Read this Thursday’s edition of the FolhaMercado newsletter (23) – 02/23/2023 – Market

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export suspended

The Ministry of Agriculture announced this Wednesday (22) the suspension of beef exports to China after the confirmation of an atypical case of mad cow in Pará.

Understand: the decision follows an understanding signed by the two countries in 2015 that the vessels are suspended after the identification of a case of the disease.

• The atypical form of mad cow appears spontaneously in older animals, causing no risk of dissemination to the herd or humans. The classic type of disease is usually caused by contaminated feed.

Confirmation of the atypical case was made by the laboratory of the International Organization for Animal Health in Canada. The government of Pará said that the case was identified in the southeast of the state, on a property that has 160 head of cattle and is already isolated.

Remember: in 2021, China maintained the embargo on the import of Brazilian protein for three and a half months after the confirmation of two atypical cases of mad cow.

Latch: this Wednesday, while the confirmation of the disease was expected, slaughterhouses suspended slaughter in several regions of the country, according to the Reuters agency.

• Before the announcement of the suspension of exports, the reaction already appeared on the Stock Exchange, with a drop in the prices of companies in the sector, such as Minerva (- 7.92%), JBS (- 4.33%) and Marfrig (- 4.71%).

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Economy on one side, loss on the other

The maintenance of remote work beyond the restrictions of the pandemic now exposes the other side of this model: without the movement of workers, businesses are closing and cities are losing money.

This is what a study by researchers from the universities of Stanford, Chicago and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexico in large American cities shows.

In numbers: the economy explains the preference for the home office. In more expensive cities like New York, workers on average skip spending $4,661 (BRL 24,000) per year on meals, shopping and entertainment close to the workplace.

• The situation is particularly serious for trade in Washington, where a quarter of workers are employed by the federal government and a good part of them are in the remote model. Over there, the savings reach US$ 4,051 (R$ 21 thousand).

CEOs of large companies have also called for an end to the home office. More recently, Andy Jassy of Amazon will require employees to be in their offices at least three days a week starting May 1.

More about job market

Four-day week: In an experiment carried out by 61 companies in the UK, 18 of them said they would adopt the format – characterized by 80% working hours and 100% salary – for good, and another 38 said they would continue the test.

• See here testimonials from British bosses and workers about the success of this routine.

Technology hires: December 2022 had the worst admissions balance for IT professionals and technicians since May 2020, when the Brazilian labor market was feeling the impact of the pandemic.

• The balance was 427 hires in the period, down 88.3% in relation to the 3,645 new jobs in December 2021. The data is from Caged, which captures hiring and firing in the formal market.

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Microsoft tries to make Bing less ‘annoyed’

To try to avoid behavior perceived as aggressive by users, Microsoft will limit the conversations of the robot integrated into the Bing search engine, which uses technology from the company that owns ChatGPT.

Understand: in the last week, user conversations with the chatbot in which the AI ​​(artificial intelligence) threatened them, considering them a risk to their integrity, went viral.

• The robot’s wrath usually came after a series of questions in which the “interviewer” tried to find out more technical details about the platform.

Now, Microsoft will limit the quiz to five questions per session and 50 questions per day.

• Sessions that are too long could cause Bing to “become repetitive or be provoked into giving responses that aren’t necessarily helpful or in keeping with the tone we designed,” bigtech said.

Opinion:

More about AI and chatbots

More than 200 books have been registered for sale on Amazon with ChatGPT as author or co-author, according to Reuters. Videos on YouTube show how a person can create up to 300 works per year with just commands to the chatbot.

• We’ve gathered here what you need to know about ChatGPT, OpenAI, and artificial intelligence in the language.

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Meta repeats Musk’s bet on Twitter

Following in the footsteps of Twitter, Meta will launch this week, in a testing period, a monthly subscription service for Instagram and Facebook.

Understand: the novelty will allow users to verify their accounts using a government-issued identity document and obtain a blue badge – which guarantees priority access to user support, as well as protection against forgery and greater visibility in comments.

• the price is $11.99 (R$62) per month for those who subscribe via the web and $14.99 (R$77.5) per month for those who prefer to do it directly from their cell phone, on Apple and Android systems –which charge a fee from the company for the transaction.

Which explains: the announcement by Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, comes at a time when the company is trying to diversify its source of revenue, which is now heavily concentrated in advertising, a sector that is showing signs of weakness in the face of the slowdown in the economy.

Yes but… The debut of the Twitter subscription model advertised by Elon Musk –which costs R$42 in Brazil– was not thrilling.

• According to The Information, less than 0.2% of the platform’s US users, or about 180,000 people, were Twitter Blue subscribers in mid-January, two months after the service started working.

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