Numlock News: July 6, 2023 • Ocean, Ozempic, Opium
By Walt Hickey
False Claims
The FTC is getting ready to crack down on companies that overreach in terms of influencer marketing, to the extent of failure to disclose sponsored content, and also the event that influencers make false claims in the course of their work. In January, the FTC hiked the maximum civil penalty for violations to $50,120 from $46,517, and in the event an influencer marketer is cracked down upon that could apply to each offending post.
Patrick Coffee, The Wall Street Journal
Impressed
A new report prepared by The Mission to Seafarers and Liverpool John Moores University shines a light on the controversial and all too common practice of people who work on ships being forced to pay illegal fees, charges and bribes in order to obtain work. The report, which included information from over 200 seafarers, found that 65 percent said they were aware of such illegal demands for placement fees. The average fee assessed was $1,872, and 10 percent of the seafarers who had to pay to get placed are still in debt, with 29 percent seeing their documents illegally withheld.
Ironic
Ozempic, the drug that makes people not want to eat meals, became the hit it is today thanks to a crap ton of comped meals. Novo Nordisk spent $11 million on meals and travel for doctors last year in its pitch to doctors to start prescribing their brands of semaglutide to patients. Kit and caboodle, over 12,000 doctors had a meal paid for by Novo Nordisk, with a grand total of 457,000 meals paid for by the pharmaceutical to better educate the physicians about the weight-loss drug over dinner. Indeed, some doctors needed a whole lot of education, with 200 doctors getting over 50 meals paid for by the company.
You Do Not, Under Any Circumstances, "Gotta Hand It To Them"
In the year since the Taliban prohibited poppy farming, the total acreage of poppy production has collapsed from 320,000 acres to just 2,500 acres as the government brutally suppresses the drug trade. That’s having reverberations the world over, one of which is that heroin that once came from Afghanistan is getting weaker and more adulterated given the diminishing supply. Opioid production accounted for 9 percent to 14 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP in 2021, and the ban has wiped out 450,000 jobs in agriculture. Afghanistan produced an annual average of 6,420 tons of opium in the period from 2018 to 2022, with Myanmar (530.2 tons) and Mexico (278.7 tons) just behind.
Samuel Lovett, Sarah Newey and Ben Farmer, The Telegraph
Japan
Japan is already food insecure, with agricultural imports totaling $70.2 billion in 2022, and Japan’s self-sufficiency rate when it comes to food hanging at just 38 percent. The government wants that to hit 45 percent self-sufficient when it comes to food by 2030, but that’s going to be a rough number to hit given that it’s already near a record low. With fisheries in peril — 64.6 percent of global fish stocks are at a biologically sustainable level as of 2019 — and limited amounts of arable land compared to peers, Japan has a vested interest in pursuing lab-grown or vegan fish-emulating products.
Desalination
Lots of California needs water, and lots of California is incidentally right next to a very large body of water that experts call the Pacific Ocean. The issue is that’s full of salt, so the state has weighed all sorts of desalination projects to varying degrees of success and failure. One new project wants to minimize the negatives of desalination — salty, fatal goop that is left as a waste product after removing all the actual water from it — by scaling down to essentially the size of a buoy. The experimental device is 6.5 meters wide, and is self-powered by the movements of the waves. It pushes water through a reverse osmosis membrane, and can produce 50,000 liters of fresh water a day, or enough for 43 average houses. The hope is that this process becomes scalable.
TikTok
TikTok Shop is a fast-growing feature of the social network, a livestreamed marketplace that is exploding across Southeast Asia and may be poised to go global. Indonesia, the first market for TikTok Shop, saw $52 billion in merchandise sales in 2022, followed by $14 billion in sales in Thailand, $12 billion in the Philippines and $9 billion in Vietnam. The app commands eyeballs like no other in the U.S. — users spent an average of 95 minutes a day in app in Q2 2022, significantly more than the 51 minutes per day for rival Instagram — and depending on the regulatory situation shopping could be big.
Zheping Huang, Olivia Poh, Alex Barinka and Yoolim Lee, Bloomberg
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The FTC is on top of the important problems; gotta hand it to ‘em.