By Walt Hickey

Uncontained

P&R Containers was a reputable German business with a straightforward business model of selling individual shipping containers to investors for €1,415 as of 2017, then overseeing the lease of those containers to shipping companies. The investors get rent, and after five years P&R would buy back the container for 65 percent of value, which all in all gets investors a solid 20 percent return. It was a coherent business tied together by Teutonic financial fastidiousness and anyway, no it wasn’t, it’s actually a massive pyramid scheme, whoops. Right now 54,000 creditors are trying to recoup as much as they can. The company was €3 billion in the hole when things blew up in 2018, they claimed to own 600,000 more containers than they actually did (400,000), and so far investors have gotten back 17.5 cents on every owed euro, with potential to maybe get that up to 25 cents. As of last September, the administrator-overseen P&R still has 350,000 containers that they’re going to keep on renting until they give out to try to make investors whole.

Giulia Morpurgo and Laura Malsch, Bloomberg

Japan

Japan is aging faster than other countries, with 28.9 percent of its population aged 65 or over, and 74.6 percent of Japan’s 1,747 cities — 1,304 cities — are categorized as shrinking. A new study looked at 270 different municipal indicators to find out what precisely the shrinking cities had in common. The answers depended on the size of the city: Small cities shrunk because they ran out of kids, medium-sized cities saw more natural population change, and shrinking large cities tended to do so because of out-migration. The authors recommended different solutions depending on size. Large cities with industrial office bases tended to win more, while medium-sized cities would do well to invest in child care initiatives and small cities might need to take more drastic steps to stymie decline.

Osaka Metropolitan University

Longshoreman

The six-year contract for the International Longshoremen’s Association with 36 East Coast ports ended last night, and a strike of some 45,000 port workers appears is imminent. A one-day strike would take about five days to fix the supply chain, and J.P. Morgan expects that it’d cost $5 billion lost to the economy every day. The real issue might be in perishables: About 75 percent of bananas sold in the U.S. arrive on ports on the East and Gulf coasts.

gCaptain

Deus Ex Machina

Religion and technology are melding and interacting in fascinating ways worldwide, from augmented reality apps like Miqat that have over 5 million downloads and help Muslims always pray toward Mecca, to the 2,304 online tomb-sweeping platforms operating out of China as of 2022, which allow people to make offerings and pay respect to the tombs of ancestors. There are apps in Indonesia that allow users to scan barcodes to determine if products are halal, apps operated by the Catholic Archdiocese in Mexico to tithe directly, and even robotic elephants funded by PETA and donated to temples in south India so real elephants don’t need to be captured and used for the purposes of worship.

Adi Renaldi, Viola Zhou, Daniela Dib and Nadia Nooreyezdan, Rest of World

Matterhorn

Switzerland and Italy share a border in the Alps, and parts of that border are defined by glaciers. One issue is that where they were isn’t where they are now, and moving forward that is not where they will be. Sensing the issue, Italy and Switzerland cut a deal back in May 2023 to rectify the border, and the latest is that Switzerland agreed to the change on Friday and Italy is poised to do the same shortly. Switzerland’s glaciers lost 6 percent of their volume in 2022 and then another 4 percent in 2023, and given the complicated history Europe has with petty border quarrels, we’re all pretty happy that they’re on top of this.

Alex Boyd, BBC

River

A new study published in Nature Geoscience models the history of Mount Everest and suggests that a change in the course of a river 89,000 years ago was responsible for the uplift that gave the mountain the last 15 to 50 meters of height. The Arun River is a tributary of the Kosi River, and if it had diverted from its course, as believed, it would’ve eroded away lots of the pressure on Earth’s crust and the tectonic plates upon which they sit, allowing the mountains to ascend a little higher.

Hannah Richter, Science

Charm

Charm Industrial is a carbon removal startup that has just partnered up with the U.S. Forest Service to turn leftovers from forest-thinning operations into bio-oil, which they will subsequently inject underground. The effect is twofold, both generating carbon removal credits and locking away CO2, while also finding uses for leftover dead trees too small for mills. The initial deal is for 538 acres of forest, but eventually California wants to thin 1 million acres per year to cut the risk of wildfire, and having something to do with all that carbon would be pretty clutch.

Katie Brigham, Heatmap

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