The Weekend Edition

A QUICK NOTE TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS: We publish the Enterprise Morning Edition in English and Arabic from Sunday through Thursday before 7am, with a focus on the business, economic and political news that will move markets each day. What you’re reading now is our Weekend Edition, which 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 between 9:00am and 9:30am CLT. We’re in beta and in English only right now.

Today’s Weekend Edition is short. We’re coming off a busy week at both Enterprise and Inktank, so we have just a handful of recommended readings for you this weekend. We’ll be back with a full issue next week.

We’ll be back on Sunday at around 6:15am with our usual roundup. Until then: Enjoy the weekend.

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SPEED ROUND, THE WEEKEND EDITION

Rehaam wonders whether Uber lives up to its own hype. Megan McArdle for Bloomberg View thinks it soon may not. With several companies popping up claiming to be the “Uber for X”, it seems like everyone is looking for a way to develop an app to shake up an industry — aka little overhead, big returns. Egypt’s on-demand valet service Rakna comes to mind (which if you ask us seems like a recipe for getting carjacked). But, unsurprisingly, not many are succeeding. The reason? While Uber effectively broke up the taxi monopoly stronghold, other industries “look a lot more like high-end services for affluent consumers willing to pay a premium for convenience.” But even Uber may not be able to keep its low-cost model for long, McArdle writes, as Uber drivers begin to wise up about the hidden costs of wear and tear on their vehicles. “I’ve started to hear drivers talk about people they know who dropped out because of the wear and tear on their cars — something that I never heard a couple of years back, even though I often asked about it.” She’s not wrong, one needs only to do a quick search on Glassdoor to see the complaints about wear and tear. The result? “We’re seeing a stream of UberX and Lyft drivers looking to drive a taxi now,” Hansu Kim, owner of cab-hailing service Flywheel Cab, tells KQED. “It used to be a trickle, now it’s more of a stream. Not the floodgates, yet.”

(That said, we’d argue Uber, Lyft and Careem drivers have a lot more to worry about in the long term: Why do you think General Motors recently invested USD 500 mn in Lyft, with which it’s now building a network of self-driving cars? There’s a reason why even Cairo probably only has a few dozen elevator operators left, ladies and gentlemen, even though the notion of an elevator without an operator was a century ago as foreign an idea as a car without a driver is today. Planet Money’s “The Big Red Button” (listening time: 16:05) is bang on point here.)

Patrick wonders why he never knew the founder of fashion label Chloé was a Jew who was born, raised and married in Alexandria. This WSJ profile of Chloé designer Clare Waight Keller’s home in Paris mentions in passing that Gaby Aghion, the creator of fashion label Chloé, grew up and was married in Alexandria, where she lived from 1921 until 1945. Of Greek-Italian origin, Aghion (neé Hanoka) had a classical pre-World War II upper-class childhood in Alex. She married her her childhood sweetheart Raymond Aghion, the wealthy political activist (and cousin of Egyptian communist movement founder Henri Curiel) who purchased Al-Majalla Al-Jadida as a forum for leftist opinions, founded the Egyptian Democratic Union, and was active in anti-Nazi propaganda work. Raymond and Gaby moved to Paris after the war, where the WSJ tells us, “They quickly fell in with the smart set at the Café de Flore on the Left Bank. Aghion had a strong sense of style, not to mention a fair amount of money (her husband’s family was in the cotton exporting business). She bought a few Balenciagas and a few Diors. But she couldn’t afford to dress that way all the time—who could?—and besides, she didn’t want to. She discovered to her dismay that there really wasn’t much else in the way of stylish, well-tailored clothing. It simply didn’t exist. Shortly before her death in 2014, Aghion recalled how she pretty much conjured prêt-à-porter out of thin air.” The designer and fashion house founder would later write that “Egypt is a colour for me. The sand is the most beautiful sand I have ever seen. A rose-tinted beige. It feels like silk in your hands.” She died in late 2014, just as we started Enterprise, and her passing flew below our radar. You can check out obits in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Telegraph or the Independent, depending on your political and national preferences. It strikes us that her biography is an Egyptian business / political history master’s thesis waiting to happen.

Gaser wonders about the never-ending debate over privacy vs security: The FBI announced this week that it had unlocked Syed Farook’s iPhone without Apple’s help, claiming it received help from an undisclosed third party. If you followed tech news over the last couple of months, Farook is the suspect behind the San Bernardino shootings, and his iPhone 5C became the center of a PR battle between the FBI and Apple, with the latter stepping up to defend the privacy rights even when it meant being accused of standing in the corner of a suspected mass murderer. The New York Times said “A furious legal battle over digital privacy in the age of the iPhone ended on Monday with no clear winner — only lingering questions over what will happen the next time the government tries to force Apple to help break into one of its own phones.” Vox’s Timothy B. Lee goes deep into why the FBI could not crack Farook’s phone before this week — and speculates on who the third party could be. But the more important question remains where will legislation stand on similar issues in the future? NYT says “This might be a missed opportunity for the Justice Department,” said Eric Berg, a former federal prosecutor. “Having this whole debate muted by this solution is probably a little bit disappointing for them.” The FBI countered Apple’s refusal to comply with demands to eliminate certain features that would allow the FBI to unscramble the encryption on Farook’s phone by brute force quicker by claiming Apple’s stance was hampering efforts to fight terrorism and other crimes. A magistrate judge initially ordered Apple to comply, but the company was appealing the order before the announcement. Last week, on the eve of a pivotal hearing in the case, the FBI asked for the proceedings to be halted, saying it had learned of a new technique that might allow it to gain access. A week later, the FBI told the court that it had recovered the data on Farook’s iPhone and no longer needed Apple’s help.

Sarah thinks a climate change disaster might happen in decades not centuries: A new report published last week in the Journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, and written by a group of prominent scientists led by “the Grandfather of climate change” James Hansen, revealed a new mechanism in the Earth’s climate system that points to a much more rapid rise in sea levels. In fact, it’s possible we will see several feet of sea-level rise over the next 50 years, which would mean loss of all coastal cities, Hansen said in a video statement. Their notion is that when ice sheets melt, it will put a cap of relatively fresh water on the ocean surfaces near Antarctica and Greenland, which will eventually shut down two essential ocean currents that allow the redistribution of heat. Thus, heat will be accumulated in deeper parts of the ocean and eventually “all hell will break loose,” because of rapid melting speeds and powerful storms caused by wider temperature differences between tropics and the poles, an idea a little too similar to this Hollywood disaster flick. The new findings might not be taken too lightly, as Hansen was one of the first to detect that global warming had already begun, circa 1988. Another report published on Wednesday made similar claims, stating that the total rise of sea levels could reach six feet by 2100, nearly twice the increase reported as a worst-case by a United Nations panel three years ago. “We are not saying this is definitely going to happen,” said David Pollard, co-author of the report. “But I think we are pointing out that there’s a danger, and it should receive a lot more attention.” Want more, but in layman’s terms? Check out Reuters, the Guardian or the Washington Post on the Hansen study.

Why Moustafa thinks you should be worried about nuclear weapons: Nuclear weapons are even more dangerous than we thought. The worst threat from nuclear weapons is not the explosion that could kill tens of thousands, the radioactive fallout that would follow, or a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse that could destroy the electrical grid (a persistent fantasy of the U.S. right wing), but a nuclear winter that would plunge Earth into an induced ice age. MIT’s Max Tegmark explains that this could kill the majority of the planet’s population. What’s scarier: he suggests nuclear winter could be triggered accidentally, without an armed conflict (run time 03:14). Nuclear weapons have not been detonated in violent conflict since 1945, but we have had a lot of “near misses,” as Heather Williams explains in a 2014 paper and discusses in a podcast (run time 09:10) about cases of near nuclear use. “Evidence from many declassified documents, testimonies and interviews suggests that the world has, indeed, been lucky, given the number of instances in which nuclear weapons were nearly used inadvertently as a result of miscalculation or error.” There are a number of recent examples of “poor control of nuclear weapons and materials are giving rise to concerns about laxity in safety, security, and command and control.” Williams, noting that risk is the combination of probability and consequence, provides some policy options to limit the risk of an inadvertent, accidental or deliberate detonation. This includes “buying time for decision-making, particularly in crises; developing trust and confidence-building measures; refraining from large-scale military exercises during times of heightened tension; involving a wider set of decision-makers in times of crisis; and improving awareness and training on the effects of nuclear weapons.” Vox’s Max Fisher gives a simpler explanation of the issue.

BRIEFLY NOTED: Some other stuff on our reading list this weekend:

• The creator of one of the most popular (and classic) cult television series of all time has an insane backstory that’s brought to life in this brief comic-based short story. (Enthralling even if you’re not a fan of the show, which this author is not.)
• “The Nazi Who Became a Mossad Hitman” is an absolute must-read if you’re into Second World War history or know who Otto Skorzeny was.
• Wait But Why’s “Why Cryonics Makes Sense” had us with the first two paragraphs. It’s probably still junk science, but the fantasy lives on.
• Being the proud owner of a new iPad Pro, one of us is going to be reading “How I built and presented my conference talk on the iPad.”
• In the expectation that we will be enraged, we’ll be skimming through “Why it’s wrong to say that the Arab uprisings failed,” by Marc Lynch for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog.

RANDOM THOUGHT: There is no better programming decision MBC could have made than to have aired The Hunt for Red October early on a Friday morning. The book by Tom Clancy gave birth to the “techno-thriller” genre and is a classic of Cold War spy fiction. Worth skimming if you’re a fan of the film: “14 Deep Facts about ‘The Hunt for Red October.’”

THE WEEK’S MOST-CLICKED STORIES

The most-clicked stories in Enterprise in the past week included multiple ties in a week in which all of you seem to have gone click-happy:

• The calendar for D-CAF, the insanely good Downtown arts and culture festival, running through late April. (pdf download)
• The best Egyptian Facebook post on the “Lovejacking.” (Facebook) (tie)
• The “imbecile hijack selfie.” (Daily Mail) (tie)
• Best Twitter joke on how passengers reacted to the notion that a domestic flight was landing abroad. (Twitter)
• Siberian winds dragging a Boeing along a runway. (RT)
• Lamis interviews Naguib Sawiris on Tarek Amer and CI Capital. (Youtube)

At the tail end of the top five, we have a cluster of stories that all came within one click of each other:

• Sands of time: a century of Egyptian photography – in pictures. (The Guardian)
• Naguib Sawiris op-ed on the Tarek Amer flap. (Al Borsa)
• The full text in Arabic of the Ismail government’s statement to the House on its policy agenda (pdf download)
• Inside the world’s most expensive hotel (Business Insider)

ON YOUR WAY OUT

Make certain to have taken your blood pressure meds before you read why Piers Morgan thinks we should all start “listening seriously to Trump” on terror. The UK talk show host, now reborn as “US editor-at-large” for the bastion of journalism known as the Mail Online, writes after having interviewed Trump for his UK show “Good morning Britain.” In his piece for the Daily Mail’s website, he says that there’s not much wrong with Trump’s views, the suggestion of a ban on Muslim entry to the US notwithstanding. “Is he so wrong? I didn’t feel I was talking to a lunatic, as many seem to view Trump. I saw a guy, a non-politician unfettered by PC language restraints, who is genuinely furious at the devastation which ISIS is wreaking, and seriously concerned for the security of his fellow Americans and indeed, the citizens of Europe.” For a dose of sanity after reading Morgan’s dreck, head over to the New York Times and read Nicholas Kristoff’s suggestion that we’re “overreacting to terrorism.” Kristoff writes that the upshot of our inability to conceive that climate change poses a far graver danger to humanity than do terror attacks is that “Brussels survived this week’s terrorist attacks, but it may not survive climate change (much of the city is less than 100 feet above sea level).”

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