Numlock News: October 12, 2023 • Convenience Fees, Disneyland, Skulls

Oct 12, 2023

By Walt Hickey

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Parks

Disney is cranking up the price of its parks as the company sets out on a $60 billion investment into parks and cruises over the next decade, setting the price of a ticket to Disneyland on the most popular days as high as $194, which is up 8 percent. A five-day ticket’s price will rise 16 percent to $480, and a bunch of the add-ons that have become popular over the past several years are also seeing jacked-up prices. The Genie+ product that is the latest incarnation of the fundamentally park-breaking and cursed FastPass program is now $30 per guest, parking is now more expensive, and the price of a Park Hopper option is up 25 percent.

Jacob Passy and Will Feuer, The Wall Street Journal

Panopticon

Amazon Ring, the doorbell camera that many people install on the front of their homes to deter would-be package thieves, has developed into a massive, interconnected network that supplies posts and videos to police departments around the country. As of September, 2,604 police departments in the U.S. have some sort of arrangement with Amazon’s Ring network, receiving automatic emails that forward posts from the companion social app Neighbors, which is where the most paranoid people in a given neighborhood can post updates about everything they or their cameras see.

Lam Thuy Vo, The Markup

Schools

The best-performing schools according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams are not of any given state, but rather the schools operated by the Department of Defense. If the Department of Defense was a state, it would be not only the best state for education on reading and math, but also the only one that managed to avoid learning losses between 2013 and 2022. About 66,000 students attend a Pentagon school because their parents serve in the military in some capacity, and the numbers are excellent. The best state in the U.S. when it comes to NEAP reading scores is New Jersey, where 42 percent of eighth graders are proficient; in the DoD schools, 55 percent are, and that’s up from 45 percent in 2013. The best states at math are Utah and Massachusetts, at 35 percent of eighth graders proficient; at DoD schools, that’s 41 percent. The secret? Well for one thing, the Pentagon funds their schools amply — $3 billion a year, for 50 U.S. schools and 100 international ones — and pay teachers great, they’re organized centrally and well-supplied, more socioeconomically and racially integrated than most districts in the U.S., and are not subjects to the whims of local school boards year to year.

Sarah Mervosh, The New York Times

Gaming

The legalization of all sorts of gambling in the United States has given many people aged 16 to 25 access to gambling that would otherwise be unavailable to them, and it’s revealing many who have problem gambling behaviors. Take New Jersey, which legalized sports betting in 2018. Already, 70 percent of 16- to 25-year-olds in New Jersey see at least four gambling ads per week on social media, and calls to the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey’s helpline are up 225 percent since legalization. They’ve found that 35 percent of calls are trying to get help for people under the age of 25. There’s even evidence that minors are able to bet online.

Maxwell Strachan, Vice

Vets

Veterinarians’ work is taxing, and practitioners are forced into untenable and undesirable positions every day when it comes to the lives of the animals they became doctors to protect. Vets face higher risks and rates of suicide, and the field is in a nearly constant state of turnover given the onerous working conditions they face. According to the American Animal Hospital Association, turnover rates are about 25 percent, which means that at any given moment a quarter of the people working in animal hospitals are soon enough quitting. There is a staffing issue, too: The field gets one applicant for every 10 open jobs.

Kate Morgan, BBC News

Skulls

Anthropologists can follow the ebbs and flows of historical violence over time by tracking the rate of head wounds seen on ancient humans. The long-debated theories are often around whether the civilizations that existed before agriculture were overall peaceful or whether they were warring until the invention of agriculture, at which point things chilled out a great deal. A new study published in Nature Human Behavior looked at the skeletal remains of 3,500 individuals who lived from 12,000 to 400 B.C.E. to try to track violence by way of head trauma. They found that violence peaked from 6,500 to 5,300 years ago, calming down a lot in the early and middle Bronze Age as states developed. Then, at the onset of the Iron Age, incidentally when weapon quality increased substantially, a 300-year drought hit, the Assyrian empire rose, things got rather bad and violence once again spiked. Thank god that we don’t have new and improved technology, climate change, or geopolitical shifts happening right now; otherwise this finding might be very worrisome!

Joanna Thompson, Scientific American

Junk Fees

The FTC has announced that it will roll out a proposed rule in an ongoing quest to fight so-called junk fees, which are additional charges that jack up the face value costs of things like hotel stays, concert tickets, utility bills and more. The goal is to force companies to advertise prices as they realistically are, kit-and-caboodle, rather than advertising an arbitrarily low rate and then slapping on convenience fees, processing fees, print from home fees, service fees, compliance fees, lodging fees and ticketing fees. According to the FTC, consumers waste an aggregated 50 million hours a year searching for the total price of tickets and lodging, and the cost of time saved in those two categories alone is roughly $1 billion saved if they can push the all-in-one pricing.

Josh Boak, Associated Press

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