It's difficult to tell but you will often find that ChatGPT repeats itself a lot, while news written by mainstream media is more concise so that they can fit more news and ads on the same spread. But with all things about trust, you don't trust the news based on how it is written, you trust it based on the trustworthiness of the brand name that produced it.

At the end of the day, that plate is worth pennies in terms of raw materials and any value above those pennies you think it has is all in the eyes of the beholder.

Or alternatively those people were investing because they were expecting a herd behavior which would push prices up after the TV ad.

Maybe Celsius was a viable business model at the start. But once they discovered the profits they earned from investing their customers money no longer offered enough to cover the interest they were paying to their customers, they should have reduced the amount of interest they were offering. Instead they chose to keep it high to maintain customer confidence and prevent a mass exodus. It might not have been a scam at the get go, but became one later on.

TL;DR, Bytedance became most valuable by using these SSP Strategies:
1. Broad exploration
2. Rapid iteration
3. Selective focus
4. Maximum-capability cross-pollination
5. Productizing platform services
6. Organizational Enablers
7. OKR system
8. Explicitly flattened hierarchy
9. Data-driven culture

When Trump signed the agreement with the Taliban in Feb 2020 to leave Afghanistan, the Taliban agreed not to attack US troops and in exchange the US would release 5000 Talibans in Afghanistan. If Biden reneged the deal to leave, the Taliban (now with a bigger force) would immediately resume attacks on US troops which would cause an even bigger backlash.

They needed salaried employees at the start to go to grocery stores and record the prices of goods for the day into the Instacart system. Then the contractors went and picked the groceries when orders were placed. Now that Instacart has enough scale, grocery stores want to join in the network, so the grocery store takes on the responsibility of entering the prices of goods into Instacart's system or else the contractors won't be directed to go there to buy goods. It's an ingenious system.

They did at the start. Ant Financial started out when Alibaba found out they had a lot of liquidity because, like Paypal, people would load money into their AliPay accounts to pay for online purchase and people rarely moved the money back to their bank accounts. AliPay even gave ways for their customers to earn interest on the money in their AliPay accounts. With that much liquidity on hand, AliPay then launched their lending program to make money off the money. It was only afterwards that they expand the concept and created financial instruments with banks to loan to their customers.

One thing that Ant was trying to do was make loans more accessible to regular people and SME businesses. Before then, banks would only loan to huge companies that were also often state-backed companies because those companies were more creditworthy. When those state-backed companies were offered those low interest loans, they parked the cash in the only place where profits were rising despite the economic down, which was in real estate. Which was why China has had a real estate bubble in the past few years. Ant is trying to achieve something that big banks don't have the balls to do.

But China's implementation of this digital currency requires a national ID and each unit of currency is linked to that ID in a national database. Each financial transaction is a record in the national database. This wouldn't fly in countries that value privacy.

Aren't 90% of mobile apps in China developed by the big 4 Chinese software companies? I would assume they are already licensed in every conceivable way in order to even operate as a business in China.

Our company experienced the same thing. The Chinese government required us to install their software to file taxes online. However our account urged us to set up an independent computer to run their software because if there were any technical problems we would have to send the whole computer in to be fixed. We were lucky to have listened to them as the independent computer didn't have any corporate secrets on it.