The Weekend Edition

WHAT HAPPENED TO ENTERPRISE YESTERDAY?

We dispatched Enterprise yesterday at 6:05 am (our customary time) and something went wrong. Several hundred readers didn’t receive their copies. Many hundreds more received theirs late. We went so far as to send out notices to affected subscribers letting them know they should head to the web to read yesterday’s issue — and most of those notices didn’t make it through…

What happened? We would love to hand-deliver each day’s report to every one of the thousands (and thousands) of you who read every day, but that would be a bit impractical. Hence, email. But sending an email with thousands (and thousands) of addresses in the BCC field is frowned upon by email providers, to say the least.

That’s where email services such as Campaign Monitor and MailChimp come in. We’ve relied on the former since we first started Enterprise a year ago.

Yesterday, Campaign Monitor let us down. Something on their end broke — and is still broken. After a lot of work yesterday and this morning, we’ve fully switched to MailChimp for today’s Weekend Edition. We’ll decide over the course of the coming days whether we’re going to stay here or move back to Campaign Monitor, because our pledge is simple: We’re here to give you the news and views you need to start your day every weekday before 7am CLT.

If you don’t find us in your in-box by 6:20am, check our website. Sometimes, the algorithms don’t like a word we use or a topic we discuss. Other times, get directed to tabs in your inbox you rarely check, or to a folder that houses your unwanted communications. If that’s ever the case, rest assured we post each day’s issue to our website the same instant we hit inboxes.

Did you miss yesterday’s Morning Edition? Tap here and go have a read. We thought it was a pretty solid issue, with good coverage of the CBE’s surprise move to appreciate the EGP and of President Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s message to the business community after the release of Salah and Tawfik Diab.

As always, feedback is very welcome at editorial@enterprisemea.com. We’ll be back on Sunday at around 6:15am with our usual roundup.

Until then: Enjoy the weekend.

WHAT HAPPENED YESTERDAY?

The EGP was steady at auction yesterday, holding at 7.7301 to the USD after the Central Bank of Egypt’s surprise decision to appreciate the pound by EGP 0.20 in direct sales to banks on Wednesday. Reuters believes the central bank flooded the market with some USD 1 bn in liquidity on Wednesday.

Leading packaged snacks maker Edita posted strong 3Q2015 results yesterday, reporting a 163% rise in net earnings to EGP 85.7 mn on revenues of EGP 535.4 million. The company noted in a statement that growth came “despite continuing economic challenges in Egypt unrelated to Edita and its core market,” highlighting “significant growth in the croissant segment and the very successful launch of new and premium products as management adjusted product mix to enhance margins, which together offset slower growth in the overall cake segment on the market in general.” Read the company’s earnings statement here (pdf) or the full earnings newsletter here (pdf)

US agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), say they have yet to receive a reply on their offer to provide formal assistance to the investigation into the crash of Flight 9268, Reuters reports. However, the same report does note: “An NTSB spokesman said that for the last several days his agency had been answering technical questions from Egyptian crash investigators on an informal basis. Some questions have related to the plane’s engines, manufactured by the U.S. company Pratt & Whitney…” On Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry had told CNN that “Egypt has already accepted the application of American investigators that are associated with the manufacturers of the engine to become part of the investigative team, and they are free to incorporate any advisers they deem as necessary for them to undertake the responsibility.”

Interior ministry to allow student Ayman Moussa out of prison to attend father’s funeral today -source: 21-year old British University in Egypt (BUE) student Ayman Moussa, who is currently serving a 15-year sentence for illegal protesting among other charges, will be allowed to attend his father’s funeral today, sources at the interior ministry told Al Ahram on Thursday, Ahram Online reports. A social media campaign had been launched on Tuesday backing the request to attend the funeral, as we noted in yesterday’s issue.

Ahram Online reviewed the Cairo International Film Festival’s opening night on Thursday. “The Faten Hamama Lifetime Achievement Award, went to Italian actress Claudia Cardinale and Egyptian actor Hussein Fahmy. ‘I am so happy to be here, and to receive an award that bears the name of the great Faten Hamama,’ Fahmy said. ‘I’m also happy that my colleagues and friends Omar Sharif and Nour El-Sherif are being honoured in this edition.’” Yes, ladies and gents, Hussein Fahmy is very much alive.

43 people were killed and at least 240 were wounded by two separate suicide bombings in Beirut on Thursday, with Daesh claiming responsibility for the attacks, Reuters reports. The bombings took place in the Hezbollah stronghold of Beirut’s southern suburbs, with the two bombs targeting a Shiite community center and a bakery in a crowded residential area. Hezbollah has sent hundreds of its militants to fight in the Syrian civil war.

SPEED ROUND, THE WEEKEND EDITION

Alibaba’s revenues last Wednesday alone came in ahead of what Viacom, Facebook, and Netflix generated in all of 2014: Alibaba alone generated USD 14.3 bn in sales on Wednesday, more than the total annual revenue of major companies or the GDP of countries including Laos. Why? Wednesday was Singles Day in China. It’s a fake holiday celebrated on 11 November every year after having become popular with young Chinese people — and it’s the biggest online shopping day on the planet, completely dwarfing Cyber Monday and Boxing Day. Singles Day 2015 was touted as the day when “the whole world will witness the power of Chinese consumption” by Alibaba’s CEO Daniel Zhang. After hitting record sales, Alibaba expects it will need 1.7 mn couriers, 400,000 vehicles, and 200 planes to make the deliveries.

Want some Egyptian context? Alibaba’s sales on Wednesday were almost double Egypt’s tourism income in FY2014-15.

Americans will finally be permitted to taste the freedom of KFC delivered right to their door, a freedom taken for granted by those of us here in Egypt, as the AP notes, “It will be the first time the chicken chain has delivered in the United States. Starting Thursday, people in Los Angeles and San Francisco will be able to have food delivered … While it’s a first for KFC in the U.S., it’s common to see KFC being delivered in China, Egypt, Malaysia and other countries around the world.”

It’s Global Entrepreneurship Week starting 16 November (yeah, that’s a Monday — seems most of the world starts the business week on Monday. Who knew?). You can read more about “GEW,” as it’s called, here. In celebration, we’ll be back on Tuesday with a special edition of inspirational material for those of you who growing your own businesses or debating whether to toss aside corporate life to strike out on your own. (And please, for the love of God, don’t call it a “project.” If you can’t call it a business / company / firm, please don’t quit your day job.)

Saudi Arabia’s differentiated approach to Shia protesters and Sunni jihadists will likely lead to more home-grown violence, Hala Al Dosari writes citing the case of Ali Al Nimr, the young Shiite activist who is due to be crucified and then beheaded after having been accused of accused of engaging in protests, riots, and chanting slogans against the state. Al Dosari contrasts Al Nimr’s fate with those of jihadists, who under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef’s munasaha programme, were allowed a rehabilitation process to reintegrate them into local communities by handing out financial aid and helping them find jobs. However, “an investigation into attacks on Shia religious gatherings in Dalwa in Eastern Province found that 44 out of 77 suspects in the attacks were prior beneficiaries of the program. Another attack on an Ismaili mosque in Najran on October 26 was claimed by a Saudi member of the Islamic State, who was released just months ago from the program.”

The notion of crucifixion got you down? Here’s the antidote: “Video shows driver crashing his USD 1.4 mn Ferrari minutes after buying it”

How a photographer sees you has a lot to do with how your image is represented, as the three-minute film “Decoy: Portrait session with a twist” makes clear. “The photographers entered the studio individually and were told a bit about the subject, whose name is Michael. The fictional back stories on Michael ranged from him being a self-made millionaire to a hero, ex-inmate, fisherman, psychic and a former alcoholic. In reality, he is none of those things. Read and watch on Shutterbug.

Slickr, which Wamda describes as the region’s first fashion social network, recently launched in Egypt and swiftly moved on into e-commerce. “We didn’t spend a single penny on marketing, and we were able to build a community interested in what we have to offer … This encouraged us to add online purchasing about a month ago,” cofounder Maria Muñoz told Wamda. Slickr received seed funding three months ago from three investors and is looking for an extra EGP 10 mn by 1Q2016. When it comes to operating in Egypt, Muñoz notes that while the “Egyptian market was no doubt the least costly for us, whether in terms of office rental or recruiting human resources … we struggle a lot to find talent, especially in technology and app development.” Slickr is targeting expanding to European markets.

If you’re anything like us, there was probably at least one moment in 2013 when you wanted to strangle every idiot who headed to Ittihadiya or Tahrir with a laser pointer to flash at the helicopters / mogamma / palace. Or when you lost your cool with the nephew who flashed one in your face for the “nth” time. If so: “Watch this dumb guy get nabbed by the NYPD for pointing lasers at helicopters.” (Apparently, doing so will get you five years in the slam in the US of A.)

The iPad Pro is out, and it’s apparently pretty fantastic. We’re still digesting John Gruber’s take from Daring Fireball — as he points out, the iPad Pro is literally faster than a maxed-out one-year-old MacBook Pro. Gruber ably dissects what makes the device tick, and as wedded as we are to our laptops here at Enterprise, we can’t help by share Stephen Hackett’s anxiety that the iPad Pro is the future (and that we may be on the wrong side of history). But the one review we’re saving to read with coffee after we dispatch this morning’s edition is by Federico Viticci over at MacStories: The man does his entire job on an iPad.

Egypt produces around 27 mn tonnes of waste annually, but only recycles around 90k tonnes of it, between mismanagement, underfunding, and ineffective promotion. Al Monitor breaks down the Egyptian government’s attempts and initiatives and their respective obstacles in an article titled Will Egypt trash its latest waste-sorting initiative?

Our charticle of the weekend: There’s still way too much oil out there to revive crude prices. (Via Quartz, which really does seem intent on a racing to the bottom at the same time as BuzzFeed tries to go legit.)

Does EgyptAir know that Hollywood is bringing Horus to life? And if it does, is it appalled? Writes one commentator in the U.S. of plans to bring Horus, Set and Thoth to the big screen: “With these posters, a movie that I’d barely paid attention to gets the highest compliment I can give: This is so ridiculous, I might have to see it.” Check out: “What Did the Ancient Egyptians Do to Deserve These Gods of Egypt Posters?”

WATCH THIS

National Geographic Live – Culture Heroes: Sarah Parcak: ‘Space archaeologist’ Sarah Parcak speaks of her work using satellite imagery to track illegal encroachment and looting affecting Egyptian sites, as well as the satellite looting database that she is working on for use to be shared with Egyptian authorities. Speaking on the recovery of items looted from the Cairo Museum during and in the immediate aftermath of the January 2011 uprising, Parcak remarks: “The Egyptian government has done an incredible job in tracking these objects down; they’ve managed to find many of the objects that were taken and they’re going [back] on display in the Cairo Museum. (Watch, running time: 16:12)

Present-day Egypt could use a healthy dose of stoic philosophy. We suggest you start with the School of Life’s short primer: The Stoics. (Watch, running time: 4:53).

From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “When considering the doctrines of the Stoics, it is important to remember that they think of philosophy not as an interesting pastime or even a particular body of knowledge, but as a way of life … The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius provide a fascinating picture of a would-be Stoic sage at work on himself. The book, also called To Himself, is the emperor’s diary.”

Too abstract for you? None other than ‘life-hacking’ guru, venture capitalist and entrepreneurism booster Tim Ferriss embraces stoicism. Check out his Stoicism 101: A practical guide for entrepreneurs and The Practicality of Pessimism: Stoicism as a Productivity System. Also check out Ferriss speaking on stoicism at Google’s 2009 IO Ignite, where speakers have five minutes to go over 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. (Watch, running time: 5:52)

An example of this focus on practicality rather than reflection on metaphysics can be found in the opening passage of Book Two of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “Begin the morning by saying to thyself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to me, not [only] of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in [the same] intelligence and [the same] portion of the divinity, I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for co-operation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.” Aurelius is considered one of history’s few true philosopher-kings, was the last of the ‘Five Good Emperors’ and is considered one of the most important figures of stoic thought.

The entire text is available online at Bartleby, featuring the George Long translation. If you’re looking to buy an updated translation that tries to move away from some of the arcane grammatical constructions found in older translations such as Long’s, both the Gregory Hays translation (Meditations: A New Translation, 2003) and the translation by David V. and C. Scot Hicks (The Emperor’s Handbook: A New Translation of The Meditations, 2002) have both been praised for simplifying the meaning without sacrificing the essence of Aurelius’ words.

---

Too many TV shows: Have we really reached “peak television”? NPR’s Linda Holmes explores this question in an essay this past August, following U.S. cable network FX CEO John Landgraf’s comments at the Television Critics Association last August where he said: “This is simply too much television. My sense is that 2015 or 2016 will represent peak TV in America, and that we’ll begin to see declines coming the year after that and beyond.” Homes notes that while similar claims have been made in the past, over 400 different scripted (non-reality) television shows will air in the United States in 2015.

With that in mind, from time to time in our weekend editions we’ll highlight shows some of us enjoy. Today we’ll look at two comedies some of us around have been following.

Portlandia debuted on IFC in January 2011, and season six is set to begin on 21 January 2016. Longtime readers will have by now watched a large chunk of Portlandia in our issues and already have a good sense of what this show’s about. When this writer asked a friend living in Portland if she watches the show, she responded by saying something about “this whole privileged white man’s wonderland [redacted],” which may give readers a handle on the outlook of both the city’s residents and the show that lovingly skewers them. The opening scene of season two draws a very legitimate parallel between modern hipsters and the end of the 19th century. Dream of the 1890s. (Watch, running time: 3:22)

Silicon Valley first aired on HBO in April 2014, and season three is set to premiere in April 2016. Series creator Mike Judge, formerly of Beavis and Butt-head and Office Space incorporated some of his own past work experience into the show, as noted by the Guardian: “There are also more recognisable cameos, notably a bummed-out appearance by Kid Rock, booked for a cash-rich, credibility-poor tech launch. ‘Kid Rock sort of owed me one,’ says Judge. ‘I’d done a Beavis And Butt-head thing for him for free that he used on his Jumbotrons on tour in 2011.’ The scene was based on Judge’s own experience. ‘I was at a big party a long time ago, before the last bubble burst. Run-DMC was playing, which was the only reason I went. And it was just a lot of disinterested tech people standing around. It seemed like an odd juxtaposition.’

While the show’s first two seasons were a little uneven, it is worth coming back to, especially for its great supporting cast including Martin Starr (who played Bill Haverchuck on Freaks and Geeks) as well as Pakistani comic and actor Kumail Nanjiani, who has been a real breakout actor in his previous appearances on Portlandia (where he specializes in characters who are overwhelmingly helpful) and who, like Aziz Ansari, eschews roles playing up his ethnicity or calling upon him to don an exaggerated accent. (Frankly it’s a welcome and refreshing change.)

Watch as Martin Starr’s character Gilfoyle explains what exactly it is that he does at internet startup Pied Piper during an internal audit. (Watch, running time: 1:17)

Next week we’ll look at Aziz Ansari’s new Netflix series Master of None, not because we’re necessarily crazy about Ansari, but the show has come highly recommended.

---

n the most recent struggle against violent jihad, Brookings Institution pointed us to two individuals who have emerged as pivotal opponents, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef and Daesh’s leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi. Bruce Riedel and William McCants profiled the two individuals and then discussed the rise, influence, and futures of the two individuals in an engaging conversation moderated by BBC international affairs correspondent Kim Ghattas. After McCants profiled Al Baghdadi’s upbringing briefly, Riedel discusses the domestic struggle facing bin Nayef, who is described as “the most pro-American Saudi prince seen in well over a generation.” The talks can be watched in full here (running time 01:01:26).

READ THIS

The Asteroid Hunters: “It’s highly unlikely that a gigantic space rock will crash through our atmosphere and destroy civilization as we know it. But it’s not impossible either. Which is why a small but growing community of scientists and astronomers are scrambling to spot and destroy dangerous asteroids long before they hit us.” If you’ve ever feared for one minute that we could go the way of the dinosaurs — that a cataclysmic collision with an asteroid could end the world as we know it — this richly written, beautifully illustrated story is for you. Whether it will help you sleep better at night, though, is an open question…

LISTEN TO THIS

Neil deGrasse Tyson sat down for a chat with former U.S. President Bill Clinton to talk about science and politics on Tyson’s StarTalk Radio podcast. They explain why the Human Genome Project was easier to fund than the Superconducting Super Collider – and why the Higgs boson was discovered at CERN instead of in the U.S. Three other guests are there: Juan Enriquez, Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” and Richard A Muller, who called in to explain why some politicians have trouble with science. (Listen, running time 58:23)

Why are there so few “unicorns” going for IPOs this year? It is a strategic choice in many cases, The Economist’s Money Talks podcast suggests. For some unicorns, going public risks a down round (raising money at a valuation less than the previous round), something that is seen as a sign of lost momentum. There is also the view that the public market has become a “nuisance.” Although the IPO gives an opportunity to cash out, staying private means that the private companies will not have to handle “pesky investors,” ratings changes, and filing requirements that come with listing. The podcast episode also notes that there are some concerns with start-ups in that some do not have established businesses and that they want to grow really fast. They need huge sums for investment and they cannot go to the market endlessly to raise those sums. From the investor’s perspective, the problem is that private and public funding rounds “aren’t comparable at all,” private rounds have clauses that protect investors making investments somewhat safer and are not like “making a punt on the stock market, and that seems to be what’s happening.” (Listen, autoplay, running time 12:44)

SOMEONE TO FOLLOW

Comedy Twitter, part 2: You don’t just need to follow comedy accounts on the cesspool that is Twitter — you should probably start putting together a comedy accounts column in Tweetdeck, if you use it. Herewith, installment two of an occasional series:

@KimKierkegaard
Bio: The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of Kim Kardashian.

We mentioned this account once before last January but it bears repeating. Capitalizing on the occasional, eerie, zen-like quality of things that stupid people say, KimKierkegaardashian seamlessly blends Søren Kierkegaard’s often bleak outlook on existence with Kim Kardashian’s unintentionally bleak and shallow outlook on existence.

First, from our 15 January 2015 issue:

Referring to an incident from September 2014 when Kanye West refused to perform until all his fans stood up, causing the audience to boo two fans in wheelchairs until West belatedly and begrudgingly understood his error, ‏@KimKierkegaard tweeted:

Kanye never told anyone in a wheelchair to stand up. He merely presented a miracle. Now you must choose either to have faith or take offense

Other highlights from the account:

‏@KimKierkegaard Oct 7 2015 The moment of choice, the rigorous pondering of alternatives, the multitude of thoughts that attach to each. Family Feud is my fave show.

‏@KimKierkegaard Jul 22 2015
I’m not trying to shade anyone, but it is my destiny to discourse on truth in such a way that all authority is simultaneously demolished.

HEALTH

It’s already past time to get your flu shot: Despite last year’s flu shot having an unusually low success rate (13% effective against H3N2 strain versus its usual success rate of 50-60%), this year’s vaccine promises to include a strain of the influenza virus whose impact was made last flu season, Live Science reports. In addition, the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) still advises you to “Encourage your loved ones to get vaccinated. Vaccination is especially important for people at high risk for serious flu complications, and their close contacts.” When should you get it? “CDC recommends that people get vaccinated against flu soon after vaccine becomes available, if possible by October. It takes about two weeks after vaccination for antibodies to develop in the body and provide protection against the flu.” A recent Canadian study also suggests that inflammation after contracting the flu may contribute to dementia and cardiovascular disease later in life.

SOMETHING THAT MADE US THINK

Does your sense of taste work in isolation? Or do you actually taste with your other senses combined? The New Yorker’s Nicola Twilley dives into the works of experimental psychologist Charles Spence from Oxford University, who specializes in integration of information across different senses, in Accounting for Taste to explore the answer. We can all agree the crunch of a potato chip is paramount to the experience, so Spence used the most uniform of all potato chips to begin his experiments: Pringles. Twenty people try 200 identical potato chips while wearing headphones in front of a microphone. His experiments found that boosting the sound of a crunch led to a 15% higher perception of freshness. In different experiments, Spence found that a strawberry-flavored mousse tastes 10% sweeter when served from a white container rather than a black one. Coffee tastes nearly twice as intense but only two-thirds as sweet when it is drunk from a white mug rather than a clear glass one, and a chalkboard feels smoother when you write on it while wearing earplugs because your brain prioritises the audio input over the tactile input from your hand. There are three tests you can try on yourself at the end of the article if you don’t believe us.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

From our 13 November 2014 issue: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season 8, Episode 1: Jeff and Susie talk divorce. (Watch, running time: 38 seconds)

AUTOMOTIVE

If you’ve ever had car troubles, chances are you’ve opened the hood of your car only to stare blankly at a steaming mess. Hyundai has come to the rescue with what it calls an “augmented reality virtual owner’s manual” (running time 06:30). While that is a bit of a mouthful, the concept itself is awesome. The virtual reality app uses the camera to relay information back to you about what you’re looking at. The app will completely demystify your car, including 82 how-to videos, six 3D overlay images that appear once users scan areas of their vehicle like the engine bay and more than 50 informational guides, according to Hyundai. The company had started handing out iPads containing owner’s manual apps with its cars a little while back, and this sounds like a natural integration into all that. It’s first available for the 2015 Sonata, but Hyundai says it’ll come to more cars soon.

TECH

Video game publisher Activision Blizzard recently bought out Candy Crush maker, King, for a staggering USD 5.9 bn, that’s at least EGP 45.6 bn, reports Kotaku. What would a company like Activision, who published both the most successful console game franchise in the world (Call of Duty) and the most successful personal computing franchise in the world (World of Warcraft), want with a casual freemium game maker? Well, for starters, Candy Crush had a USD 1.33 bn top line in 2014, according to a King financial statement. That puts Candy Crush Saga and Candy Crush Soda Saga amongst the top five highest-grossing mobile games in the US. More importantly, Activision will now have access to an enormous network of casual gamers, and perhaps most bizarre of all is Stephen Colbert’s theory about Activision Blizzard creating their own movie and television studio that could see the production of Candy Crush: The Movie.

Speaking of Blizzard, the trailer for the long-delayed Warcraft movie was released last week. The movie will arrive in theaters next summer. (Watch, running time: 2:13)

Ever wonder whether a 1950s TV could stream Netflix? We hadn’t, either. But that’s one of the cooler projects at the streaming entertainment company’s fall 2015 hack day.

THE WEEK’S MOST-CLICKED STORIES

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week were:

• President Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s message to business from Sharm El Sheikh (Youtube)
• How to Succeed in Business by Bundling – and Unbundling (Harvard Business Review)
• Egypt on the Brink (Financial Times, but reprinted without paywall on the author’s blog)
• Cairo International Film Festival (website)
• A passageway in one of three tombs opened for the first time to the public in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings (image)

THIS WEEK IN: BUSINESS AND ECONOMY

The story of the week? It’s a toss-up between the pre-dawn special forces raid to arrest Salah and Tawfik Diab and the surprise appreciation of the EGP after the nation’s two leading public-sector banks hiked interest rates to 12.5% on three-year term deposits. The Diab case had some in the business community dusting off 2012-vintage plans to stash their families in London / Paris / Dubai / Toronto while looking for ways to get as much USD out of the country as possible. The panic subsided toward week’s end as the Diabs were released on EGP 60,000 bail, albeit with weapons charges still hanging over their heads — and as President Abdel Fattah El Sisi made a remarkable statement on the role of business in society. “The President affirmed that the law governs all relations between the state and businessmen and that he will not tolerate abuses to anyone,” said a statement from Ittihadiya.

The prospects for a meaningful devaluation of the EGP — does anyone see any other way out of our current FX crunch? — await Tarek Amer’s first day of work at the Central Bank of Egypt on 27 November.

THIS WEEK IN: POLITICS

Fallout from the crash of Metrojet Flight 9268 in Sinai, which killed all 224 people aboard, continued to play an outsized role in international headlines on Egypt this week, but the arrest of rights activist and journalist Hossam Bahgat was perhaps the most damaging to the nation’s image abroad. Bahgat was released on Tuesday after having been detained for questioning about at 13 October story alleging that a group of mid-ranking officers with Islamist leanings — including two colonels and a brigadier general — had plotted a coup.

ON YOUR WAY OUT

Why do we argue? Logic dictates that arguments are a waste of time and should be resolved quickly, yet conflicts — ranging from strikes to war — still happen. “The simplest explanation is that people misperceive what is fair and also their chances of winning,” economist Tim Harford says. We also find it hard to distinguish between what is true, and what we wish were true. This is evident in an experiment conducted where subjects were divided into “farmers,” who benefited from high wheat prices, and “bakers,” who profited when wheat was cheap, and showed both groups historical charts of wheat prices and asked them to make forecasts. The subjects were paid a bonus for accuracy, yet the farmers systematically predicted higher prices than the bakers, “wishful thinking in its purest form,” Harford says.

Hong Kong businessman Joseph Lau bought a rare 12.03-carat diamond for his seven-year-old daughter, Josephine, for USD 48.4 mn, the most expensive jewel ever sold at auction. This was one day after Lau bought little Josephine a USD 28.5 mn 16.08-carat pink diamond.

Scandinavia is not a socialist utopia after all: Turns out, Nordic households are more indebted than Americans, Quartz notes. “Economic growth in countries such as Sweden, Denmark and Norway—as well as non-Nordic countries like the Netherlands and Ireland—has been fueled by a surge of debt-fueled consumption. Basically, it’s home buying, which has in turn spurred a huge increase in home prices.” No reason to worry now, however, as low interest rates are allowing Nordic households to “continue to carry this load for the foreseeable future.”

Countries can run budget deficits and still reduce their national debt. “What does matter is the size of the debt relative to the size of the economy, and the pool of taxpayers’ incomes from which revenues are drawn. And it is perfectly possible to reduce the relative size of debt while simultaneously running a budget deficit,” The Economist’s Free Exchange blog explains.

Mythbusters is set to end this January 2016 with one final “spectacular” season left. One mourning writer and fan, Bonnie Burton from tech news site CNET, describes the anguishing process of coming to terms with such a loss, and the huge amount of genuine scientific interest the show has created. (Read)

The Ancient Greeks Sacrificed Ugly People: Dania Rodrigues writing in Atlas Obscura shatters ideas held by some of us that the ancient Greeks were “philosophers wandering in their white robes, enlightened politicians arguing about the bases of democracy, or artists sculpting perfectly proportionate figures in white marble. But there is a darker aspect of Grecian society that is less widely-known … In early Greek history, during times of plague or famine, when the precarious agrarian societies started to fear for their survival, each Greek town would elect its ugliest inhabitant, known as the pharmakos … ‘Ugly’ in this case probably meant deformed in some way … for a while, this person would be fed at public expense with the most exquisite delicacies available at the time” and that “In some places he or she was merely cast out of the city, while in others the pharmakos would be stoned to death, burned, or thrown off a cliff.”

What am I reading?

Enterprise publishes English and Arabic editions Sunday-Thursday before 7am, with a focus on the business, economic and politics news that will move markets that day. But for the past six weekends, we’ve been experimenting with a weekend edition that is light on news and heavy on stories to read, videos to watch, and podcasts to which you may want to listen on Friday and Saturday (that being the weekend for the vast majority of our readers). The Weekend Edition comes out each Friday at 9:00am CLT. We’re in beta and in English only right now.