How many books will you read before you die? - The Economist   

CHOOSING YOUR next book can be a daunting task. Do you go with one that will broaden your worldview and pique your imagination? Perhaps a neglected classic, or the newest sensation? Or, defying the snobs, do you indulge in a salacious romp? The choice is all the more daunting when you consider how much reading time you have left in a lifetime. Calculating this might strike you as morbid. But The Economist dived in with glee. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations show how many books you can still hope to read—and how to make time for the best ones.

We started by asking 1,500 Americans about their reading habits with help from YouGov, a pollster (see chart 1). Only 54% of respondents said they read or listened to a book in 2023. Of those who did, the average was 11 books. By that count, if a seven-year-old began reading in 2023, they would get through roughly 770 books in their lifetime, according to actuarial tables. A 30-year-old might have around 500 left to read. And someone in their 70s might be down to their last 100.

Even a more voracious reader, who lives well into old age, would struggle to scale the mountain of books in existence. By some rough estimates there have been 160m unique titles published since the widespread adoption of the printing press in the 15th century. One would struggle to get through more than 0.003% of the total, even if reading a book a week (which only 4% of our respondents managed in 2023).

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Has Twitter (now X) become more right-wing? - The Economist   

FIRST HE DABBLED in digital payments. Then he revolutionised the electric-car industry. After igniting a new space race, Elon Musk set out on a new challenge. In 2022 he agreed to pay $44bn for Twitter (since renamed X), just as tech stocks started to slide. It has been a costly adventure for the serial entrepreneur: advertisers are retreating, and app downloads and user numbers appear to be falling. How has all that changed the site’s demography?

Leftist users had threatened to quit the platform if Mr Musk took charge, amid concerns over his approach to free speech. Our data suggest they were not bluffing. Within 24 hours of announcing his intention to buy Twitter in April 2022, the number of accounts following Democrats in the Senate dropped by 0.2%. Accounts linked to Republicans, however, increased by 0.8%. After the sale was completed six months later, we noted these trends had strengthened.

Such big swings in follower numbers across many accounts usually indicate an operation to clean up “bots”—automated accounts controlled by software. But the vast majority of Republican accounts gained significant numbers of followers, which suggests a clean-up was not the cause. Twitter responded to these sudden changes in April 2023, to say that they were driven by the creation and deactivation of accounts. Our latest calculations show the pattern has continued throughout the rest of 2023 (see charts).

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Inside the secretive business of geopolitical advice - The Economist   

These are anxious times for the bosses of Western multinational companies. After decades of being wooed by governments the world over, many now live with an ever-present fear of being caught in the crossfire of fraying geopolitical relations. An increasingly assertive China has now taken to slapping exit bans on the executives of foreign firms. The latest example came on September 29th, when a Hong Kong-based restructuring consultant at Kroll, an American advisory firm, was reported to have been barred from leaving the mainland.

Doing business in China is far from the only source of worry. American chief executives are contending with the regulatory zeal of Brussels just as their European counterparts are dealing with a more interventionist America. Both groups are trying to tap the cash gushers of the Gulf without appearing to cosy up to its authoritarian rulers. A diplomatic spat between Canada and India over the alleged assassination of a Sikh activist on Canadian soil will have sent shivers down the spines of many Western business grandees. Trouble, it seems, is everywhere.

Luckily, an industry of consiglieri is at hand to help multinational firms traverse these treacherous waters. Although geopolitical advisers have existed for decades, demand for their services is now soaring, thanks to the growing complexity of doing business abroad. Bankers, lawyers and management consultants are pouring into the field. What was once a niche and secretive business is entering the mainstream of professional services.

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Why companies still want in-house data centres - The Economist   

Sometimes it seems as if the cloud is swallowing corporate computing. Last year businesses spent nearly $230bn globally on external (or “public”) cloud services, up from less than $100bn in 2019. Revenues of the industry’s three so-called “hyperscalers”, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure, are growing by over 30% a year. The trio are beginning to offer clients newfangled artificial-intelligence (AI) tools, which big tech has the most resources to develop. The days of the humble on-premises company data centre are, surely, numbered.

Or are they? Though cloud budgets overtook in-house spending on data centres a few years ago, firms continue to invest in their own hardware and software. Last year these expenditures passed $100bn for the first time, reckons Synergy Research Group, a firm of analysts (see chart 1). Many industrial companies, in particular, are finding that on-premises computing has its advantages. A slug of the data generated by their increasingly connected factories and products, which Bain, a consultancy, expects soon to outgrow data from broadcast media or internet services (see chart 2), will stay on premises.

The public cloud’s convenience and, thanks to its economies of scale, cost savings come with downsides. The hyperscalers’ data centres are often far away from the source of their customers’ data. Transferring these data from this source to where they are crunched, sometimes half a world away, and back again takes time. Often that does not matter; not all business information is time-sensitive to the millisecond. But sometimes it does.

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