The Weekend Edition

In yesterday morning’s edition, we outlined new EGX regulations that add new restrictions on the shares that can be traded as GDRs — and noted incorrectly that the decision changed the limit. The cap that a maximum of a third of company shares can be traded as GDRs remains. What the EGX did was add a restriction: The percentage of shares traded as GDRs cannot exceed the proportion of shares in free float. Under the new rules, if the percentage of GDRs exceeds a company’s free-float, no new GDRs can be issued until the percentage returns to the level set by the new rule. Given the list of GDRs provided by the EGX, CIB’s shares will not be affected, contrary to our commentary yesterday. We try awfully hard around here to get things right, and we were wrong in this case. We regret the mistake.

…EGX Chairman Mohamed Omran told Reuters “the goal [behind the new limits] is to encourage companies to increase their free-floating shares on the bourse." The newswire adds that the change will impact Edita, which has GDRs representing 24.9% of its shares compared to just 14.12% free floating.

Amateur cooks make a lot of mistakes that rile classically-trained chefs, Noam Ben-Ami writes, saying “it’s hard to watch regular people cook. I just excuse myself and leave the kitchen, or I end up taking over.” His pet peeves include: improperly salting food, the grave sin of not letting meat rest before cutting it, improperly cooking pasta (keep that stuff al dente, please), cooking with extra virgin olive oil, using blunt knives, and probably most importantly, “failing to make use of deliciousness. For example, roasting a chicken and then not making use of all the wonderful juices that have caramelized on the bottom of the pan. Strain that beautiful liquid, let it rest in a narrow container, drain off the fat, then make the remains into a sauce or just pour them on the chicken or on rice.”

When did modern art end and contemporary art begin in the Arab world? Sultan Al Qassemi tackles the question in an essay on Medium. Rather than assigning a specific date or year, Al Qassemi proposes that “Arab contemporary art timeframe begins with artists who have come of age in the decade between the early 1980s and the early 1990s due to their general readiness to adopt the latest technologies and concepts in their work.” He pinpoints one artist that best embodies that specification: Beirut-born British-Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum. Just as American philosopher Arthur Danto was “shocked” when he first visited an Andy Warhol exhibition in 1964 as he claimed that “[Warhol’s Brillo boxes] could not have been art fifty years ago. The world has to be ready for certain things,” Hatoum shocked the world, Al Qassemi says. She “not only was the Arab world not ready for Hatoum, the Western world itself, where museums typically showed far less works by female artists was coming to grips with this strong woman and who transcends boundaries and conventions… In Hatoum’s ascent to global art phenomenon, she has transcended the constricting labels of her ethnic and gender identities.”

…If you’re interested in more of her work, London’s Tate Modern is currently running a Mona Hatoum exhibition until 21 August. Tate Modern says Hatoum’s work “creates a challenging vision of our world, exposing its contradictions and complexities, often making the familiar uncanny. Through the juxtaposition of opposites such as beauty and horror, she engages us in conflicting emotions of desire and revulsion, fear and fascination.” Can’t make the trip to London? You can also watch Hatoum’s heartfelt 1988 videotape Measures of Distance, in which she examines her position as an exiled female artist, translating letters from her mother from Arabic to English, represented visually as a texture of calligraphy over the texture of her body and skin. (Runtime 07:17)

Remember when Ikea came to town and we all woke up with the same spatulas and plates and coffee carafes and…? Well, we weren’t alone. In a beautiful return to the magazine’s long-form roots, Fortune’s Beth Kowitt serves up “It’s Ikea’s World, We Just Live In It: How Ikea took over the world.”

The Economist launched an excellent series of brief episodes exploring “six big economic ideas” on breakthroughs that shaped off the discipline. The series started-off with explaining George Akerlof’s seminal work on information asymmetry in his paper “The Market for Lemons.” Last week’s briefing was Hyman Minsky’s hypothesis that booms sow the seeds of busts. Minsky’s work remained fairly obscure during his life until his death in 1996; it wasn’t until 2007 that market participants, brokers, and central bankers began citing his work extensively — pointing out of Hyman Minsky’s unsettling conclusion that “economic stability breeds instability. Periods of prosperity give way to financial fragility.”

PIMCO’s Paul McCulley coined the term “‘Minsky moment’ to describe a situation when debt levels reach breaking-point and asset prices across the board start plunging.” The Economist, however, notes that Minsky’s own theories expect that the Minsky moment “will eventually peter out. Economic growth is still shaky and the scars of the global financial crisis visible. In the Minskyan trajectory, this is when firms and banks are at their most cautious, wary of repeating past mistakes and determined to fortify their balance-sheets. But in time, memories of the 2008 turmoil will dim. Firms will again race to expand, banks to fund them and regulators to loosen constraints. The warnings of Minsky will fade away. The further we move on from the last crisis, the less we want to hear from those who see another one coming.” Whether that’s true or not, Nobel laureate Paul Krugman said “we are all Minskyites now” and central banks seem to agree.

Econonerds, take note: Later in the series, The Economist will present: The Stolper-Samuelson theorem, The Keynesian multiplier, The Nash equilibrium, and The Mundell-Fleming trilemma.

The Economist stayed away from the ideas of Milton Friedman who has been “treated a bit like a secular saint in policy discussions,” according to Noah Smith. So Smith decided to venture into classical economics-heresy land and “grade” Friedman’s macroeconomic ideas in what’s possibly one of the most interesting and controversial economics blog posts of the year. Smith gave Friedman D’s for the ideas of money growth targeting and that fiscal policy can’t stabilise economies. Overall, Smith rates Friedman’s macroeconomic policy at a C+, saying his “macro ideas were enormously influential, and probably made very crucial points at the time they were introduced. However, they suffer from one fatal flaw: They are macro ideas. Macroeconomics does not easily yield its truths to the probing mind, given uninformative data and the complexity of the thing. Plus, it’s likely that big structural changes make it such that the discipline has few eternal verities – what describes the economy well in 1976 might have little to do with the events of 2016.”

How to get away with (the perfect) murder: You remember that hilltop shooting in France — the one that left an Iraqi engineer and most of his young family dead? It was never solved. QG investigated it and, if you like murder mysteries, you won’t want to miss this one. “The driver was a British engineer born in Iraq who worked on satellite systems in Surrey, and maybe that’s why he was dead and all the others were, too. He was shot four times, twice in the head. His wife … was dead in the backseat, also shot four times, also twice in the head. Her mother … was dead, too, shot three times, twice in the head. The cyclist was shot five times, including twice in the head. Zainab was still alive, though barely: She was shot once in the shoulder, then clubbed in the skull with the butt of the gun. The shooter had fired 21 times, mostly at a moving vehicle. … Eight of them were head shots. Apparently he was a professional. It all seemed so obvious three years ago, exactly what happened. Saad al-Hilli got whacked. He was stupid enough to have his family with him, so they got killed, too. … What other explanation could there be?” Read: “How to get away with (the perfect) murder.”

The New York Times has got it in for private equity. And there are investment ideas for you in their hatchet jobs. The boys and girls in PE sometimes make themselves easy targets (and don’t get us started on the hedgies), but still… For about a month now, the times has been investigating not so much the excesses of PE, but (for the most part) using private equity as a way to open a discussion about what it means to privatize public services. The series starts with “When you dial 911 and Wall Street answers” (links to other pieces in the series start there). Along the way, they’ve done a drive-by on Bridgewater Associates (“At World’s Largest Hedge Fund, [physical intimacy], Fear and Video Surveillance”) and published Bridgewater’s reply.

Their latest is “This Is Your Life, Brought to You by Private Equity” and it’s a gorgeously designed, text-light package of some of the more interesting ways PE outfits are making (or want to make) money in the US. The Times is running it as a warning. You can think of it as a tip sheet packed with interesting investment ideas.

BONUS TIP: Do you love or hate hedgies? How about crusading lawyers with skeletons in their closets? Adrenaline? Sarcasm? Then head directly to iTunes and download episode 1 of the first season of Billions, the already-classic show pitting Paul Giamatti’s US attorney against Damian Lewis’ blue-collar bn’aire hedge fund manager. It’s a financial drama so good, even the socialists over at the Guardian confess to liking it.

If the words “thought leadership” make you want to puke, read this. It won’t make you like it any more. But the act of having read it may make it a tiny bit less likely you’ll want to defenestrate your PR person the next time s/he insists you (ghost)write one.

Do you really want to give birth in Miami? We’re not saying “don’t take that all-inclusive give birth in Miami package,” but you might want to think twice, no matter how good your doc is or how plush the flat, after the Centers for Disease Control imposed an “unprecedented” travel warning for a Miami neighborhood in which the Zika virus has appeared. Zika, which is believed to cause microcephaly in pregnant women, has infected more than a dozen people in Florida who were bitten by local mosquitos. The New York Times has the latest update, and if you’re planning a trip to Amreeka any time soon, you may want to check out Vox’s discussion (and maps) of where Zika could spread in the United States.

Economists can say global trade is a good thing until they’re blue in the face, voters still don’t believe them, according the New York Times. The Brexit vote is a good example, and American voters’ terrifying leaning toward Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is another. But why? While economists think the issue is self-interest, studies on free trade and offshore outsourcing by Edward Mansfield and Diana Mutz, political science professors at the University of Pennsylvania, say otherwise. Voters actually swing toward policies based on national interests, a theory called sociotropic voting.

So why does the average “person on the street” think globalization is bad for the economy? Looking at US voters, the short answer is they don’t want their countries involved in conflicts abroad and, more worryingly, they think the US is culturally superior and that the racial or ethnic group they belong to is superior as well. “They say their own group is harder-working, less wasteful and more trustworthy.” The study does report, however, that “this isolationist, nationalist, ethnocentric worldview is related to one’s level of education. The more years of schooling people have, the more likely they are to reject anti-globalization attitudes.”

Donald Trump is cratering. His campaign is in disarray. He’s alienating veterans. Trailing Hillary by 15 points. The GOP will dump him by September and focus on congressional races. And yet he could still win. He equaled Hillary Clinton in fundraising in July, and he’s got a base of support that could care less what he steps in between now and election day — he is, as Clint Eastwood suggested this week, just saying what “a lot of folks” are thinking. Those folks: Poor whites. If you really want to understand why Trump could become president, you need to read the American Conservative’s “Trump: Tribune Of Poor White People.”

ICYMI: The New York Times has some eye-opening footage of the behavior of Trump supporters at his rallies, which really has to be seen to be believed. (Watch Unfiltered: Voices from Trump’s crowds, running time: 3:11)

DOCUMENTARY OF THE WEEK – Welcome to Leith: One of the most intriguing documentaries to come out in 2015, Welcome to Leith tracks the story of how one white supremacist in America thought he could take over a town in North Dakota and turn it into a Mecca for white nationalism and neo-Nazi organizations in the US. Spoiler Alert: he fails. The most interesting part of the documentary however, is its look into how far a community would go to remove someone whom they feel is damaging, and how justified it is in doing so. Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker take no apologist stance on Craig Cobb (whose genealogy test results were not what he expected) and his views and portray him as the evil mastermind he pathetically failed to be. But their film poses interesting questions on how far the right to free speech can be acceptable — and whether free speech can be abhorrent enough to justify the use of any means to suppress it. It brings to mind the Evelyn Beatrice Hall quote: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” It inadvertently holds added significance in light of the candidacy of Donald Zeft. You can watch the documentary on Youtube (runtime: 1:26:05)

The illusion of causality: Please do not forward the following article to your anti-vaccine friends unless you are prepared for an infinite email argument. While the piece is not exclusively about cognitive biases surrounding vaccines, the resulting disagreement will likely be fruitless and bitter. You have been adequately warned.

“Paul Offit likes to tell a story about how his wife, pediatrician Bonnie Offit, was about to give a child a vaccination when the kid was struck by a seizure. Had she given the injection a minute sooner, Paul Offit says, it would surely have appeared as though the vaccine had caused the seizure and probably no study in the world would have convinced the parent otherwise.”

Further complicating matters, efforts to educate people on how to avoid this cognitive bias, dubbed ‘causality illusion’ by psychologists, have hit a very significant snag, according to political scientist Brendan Nyhan: “The lesson of controversial political, health and science issues is that people don’t apply their critical-thinking skills in the same way when they have a preference for who’s right.” (Read Your brain is primed to reach false conclusions)

This refugee-camp life: The mother of all podcasts, This American Life, sent a team to refugee camps in Greece to hear what it is really like there where refugees are waiting for some country to let them in and restart their lives. The best thing about the episode is that, unlike many reports about refugees, it doesn’t dehumanize the people involved, nor does it treat them as merely a “statistic.” They found “people falling in love, kids mad at their parents for dragging them to Europe, women doing their laundry in a baseball stadium locker room, and hundreds of people living at a gas station—sitting next to the pumps, smoking.” (Runtime 01:04:44)

Gimlet Media launched Science Vs, a new well-produced show, hosted by Wendy Zukerman, aimed at “pitting scientific facts against people’s ‘greatest fears’.” The show’s first episode asks scientists about fracking, and if it merits the fears usually associated with it. So, do people’s fears of fracking stack up? “Maybe.” Chemicals from fracking can contaminate drinking water, but “these instances are rare” and, in high doses, the chemicals can make people sick, but amount likely to seep into the water supply is small and, so far, the reported doses present do not appear to cause harm. However, fears of fracking causing earthquakes are completely founded — with almost no debate. Less clear-cut is the impact on the environment; methane from natural gas does escape into the atmosphere from fracking and that is bad for the climate as it is a powerful greenhouse gas, but even with that, natural gas is better than coal (but worse than renewables). (Runtime 40:59)

For those thinking vaping is a safe bet, don’t say you were not warned: a US government-funded Harvard University study apparently confirmed that dangerous, lung-destroying chemicals are commonly found in the liquids used in electronic cigarettes and other vaping devices, with some of the participating scientists calling for "urgent action". This was also not new, with the results having been released back in December of last year. The study detected the significance presence of diacetyl in e-cigarettes along with 2,3-pentanedione and acetoin. These chemicals “destroy the lungs’ tiniest airways, leading to scar tissue buildup that blocks airflow. It can result in a permanent, sometimes fatal, lung condition known as bronchiolitis obliterans,” according to the study. The research identified 31 toxic compounds emitted by vaporizers. A more recent study published last month in Environmental Science and Technology, also revealed the more one uses the vaporizer, the hotter it gets, the more toxic chemicals get released. The study shows that while e-cigarettes emit fewer toxins than cigarettes, they are not a healthy or harmless alternative. Vaping at this point in time is not something new and is continuing to grow significantly as a trend, with industry regulations having traditionally been few. But these studies are now driving more stringent measures in the EU and the US over their manufacture, according to Tech.Co. In the end, the hard choice of cold turkey may be your one option.

Remember the ALS ice bucket challenge? In case you lived under a rock in 2014, the idea was: film yourself dumping a bucket of ice water over your head to spread the word about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Well, despite being criticized as slacktivism, the funding from the challenge helped discover NEK1, a gene that is among the most common genes contributing to the disease. The findings call into question the long-debated usefulness of social media activism. Looks like George W. Bush (run time 0:49) and General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt’s (run time 1:17) efforts didn’t go to waste after all.

Speaking of unexpected health news: Confirming everyone’s gut instinct (and validating our laziness), there’s apparently no evidence to back up efficacy of flossing. The AP’s Jeff Donn filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US government asking them what exactly the evidence was that shows flossing is necessary for oral health. Their response? They don’t have any. (If you geek out about journalism: Poynter has the story behind the story here.)

More surprising is the fact that the benefits of stretching have been overstated. "For the research that’s been done up to now, it looks like there’s little or no effect on injury, and a very small beneficial effect of stretching on soreness — but that’s probably so small most people wouldn’t be able to perceive it,” according to stretching expert (yes, that is apparently a thing) Rob Herbert. On the bright side, that’s two things you no longer have to think about on the daily.

Time Warner has bought a 10% stake in the streaming television service Hulu, paying USD 583 mn in cash and valuing the firm at USD 5.8 bn, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. The media conglomerate joins 21st Century Fox, Comcast and the Walt Disney Company in paving a new future for Hulu, which is now set to offer “both live and recorded programming from a streamlined bundle of broadcast and cable channels.” Traditional media companies are trying to cash in on the current boom in digital television, mainly helmed by Netflix and Amazon. “Hulu is locked in a fierce battle for content with far larger Netflix and a far better funded Amazon, with Hulu’s subbase not scaling as rapidly as we would expect based on its content investments,” BTG Research analyst Richard Greenfield said. Time Warner’s TNT, TBS and CNN are set to be available live on Hulu’s new live-streaming service.

Phone on wheels? Picture a smartphone placed in a plastic case with wheels attached to it and an embedded motor that controls the phone’s movement. Then watch it come alive with this video of University of Tokyo students Takefumi Hiraki, Koya Narumi, Koji Yatani and Yoshihiro Kawahara’s prototype which they will present at the annual ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium in October, according to Co.Design’s John Brownlee. The phone can rotate, move forward and backward, and even push loads. Thanks to such features, we can be saved from snoozing the alarm until God knows when – Runaway snooze application lets the phone literally run away from your hand when you try to reach out for it.

Airbnb is not just taking over big cities, it’s going after small towns: Airbnb is experimenting with building a community centre for a small village in Japan through Samara, a design studio which they are about to reveal this week, Cliff Kuang writes for Co.Design. They are starting with a small town in Japan, coming from the idea that Japan’s aging population and the youth’s migration to bigger cities have left houses abandoned in smaller cities. And Airbnb saw an opportunity there. Airbnb’s Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk worked with architect Go Hasegawa to design a community centre in Yoshino town in Japan’s Nara Prefecture, which would serve the community and attract tourists to stay. “The idea is that Airbnb could become a force not only in sharing homes, but in urban planning,” writes Kuang. The building is now at Tokyo’s House Vision exhibition, then will be transported to Yoshino in October. This is Airbnb going niche, local, as a way to expand their business, which they will take elsewhere too after Japan, after receiving requests for the project from the U.K., China, Korea, Spain, France, and Italy.

Uber’s Chinese competitor Didi Chuxing is investing USD 1 bn in Uber’s global company to buy out its entire China operation, ending a price war that left Uber out USD 2 bn over two years, Bloomberg reported. The agreement sheds light on harsh conditions faced by US tech giants when entering the Chinese market. Since US tech firms were expunged in 2009 in favor of domestic alternatives, “a new Chinese tech order took shape,” writes Scott Cendrowski for Fortune. China’s Tech market is controlled by four players: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, and the government. The tech companies have expanded into every possible tech vertical, well before anyone in Silicon Valley did, while the government sets the rules and has amassed its own USD 340 bn venture capital fund.

Uber wasn’t just competing with domestic ridesharing applications, it was competing with government supported tech giants with deep pockets to support homegrown startups. Uber Founder Travis Kalanick tried to alleviate the government’s concerns with country visits and promises of employment and efficiency improvements in cities. He even got Uber backing from Baidu, the one company of the big three tech giants that wasn’t ultimately backing Didi. Tencent’s social network WeChat shut down Uber’s public hiring and services pages three times last year, and by August Uber had disappeared completely from WeChat.

Two of the highest profile women in tech have had a tough year, says Laura Sydell in the latest episode of All Tech Considered on NPR (runtime 4:06). Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer saw the core company sold to Verizon, while Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was banned from her own labs and the blood testing industry for two years by regulators. There are so few women CEOs in tech, says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University, that when a Marissa Mayer or Elizabeth Holmes fails "It not only can damage her career just individually for herself but it can actually serve to reconfirm broader cultural beliefs that are out there that women aren’t quite the right fit for senior leadership or certain kinds of senior leadership positions."

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

• Schedule of Egyptians competing at the Rio Olympics (pdf download)
• There’s a reason middle-income housing doesn’t exist — here’s how the government can fix it (Enterprise)
• Photos of Naguib, Abou Hashima, Amr Adib closing the deal that saw Adib go to OnTV (Facebook)
• Full text in English of Egypt’s Vision 2030 as officially launched this week (Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
• How the American Civil War Built Egypt’s Vaunted Cotton Industry and Changed the Country Forever (Smithsonian)

Twenty-six year old Dina Amin has been featured on The Daily Dot for Instagram videos she posts every Friday outlining what she calls her “tinker process” —her thoughts as she takes apart products ranging from pens and fluorescent lamps to PlayStation controllers and floppy disks. A graduate of industrial design from Universiti Teknologi Mara in Malaysia, Amin found opportunity in the lack of recycling or separation of trash in Egypt (we assume she means recycling done by consumers themselves, and not including the efforts of the Zabaleen and electronics recycling companies such as Recyclobekia). “We carry our phones with us 24/7, but we don’t even know what it looks like on the inside. That is a right that we, as users, have: to know our products.”

As the Olympic Games fast-approach, hold your nose and go read the Huffington Post’s “11 weird sports that were actually in the Olympics,” which includes everything from live pigeon shooting (300 birds were reportedly killing during its one and only Olympic appearance in 1900) to middle-school favorite tug of war.