What We’re Reading
A few good pieces the Collab team came across this week …
Grinding
What do you say when you talk to a young comedian who’s coming up and reaching for the kind of career you’ve had?
My advice is just take the job. Don’t worry about how much it pays. I’m always astounded when I meet comedians who go, “I’m not going there for that kind of money,” and I go, “Who are you? You haven’t done anything. No one knows who you are.” If you’re any good, the money will come. Pay attention to your product. If you’re not making enough money, it’s ‘cause you’re not good enough.
Engagement
“Huge swathes of people spend their days performing jobs they secretly believe do not really need to be performed,” Graeber writes. The rise of automation has meant that fewer humans are needed in manufacturing and farming, but instead of this freeing up our time, we’ve seen those jobs replaced by “the ballooning of … the administrative sector up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources and public relations.”
Sight
A report on glasses manufacturers:
The first is a largely unreported global epidemic of myopia, or shortsightedness, which has doubled among young people within a single generation. For a long time, scientists thought myopia was primarily determined by our genes. But about 10 years ago, it became clear that the way children were growing up was harming their eyesight, too. The effect is starkest in east Asia, where myopia has always been more common, but the rate of increase has been uniform, more or less, across the world. In the 1950s, between 10% and 20% of Chinese people were shortsighted. Now, among teenagers and young adults, the proportion is more like 90%. In Seoul, 95% of 19-year-old men are myopic, many of them severely, and at risk of blindness later in life.
Fake news
This is astounding:
Facebook disabled nearly 1.3 billion “fake” accounts over the past two quarters, many of them bots “with the intent of spreading spam or conducting illicit activities such as scams,” the company said on Monday.
Facebook disabled 583 million accounts in Q1 2018, down from 694 million accounts in Q4 of last year, a decrease the company attributes to its “variability of our detection technology’s ability to find and flag them.”
Leader
China is not messing around:
Shenzhen: May 1st: all new commercial light duty trucks = EVs
From July 1: Only EVs allowed in ride hailing
By Dec 31: Replace all remaining taxis with EVs Build 5,200 EV chargers for taxis Retire 20,000 diesel light duty trucks City policies will reshape auto markets.
Health
Big:
The World Health Organization on Monday announced a sweeping plan that urges governments around the globe to eliminate the use of trans fats, the industrially produced edible oil that gave birth to margarine, Crisco and other artery-clogging products that have been linked to millions of premature deaths.
Artificial trans fats, better known to many American consumers as partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, have contributed to a half million deaths a year, many of those in developing countries ill-equipped to address the health threats posed by a product cherished for its low price and long shelf life.
Have a nice weekend.