Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.

NASA astronaut back on Earth after record-breaking spaceflight

Summary: Astronaut Frank Rubio has been returned safely to Earth after spending 371 continuous days in orbit at the International Space Station.

Context: He touched down in Kazakhstan with two Cosmonauts on Wednesday, and though his time in space (which was originally intended to be much shorter, but a coolant leak on an earlier return craft extended his mission substantially) beat-out the previous American record of 355 days, it still falls a fair bit short of the overall record, which is held by Russian Cosmonaut Valeria Polyakov, who spent 437 continuous days in orbit in the late Mir space station back in the mid-1990s.

—Axios

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Prescriptions surge for Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and similar drugs

Summary: Diabetes medications that have been repurposed as obesity drugs have seen a huge surge in demand in the US over the past year, the volume of prescriptions increasing 300% from the start of 2020 through the end of 2022.

Context: Demand for this class of medications, which are generally referred to as GLP-1 weight loss drugs, is booming, despite their high cost of more than $900 per month, and despite most insurance plans not covering them; it’s thought that overall healthcare costs in the country could be brought down if this drug category were to be more widely used, as many of the highest costs for these plans, currently, are related to complications associated with obesity, and though there are some side effects associated with this class of medications, new research has also shown they substantially reduce the risk of serious cardiovascular events, which are a leading cause of debilitating ailment and death in the United States—so there’s a chance that at some point insurance companies will do the math, and it will make sense for them to start covering these drugs, at which point, it’s a fair bet, that demand will surge still further.

—Financial Times

Indonesia bans e-commerce sales on social media platforms like TikTok

Summary: The Indonesian government has banned the sale of goods on social media platforms in the country, saying that it hopes to protect small, local businesses from the impact of low-cost, overseas competitors.

Context: This is notable in part because social video platform TikTok has been pushing its new, Amazon-like TikTok Shop platform in Indonesia especially hard, as Indonesia is an important market for the company—it was the first market in which TikTok deployed its e-commerce offering, and it’s the second-largest global market for the company, after the United States—and for Chinese manufacturers more broadly; the government has said that companies failing to honor this ban could have their license to do business in Indonesia revoked, and that some foreign-made goods, sold by Indonesian companies on e-commerce platforms, would have their minimum price set at $100 in order to limit what the government considers to be unfair competition from below-market sellers based in other countries.

—The Guardian

After a substantial pandemic-era drop, cruise companies are seeing an uptick in bookings, once more, purportedly the consequence of “revenge travel” ambitions by people who were unable to go anywhere or do much of anything (safely, at least) for years, alongside a string of news about cruise passengers catching COVID, being stranded, etc.

—Chartr

September 2021

Previous cutoff month for OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot; it had information up till this month, but not after it, because of training-data constraints.

Those constraints were both practical and intentional: this kept the bot from speculating on evolving information, up-to-the-minute, which was meant to limit the impact it would have on things like news consumption (a real issue, as these sorts of generative AI tools are prone to making things up), but it was also just a limitation imposed by how the bot was trained, initially (using a chunk of data, rather than a stream of ever-changing data).

Earlier this week, though, the company announced that this bot will now have information about the world as it exists, today, and can thus hold conversations, aggregate information, and speculate about things that happened mere moments before.

—Reuters

Trust Click

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