🌏 The young and the jobless

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One in five young people are unemployed in China. The country’s youth jobless rate topped 20% in April, marking its highest level since records began five years ago.

The investor of The Big Short fame is betting big on Chinese tech stocks... Michael Burry is turning bullish on internet giants Alibaba and JD.com at a time when trades in the country are cooling.

…while Warren Buffett’s $4.1 billion bet on TSMC lasted less than six months. The billionaire sold his entire stake in the world’s largest chipmaker in a U-turn that put investors on high alert.

Ecuador’s president is facing an impeachment vote. Guillermo Lasso has been accused of embezzlement, which he denies, and has in response threatened to dissolve the country’s legislature.

Sam Altman got a warm Congressional welcome

“My worst fear is we cause significant harm to the world. If this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong.”

—Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company responsible for the large language model GPT-4 and its most famous consumer application, ChatGPT, during his testimony in front of US lawmakers yesterday

Compared to other Congressional grillings of Big Tech executives, Altman was treated like a responsible steward of an inevitable technology rather than an adversarial industry leader… and no one was hallucinating, as far as we can tell.

A soft landing is still very much possible for the US economy

US retail sales are growing again after two straight months of decline. It’s good news for those who are still holding out for the world’s largest economy to make a soft landing on the shores of a recession. But a US debt default would of course trigger a tsunami.

One big Bollywood number: $40.7 million

That’s the quarterly loss of the newly combined PVR INOX, now India’s largest movie theater chain

Bollywood is beyond big (just ask Indian politicians how big). But as Quartz’s Niharika Sharma explains, the Hindi film industry is losing its luster among moviegoers in India.

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👋 It’s not just conversation—Gen Z is missing some essential nonverbal skills, too

Surprising discoveries

Baseball fans can agree on one thing: pitch clocks. The countdown used by Major League Baseball in the US is making viewers more interested in watching games.

Eight million people speak Sorani Kurdish, but it wasn’t on Google Translate until 2022. The community that worked to digitize the language was made up mostly of volunteers.

Water was found around a rare comet for the first time. The James Webb telescope’s discovery generated more questions than answers.

US hospitals are creating their own police forces. Violence in clinical settings has been increasing at an alarming rate in the US.

Plastic bottles were created in 1973. That’s a fairly recent date, considering the item has entrenched itself so firmly into our daily lives. Host Scott Nover and Quartz editor Sofia Lotto Persio unwrap the invention of single-use plastics in the latest episode of the Quartz Obsession podcast, season five.

🎧 Listen right now!

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