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When the Supreme Court granted an unusually quick hearing over President Donald Trump’s tariffs, a similarly rapid resolution seemed possible.After all, Trump’s lawyers told the court that speed was of the essence on an issue central to the Republican president’s economic agenda. They pointed to a statement from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warning that the “longer a final ruling is delayed, the greater the risk of economic disruption.”But nearly three months have elapsed since arguments in the closely watched case, and the court isn’t scheduled to meet in public for more than three weeks.No one knows for sure what’s going on among the nine justices, several of whom expressed skepticism about the tariffs’ legality at arguments in November. But the timeline for deciding the case now looks more or less typical and could reflect the normal back-and-forth that occurs not just in the biggest cases but in almost all the disputes the justices hear.Several Supreme Court practitioners and law professors scoffed at the idea the justices are dragging their feet on tariffs, putting off a potentially uncomfortable ruling against Trump.“People suspect this kind of thing from time to time, but I am not aware of instances in which we have more than speculation,” said Jonathan Adler, a law professor at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.The timeframe alone also doesn’t point to one outcome or the other.One possible explanation, said Carter Phillips, a lawyer with 91 arguments before the high court, “is that the court is more evenly divided than appeared to be the case at oral argument and the fifth vote is wavering.”Even if the majority opinion has been drafted and more or less agreed to by five or more members of the court, a separate opinion, probably in dissent, could slow things down, Phillips said.Just last week, the court issued two opinions in cases that were argued in October. All nine justices agreed with the outcome, a situation that typically allows decisions to be issued relatively quickly. But a separate opinion in each case probably delayed the decision.The court is generally moving more slowly in argued cases, perhaps because of the flood of emergency appeals the Trump administration has brought to the justices. The first argued case wasn’t decided until January this year. Typically, that happens in December, if not November.Over the last 20 years, the average turnaround time for a Supreme Court opinion was just over three months, according to data gathered by Adam Feldman, creator of Empirical SCOTUS. The timeline has increased in recent years, with the court releasing half or more of its cases in June.Decision times can vary widely. The court can move quickly, especially in cases with hard external deadlines: The landmark Bush v. Gore case that effectively decided the 2000 presidential election took just over a day. The recent case over TikTok took seven days.On the higher end, when the justices are on their own timelines, cases can take much longer to resolve. Gundy v. U.S., a case argued in 2018 about how the sex offender registry is administered, took more than eight months to be decided.Major decisions on expanding gun rights, overturning Roe v. Wade and ending affirmative action in college admissions were handed down six to eight months after the cases were argued.Also undecided so far is a second major case in which the court sped up its pace over redistricting in Louisiana and the future of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.The tariffs case took on added urgency because the consequences of the Trump administration’s policy were playing out in real time, in ways that have been both positive and negative.“Like many, I had hoped that the Supreme would rush the decision out,” said Marc Busch, an expert on international trade policy and law at Georgetown University. “But it’s not a surprise in the sense that they have until June and lots of issues to work through.”The separation of powers questions central to the case are complicated. Whatever the majority decides, there will likely be a dissent and both sides will be carefully calibrating their writing.“It is the language at the end of the day that’s going to make this more or less meaningful,” he said.Meanwhile, as the justices weigh the case, Trump continues to invoke the threat of tariffs, extol their virtues and refer to the case as the court’s most important.“I would hope, like a lot of people, the justices have been watching the tariff threats over Greenland and realize the gravity of this moment,” Busch said. Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court. Mark Sherman and Lindsay Whitehurst, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Remember the Flip video recorder? In 2009, it was a sensationa dead-simple, pocket-size recorder that let ordinary people capture and share moments without lugging around a camcorder or figuring out complicated settings. Cisco acquired Flip’s maker, Pure Digital Technologies, for $590 million in stock. Two years later, Cisco shut Flip down entirely. The Flip wasn’t a failure. It solved a real problem elegantly. But it was what I call a “gateway product”an innovation that reveals what customers want but that gets supplanted by something that delivers the same outcome more simply, cheaply, or conveniently. In this case, the rise of smartphones made a dedicated device obsolete. The history of innovation suggests that most game changers proceed through a series of gateways. We had fax machines before email, PalmPilots before BlackBerrys before iPhones, TiVo before streaming, MapQuest and GPS units before Google Maps. Each one mattered. Each one made money. And each one was eventually swept aside. The strategic challenge is to figure out what the shelf life of your gateway offering is. Gateways solve real jobswith inherited constraints Gateway products genuinely solve customer problems. That’s what makes them successful, and that’s what makes them dangerous. Their success validates the desire of customers to achieve given outcomes while obscuring the fact that the method of doing so may be temporary. The fax machine eliminated the delay of postal mail. But it still required paper, a dedicated phone line, and a compatible machine on the receiving end. It imported friction from the old system even as it improved upon it. Email didn’t just do the fax’s job fasterit eliminated the infrastructure entirely. When your product requires customers to maintain scaffolding from a previous era, you’re building on borrowed time. The dedicated device trap One of the clearest gateway signals is a stand-alone device built for a job that could eventually migrate to a general-purpose platform. GPS units, point-and-shoot cameras, MP3 players, handheld translators, portable DVD playersall were gateways. The job each one performed was real and enduring. The form factor was not. This doesn’t mean dedicated devices always lose. Sometimes they win on performance or experienceprofessional cameras, high-end gaming consoles, studio monitors. But the burden of proof is on the dedicated device to justify its separate existence. If a product’s primary advantage is that nothing else can do the job yet, leadership needs to plan for “yet” becoming “now.” When your moat is mastery, you’re vulnerable Gateway products often develop loyal followings among people who’ve invested time in learning them. PalmPilot users mastered Graffiti. BlackBerry devotees became virtuosos of the physical keyboard. TiVo owners learned the interface and programming logic. The learning curve feels like a moatcustomers have sunk costs, and they’re reluctant to switch. But mastery-based loyalty evaporates the moment a competitor makes it unnecessary. Smartphones didn’t require users to learn a new input language; they just worked. Streaming didn’t demand programming skills; it just played. If your customer retention depends on what people have learned rather than what they love, you’re more vulnerable than your churn numbers suggest. 5 questions to ask about your product What frictions or complexities does our product require that customers would prefer to eliminate entirely? Every negative is an opening for a competitor who does away with it. Are we competing on getting to an outcome or on the current method of doing it? If your differentiation is about how rather than what, you’re racing against obsolescence. If someone started fresh today with current technology, would they build this the same way? This is the greenfield test. If the answer is noif they’d build something that makes your product unnecessaryyou have a gateway. What temporary technological gap are we exploiting? Flip cameras existed because smartphone cameras weren’t good enough yet. GPS units existed because phones lacked sensors and software. Identify your gap, and monitor it relentlessly. What’s our plan for when the gap closes? This is the question most leaders avoid. Acknowledging that your hit product has an expiration date feels like disloyalty. But the alternative is being caught flat-footed. The right strategic stance None of this means gateway products are bad businesses. Nokia and Blackberry built hugely profitable business empires on technology that would eventually be supplanted. The strategic error is being lured into believing that it will be a permanent franchise. That can lead, in turn, to overinvesting in extending the product’s life, building organizations optimized for a form factor that’s becoming obsolete, and missing the chance to be the company that makes its own product unnecessary. Apple famously undermined its own hugely profitable iPod to launch the modern smartphone revolution, leading to enormous value creation. The smart play is to harvest margins while they last, watch for substitution signals, avoid the trap of defending your method, and position your firm to ride the next wave rather than getting swamped by it. Gateway products can be supremely valuable. They are like paying tuition to learn about the future.
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E-Commerce
Being a night owl can be bad for your heart.That may sound surprising but a large study found people who are more active late at night when most of the population is winding down or already asleep have poorer overall heart health than the average person.“It is not like, that, night owls are doomed,” said research fellow Sina Kianersi of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who led the study. “The challenge is the mismatch between your internal clock and typical daily schedules” that makes it harder to follow heart-healthy behaviors.And that’s fixable, added Kianersi, who describes himself as “sort of a night owl” who feels a boost in “my analytical thinking” after about 7 or 8 at night.Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. The American Heart Association has a list of eight key factors that everyone should heed for better heart health: being more physically active; avoiding tobacco; getting enough sleep and a healthy diet; and controlling blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar and weight.Where does being a night owl come in? That has to do with the body’s circadian rhythm, our master biological clock. It follows a roughly 24-hour schedule that regulates not just when we become sleepy and when we’re more awake but also keeps organ systems in sync, influencing things like heart rate, blood pressure, stress hormones and metabolism.Everybody’s circadian rhythm is a little different. Prior research had suggested night owls might have more health problems, as well as risk factors like higher rates of smoking and less physical activity, than people with more typical bedtimes, Kianersi said.To learn more, Kianersi’s team tracked more than 300,000 middle-age and older adults in the UK Biobank, a huge health database that includes information about people’s sleep-wake preferences. About 8% of those people classified themselves as night owls, more active physically and mentally in the late afternoon or evening and up past most people’s bedtime. About a quarter were early-birds, most productive in the daylight hours and likewise early to bed. The rest were average, somewhere in the middle.Over 14 years, the night owls had a 16% higher risk of a first heart attack or stroke compared to the average population, the researchers found.The night owls, especially women, also had overall worse cardiovascular health based on meeting the heart association’s eight key factors, the researchers reported Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association.Unhealthy behaviors smoking, insufficient sleep and poor diet appear to be the main reasons.“It comes down to the problem of a night owl trying to live in a morning person’s world. They’re getting up early for work because that’s when their job starts but it may not align with their internal rhythm,” said Kristen Knutson of Northwestern University, who led recent heart association guidance on circadian rhythms but wasn’t involved in the new study.That affects more than sleep. For example, metabolism fluctuates throughout the day as the body produces insulin to turn food into energy. That means it might be harder for a night owl to handle a high-calorie breakfast eaten very early in the day, during what normally would still be their biological night, Knutson said. And if they’re out late at night, it can be harder to find healthy food choices.As for sleep, even if you can’t meet the ideal of at least seven hours, sticking to a regular bedtime and wake time also may help, she and Kianersi said.The study couldn’t examine what night owls do when the rest of the world is asleep. But Kianersi said one of the best steps to protect heart health for night owls and anyone is to quit smoking.“Focus on the basics, not perfection,” he said, again, advice that’s good for everyone. The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Lauran Neergaard, AP Medical Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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