Cull

Good morning, you glorious beasts.

The HS2 project is spending £125 million on a “bat tunnel” to protect wildlife from speeding trains - nearly £30 million more than originally budgeted.

Environment Secretary Steve Reed lamented the "ludicrous" ballooning costs, but too much of the 900-metre tunnel has already been constructed for abandoning the project to make sense.

It remains to be seen what the influx of new builds will do for bat rental prices in the Buckinghamshire woodland.

CONSUMER TECH
Dating apps are cutting staff because everyone’s tired of them

Particularly Bumble, which has just cut almost a third of its staff. This comes just after the owner of Tinder, Hinge and Grindr said it was laying off 13% of its people. 

Investors aren’t happy with dating apps

Like Bumble, which is losing money fast, making its investors rather disappointed. 

God’s blood, its share price has fallen 92% since it became listed. 

Because we are getting tired of dating apps

Hinge, Tinder, and Grindr all lost users last year, according to Ofcom. 

We’re exhausted, with three-quarters of Gen Z users reporting burnout after using dating apps - tired of swiping right and getting nothing to show for it. 

Which is the fault of investors

Who encouraged dating apps to put premium services behind paywalls - things like unlimited swipes and preferences. 

Since then, dating app downloads have fallen year on year. 

To be fair to investors, they faced a structural problem: 

Dating apps have a high churn rate

Possibly somewhere between 20-30% a month.

That’s the whole point of dating apps, of course: use them to find a partner, then delete them forever (unless you’re a cad). 

It just means that the better the algorithm is at matchmaking, the less time customers use it. 

Which in turn means less money for investors. Thus:

Bumble’s share price rose at the news of the cull

By 30%, to be exact. 

The CEO says the move will save the company $40 million a year, which they’ll invest in developing the sort of user experience that doesn’t make people want to delete it.

MEDIA
We’re on our phones more than ever - and it’s making us sad

According to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, at least, which has just published its annual study of British media consumer habits. Let’s start with the basics:

We bloody love our phones

It’s the first time in recorded history that we spend more time looking at our phones (3 hours 21 minutes) than at a TV (3 hours 17 minutes). 

At pretty consistent times, too: 

• 5am - 10pm – mobile phone.

• 8pm - 12am - TV.

That means we spend an average of 7.5 hours a day looking at some sort of screen, whether it’s a phone, computer or TV. That’s one hour more than a decade ago. 

Social media is responsible

Nearly half of phone use is spent on some sort of social media platform. 

Listening to music or podcasts (20%). 

TV (15%) and news (3%). 

But our addiction is making us depressed

Young people (up to the tender age of 24) spend an average of 4 hours 49 minutes on their phones, which is double the overall average. 

But 55% of viewers said they felt sadder watching videos on their phones than on TV. 

We really must get out more.

DEFENCE
It’s a lovely time to be an arms dealer

Babcock International fits nuclear submarines, and there’s been a staggeringly high demand for all manner of world-destroying weaponry in recent years. 

Which might be why in the last year, it’s recorded:

• An 11% increase in revenue

• 50% operating profit. 

They’re in high demand

You can tell by the contracts they’ve just signed. 

A £70 million contract with Ascent here, a £1 billion contract with the British Army there. 

And it’ll only get better

NATO members have just agreed to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP. British companies can now win contracts with EU states for military contracts. 

Hip hip hooray for British arms dealers!

NEWS BITES
This just in…

• 🧬 💡 A group of Cambridge researchers is building DNA from scratch, the first project of its kind in history. The Wellcome Trust just donated £10 million to see it done. The scientists aim to build increasingly bigger blocks of human DNA until they’ve synthetically constructed a human chromosome. That way, they can study how genes and DNA make us incurably sick or, in my case, incurably handsome and powerful. 

• 🔞 🔐 Porn sites are introducing government-approved age ID checks in July, thanks to the government’s Online Safety Bill. No one knows how these companies will actually verify your age, but government-approved methods include credit card checks and photo identification. So they’ll have your face tied to whatever filth you’re watching, you absolute savages.

• 🍳 ❄️ The number of IVF treatments increased 34% since 2013, which means that 1 in every 32 births are the result of fertility treatment. More women are freezing their eggs, but the number of women actually using those frozen eggs remains the same. The fertility rate also dropped to a new low in Britain, at 1.4 children per woman. Time to get breeding.

• 🚲️ 🔈️ London will regulate rickshaws after TfL received overwhelming support for its little survey. Licences will be brought in for starters. Right now, so-called “Pedicab” drivers don’t need to pass a background check, unlike taxi drivers. Maybe they’ll find a way to regulate how loud the music is, because 96% of survey respondents (and 2,400 comments) were related to just how bloody noisy those damn rickshaws are.

• 🚢 🚭️ UK startup Seabound has developed a carbon-capture technology for container ships, which are responsible for 3.9% of global emissions. It’s an arrangement of tiny quicklime pellets that soak up toxic fumes, and via a chemical reaction, turn into limestone. In one trial of a container ship doing a 3-week stint down the Suez Canal, it absorbed 78% of carbon fumes, and 90% of the sulphur. 

• 🏘️ 🫠 Britain’s financial regulator wants to ease mortgage rules, possibly by relaxing the ‘stress tests’ imposed on lenders, which look at whether loans can be repaid by the customer if interest rates rise. This comes after the news that the number of British adults who own their own homes has declined to 29% from 33% in 2023.