Numlock News: October 27, 2022 • Ozone Layer, Quebec, AARP

Oct 27, 2022

AARP

The hottest new social club for young people is the AARP, the American Association of Retired People, which thanks to a number of viral TikToks and no actual minimum age is in fact available to anyone over the age of 13. It costs $63 for a five-year membership, a card that entitles the 38 million bearers to a host of discounts, offers and more. The trend in young people joining the largest lobby for the retired population of the U.S. began in earnest last summer, when a 42-year-old man espousing the benefits of membership posted a TikTok that went extremely viral and, according to the AARP, led to 150,000 new AARP members.

Veronica Dagher, The Wall Street Journal

Temu

The most-downloaded e-commerce app in the United States right now is Temu, the external version of Chinese e-commerce app Pinduoduo. It's a 7-year-old company that in 2020 beat Alibaba as the company with the most customers in China, with north of 730 million monthly active users. It's known for cheap prices and sales gimmicks, and thanks to a massive advertising campaign — according to Meta, Temu's run over 1,000 different ads on the service since September alone — it's bought its way to the top spot.

Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review

Turkey

This Thanksgiving turkey is poised to be a bit more expensive, and for once it's not due to the supply chain. This one is because of the pandemic, and no, not that one. There's an avian flu that's been tearing through the U.S. poultry business, with some 44.6 million birds dying from the virus or being depopulated due to exposure this year. Of those, 6 million were turkeys. The avian flu is on track to be more significant than the 2015 bird flu that claimed 50.5 million birds in the worst animal health event in the history of the U.S.

Erica Werner and Laura Reiley, The Washington Post

Builder's Remedy

A 30-year-old law in California states that when a city fails to produce a housing plan that accommodates projected population growth, developers are pretty much free to do whatever they want as long as a percentage of the built apartments are slated for low-income housing. Thanks to some eagle-eyed work among state-level officials, it turns out that lots of municipalities — 124 jurisdictions in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Imperial counties, which include Beverly Hills, Malibu, Palm Springs and Pasadena — are in violation, and as a result it's a developer free-for-all to add new housing to a state that desperately needs it.

Liam Dillon, The Los Angeles Times

Trucking

The $875 billion trucking industry is girding its loins for a market downturn, and after several years of seemingly unrelenting demand, the shift is poised to seriously impact the health of the thousands of small companies that dominate the business. About 97 percent of companies operate 10 or fewer trucks, and since the beginning of 2021 a whopping 265,000 new companies got an operating authority in the U.S. Many of those companies paid top dollar for used big rigs in an attempt to get skin in the game on one of the hottest markets in America, with prices for a used container truck up 64 percent in August 2022 compared to 2019.

Thomas Black, Bloomberg

King

Canadian parliament voted an overwhelming no to cutting ties with the monarchy after a Bloc Quebecois leader introduced the motion to sever the relationship between Canada and the House of Windsor, now led by the slightly less popular son of Queen Elizabeth II. King Charles is the head of state in Canada, and a poll conducted after the death of the queen found that is not an entirely unanimous position. An Ipsos survey found that 54 percent of Canadians thought that the country should cut ties with the monarchy, a sentiment that rose to 79 percent in Quebec.

Nadine Yousif, BBC News

Ozone

A multinational conspiracy between a consortium of producers to curtail the market for refrigerants has marked another victory in their worldwide plan, as the ozone hole shrank again. Yes, in what is one of the most successful climate actions in the history of the planet, the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica is now a mere 8.91 million square miles, down from 8.99 million square miles last year, the result of the Montreal Protocol 35 years ago that phased out chlorofluorocarbons.

Samantha Davies, NBC Dallas

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

The best way to reach new readers is word of mouth. If you click THIS LINK in your inbox, it’ll create an easy-to-send pre-written email you can just fire off to some friends.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

2022 Sunday subscriber editions: Mexican Beer · The Chaos Machine · [CENSORED] · Podcast Industrialization · Fantasy Shows · Law Dork · Chinese Box Office · Box Office Recovery · Giant Hornets · Graphic Novels ·