2026-08-21 23:53:07
For the New York Times, Mira Rojanasakul and Brad Plumer report on the rise in electric vehicle registrations around the world. The snippet of a chart above shows the change between 2020 and 2025 with a faded arrow. This provides a point of comparison showing the more recent jump this past year. I like it.
The U.S. is much farther down the list showing a decrease in registrations year-over-year.
Tags: electric vehicle, New York Times
2026-08-20 21:16:41
When you spend more than you make, you get debt. For the Washington Post, Youyou Zhou, with illustrations by Kyle Ellingson, visualized the difference over time for the United States.
A long stacked bar chart provides a backdrop of revenue and spending, and the animations give a little something to highlight significant spikes.
The debt has been running up for decades. It’s as if the government doesn’t even care.
Tags: debt, government, revenue, spending, Washington Post
2026-08-20 21:06:54
This is issue No. 402 of the Process, where we look at data from all the angles. I’m Nathan Yau. This week is about changing perspectives so we can find and visualize new insights.
Become a member for access to this — plus tutorials, courses, and guides.
2026-08-20 00:21:34
Spirit Airlines went bankrupt for real this time, and Google bought the data. AJ Dellinger reports for Gizmodo:
Google’s winning bid in the auction was priced at $10 million, outbidding Mercor, an AI training data giant. According to a notice published on the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York’s docket, as the winning bidder, Google is now the proud owner of more than 100 million company emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 30 million lines of code, development metadata, software models and algorithms, as well as revenue, aircraft operations and employee productivity data.
Companies continue to spread their tentacles to wherever data resides. The AI training models need to be fed, and they already ate all the data on the internet.
Tags: Gizmodo, Google, Spirit Airlines, training
2026-08-19 17:58:29
For the Wall Street Journal, Peter Rudegeair and Peter Santilli report on the trillions (with a t) of dollars slated for later spending by big tech:
Nine top tech companies had some $3 trillion of off-balance-sheet commitments mostly related to AI, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of footnotes in their most recent securities filings. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional “capex,” which totaled about $600 billion over the past year they reported, and were about triple what the companies owe under their outstanding leases and long-term borrowings.
That is a lot of money.
Mostly, the triangle Voronoi treemap caught my eye. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of those. I wish they had shown all $3 trillion of commitments to match the headline instead of just the four companies. The math threw me off for a second.
Tags: spending, technology, Wall Street Journal
2026-08-18 15:51:30
Suspecting that an anonymous order of 1,000 books was headed to an AI company to scan for training data, 404 Media stuck an Apple AirTag in the shipment to track its location. The books landed at an Amazon training facility in Las Vegas called VGT3. Emanuel Maiberg reports:
That employees are scanning the barcodes or ISBNs on books — a unique serial number given to every published book — before scanning their content gives further credence to another theory put forth by booksellers: AI companies are trying to methodically scan every printed book in the world by working through the list of ISBNs. One bookseller told me they suspected this was the case because the very large orders they were getting never included very rare books that do not have ISBNs.
Amazon (and probably other AI facilities) strips the binding to make scans easier, so the books are destroyed in the process. Not ideal.
