Business

The unseen costs of dirty work

THE TERM “dirty work” was coined by Everett Hughes, an American sociologist, to capture the attitudes of ordinary Germans to the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Hughes used it to convey the idea of something immoral but conveniently distant, activities that were tacitly endorsed by the public but that could also be disavowed by them.…

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Making sense of the East-West divide in tech

THANKS TO A venture-capital (VC) boom, it is no longer unusual to find tech unicorns, as unlisted startups valued above $1bn are known, springing up in middle-income countries. However, two coming from Turkey are particularly strange creatures. First, they are big. Trendyol, an e-commerce company, is valued at $16.5bn, giving it the status of a…

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Unilever’s £50bn health cheque

Purchasing GSK’s consumer-health division may be hard to swallowWHEN UNILEVER bought Bestfoods for $20.3bn at the turn of the millennium, it was one of the largest cash acquisitions ever. After two failed bids, the British consumer-goods giant dug up an extra $2bn to sweeten the deal. It divested 700 of its brands in the year…

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Why Microsoft is splashing $69bn on video games

EVEN FOR Microsoft, which boasts a market value of $2.3trn, $69bn is a lot of money. On January 18th the firm said it would pay that sum—in cash—for Activision Blizzard, a video-game developer. It is by far the biggest acquisition in the video-game industry’s history, and the largest ever by Microsoft, more than twice the…

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Drinking in the office

Don’t ban, don’t binge and don’t badgerA RATHER GOOD black comedy called “Another Round” depicts what happens when a bunch of disenchanted Danish school teachers constantly top up the levels of alcohol in their blood. At first the experiment goes well: the students respond enthusiastically to their newly inspiring teachers. But unconsciousness, bed-wetting and worse…

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Can Silicon Valley still dominate global innovation?

TAKE AN EVENING walk on 17th Cross Road in Bengaluru’s HSR Layout district, and you bump into tech types stepping out of their startup’s office and into one of the local microbreweries. They might work for Udaan (e-commerce), Vedantu (education technology) or another of the growing herd of private startups valued at $1bn, whose proliferation…

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