Bloomberg Businessweek-Europe Edition December 19, 2022

● Globally, there have been 651 million cases of the coronavirus, and almost 6.7m have died. After China began loosening its strict Covid Zero measures in the wake of protests, signs are emerging that the virus is spreading rapidly, including in Beijing, where there are long lines at hospitals and a growing drug shortage. ● War in Ukraine ▶ Ukraine said it needs €1.5 billion ($1.6 billion) to fix its energy grid as close to 12 million people remain without power in freezing temperatures. ▶ Ukraine shot down 13 Russian drones headed for Kyiv on Dec. 14. The US is poised to further bolster its ally’s air defenses with Patriot air and missile defense batteries. ▶ President Vladimir Putin will skip his annual marathon press conference for the first time in a decade, possibly…

Have you heard of ChatGPT yet? It’s a thrilling, vexing, ontologically mesmerizing new technology created by the research group OpenAI in San Francisco. It can solve all your problems and answer all your questions. Or at least it will try to. In essence, ChatGPT is a bot trained to generate human-like responses to user inputs. Through the wonders of machine learning, it’s acquired a remarkably expansive skill set. On request, it can produce basic software code, rudimentary financial analysis, amusing poems and songs, spot-on imitations, reflective essays on virtually any topic, natural-language summaries of technical papers or scientific concepts, chat-based customer service, informed predictions, and personalized advice and answers—for better or worse—to just about any question. Unusually for a chatbot, it learns as it goes, and thus it can sustain engaging…

▶ The Bank of Japan sets interest rates on Dec. 20. The BOJ has kept rates low even as its peers keep hiking. Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has said that stance hasn’t changed. ▶ Nike reports earnings on Dec. 20. Investors will look for signs the sportswear giant has been able to cut back on an inventory glut that’s curbed its profitability this year. ▶ The annual Nasdaq reconstitution comes into effect on Dec. 19. Among companies joining the index are Rivian Automotive and Warner Bros. Baidu and Splunk are out.…

Remember lunch? It was the meal that wasn’t supposed to matter anymore. Long in decline as the plastic clamshell salad colonized spare desk real estate, the weekday lunch break was an immediate casualty of the shift to remote work at the start of the pandemic. Across office parks and downtowns the world over, the great feedlots of salaried workers sat empty: boozy clubhouses; takeout holes-in-the-wall specializing in pre-grilled panini; food trucks slinging cumin-scented chicken thighs drizzled with white sauce and atop a generous bed of rice. During the past half-century, the workday lunch has been cast as a wasteful indulgence, the enemy of productivity, especially in America. It ate away at company time, interrupted the flow of work, taxed the wallets of employees and heaped on unnecessary calories, leading to weight gain…

On the evening of Nov. 16, a corner of the Warner Bros. studio lot was festooned with string lights and tinsel hanging above tables lined with chocolate fountains and gingerbread cookies. Santa Claus asked children if they’d been naughty or nice while a red carpet, flanked by two Christmas trees, welcomed stars of the three movies that premiered that night: A Christmas Mystery, Holiday Harmony and A Hollywood Christmas. It’s not the sort of fare Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., which manages multibillion-dollar franchises such as Batman and Game of Thrones, is typically known for. Each holiday film was produced on a shoestring budget of $3 million to $5 million for HBO Max, the company’s streaming service, by the professional race-car driver Ali Afshar. But they’re part of an increasingly crucial genre…

To many observers, the Federal Trade Commission under previous administrations was a paper tiger. But President Joe Biden’s FTC chair, Lina Khan, has been particularly vocal about the dangers of market concentration, and unafraid to go to the courts to back up her own skepticism. After some moderate successes halting deals among smaller companies, on Dec. 8 Khan launched her biggest challenge yet: a suit to block Microsoft Corp.’s $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard Inc. The FTC suit argues that combining a top maker of game consoles with one of the largest online gaming companies could limit rivals’ access to the most popular titles, such as Activision’s blockbuster shooter Call of Duty. Microsoft has said it intends to vigorously contest the case, filed in the agency’s in-house court with a…