil Prices Drop to Pre-OPEC Levels
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This week they hit their lowest level since last November. Brent went below $50 U.S. Crude was at $46.47.
Trump Doesn’t Fear Trade War Because of Canada’s ‘Tremendous Surplus’
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Trump’s response to questions about whether he feared a trade war with Canada after his new taxes on lumber imports was, “Nope. Not at all.”
The reason, Trump said, was, “They have a tremendous surplus with the United States. Whenever they have a surplus, I have no fear.”
He also told reporters, “They’ve outsmarted our politicians for many years, and you people understand that.”
Canada and the U.S. charge their forestry companies differently for the trees they cut down. In the U.S. companies compete and bid for trees. In Canada, the provincial governments charges fees to companies which happen to be lower than the market price U.S. companies pay. American companies complain Canada’s system is an unfair subsidy.
The tariffs are expected to add around $1200 to the price of new homes since taxes are always passed on to consumers, although lumber prices have already started to move up in expectation of an increase in cost.
Analysts expect that Canada may fire back by taxing American imports to Canada.
United Airlines Report on Dragging Reveals Which Passengers Are Bumped First
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How United Airlines passengers are picked to be removed from overbooked flights was detailed in a report by the company this week, following this months widely publicized forced removal of an unwilling passenger.
According to the company, the process is automatic, done by computers:
– First, anyone without a seat assignment
– Second, passengers who paid the least for their ticket
– Third, passengers who checked in last
– Fourth, those who aren’t in United’s MileagePlus frequent-flyer program, or those with the lowest status
– Fifth, everyone except unaccompanied minors and passengers with disabilities
Source: Company’s “United Express Flight 3411 Review and Action Report ”
Coca-Cola to Cut 1,200 Jobs as People Drink Less Sugary Drinks
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Coca Cola said it would cut 20% of its corporate workforce to save $800m, and will increase cuts to save $3.8b by 2019.
The current corporate staff is 5,500, around 5% of the total workforce of over 100,000.
The company expects profits to be down 1 – 3% this year.
Sugary drink and snack companies are looking towards new technology to reduce sugar while keeping sweetness.
In India, Chocolate Consumption Is Growing Fast
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Due to low cost, a belief the treats are healthy, and Indians’ general liking for chocolate, sales of the food have grown rapidly in the past few years.
Sales grew by 13% last year, according to global market analysis agency Mintel, and the rapid growth is expected to continue to 2020. It’s one of the fastest-growing markets. Mintel thinks it will hit Rs32,000 crore by 2020, up 160% from 2015.
The price for a chocolate bar is around 8 to 16 cents, and 2 in 5 Indians think sugary chocolates and cakes are healthy, according to Mintel.
India’s 228,000 tonnes of consumed chocolate for the year is still well below the much less populated U.S. and U.K., which consumed around 1,300,000 and 600,000 respectively.
95% of India’s Engineers Unfit for Software Development, Study Says
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Despite the large number of engineers in India, most are not fit for software development jobs, according to Aspiring Minds, a private company that does employability assessment, reported Business Line.
Aspiring Minds assessed test results when 36,000 engineering students from over 500 colleges wrote Automata (which tests software development ability). Over 2/3 could not even write code that compiles. Most of the other 1/3 wrote incorrect or inefficient code. 1.4% were found to write good code.
While the overall assessment of India’s engineer’s was this low, India’s tier I colleges fared much better than it’s tier IIIs. From India’s top 100 colleges, almost 70% of students could write compilable — even if incorrect or inefficient — code, compared with 31% for tier IIIs.
Another dimension to the assessment is the test itself, Automata, which has been criticised for poor or incorrect questions, as well as the company which is the source of the results.
These Tiny New Satellites
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So these tiny satellites being sent up into space in bundles …
The buzz company is called Planet, and they started in 2010 with a team of ex-NASA scientists.
They recently launched 88 new little imaging satellites in one go from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India.
Their satellites are called Doves, and they’re shoebox-like machines weighing around 11 pounds. They take a lot of pictures: right now, they can capture 58 million square miles per day, the equivalent of the land on our planet.
The company also recently bought Terra Bella, another imaging company, from Google (for an undisclosed amount, and in a deal that included Google buying data back from Planet). That added 7 better-quality camera satellites to their flock. They can now use their lower-res satellites to build a large picture of Earth and look for changes, and use the 7 Terra Bella units (which have 4 – 6x better resolution) to get details.
They also bought another satellite company that gave them an archive of satellite images dating back to 2008, as well as some more satellites.
Planet doesn’t have a monopoly in the field, though. While they have the lead in whole-Earth imaging, other companies that have better resolution, like DigitalGlobe, provide other services. DigitalGlobe’s resolution exceeds Planet’s: they can make make images from orbit in which they can resolve a laptop screen into a pixel.
Chinese Investment in U.S. Tripled Last Year
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140,000 Americans are now employed by 3,200 Chinese companies operating in the U.S., according to Chinese state media organization Xinhua.
The 140k is 9 times the 2009 number. And the dollar figure for investment, $46b, is three times what it was a year earlier.
Consumer Spending Low
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Q1 for 2017 GDP was weak: 0.7% annualized.
Of that, one of the weaker components was consumer spending, which rose only 0.3%, the weakest level for spending since Q4 2009.
Hacker News Upgrade Demonstrates Computer Understanding … Tagger News
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Users of the sharing and discussion board Hacker News are this week discussing whether the recent TechCrunch Disrupt New York Hackathon team’s improvements to the ycombinater site are really improvements, but are generally impressed with the work.
The team sought to boost the user experience of Hacker News by adding tags to posts in order to make it easier to discover content on the site. They created Tagger News (a copy of Hacker News, but with tags added).
Most interesting to coders is the way they added the tags. They used Random Forests to analyze 25,000 Hacker News titles and automatically deduce the subjects of the articles based on the combinations of words found in the articles.
Also of note: The team of 4 (Daniel and David Robinson, Nathan Gould and Chris Riederer) came up with the idea and did their work in only 24 hours. Three of their computers were used to collect data using the Hacker News API, and one was used to build the Tagger News site.