The Hottest Trend In Travel, Detroit's Resurgence and the Invisibility Shield

Why Industrial Tourism Is One of the Fastest Growing Trends In Travel

Portugal is one of several countries investing big into industrial tourism - a term that describes experiences where travelers can visit factories to see how products get made. Of course, vineyards and liquor distilleries along with many food manufacturers have long offered this sort of experience. But Portugal is taking it one step further. In São João da Madeira, you can visit a pencil making factory, or a hat factory or facility that makes high end belts. The entire idea is a perfect twist on the usual sterile tourist experiences offered in gift shops where you can buy "artisan" products without any real experience of how those things were created.

Industrial tourism bridges that gap, and is one of the factors that helped Portugal achieve record profits from the tourism sector last year. The idea is perfectly on trend, and actually encompasses a lot of experiences that reach every sector - from touring a BMW factory in Germany to seeing how perfume is made in the famous French town of Grasse. If you're thinking about your next trip or planning it now, there's probably a fascinating industrial tourism experience you could add to your itinerary too.

Detroit Rides "Postbankruptcy Energy" To Become America's Most Unlikely Boomtown, According to WSJ

About ten years ago, no one would have said the city of Detroit would be sitting at the perfect crossroads of multiple urban trends. Around then, the city was in the midst of declaring bankruptcy. That moment created a new sense of urgency among those wealthy enough to do something about the future of the city, and many of them stepped up. Dan Gilbert, the billionaire co-founder of home lender Rocket Mortgage, moved the company headquarters to downtown Detroit and bought more than 130 buildings downtown.

This billion-dollar investment opened the doors for other families and companies with old and new money to also invest in the city as well. Additionally, as the WSJ writes, "rock-bottom office rents long ago forced developers to come up with other things to build. They added casinos and sports venues and restored aging theaters. That made downtown less office-dependent, an advantage in the age of remote work." Finally, the urgency to rebuild also incentivized many tax breaks which also attracted more investment.

Altogether, experts are starting to point to the city as an example of how a dying city can turn its fortunes around and win the future. As Gilbert himself noted in the article, "If somebody would have told you there was going to be a Gucci store in Detroit 10 years ago, I mean, I would have laughed at them." Now they have one ... and probably more to come.

How Water Flipping, Excess Solar Energy and Shifting Hydropower Stations Show Us The Future Is All About Water

The skies were orange above Athens and that was just one of several climate and energy related stories this week that offered a glimpse into stories we will see more frequently in the coming years.

The first example is a concerning story of a tiny Arizona town where a private company purchased land and water rights only to flip the property and sell back the water rights to a local town for a huge profit. The concern is that more water speculators will "scavenge agricultural land" and engage in a lucrative water flipping real estate deals making an already scarce resource even worse. Also related to water was the news that China's data centers may use more water than the entire population of South Korea by 2030.

On the positive side, there was a story about how California is generating so much solar power that it's driving electricity prices to go negative and creating issues about where and how to store all this excess solar. And in Costa Rica, a country where 99% of energy comes from renewable sources (mainly through hydropower), climate change is likely to create less rainfall in some areas and more in others ... which means authorities are already thinking about how power stations may need to move over time.

The theme here seems to be that the real scarce resource of the future is going to be water more than energy. Since the ability to control and flow water relies on geographic restrictions, land rights and physical distance - that will make it harder to source independently or divert to places far from it. As a result, water scarcity may be the biggest problem for humanity in the long term future.

What The New Ban On Non-Competes Actually Means For Companies

This week the FTC issued a rule this week that bans non-compete clauses, estimating that up to 8,500 new startups will be created as a result of the ban. The federal agency describes the down-sides of non-competes this way:

"Noncompetes are a widespread and often exploitative practice imposing contractual conditions that prevent workers from taking a new job or starting a new business. Noncompetes often force workers to either stay in a job they want to leave or bear other significant harms and costs, such as being forced to switch to a lower-paying field, being forced to relocate, being forced to leave the workforce altogether, or being forced to defend against expensive litigation."

Critics of the ban describe it as unnecessary government intervention. Regardless of who is more right, there is a bigger and more obvious implication here. The best way to make this issue irrelevant is to focus on employee retention. Give them more ownership over their work. Don't steal their ideas or shut down their ingenuity. In other words, make the issue of non-competes irrelevant ... which it would be if your best people never leave.