“Each coat of paint on the Model Ts had to be brushed or dipped on and allowed to dry before the next layer went on. While the duration of assembly was initially measured in hours, the duration of painting was measured in days or even weeks.“
So starts this sojourn into the world of car paint and how the “single biggest hindrance to mass production” for Ford was solved.
Four regions, the US, Europe, Japan, and China, make up 70% of the world’s consumption.
In 2020 this group was home to 1.47 billion people aged 25-64, the prime demographic. By 2050 there will be 1.2 billion. “That’s an 18% decline in the working age population for the four largest economic regions.“
The US, as seen in this chart, fares best as it sees this cohort grow. However, at slower rates than before and facing a decline as a proportion of the overall population.
RISC-V, the royalty-free open-source instruction set architecture, is worth keeping an eye on especially as Arm convulses its way back to the stock market.
The December 2022 summit (and this great write-up) offered a deep feel of the status of RISC-V.
Bold statements abounded – “It’s really important that you get this. RISC-V is inevitable. RISC-V is going to have the best processors. And RISC-V is going to have the best ecosystem.”
2022 saw a new record in off-exchange trading of US ETFs.
Part of a broader trend where trading off-exchange in US equities went from 35% in 2015 to 43% last year.
Yet, as the FT Alphaville article notes, “ETF shift from lit to off-exchange trading has actually been even starker than it has for equities as a whole“.
Films often get measured by gross box office, with Avatar (both of them) reigning supreme on this measure.
However, using a measure of return on investment (percentage of budget recovered) throws up an alternative perspective.
Winners on this measure are E.T. (7,552%) but also films like “The King’s Speech (2,849%), Home Alone (2,648%), and breakout sleepers like Crocodile Dundee (3,282%), Slumdog Millionaire (2,523%) and … er, Black Swan?“
IRF’s The Cut is a fortnightly publication highlighting the latest original and thought-provoking research from a selection of high-quality and differentiated Research Providers.
