📖 reading time: 5m 21s.
hi, happy monday :) it’s been a good week! i got exciting news at work and i’m finally getting a little bit faster at running.
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👂 earworm: listen to billy lemos on spotify or apple music.
📚 word of the week:
“
inanition
”.
lack of mental or spiritual vigour and enthusiasm.
there are a pair of weeping willows in the churchyard, very often rapturously astream in the wind, but which, on a hot, calm day, hang there for a moment in a gust of sudden awful inanition, like the stillness between two beats of one’s heart.
- j. r. salamanca, southern light, 1986
🧠 brain candy:
🦶 in 40 u.s. states, land surveyors still use the “us survey foot”, which is 0.0002% longer than the widely accepted “international foot”. this is due to change in 2023, however.
🏃♂️ we now know that people dramatically over report physical activity, so the benefits of actual activity (now measured) are about 2.5 times better for you than had been previously thought.
🤳 hyderabad, with 500k+ cctv cameras, has become india's most surveilled city and a test bed for ai-based visual surveillance tech for the rest of the country.
⭐️ if — like a mussel — you can’t move, starfish can be fearsome predators. they have thousands of tube feet which clamp on to mussel shells and pry them open. the mouth at the centre of the starfish is too small to take in a mussel whole. instead, the starfish turns its guts inside out, extruding its stomach through its mouth and into the mussel shell before digesting the mussel in situ.
🍗 how did americans go from eating 10 lbs of chicken annually in the 1930s to 64 lbs a year in 2017? the story starts with corn.
🤪 mildly humorous:
💡 longer reads:
💵 cashless society
.
going cashless disadvantages the unbanked and communities of colour.
approximately 6.5% of u.s. households—14.1 million adults and 6.4 million children—are unbanked, according to the fdic’s 2017 national survey of unbanked and underbanked households, meaning they live in a household holding no accounts with formal, insured financial institutions. another 18.7% of households are underbanked, which means they have at least one account at an insured institution, but they also use financial products or services outside of the banking system, like payday loans or cash-checking services.
“any move to cashlessness is, by definition, exclusionary to those groups,” christina tetreault, senior policy counsel at consumer reports, says.
if you have a bank account, it’s easy to get checks cashed and transfer money for free. but the unbanked typically have to use check-cashing services or money orders to get cash and transfer money, methods that cost quite a bit in fees.
“it’s expensive to be poor, and it’s very expensive to be unbanked,” says martin chorzempa, research fellow at the peterson institute for international economics.
banking in the united states has unnecessarily high barriers to entry, says chorzempa. that leaves lower-income people—often people of color, particularly black people—from participating in the formal economy. america’s long and racist history of excluding nonwhite people in all corners of society rears its ugly head here too.
👉 read more via fortune.
💰
fat cats
.
the house of lords now has more than 800 members, which makes it the second largest assembly in the world, behind china’s national congress. there is no space on its red benches for all these lords and ladies to sit, so if they did turn up to work, it would be like one of those overbooked flights with everyone arguing about who gets bumped.
most members only use it as a prestigious club, and don’t bother about engaging in legislation, but the appointment of a wealthy russian-born media mogul to its ranks has only hastened demands that it be radically reformed.
“we now have a government whose prime minister does not believe russian interference in our democracy is worthy of investigation, a government that does not believe well established anti-corruption procurement rules matter, and tory mps unconcerned about both,” wrote alistair campbell, tony blair’s former head of communications.
to add another level to the already dense irony around this sordid and depressing affair, he wrote that in the independent, in which lebedev is the largest shareholder.
but how do we tell who’s corrupt?
corruption hides in the shadows, a nebulous enemy that shifts its shape, modifies its methods, and changes its character whenever we come close to defining it. but pavlo blavatskyy, an economist at montpellier’s business school, has stared corruption full in the face and lived to tell the tale.
“we collected 299 frontal face images of 2017 cabinet ministers from 15 post‐soviet states,” he wrote in the summary of his peculiar academic study, obesity of politicians and corruption in post‐soviet countries. “ for each image, the minister’s body‐mass index is estimated using a computer vision algorithm. the median estimated body‐mass index of cabinet ministers is highly correlated with conventional measures of corruption.”
translation: the more corrupt the government, the fatter the ministers.
👉 read more via coda.
🦶 footer:
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👋 read one of my last 3 posts:
🚴♀️ youth bike america.
📦 the amazonification of retail.
or click to see them all.