Numlock News: August 7, 2019 • Milk, Quidditch, Wild Dogs
By Walt Hickey
Sport
A new poll settles once and for all what is and isn’t a sport. Looking at non-traditional events that are polling above 75 percent, dodgeball, professional wrestling, ping-pong, horse racing and water skiing are vastly considered sports. Somewhat more controversially, only about 56 percent consider darts a sport, 53 percent consider paintball one, and a generous 52 percent think miniature golf is. Among those events in the red include cornhole (33 percent considering it a sport), esports (31 percent), Quidditch (27 percent), parkour (24 percent), competitive eating (24 percent) and spelling bee (16 percent).
Mark J. Burns and Joanna Piacenza, Morning Consult
Wild Dogs Cry Out In The Night
Last summer, 14 African wild dogs were released in Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, a one million acre area that lost its population of Canis major. In April, a litter of 11 pups emerged, followed by another litter of eight pups, and today we’re nearing 50 wild dogs in the park. Since the end of the nation’s civil war, the lion population has bounced back well — there are now 146 lions in Gorongosa — and while wild hyenas and leopards have struggled, the dogs are doing fine and hunting cooperatively, and another pack of 22 dogs will be introduced in September.
Natalie Angier, The New York Times
Trust
According to research from the Pew Research Center, millennials and Gen Z make Dale Gribble look like Leslie Knope. While previous generations entered the world bright-eyed and bushy tailed and full of dreams, the young people of today know what’s up. 60 percent of people aged 18 to 29 said that “most people can’t be trusted,” the highest of all age brackets by far and considerably less trusting than the 29 percent of people aged 65 and up who agree. Furthermore, 73 percent of those 18 to 29 agree “most of the time people just look out for themselves” and 71 percent of the time people will try to take advantage of you if they get a chance, which certainly sounds like a generation raised on the Internet if I’ve seen one. Compared to older folks, young people are vastly less likely to trust the military, religious leaders, police officers and business leaders.
John Gramlich, Pew Research Center
Sea Levels
Over the next few decades, rising sea levels will put many things situated on coasts at risk. While the immediate and most compelling of those things is housing that people live in, it’s crucial to consider all the many other essential entities that will be at risk. For instance, over the next 15 years alone rising sea levels will put 6,500 kilometers of communications lines — such as the fiber optic cables that facilitate intercontinental internet coverage — at risk of flooding that could disable them. A 90 centimeter rise in sea levels, likely to occur before the end of the century, would mean 162 sewage treatment plants that serve 10 million people in coastal states would be underwater.
Daniel Grossman and Alex MacLean, Hakai Magazine
Milk
Americans are consuming less milk than ever. Milk producers are in a rough position, with not only new competition from the likes of almond milk, oat milk and more, but also rising consumption of water products, be they from the tap or from bottles. In the late 1970s, per capita an American drank just shy of 250 pounds of milk annually. By the late 1990s that was down to 200 pounds per person annually. Today, the average American drinks a paltry 149 pounds of milk per year, a figure that sounds enormous when you just write it out like that. Let’s never speak of this again, oh my gosh.
Travel
According to a new analysis from Crunchbase, roughly $1.4 trillion is spent annually on corporate travel alone. That’s one reason that a legion of startups are angling to get in on the corporate travel space, and yet another reason that the bigger fish in the scene are capriciously eyeing those companies. Airbnb has bought four companies this year alone and invested in hotel startups like Oyo in India and The Wing, a coworking space. Yesterday it bought Urbandoor, which offers short term corporate rentals, for an undisclosed sum. This arrangement lets Airbnb have all the amenities of a hotel, with none of those pesky things like insurance, liability, taxation or zoning.
Natasha Mascarenhas, Crunchbase News
I.O.U.
Chinese businesses are a bit cash strapped because the country’s banks are a bit reluctant to lend to private companies when there’s a perfectly reliable legion of state-owned companies that are reliable in paying back what they owe. And because of some trade kerfuffle, those private companies are having trouble getting cash, even though they’re functional businesses. The need to keep the wheels moving has led to a surfeit of “commercial acceptance bills,” which is how I.O.U. is pronounced among the MBA set. All told, companies owe $211 billion in informal notes promising payment as of February, the most recent data available. It’s especially bad for property developers, who are seeing balance sheets flooded with I.O.U.s.
Alexandra Stevenson and Cao Li, The New York Times
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