TheChek News Flow

Cost jumped by hundreds of pounds during online sale as a result of ‘dynamic’ pricing system

Ministers are planning to probe the use of “dynamic” pricing that has forced up costs for thousands of music fans who struggled to secure tickets for rock band Oasis.

The government will include the practice used by sites such as Ticketmaster in a forthcoming consultation into the ticketing market in the UK, which will be aimed at cracking down on unfair pricing and ticket touts.

In a statement on Sunday night, UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy said it had been “depressing to see vastly inflated prices excluding ordinary fans from having a chance of enjoying their favourite band live”. 

She said the government will include “issues around the transparency and use of dynamic pricing, including the technology around queueing systems which incentivise it, in our forthcoming consultation on consumer protections for ticket resales”.

She added: “Working with artists, industry and fans we can create a fairer system that ends the scourge of touts, rip-off resales and ensures tickets at fair prices.”

Ticketmaster, the world’s biggest seller of music and sporting tickets, has come under fire for using a “dynamic” pricing system that changes the cost of tickets according to demand, a practice often adopted in the US. Ticketmaster says the system helps stop ticket touts, and gives more money to artists by allowing them to price their tickets nearer market value.

The reunion of the Mancunian band sparked fevered demand for tickets among its millions of fans, including not just the original audiences but also their children given a resurgence in 1990s music among younger generations.

Tickets for the first Oasis gigs in the UK and Ireland in 16 years went on sale on Saturday morning, with the tour expected to generate hundreds of millions of pounds across ticket sales, hospitality and hotel packaging, merchandise and possible media rights sales. The band has already benefited from a surge on streaming services for its tracks.

However, fans were left angered after waiting for many hours to access tickets, and then finding that seats were priced much higher than initially stated. Hundreds took to social media complaining of the spiralling cost, with standing tickets for some venues jumping by hundreds of pounds. Many also reported being thrown out of the queue after waiting for hours.

David Baines, Labour MP for St Helens North, said it was “shocking to hear that Ticketmaster UK are now using ‘dynamic pricing’ to fleece fans and rake in the cash”, adding that it was “especially insulting for those who have queued all day”. 

The Labour government has made tackling higher prices caused by ticket touts — who often buy up large numbers of tickets and sell them on at a massive profit — a priority for its first year in power, and said it was committed to supporting fair and transparent ticket pricing.

Dublin MEP Regina Doherty said Ireland’s Competition and Consumer Protection Commission should investigate Ticketmaster following the surge in pricing for tickets at the city’s Croke Park.

“The EU’s Digital Services Act has sections included specifically to ensure large platforms that control aspects of the digital economy don’t just make up their own rules that are unfair for consumers,” she said. “I think TicketMaster’s ‘in-demand’ pricing structure certainly needs investigating in this context.”

Ticketmaster is owned by US media company Live Nation, which manages music venues and festivals. The outrage will add to the concerns among music executives and artists over Live Nation’s power after it acquired the ticketing platform in 2009, allowing it to span management of venues and artists as well as ticket sales.

The US Department of Justice, along with 30 state and district attorneys-general, filed a civil antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster in May for “monopolisation and other unlawful conduct that thwarts competition in markets across the live entertainment industry”. 

The lawsuit seeks to restore competition, and provide better choices at lower prices for fans. US attorney-general Merrick B Garland said it was “time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster”.

Cris Miller, global managing director of Viagogo, the world’s largest ticket resale marketplace for live events, said he was “glad to see the Department of Justice act finally” to sue Live Nation for monopolising. “Ticketmaster has a monopoly [in the UK] too . . . they have a disproportionate amount of control over the concerts.”

Pricing strategies are also agreed with artists, however, which has sparked criticism of Oasis. Artists and promoters can turn down dynamic pricing to create a level playing field for all fans.

Aidan Moffat, of Scottish band Arab Strap, said on X that as “many people are finding out today, dynamic pricing is an utterly despicable practice, and acts who do it are no better than the touts they claim to oppose . . . Voice of the working classes? Pfft.”

On its website, Ticketmaster said “prices are adjusted according to supply and demand. The goal is to give fans fair and safe access to the best tickets while enabling artists and other people involved in staging live events to price tickets closer to their true market value.”

Ticketmaster was not available for comment on Sunday, while promoter SJM Concerts did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

What California AI Bill Could Mean

As we described in this piece on Thursday night, the bill requires AI developers to anticipate “what their customers do with their AI and to pay steep fines if the software causes harm.”

Whoa! You can just imagine what that could mean. As our story pointed out, some people worry this would make AI developers liable for what their customers do with their software. That’s a nightmare scenario.

The devil is in the details, as they say. On a conference call today for subscribers to The Information, proponents of the bill, such as California state Sen. Scott Wiener, debated it with critics, such as Ian Stoica, co-founder of AI startups Anyscale and Databricks and a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Wiener argued that amendments to the bill deal with the worst-case scenarios outlined by opponents—particularly as related to how people use open-source models.

Stoica, though, argued that the bill won’t do anything to promote AI safety and that it would hurt development of open-source AI software made by local companies. If the bill is signed into law, Stoica predicted the open-source software we use will come from “foreign nations,” not California. “Now you ask yourself…whether that is [a] safer, safer world.”

There’s no guarantee Newsom will sign. Aside from the intense industry opposition, the bill is opposed by Democrats on the national stage, such as Nancy Pelosi. Of course, one of Wiener’s arguments is that California has to act, because Congress won’t. He’s got a point there.

Still, given that Wiener also claims the bill is meant to be forward looking, applying to “models that do not exist yet,” you have to wonder what the rush is. Better to get this right, no?

Nvidia’s Future Relies on Chips That Push Technology’s Limits

As the company pushes the chip-making envelope, manufacturing hurdles are causing delays and higher costs

o keep its lead in AI chips, Nvidia NVDA 1.51%increase; green up pointing triangle is banking on the idea that bigger is better.

Bigger is also turning out to be more difficult.

The digital brains of the company’s newest artificial-intelligence chips, roughly the size of four Scrabble tiles arranged in a square, are about twice as big as the ones whose sales propelled an explosion in Nvidia’s business since early last year. The new chips, dubbed Blackwell, boast an even bigger increase in performance—they house 2.6 times the number of transistors—and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has said demand is red hot.

But Nvidia, when it reported strong quarterly sales and profit on Wednesday, also said challenges manufacturing the new chips were largely responsible for narrower profit margins and a $908 million provision it booked in the most recent period. Those factors pushed its highflying stock down 6.4% on Thursday.

Nvidia hasn’t detailed the nature of the issue. But analysts and industry executives say its engineering challenges stem mostly from the size of the Blackwell chips, which require a significant departure in design. Instead of one big piece of silicon, Blackwell consists of two advanced new Nvidia processors and numerous memory components joined in a single, delicate mesh of silicon, metal and plastic.

The manufacturing of each chip has to be close to perfect: serious defects in any one part can spell disaster, and with more components involved, there is a greater chance of that happening. What’s more, the heat generated by all those pieces risks warping different materials in the package at different rates.

It is a wonky-sounding set of challenges involving microscopic circuitry that can nonetheless have a sizable impact on the bottom line. Any significant defect can render a $40,000 Blackwell chip useless and damage the overall manufacturing “yield,” a critical industry measurement of the usable percentage of a chip maker’s output.

“The issue has been getting the chips to work together and the yields,” said G. Dan Hutcheson, vice chair of TechInsights, an industry analysis firm. When the yields on individual parts of chips aren’t high enough, he said, “You find that everything goes south very quick.”

Blackwell’s complexity

Nvidia said Wednesday it made a change in Blackwell’s design to improve its yield. No “functional changes” to the chips were necessary, Huang said on a call with analysts.

Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said Nvidia was on track to increase Blackwell production and expects it to contribute several billion dollars to revenue in the quarter ending in January.

In a report earlier this month, analysts at UBS said Nvidia’s main issue with Blackwell was the complexity of using a new way of joining chips together that is offered by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the contract chip maker that produces most of Nvidia’s chips. TSMC declined to comment.

The new approach, necessary because of Blackwell’s size, came with hurdles including increased manufacturing complexity and warpage that affected reliability and performance, the analysts said. Those were the primary factors challenging the Blackwell rollout, they said, although rising production yields over time should allow Nvidia to produce the chips as planned next year.

Nvidia’s recent shift to releasing a new generation of chips every year—instead of every other year previously—has heightened the pressure to sort out manufacturing issues quickly.

The company acknowledged that dynamic in a securities filing Wednesday, saying the “increased frequency and complexity of newly introduced products could result in quality or production issues” that could raise costs or cause delays.

‘One giant chip’

Such problems aren’t unique to Nvidia, and industry insiders say they are likely to emerge more as chip makers look to add processing power by increasing chip size. Chip-design changes to iron out flaws or improve yields are also commonplace in the industry.

Complexity will increase in the future as companies look to squeeze out more performance by stacking chips on top of each other and using more silicon, said Lisa Su, CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia’s nearest chip-making competitor.

“It’s a lot of technology to make work,” she said. “Is it just going to get more complicated and bigger? Absolutely. That’s the world we live in.”

There also are benefits in next-generation chips that are more energy-efficient and need less power, she said—a growing concern as AI data centers gobble up grid capacity.

Huang has used Blackwell’s size as a selling point. “It’s just one giant chip,” he said at an Nvidia conference in March. “When we were told Blackwell’s ambitions were beyond the limits of physics, the engineers said, ‘So what?’”

With Hopper, Nvidia’s current-generation AI chip, Nvidia had already reached a size limit in chip making. The most advanced lithography machines, which imprint minute circuitry on silicon, are only able to make a chip up to around 800 square millimeters, or a square with sides of about 1.1 inches.

To push the envelope with Blackwell, Nvidia opted to knit two maximum-size chips together in one chip, something that hadn’t been done in commercial graphics chips like the ones it makes.

“To do meaningful work in AI, you need a huge amount of compute, and that converts to many transistors, many more than can fit on a single chip,” said Andrew Feldman, a founder of Cerebras Systems, a chip-making startup that competes with Nvidia. “The technology to get to two [chips] is difficult to develop, the technology to get to four is harder, and to get to eight, even harder.”

Cerebras, whose investors include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has attacked the problem by developing the largest chips ever made—platters of silicon that are usually diced up into smaller chips but that Cerebras figured out how to connect and operate as one huge chip.

The company, which this week launched a cloud-computing service for AI deployments to challenge Nvidia’s dominance, has gathered customers including AstraZeneca and the Mayo Clinic. It recently confidentially filed for an initial public offering in the U.S.

Parties in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition government receive a drubbing

The Alternative for Germany has won elections in the eastern region of Thuringia, the first time a far-right party has secured victory in a state poll in the country’s postwar history.

Projections by Germany’s public broadcaster ZDF put the AfD on 33.2 per cent in Thuringia, way ahead of all other parties. The centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was in second place with 23.6 per cent, as of 8pm UK time.

In the neighbouring state of Saxony the two parties were neck and neck, with the CDU projected to win 31.5 per cent and the AfD to come second with 30.4 per cent.

Tino Chrupalla, the AfD’s co-leader, described the party’s result in Thuringia as “sensational”. 

“One thing is clear: the will of the voters is that there should be political change, both in Saxony and in Thuringia,” he said. “If you want to do credible politics, you won’t be able to do it without the AfD.”

The results are a disaster for the parties in chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition, with the Social Democrats, Greens and liberals all predicted to sink to single-digits in both states. In Thuringia, the SPD is projected to suffer its worst result in a regional election in postwar German history.

They reflect mounting voter frustration among East Germans with a government many associate with high inflation, economic stagnation, surging energy costs and constant internecine squabbling.

But they also show how voters are increasingly abandoning the centre ground for populist parties on the political margins.

Omid Nouripour, the Greens’ co-chair, described the election as a “turning point”.

“People from the world of culture, people with immigrant roots, people who go to Gay Pride are really scared,” Nouripour said. “We have to stand together with them and defend democracy.”

The AfD is not the only beneficiary of the East Germans’ anger: they also voted in large numbers for a new far-left party, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW), which ZDF projected to receive 11.5 per cent in Saxony and 15.6 per cent in Thuringia.

Voters were attracted to both the AfD and BSW by their opposition to the war in Ukraine. Both parties have heavily criticised German weapons supplies to Kyiv, as well as western sanctions against Russia, and called for negotiations to bring about an end to the fighting.

The result has shown that 34 years after German reunification, a majority of people in two regions of the former communist east of the country are deeply disillusioned with the mainstream parties of the centre and frustrated with the way Germany is run.

Despite its stunning performance in Thuringia, the AfD will not be able to form a government there. Since no other party will co-operate with it, it will not enjoy the parliamentary majority needed to rule.

The AfD, which was formed 11 years ago by economists angry at the Eurozone bailouts, has morphed into a hardline, historically revisionist nationalist party vehemently opposed to immigration.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has designated the party’s local Saxon and Thuringian branches as “rightwing extremist”.

In Thuringia the party is led by Björn Höcke, an ethno-nationalist who has been fined twice by local courts this year for using banned Nazi slogans in speeches to supporters. 

It could prove difficult to form viable coalitions without the AfD, however. For the CDU to govern in Thuringia, for example, it might have to team up with the BSW, an option that would be hard to swallow for many in the centre-right party. 

Wagenknecht, a former communist who many see as an apologist for Russian President Vladimir Putin, has made changing Germany’s policy on Ukraine a precondition for any coalition talks.

She said her voters wanted to see “a different foreign policy in Germany”.

“They want to achieve more peace, more diplomacy, and that’s our condition for [joining] a government,” she said on ZDF.

That has triggered outrage in the CDU, which has been steadfast in its support for Ukraine and has pressed the Scholz government, already the second-largest provider of military assistance to Kyiv after the US, to supply even more weapons.

Höcke has taken a similar position to Wagenknecht, saying in his campaign speeches that the AfD was against Germany “being dragged into a war with Russia by some wacko western elites”.

But it might even prove impossible for the CDU to form a government with the BSW. Analysis by ZDF showed that even a three-way coalition between the CDU, BSW and the Social Democrats would be one seat short of a majority in the 90-seat Thuringian parliament. 

The election campaign was also overshadowed by the August 23 terror attack in the west German town of Solingen, when a man fatally stabbed three people and injured eight others. The man, a Syrian national suspected of being a member of Isis, was arrested a day after the attack after handing himself in to police.

Both the AfD and BSW seized on the incident to claim that uncontrolled immigration had led to a surge in violent crime on German streets and to demand that asylum-seekers who have committed crimes be deported.

The disastrous performance of the three parties in Scholz’s coalition — the SPD, Greens and liberals — has led to speculation that one of them might withdraw from the government, triggering snap elections.

But experts say such an outcome is unlikely. All three are polling so badly nationwide that there is little appetite to face voters ahead of the next scheduled election in the autumn of 2025.

Decision against Dozy Mmobuosi by US court comes after civil complaint by SEC against his Nasdaq-listed companies

A US federal court has ordered a Nigerian businessman, who last year sought to buy the English football club Sheffield United, to pay more than $250mn in fines and barred him from serving as a director of a public company.

Last year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission had charged Dozy Mmobuosi and three of his companies, including two Nasdaq-listed enterprises, with fraud for inflating the “financial performance metrics of his companies and key operating subsidiaries to defraud investors worldwide”.

Judge Jesse M Furman, of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, has now entered a final judgment by default against Mmobuosi and his companies after the entrepreneur failed to make any representations in the civil complaint filed last December by the SEC.

The judge wrote that Mmobuosi and his companies, Tingo Group, Agri-Fintech Holdings and Tingo International Holdings, had “failed to answer, plead, or otherwise defend” themselves in the case.

Mmobuosi and his three US-based entities have been ordered to pay more than $250mn in fines after the SEC alleged that his empire was a “fiction”.

Tingo, a fintech group, claimed it had more than 9mn customers in Nigeria, most of whom were farmers, and that it had a food processing business.

The SEC said in last year’s complaint that the “purported assets, revenues, expenses, customers and suppliers” of Mmobuosi’s Tingo group were all “virtually entirely fabricated” and that the scale of the fraud at the venture was “staggering”.

Tingo Mobile reported cash and cash equivalents of $461.7mn for 2022 in its Nigerian bank accounts, but the SEC said its balance was less than $50.

Hindenburg, the US-based short seller, cast doubts on the viability of the business last year, calling it an “exceptionally obvious scam” in a report that sent Tingo’s stock prices plummeting more than 60 per cent on the day of its release.

The charges filed last year came a month after the SEC halted the trading in the shares of Nasdaq-listed Tingo Group and Agri-Fintech Holdings over what the agency described as “questions and concerns regarding the adequacy and accuracy of publicly available information”.

The entrepreneur shot into the limelight last year when he launched an audacious bid to buy Sheffield United, a Yorkshire-based club that played in the English Premier League last year and is now in the second tier of English football.

Mmobuosi and his companies could not be immediately reached for comment.

Nuclear Weapons Always Stopped Invasions. Then Ukrainian Troops Poured Into Russia.

In testing Putin’s red lines, Kyiv is sparking a rediscovery of Cold War-era ideas about nuclear escalation

Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk isn’t just a brash bid to upend Russia’s invasion. It also marks the first time that a declared nuclear power has faced invasion and occupation by another country.

For decades, nuclear-escalation theory has presumed that countries with atomic weapons were largely immune from attack because an aggressor risked triggering armageddon. Relatively small states including Israel, Iran, North Korea and Libya have pursued nuclear arms in part to deter attacks by larger, better-armed adversaries.

Nuclear powers have scuffled: India has had border skirmishes with China and Pakistan. Palestinian Hamas militants in October stormed into Israel, which is widely believed to have nuclear weapons. But generally the threat of annihilation has protected nuclear-armed countries from large-scale attack and kept peace between them.

Ukraine isn’t a nuclear power and is outgunned by Russia, yet Kyiv has managed for more than three weeks to control territory now totaling almost 500 square miles. It is a stunning twist. Strategists over the years have frequently envisaged countries from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization grabbing Russian turf in a fight, not a beleaguered underdog doing it.

Now Western leaders, military thinkers and nuclear theorists are puzzling over what current events mean for prospects of Russian escalation—and for future war gaming. Theoretical risk faces a real-world test, forcing a re-examination of the role nuclear weapons can play in deterrence.

Russia’s published nuclear doctrine says Moscow would only resort to atomic weapons if the country’s sovereignty or territorial integrity were threatened. Although Ukraine occupies a chunk of Russian soil, neither side appears to consider the Kursk region strategically vital, so Ukraine’s attack—however embarrassing to the Kremlin—shows no sign of crossing a Russian red line.

But ambiguity and uncertainty are integral to nuclear gamesmanship.

“No one really knows the Russian red line—they’ve never given any precision,” said Nikolai Sokov, a former Soviet and Russian arms-control negotiator. “We may find out later that we crossed the red line two months ago,” said Sokov, who now briefs Western military leaders on Russian strategic thinking.

One wild card Sokov notes is that the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin seem to consider threats to his regime as sovereign threats to Russia. In a sign of how events are affecting deterrence calculations, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Sunday said that the Kremlin would adjust its nuclear doctrine based on analysis of the war and the West’s role, according to state news agency TASS, reiterating a pledge Putin has made several times.

Fear of crossing Russian red lines has shaped President Biden’s approach to the war. Not wanting it to become a direct fight with NATO, he has hesitated to give Ukraine weapons it has begged for, including tanks, advanced missiles and jet fighters. Kyiv eventually got most of them, prompting Ukrainians and their Western supporters to argue that Putin’s red lines were flexible.

Ukraine aims to show with its Kursk incursion that another taboo can be broken without dire consequences. Part of the aim is to convince the White House that Ukraine should be allowed to use more lethal and precise U.S. weapons to attack Russia.

Many Western officials, particularly in Washington and Berlin, remain more cautious because Putin is so unpredictable.

Uncertainty over where Russia’s red lines lie is “the fundamental challenge of strategic ambiguity,” said Janice Gross Stein, a professor of conflict management at the University of Toronto. Testing limits and signaling through threats or pledges of restraint form what she calls a “contest between a strategy to manipulate uncertainty and a strategy to reduce uncertainty.”

Gaming out events triggered by Ukraine’s push into Kursk harks back to the Cold War, when escalation theory was a widely studied discipline. When the Soviets developed an atomic bomb in 1949, four years after the U.S. had, Western strategists tried to envisage how the terrifying weapons might figure into combat.

Their massive destructive power—and the far greater danger from thermonuclear weapons, starting in 1952—prompted creation of a new field, nuclear deterrence thinking, and analytical tools to support it.

Game theory, pioneered in the 1920s by mathematician John von Neumann, flourished as an approach to assessing nuclear brinkmanship. To tackle weighty unknowns, the Rand Corporation, created as a Pentagon think tank, used theoretical constructs such as the so-called prisoner’s dilemma—a situation where two parties that are unable to communicate must separately decide whether to cooperate for mutual benefit—to play out how the U.S. and Soviet Union might act and react in conflict scenarios.

Theorist and economist Thomas Schelling in 1960 codified the analysis in a deeply influential collection of scholarly articles, “The Strategy of Conflict,” which presented an intellectual path for assessing deterrence and escalation.

Nuclear theorizing drew brilliant thinkers. Schelling won a Nobel Prize in economics. Escalation theory was advanced by the work of Nobel-winning economist John Nash, subject of the film “A Beautiful Mind.”

Yet nuclear strategizing and determining an adversary’s red lines remain a high-stakes game of chicken.

“It is like we’re walking in the dark toward a cliff,” said Christopher Chivvis, who has assessed nuclear-risk issues at Rand and as a U.S. intelligence officer. “It is out there somewhere. We just don’t know where it is.”

Putin has more or less directly threatened to use nuclear weapons at several points since launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But already a decade ago, Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula marked a new level of post-Cold War aggression that prompted escalation theorists to dust off their textbooks.

About six years ago, political science professor James Davis, chair of international relations at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, realized that nuclear decision-making had faded as an academic field but was returning as a concern. He began teaching courses on it, including one titled “Fundamentals of Arms Control.”

Now he’s reassessing some long-held assumptions.

“We always thought nuclear weapons weren’t good for anything but deterrence,” he said. “We really didn’t think a nonnuclear power would invade a nuclear power.”

Communicating uncertainties of escalation theory outside the classroom, to the general public, can be even more puzzling. Specialists note that 75 years of successful deterrence doesn’t mean the approach can always prevent nuclear war.

“It is a difficult messaging task for people who think about this full-time,” said Chivvis, who is now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “You don’t want to be warning about this all the time, but you don’t want to say it’s not going to happen.”

Increasing the use of a little-known, intermediate category of worker is one way to start

For the drivers and riders of the UK gig economy, employment status really matters. Most are classed as self-employed and do not receive statutory sick pay, for example. That’s worth remembering as they dodge between cars trying to make enough money to live on and not end up injured, or worse. 

Efforts to improve the rights of this group have resulted in some changing their employment status — but often to one where they are neither self-employed nor employees. Instead they belong to a little-known, intermediate category of work, known by the opaque term “limb (b)”. 

In 2021, the UK Supreme Court moved Uber drivers into this intermediate status. Until last year, couriers for Just Eat were also included in it. Workers in this category have the right to annual leave and a minimum wage, but they still do not have full employee rights. They don’t have protection from redundancy or dismissal, for example. The trade-off is that they tend to have more autonomy.

Recently, though, this limb (b) category has become highly contentious, primarily because of how some major gig economy companies operate in the grey areas of employment law.

Prior to the general election, the Labour party suggested that all of these workers should become full employees instead — a policy known as single worker status. While this idea was not included in the King’s Speech, the imminent employment rights bill will have an impact on any future reforms to status. For example, gig economy drivers who once had no employment rights at all could have employee rights from day one.

This won’t improve things for all in the gig economy but it might help to clarify and enforce the law. Many legal experts and trade unions have been tearing their hair out at the inconsistencies and confusion in employment judgments, which have classed Uber drivers as limb (b) workers but Deliveroo riders as self-employed.

But do workers want the intermediate employment status to go? The answer is not clear cut. Our research project found that their views reflected the complexities of life at the sharp end of the labour market where the realistic alternative of many employee jobs is a harsh one. Any move to shift them into employee status — designed to improve their rights — must ensure the change does not actually make their working lives more unpleasant.

Crucially, the intermediate employment status was initially created to extend the protection of employment law to vulnerable self-employed people. But this group doesn’t easily fit into employer-employee relationships, which is what single worker status could do in practice.

One option might be to keep the intermediate worker status but reform it to include more people, at least in the short-term. This could offer a quick and practical way to wrap a new group of the most vulnerable gig economy workers into a protective layer of employment law — far sooner than the wholesale shift to single worker status suggested by the government could hope to do.

In particular, it could emphasise the amount of control that companies exercise over workers as the primary test of their status. It could pay less attention to whether employers can send a substitute or not — which is how some companies have tried to keep their workforce classed as self-employed.

This is clearly a debate we need to have, and it’s important to start now. Listening to the voices of those affected by these policies is a vital first step.

Most of us, thankfully, don’t have to constantly police our employment rights. With the right status reforms, the most vulnerable workers in our society can enjoy that security too. 

“Industry,” a tale of Gen Z bankers and a chaotic tech founder, has become an heir to “Succession” just as HBO and its corporate parent could use a breakthrough hit. Plus, what else to watch this fall.

Konrad Kay and Mickey Down were out at a party near the end of 2023 when they received word from HBO that their show, “Industry,” would move from its home on Monday evenings to the television industry’s premier time slot: 9 p.m. on Sunday, a position HBO had previously given to the likes of “Succession,” “Game of Thrones” and “The Sopranos.”

At that point, they had already finished filming the third season of the London-set show, which centers on a trio of young, attractive bankers striving to find professional success and something resembling personal contentment in the cutthroat world of finance. The career-redefining call that the pair received mid-party seemed like a scene out of “Industry.”

“They’d seen the first couple of episodes of the [season],” Down, 35, recounted earlier this month shortly after the third season’s debut. “They were really impressed with how it leveled up.”

This show of faith in the series—which had developed a cult fan base but had yet to achieve the monster ratings or awards-ceremony hauls of other HBO fare—has signaled the potential anointment of “Industry” as the water-cooler show (or, uh, the TikTok For You Page show) of the moment. “Me and Mickey grew up watching HBO, so all of our favorite shows are ‘Sopranos,’ all this stuff,” said Kay, 36. “Obviously to be in that legacy is very fun for us. But from just a practical point of view, we were very excited that more people were going to see it.” Down added, “I think someone’s always thinking, ‘What’s on HBO on Sundays at nine?’”

Nothing HBO has put on Sunday nights since “Succession” has captured the cultural zeitgeist quite like the Roy family was able to. That has created a cultural vacuum—and a corporate challenge. The network’s decision to anoint “Industry” as its surprise heir to “Succession” is a reflection of a fractured moment in the media industry and underscores how topsy-turvy the past few years have been for HBO and its corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery. Both could really use the type of hit “Industry” seems to be growing into, and if the show continues on its trajectory, it might go a decent way toward assuring viewers and investors alike that HBO—a Warner Bros. Discovery crown jewel—hasn’t lost its magic.

Kay and Down both noted the handful of factors that may have contributed to the decision of HBO brass, including the slowdown caused by last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike. That didn’t affect production of “Industry,” which is filmed in the U.K. with a local production company, but it slowed down work on HBO’s U.S.-based productions.

“Some part of it was a function of the fact that there were two strikes and there were a lot of things that just had to pause,” Down said. “So I think it was a mixture of the fact that there was availability and the fact that they were really happy with the season.” Another draw may have been that this season features two high-profile guest stars: “Game of Thrones” veteran Kit Harington as Henry Muck, posh CEO of a green tech company, and “Barry” alum Sarah Goldberg playing Petra Koenig, a steely portfolio manager. (Come to think of it, Harrington enters the fray as a now-familiar prestige TV archetype: the eccentric tech billionaire who arrives to cause some chaos, à la Alexander Skarsgård and Adrien Brody on “Succession” and Jon Hamm from Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show.”)

HBO’s bet has paid off so far. While the first two seasons of the show—released in 2020 and 2022, respectively—earned the show its fair share of admirers (particularly among the “very online” cohort), this third season has debuted to its strongest ratings yet in the new time slot. Per The Wrap, the third-season premiere on August 11 saw a 60% increase in viewership from the season two premiere; and the show achieved an audience record in its third episode, with 370,000 “cross-platform viewers.”

Though the show features its fair share of finance-world jargon and conference-room maneuvering, there are also ample servings of sex, drugs and (friendly-ish) name-calling. Subsequently, the show has received a marketer’s dream of a shorthand as “Euphoria” meets “Succession,” a labeling the pair responds to with something of a shrug. “It’s cute,” Down said. “It feels like an easy way of categorizing it. If it helps people find the show, then that’s fine.” Kay added, “It’s good marketing in the sense that they’re both HBO shows and both big smash hits. So it makes total sense.”

“Industry” has won fans like Matthew Ball, a Makers Fund venture partner, who has come to appreciate its similiarites to "Succession, which include its “high-stakes corporate drama, protégé versus titan tit for tats and globe-hopping retreats,” he said.

Down and Kay—who dress with the chic panache of TikTok menswear influencers—were best friends at Oxford University and both went on to land banking jobs, including a three-year spin at Morgan Stanley for Kay.

After moving on from that gig, Down wrote a handful of plays, and then went into TV and film work. Kay eventually joined him, and they started working on “Industry,” basing the fictional bank, Pierpoint, in the show on their own trading-floor experiences.

Kay and Down describe themselves as “terminally online,” which is not surprising given the extremely on-point references and cultural touch points woven into the scripts. “I have a very well-curated Twitter feed, if I say so myself—that’s where I get all my news,” Kay said, also citing The New Yorker, Graydon Carter’s “Air Mail” newsletter, The Atlantic and culture newsletter “Dirt” as his go-to media outlets.

Both Kay and Down regularly repost “Industry”-related memes and screen grabs. And while most showrunners and other creatives publicly act as if they never so much as glance at the comments, the duo is very open about the fact that they scour the online reaction to the show.

Kay explained that scanning Reddit can sometimes help him discern what aspects of the show are landing with the audience, and he often finds it “constructive and not destructive” to keep up with the conversation. “Obviously me and Mickey are obsessed with the details of the show,” Kay said. “So I like it when a joke that I think only me and Mickey are going to get, there’s some guy on Reddit who has pulled that line out and it’s got 30 upvotes. I f*cking love that.”

The third season’s central focus concerns the arc of Harrington’s Muck, who works with Pierpoint on his energy company’s IPO to somewhat mixed success (the real-life volatility of the IPO market is entertainingly reflected). The pair asked themselves what kind of individual would be leading a company like this in the U.K. and started to shape Harrington’s character, who frequents members’ clubs and attends Burning Man–style psilocybin circles (and whose uncle owns a tabloid, of course). In the end, Harrington ends up resembling a mashup of Kendall Roy, Elon Musk and, say, Jack Dorsey.

“Let’s just make this character feel like he’s the most entitled character we’ve seen but with a sense of altruism, which is genuine and isn’t totally insincere,” Down said of their initial crafting of Muck. When they cast Harrington in the role, they infused the portrayal with the actor’s sense of humor. “Let’s make this character a little bit bumbling, flying by the seat of his pants constantly, very educated, with this illustrious background, but—” and Down switched into the Muck character’s wobbly speech cadence here: “‘Obviously I’m in this position, but also I can’t quite believe I’m in this position where I’m in charge of a thousand people and two billion pounds of revenue.’”

Despite the similarity of Muck’s last name to that of a certain Tesla founder, the duo dismissed a suggestion that Elon may have inspired the character. “It was more a composite of people we know,” Down explained. “And a composite of an idea of what a tech founder in the U.K. would be.”

When Harrington’s character finds himself at a low point, he looks for meaning outside himself. “A lot of those people turn to psychedelics…to try to reach a higher plane,” Down observed. “I know that’s a reflection of how lots of people in Silicon Valley feel, but it’s also a reflection of how young people who have a lot of success in the U.K. and Europe feel.”

The duo is also directing for the first time this season and helmed the season’s final two episodes together. “That’s a privilege that HBO gave us,” Down said, describing how much they enjoyed sitting in the directors’ chairs. “I think we know its DNA well enough [now] that we can be quite precise about the way that we direct stuff.” Kay added, “We knew exactly what we needed to get out of those performances. We’re very fast. We’re focused.” (Surely that’s music to an HBO executive’s ears.)

While the show hasn’t been officially picked up for a fourth season, Kay and Down grin when asked if they’ve started devising a story for more “Industry.” “We’ve thought about it a lot,” Kay said. “We’ve pitched it to HBO. We’ll see if there’s any appetite to do it.”

And, yes, they recognize the pressure they’re under with the shift to Sunday evenings. “The good thing about Sundays at nine is if we get to do more shit,” Kay said, “it’s going to really keep us f*cking honest.”