10 Items from the Week | 8 Sep 24
News from the past week, and a few other things.
👋 Hello Reader,
Another busy week for me, so instead of the full news summary, here are 10 interesting items that came across my desk:
1. English Teacher wins Mercury Prize for This Could Be Texas
NOTE: Forget the article itself, it’s the title that takes the cake. You’d have no idea what this article is about unless you knew: 1) the Mercury Prize is an award for best album by a UK or Irish band, 2) English Teacher is the name of a band who won the award this year, and 3) This Could Be Texas is the name of their album that won. I have to say, having only listened to their song (of the same name as the album) This Could Be Texas, I like it. I totally see this being used in a movie, possibly in one directed by Wes Anderson.
2. The State of America’s Wallet
If you want to know how Americans are doing, look in their wallets. They have more money in the bank than they did in 2019, even after adjusting for inflation, and just slightly less credit-card debt relative to income. But they generally don’t feel better off financially than they did five years ago, before the turmoil of the pandemic, inflation and rising interest rates. Heavier wallets have lightened the mood, though. We are getting more optimistic about the economy, according to the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers. It doesn’t hurt that average 401(k) balances rose to about $127,000 in the second quarter of this year, from about $104,000 two years earlier, according to Fidelity. Zooming in on the American wallet is a useful way to understand this moment of unease about the economy, and to think about how our own finances stack up, economists say. The mental anchor point many use to measure themselves against is 2019, because it was prepandemic and preinflation surge. “It’s basically the most extreme comparison we could come up with, but also the most convenient one,” said Joanne Hsu, an economist at the University of Michigan who oversees its consumer sentiment survey.
3. Rich people don’t even feel rich these days
Sometimes, they say, less is more… but, with money, more tends to be more. Even millionaires these days think they could do with some extra dough: a new survey from Northwestern Mutual, reported by Quartz, found that only one-third of Americans with at least $1 million worth of investable assets considered themselves “wealthy”. From 2019 to 2022, the average American family’s net worth increased 23% to just over $1 million, per Business Insider. So, is being a millionaire actually the norm now? Well, no. In fact, the median American family’s net worth is only $192,900. This huge disparity between the average (mean) and the average (median) is because America’s wealth is skewed by its mega-rich. For example, if Bill Gates got into an elevator with me and 8 of my friends, the average net worth of that lift would work out as a little over $13 billion (once we'd finished wondering why the hell he was there).
4. Amazon Wants Your Palm and TSA Wants Your Face. What Saying Yes Will Mean.
More companies and government agencies out in the wild want to read our body parts. The Transportation Security Administration, for example, started scanning passengers’ faces instead of checking IDs. These groups say the biometric processes are meant to eliminate friction, save time and reduce lines. While they might resemble the fingerprint and facial recognition systems we’ve used for years, these services are different. Our phones and laptops keep our biometric information to themselves. To work, public-facing services collect and extract data linked to you and store it in the cloud. That brings greater potential security risks and a new set of concerns for you, the consumer. To determine whether you should say yes and give them your face or palm, you need to know how they work, how your data is protected, and whom you can trust to know your face and hands.
NOTE: I’ve read too many dystopian novels to like the path this takes us on. There’s a price for convenience.
5. Venezuela’s Opposition Candidate Flees to Spain
The opposition candidate in Venezuela’s disputed July presidential election left the country on Saturday, the authorities said, as a standoff deepened at the Argentine diplomatic residence in Caracas where six Venezuelan opposition leaders have been sheltering since March. President Nicolás Maduro has faced widespread domestic and international condemnation for proclaiming that he won that election, as well as for a violent crackdown on demonstrators protesting that declaration. The United States has said that the opposition candidate, Edmundo González, won. On Saturday, Vice President Delcy Rodríguez said on social media that Mr. González had left for Spain after voluntarily seeking refuge at the Spanish embassy in Caracas. Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, said that Mr. González was traveling on a Spanish Air Force plane at his own request.
6. Inside the Trump-Harris Debate Prep: Method Acting, Insults, Tough Questions
Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions ahead of Tuesday night’s clash. There’s a stage and replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald J. Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie. The former president’s preparations are more improv. They are pointedly called not “debate prep” but “policy time,” meant to refresh him on his record. Nobody is playing Ms. Harris; sometimes his aides sit at a long table opposite him and bat questions back and forth, or other times he pulls up a chair closer to them. Mr. Trump has held just a handful of sessions so far, interrupting one at his Las Vegas hotel so he and his advisers could go up to his suite to watch Ms. Harris’s convention speech. While the two camps’ preparations for the big night in Philadelphia could not be more different, both sides view the debate the same way, according to interviews with nearly two dozen people close to the candidates, many of whom insisted on anonymity to discuss the private preparations.
NOTE: Great lesson for everyone—practice, practice, practice. I guess we’ll see how it all turns out.
7. Scientists use food dye found in Doritos to make see-through mice
In a series of experiments that could have been plucked from the pages of science fiction, researchers at Stanford University massaged a solution containing tartrazine, the chemical found in the food dye known as “yellow No. 5,” onto the stomachs, scalps and hind legs of mice. About five minutes later, the opaque skin of the mice transformed temporarily into a living window, revealing branching blood vessels, muscle fibers and contractions of the gut, they reported Thursday in the journal Science.
NOTE: Um…this makes me seriously question eating Doritos. Well, to be fair, Doritos aren’t the only food with yellow No. 5. Read this if you want to know more about No. 5 (though you probably don’t).
8. Teenage E-Cigarette Use Drops to a 10-Year Low
In an annual survey conducted from January through May in schools across the nation, fewer than 8 percent of high school students reported using e-cigarettes in the past month, the lowest level in a decade. That’s far lower than the apex, in 2019, when more than 27 percent of high school students who took the survey reported that they vaped — and an estimated 500,000 fewer adolescents than last year.
9. Meet the most powerful man in college sports
SEC leader Greg Sankey’s ambition and aversion to complacency have helped overhaul the landscape. But to what end?
NOTE: Fascinating read about a guy who is a prolific reader and seeks to out-vision and out-work everyone out there. When asked what keeps him up at night: “Well, complacency is one. It is absolutely at the top of my list of fears. … Someone is out there working.”
10. How Immigration Remade the U.S. Labor Force
The U.S. is experiencing its largest immigration wave in generations, driven by millions of people from around the world seeking personal safety and economic opportunity. Immigrants are swelling the population and changing the makeup of the U.S. labor force in ways that are likely to reverberate through the economy for decades. Since the end of 2020, more than nine million people have migrated to the U.S., after subtracting those who have left, coming both legally and illegally, according to estimates and projections from the Congressional Budget Office. That’s nearly as many as the number that came in the previous decade. The surge in immigration has been controversial, because most migrants didn’t come through regular legal channels. Less than 30%, or 2.6 million, are what the CBO counts as “lawful permanent residents,” which includes green-card holders and other immigrants who came through legal channels, such as family or employment-based visas. In addition, the CBO estimates the nonimmigrant foreign population, which includes temporary workers and students, has grown by about 230,000 since the end of 2020. The CBO refers to most of the other 6.5 million as “other foreign nationals.” The bulk of that group crossed the southern border without prior authorization, turned themselves over to American border officials and requested asylum. They were assigned court dates, sometimes years in the future. While the newcomers wait, some in government-provided shelters at first, most of them work. But while most recent immigrants are able to work, many aren’t ready for high-skilled jobs: The census data show immigrants who arrived since the start of 2020 are more than twice as likely to lack a high-school diploma as U.S.-born workers. Perhaps counterintuitively, recent immigrants are also slightly more likely to hold a bachelor’s degree or higher than the U.S. born. The data don’t make it clear why.
Have a great week!
The Curator