PJH Studios

Tag: business

  • The AI Bubble

    This is such a good analysis of the practical constraints around AI: the financial, physical, technical and how they all come together.

    The buyers have not learned to manage and the sellers have not learned to price, the two failures meeting in the middle and being reported, in the aggregate, as demand. The buildout is being sized against consumption figures that include their own inefficiency — and the revenue projections required to justify it assume this inflated consumption will grow, not contract, as teams mature and architectures stabilize.

  • The Pope called customer service

    It reads like a joke, but even His Holiness can’t pacify customer service.

    Then, the woman on the line for the bank told him that it wasn’t enough — he would have to come to the branch in person.

    “He said, ‘Well, I’m not going to be able to do that,’” Father McCarthy said in a video clip shared on social media, recounting the new pope’s growing frustration as the audience laughed. “I gave you all the security questions.”

    The bank employee apologized. The pope tried a different tack.

    “Would it matter to you if I told you I’m Pope Leo?” he asked, according to Father McCarthy.

    She hung up.

  • An AI Business

    Andon Labs launched an experiment–a storefront in San Francisco run entirely by AI.

    The store is named Andon Market and the AI’s name is Luna. But entering the store, you might ask “what is so AI about it? There are human employees here”. Yes, they are here because Luna knew that she needed them, so she posted job listings, held phone interviews and in the end made a hiring decision. Everything else you see, from the item selection, to the prices, to the opening hours, to the mural on the wall, was decided by Luna. She has a corporate card, a phone number, email, internet access and eyes through security cameras.

    The New York Times checked in on how it was going. Not great, Bob.

    Since opening on April 10, the store has been limping along. As humans brace for A.I. to steal their jobs or launch military weapons, it might be reassuring to know that Luna has struggled with employee schedules and cannot stop ordering candles.

  • Get some KFC while you charge your BYD

    Chinese electric car maker, BYD, is partnering with KFC to install charging stations add store locations.

    BYD and Yum China Holdings — the conglomerate that owns the KFC brand in China — signed a strategic cooperation agreement earlier this week at BYD’s headquarters in Shenzhen, aiming to install flash charging equipment at KFC drive-thru locations across the country.

    Central to the agreement is a concept the two companies are calling “9-minute one-stop human and vehicle refueling,” a nod to BYD’s second-generation Blade battery — introduced in March — which BYD says can bring a vehicle from 10% battery to 97% in nine minutes, a window that lines up neatly with a drive-thru pickup.

  • Life and history lessons in a storage locker

    High school student Michael Haskell buys abandoned storage units, discovery profit, history, and life lessons.

    He stopped at #3361 and unlocked the padlock. A musty odor emerged. He looked inside. The unit was crammed with birdcages, cedar chests, old paperbacks, barstools and Art Deco lamps.

    “I think I’ll make good money off this locker, which isn’t bad, since I bought it for $140,” Michael said. “Copper is at $6 a pound right now, so I can sell the lamps to the scrap yard. It’s all about squeezing every dollar out of the locker.”

    While some teenagers hang out after school, playing Fortnite or shooting hoops, Michael has taken up a more enterprising hobby. He buys abandoned storage lockers at bargain prices from public lien auctions with the aim of selling their contents for profit. It began two years ago, when he watched a rerun of “Storage Wars.” He has been on an urban treasure hunt since.

  • Red roof Pizza Hut locations

    Red roof Pizza Hut locations taste like nostalgia, and a cure for the DoorDash blues. What’s crazy, is that even the corporation that owns Pizza Hut doesn’t even know how many of these locations still exist.

    Once a common sight across the country, these old-school, low-slung buildings had largely disappeared as the restaurant chain modernized its stores and focused on takeout. Mr. Pujol, a journalist who documents retro American highway culture, says he “freaked out,” and swerved into the parking lot.

    He had not discovered an abandoned relic from the Reagan era. As a plaque near the door explained, this restaurant in Tunkhannock, Pa., was a Pizza Hut Classic. The interior design and menu had been painstakingly engineered to replicate the Pizza Huts of the 1980s and ’90s, when families and friends settled into red-vinyl booths on a Friday night to eat deep-dish pan pizza and drink Pepsi from red plastic cups.

  • US automakers at risk of becoming niche manufacturers

    For a multitude of reasons, US automakers are at risk of becoming niche manufacturers. Short term thinking may get them there sooner.

    Auto experts say old-line companies risk becoming obsolete if they don’t learn how to make appealing, profitable electric vehicles, which most executives expect to eventually replace cars that run on gasoline despite the Trump’s administration efforts to promote fossil fuels. Improvements in electric vehicle technology mean that, within a few years, they will be cheaper to buy and will charge in 15 minutes or less.

    One of the biggest problems established manufacturers have is that many of the electric models they sell have fared poorly against cars from Tesla and other newer companies.

  • Sabbatical, a.k.a. the adult gap year

    There appears to be a growing trend of working adults taking sabbatical or gap years between jobs.

    Mini-sabbaticals. Adult gap years. Micro-retirement. Extended career breaks go by many names and take many forms, from using the time between jobs to explore or taking an employer-approved leave to becoming a digital nomad or saving up for a monthslong adventure. Creating space for a reset, whether mental, physical or spiritual, is the common thread.

    Cost, personal responsibilities and fears of being judged by colleagues, friends and family members are some of the obstacles that prevent people from hitting pause on their work lives and setting out in search of new perspectives, according to sabbatical experts and people who have taken sabbaticals.

  • Drones tracking shoplifters

    Is sending a drone after a shoplifter really the best thing?

    “Instead of a 911 call [that triggers the drone], it’s an alarm call,” says Keith Kauffman, a former police chief who now directs Flock’s drone program. “It’s still the same type of response.”

    Kauffman walked through how the drone program might work in the case of retail theft: If the security team at a store like Home Depot, for example, saw shoplifters leave the store, then the drone, equipped with cameras, could be activated from its docking station on the roof.

    “The drone follows the people. The people get in a car. You click a button,” he says, “and you track the vehicle with the drone, and the drone just follows the car.” 

    The video feed of that drone might go to the company’s security team, but it could also be automatically transmitted directly to police departments.

  • Sushi’s rise in the USA

    Sushi’s popularity continues to grow.

    Once a small niche of the seafood business, sushi is now the industry’s growth leader.

    Most of that growth is not happening in $300-per-head omakase restaurants (though those are proliferating). It is happening in gas stations and big-box stores, bowling alleys and stadiums, U.S. Army commissaries and amusement parks.

    Retail sushi, also called “deli sushi” because of its usual location in supermarkets, is one of the fastest-growing segments in supermarkets overall, according to Circana, a market research firm. In 2024, retail sushi was a $2.8 billion business, up 7 percent from 2023