At the recent WNBA All-Star game, players wore T-shirts with the message, “Pay us what you owe us.” If one uses the discounted marginal revenue product as a guide, the answer to their demand would be “zero.”
As we head into the dog days of summer, it’s time to make the most of the season and check off items on our summer bucket lists. So, we sat down with John Kessler, Chicago Magazine dining critic, Ambar Colón, Chicago Sun-Times arts and culture reporter, Mike Davis, WBEZ theater reporter to get dining, ice cream and theater recommendations.
For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
When the covid madness was imposed upon the world five years ago, the lockdown advocates claimed they were just “doing science.” In reality, they were ignoring science, lying, and just “doing totalitarian politics.”
From the BBC World Service: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is in London sealing a major trade deal with the United Kingdom worth $6.5 billion. The agreement, billed as the biggest since Britain left the European Union, will slash India's tariffs on U..K goods from 15% to around 3%. We'll discuss the significance. Then, Armenia — a landlocked country of just 2.7 million people — is making big waves in tech, from coding labs and schools to startups.
A new bill threatening the independence of anti-corruption agencies has brought Ukrainians onto the streets and rattled international observers. London’s electric bikes are making it ever more a cycling city—and plugging longstanding transport gaps. And a tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, who did perhaps more than anyone to found the genre of heavy metal.
Plus: Columbia University agrees to pay more than $200 million dollars to the federal government over allegations the school violated anti-discrimination laws. And, Hyundai Motor reports a 22% drop in profits from a year earlier amid higher U.S. tariffs. Kate Bullivant hosts.
A.M. Edition for July 24. Japan’s TOPIX hits a new record high and European markets surge on trade optimism. So are 15% tariffs the new benchmark for trade with the U.S.? The WSJ’s Kim Mackrael discusses. Plus, Tesla’s profit plunges as EV sales continue to slip, and Elon Musk urges investors to look to future revenue streams. And Microsoft says human waste could be the key to offsetting the climate impact of its AI data centers. Azhar Sukri hosts.
The White House is pushing against the wave of questions around the release of Jeffrey Epstein documents, Columbia University agreed to pay over $220 million to the federal government in order to resolve investigations and restore access to federal research funding, and President Trump signed an executive order instructing tech companies to address what he labeled "woke AI."
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Today's episode of Up First was edited by Dana Farrington, Steve Drummond, Brett Neely, Janaya Williams and Alice Woelfle. It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Zo van Ginhoven. And our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.
High-flying and high-tech, the very latest in drone technology took to the skies over an airfield near the Danish city of Odense.
At the International Drone Show, 50 exhibitors showed off their wares. And because more money is flowing into military budgets, the emphasis was on defense.
Danish company Quadsat makes drones with satellite reading software. Besides civilian uses, the devices can also identify enemy radar.
"Over the years, we have seen an increasing interest from the defense side, no doubt about that, and that's also where we have a lot of work currently being carried out," said Klaus Aude, Quadsat’s chief commercial officer.
Leaders of the NATO military alliance have agreed to ramp up defense spending to 5% of their countries' economic output by 2035, following months of pressure from President Donald Trump.
Nordic countries have already committed to bigger budgets. Among them, NATO’s newest members Finland and Sweden, as well as long time members Norway and Denmark.
As Europe races to re-arm, drones are a sought-after technology. One estimate suggests the global market for defense drones is already worth over $24 billion, and could double by 2032.
"The Nordics have always been very strong in drone adoption, drone development," said Kay Wackwitz, chief executive of Drone Industry Insights.
"You can definitely see that those countries that have borders with Russia are really stocking up on those technologies. The commercial market is now struggling for its fourth year in a row with declining venture capital,” added Wackwitz. “And on the other side, we see a huge demand on the military end of things, which means a lot of companies are refocusing from the commercial space to the military space."
North of Copenhagen in a hangar, Danish firm Nordic Wing makes drones used for battlefield surveillance and combat. Its customers are NATO countries, but they are largely destined for Ukraine, where “there was a huge need and a calling to have these systems helping on the front lines,” said Jonas Münster, CEO of Nordic Wing. “And therefore, the production went into overdrive. Now we have a European Union that is looking into what we've learned in Ukraine and realizing that we don't have a drone capability in Europe."
With a 2,000-square-kilometer flying zone, the drone port in Odense has grown into a hub for tech startups. Next year, military personnel will also be training there at a new $110 million army facility.
"Some militaries have actually made a shift from saying ‘every soldier is a rifleman,’ to ‘everyone is going to be a drone operator at some level,’” said Major Rasmus Ros, who’s part of Denmark’s Defense Command. “We're going to have drone operators in the whole joint military of Denmark. They can come here, get their basic training, share ideas and technology development, and then go back to their units and further develop that."
But not everyone is so positive about this. Outside the trade fair, protestors chanted "drones for peace, not war." New geopolitical realities are reshaping this fast-paced industry. And as this technology advances, ethical and regulatory concerns over the use of AI to pilot drones are also being raised.
Ben Lerner was a fan of tech growing up, along side being into math and science. Right out of school, he joined a startup called Data Nitro, which attempted to integrate python into excel. Ever since then, he has been jamming in the tech and startup world. Outside of tech, he married to a computational biologist. He enjoys padel, which is kind of like Pickleball meets Tennis, and of course ping pong. Though, with his full time job as a CEO, he often finds his hobby is going home to write code.
Ben realized that LLMs are really good at understanding code, leaps and bounds better than prior ML models. While he was at Google, he was also digging into how to apply LLMs to coding in general. Applying both of these things, he and his co-founders are seeing where this can be applied to the real world, starting with Snowflake compute.