By Walt Hickey

ASML

ASML is a Dutch company that makes the machines that make chips, which are increasingly some of the most consequential and valuable items in the global economy. ASML has essentially no competitors when it comes to extreme ultraviolet lithography, which is used to make the most precise and smallest chips. The newest machines can carve designs 8 nanometers in thickness, which given that a sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick, is quite the feat. One such model shipped last December to Intel in Oregon cost $380 million for a single machine, but again, there is simply not another company on earth capable of making this thing. In 2023, it made $30 billion in revenue, up from $13 billion five years before.

Scott Nover, Sherwood News

Boot

In New York City, when you rack up over $350 in unpaid tickets within 100 days of issuance, you’re subject to get a boot put on your tire, which immobilizes the car until you pay up. For a few years there, enforcement slacked off on booting repeat offenders — 31,379 vehicles were booted in 2020 — but in 2023 there were 134,945 boots put on cars in the city. This year, things are on track to keep that pace, with 74,975 vehicles booted so far and an aggregate of $118 million in total fines. Interestingly, of the 2023 bootings, the city flagged 8,274 as “runaways,” which means that people managed somehow to get the boot off and drive away, or, Homer Simpson-style, drive off in spite of the impediment.

Liam Quigley and David Brand, Gothamist

Black Myth: Wukong

The game considered to be China’s first AAA game, Black Myth: Wukong, just hit the milestone of having the most concurrent players of all time on Steam for a single-player title, beating out Cyberpunk 2077, and notched second place behind multiplayer Palworld with 2,223,179 simultaneous players at peak. Those players are disproportionately in China, with GameDiscoverCo estimating that 88 percent of players were there and just 3 percent were in the U.S.

Will Shanklin, Engadget

Push

The average person in the United States is subjected to almost 50 push notifications a day, which is an increase of 284 percent compared to 2015. App makers do it because it works — engagement boosts within apps is up 88 percent when notifications are deployed — but it’s also a pretty direct seizure of attention on behalf of an application that would otherwise serve a passive role in one’s life. Indeed, the Great Pushback is already accelerating, with the youngest mobile users developing a reputation for being more of a Do Not Disturb generation.

Julia Alexander, Posting Nexus

Tattoos

The tattoo business has been growing at a reliable clip over the past several years, with independent studios cropping up to take on the rising demand for ink from across the socioeconomic spectrum. According to IBISWorld, the tattoo industry grew by 2.5 percent each year from 2018 to 2023. Independent studios and collaborative work environments have begun to replace the more typical model of a tattoo shop, where the owner of a store has a crew of contracted artists who pay up a percentage of their earnings to the owner in exchange for training and space.

Linnea E. Anderson, NPR

Fuel Cells

California is pretty much the only state with anything resembling serious hydrogen fueling infrastructure for fuel cell-powered cars, and despite high ambitions early on, the whole thing has deteriorated. In the first half of the year, only 322 fuel cell vehicles were sold, down 82 percent compared to the same period of last year. Exacerbating that is an ongoing and nearly yearlong hydrogen supply shortage in Southern California that’s left 13 stations in the Los Angeles area offline since last September. This has been a headache for drivers, but the dream of hydrogen is far from dead in California; it’s just taken new shape in the form of hydrogen-powered marine vessels and aircraft.

William Poor, The Verge and Andrew J. Hawkins, The Verge

Golden Triangle

The Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone is a region of Laos near the border with Myanmar and Thailand that has been effectively handed over to a Chinese businessman named Zhao Wei, who has constructed a city there with an airport, casinos, and mounting evidence of thousands of people held against their will and forced to work for scammers or drug smugglers. The Laotian police need dispensation from Zhao to even enter, and it essentially operates autonomously within the 39 square miles of the zone. The U.S. Institute of Peace, a congressionally funded research group, estimates that the amount of money stolen by scam centers in the Mekong countries is over $43.8 billion per year, much of it through fake romance schemes and pig butchering schemes that con people out of money. The Laotian authorities have conducted some raids of scam operations in the GTSEZ and arrested over 1,000 Chinese citizens, but there are an estimated 85,000 people being held against their will in Laos working for scammers, mostly believed to be in the GTSEZ.

Matthew Campbell and Patpicha Tanakasempipat, Bloomberg

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