Friday Five: August

Sam Boochever
Aug 31, 2018 · 8 min read

The Friday Five is a collection of five of the most interesting topics, articles, stories, facts, or general musings that I came across during the past month.

It has been a couple of months since I’ve posted a Friday Five. I wrote one every week for about five months, then a lot of life changes happened — new apartment, new job, new focus on getting my ass in shape — and it became too much to keep up with the weekly posts. I have missed writing the Friday Five. I miss having a forum by which to share interesting articles/ideas that I come across and I miss the discussions with friends old and new that were spurred from the Friday Five posts. I have decided to start writing the Friday Five again, but to do so on a monthly basis. I’ve actually written a Friday Five each of the past few months, but never posted them. Check out the Friday Five from May, June, and July. Going forward, you can expect the Friday Five on the last Friday of every month. The new monthly format brings new challenges. I will still write about five topics that have captured my attention over the past month, but the content will hopefully be less temporal and more evergreen. Without further ado, August’s Friday Five…

Pupu Platter

· Dennis Rodman’s success of brokering peace talks between the US and North Korea (he believes he should win a Nobel Prize for his efforts) have led other countries to embrace “celebrity diplomacy.” Russia recently tapped Steven Seagal as a special representative to help improve relations between the US and Russia. Yes, that Steven Seagal. Seagal has prepared for the position by playing a CIA agent in multiple Hollywood movies. Putin personally presented Seagal with his Russian passport when he became a citizen in 2016 because Putin is a fan of his movies. Even more surprising, Seagal is still making movies.

· It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Amazon! Amazon just filed a patent for a blimp warehouse. The blimp would float in the sky and drones would “guide” packages as they float down to their recipient on the ground. Hopefully the blimp warehouse can find some synergies with the underwater warehouse Amazon filed a patent for last year.

· If you have flown recently, chances are good that you have seen a support animal on board. Delta, for example, has animals on board 700 flights per day. As deranged pet lovers push the boundaries, airlines have struggled to define what animals are allowed on planes. Southwest just issued its newest guidelines; it will now permit only cats, dogs, and miniature horses. Now, not only can I wear my Lil’ Sebastian sweatshirt to comfort me while flying, I can actually bring Lil’ Sebastian on the plane with me.

· Lithuania just put out a new tourism campaign for its capital city of Vilnius. The ad reads, “Vilnius, the G-spot of Europe. Nobody knows where it is, but when you find it, its’s amazing.”

· Chain migration is when an adult citizen obtains residency and citizenship for their relatives. Trump is vehemently opposed to this policy. In November, he tweeted, “CHAIN MIGRATION must end now! Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!” Yet, his Slovenian in-laws just became US citizens in a private ceremony.

Pheromone Parties: The modern dating story is as old as 2011. It goes something like this: one farmer swipes right and matches with a second farmer on Farmers Only (or Tinder, Bumble or one of the other 7,500 online dating services that generate nearly $1.3B/year). Then, the farmers go on a tractor date that more than likely won’t work out — online dating is responsible for only 20% of committed relationships. At the end of the day, an algorithm can’t always predict chemistry or animalistic physical attraction. Enter pheromone parties. Pheromones are chemicals (smells) that animals secrete to help attract a mate (and for other reasons). A study determined that humans can determine genetically superior mating partners just by smelling a sampling of their t-shirts. Pheromone parties are trying to recreate the results of this study. Before a party, guests are instructed to sleep in the same clean t-shirt for four nights in a row to capture their natural pheromones and bring the t-shirt to the party in a sealed zip-lock bag. It is important that guests wear the shirt while sleeping so their natural scent does not have aromatic interference from the myriad of smells we encounter while outside. Then, the party goers go around the room, stick their nose in a numbered plastic bag, take a deep inhale, and rank the scent on their scorecard. After all the t-shirt smelling has completed, party goers can find their favorite smelling humans by matching the number on a zip-lock to a corresponding number on a wall of photographs. The success rate of these pheromone parties is unclear, but one thing is clear: at these parties, you can always smell the desperation.

Social Credit Scores: It is often unsettling how prescient Black Mirror can be. I often think that Trump watched “The Waldo Moment” and used it as a playbook to become president. The first Black Mirror episode I watched was “Nosedive.” The episode depicts a society where every social interaction is rated on a one to five-star scale, similar to an Uber rating. The rating then impacts one’s social standing in society. In the end of the episode, everyone becomes completely fake, anesthetized versions of themselves so to never offend anyone and keep their ratings high. It is not that far-fetched to picture that future, especially because that future already exists in China. China has been piloting a “Social Credit System” since 2014 and plans to roll out the program more broadly in 2020. The stated goal of the program is the “construction of sincerity in government affairs, commercial sincerity, and judicial credibility.” In one pilot, the city of Rongcheng assigned a starting score of 1,000 to each of its 74,000 residents. Residents can gain points by donating to a charity or winning an award. On the other hand, residents can lose points by violating the rules, such as running a red light. The government then offers benefits, such as discounts on utilities or better mortgage rates, to those residents with higher scores. A bad score can result in being passed over for a promotion or the loss of access to bank loans. This is just one of many pilot programs throughout the country, but when rolled out nationally, the social credit score will likely permeate all aspects of society. One of the biggest concerns is that China lacks an independent judiciary, which means that citizens have no recourse for disputing false or inaccurate allegations that can drop their score. Another concern is that social credit scores have the potential to virtually wipe out all political dissension and free speech in China.

Facebook Echo Chamber: Researchers studied all 3,335 anti-refugee attacks in Germany over the past two years. They analyzed the communities in which the attacks took place to try to determine a pattern. Ultimately, there was one variable that most reliably predicted anti-refugee attacks: Facebook use. In fact, when a community’s per person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50%. This holds true regardless of the makeup of the community — size, affluence, political leaning, internet usage, etc. The study also found that when internet access went down in an area with high Facebook use, attacks on refugees dropped significantly. To be clear, the study is not claiming Facebook caused the attacks on refugees. However, the study supports the idea that Facebook is an echo chamber; it is designed to maximize engagement. Posts that tap into our emotions, like anger and fear, more quickly proliferate. Moreover, the more we engage with a post, the more Facebook shows us similar posts. Facebook not only provides a confirmation bias for our preexisting beliefs, but it also leads people to misestimate how many people agree with those beliefs. This is not new news; however, it is the real-world effects of this echo chamber, now empirically documented, that are most disturbing. The researchers estimate that the “Facebook Effect” drove one-tenth of all anti-refugee violence in Germany over the past two years. While Facebook didn’t create the idea of an echo chamber, it amplifies an echo chamber’s impact based on personalized news feeds and the speed at which information can be shared. Echo chambers exist in traditional media as well. In the last decade, terrorist attacks in America by Muslims have received 357% more press coverage than terrorist attacks committed by non-Muslims. This is particularly disturbing considering that white, right-wing terrorists have carried out nearly twice as many terrorist attacks on US soil. It is worth noting that this study started in 2005, long before today’s era of state-sanctioned dissemination of narrative-shaping half-truths, made-up facts, and outright lies.

Plastic Cups: Ditching plastic straws is all the rage these days and for good reason. An estimated 7.5% of plastic in the environment comes from straws and stirrers. To make matters worse, it takes a straw nearly 200 years to break down under normal environmental conditions. In the US, more than a 1/2 billion straws are used every day. The large drink purveyors, such as Starbucks, have taken action by starting the process of removing all plastic straws from stores. Starbucks will eliminate more than a billion straws per year by 2020. While removing plastic straws is in vogue, plastic cups are also a big problem for the environment. Every year, 600 billion cups are produced globally; Starbucks alone uses 6 billion. Yet, it is not nearly as easy to eliminate plastic cups as it is plastic straws. It is incredibly hard to build a fully recyclable and compostable cup that is suitable for serving hot and cold beverages. Most paper cups include a plastic lining that prevents the cup from leaking, but also prevent it from being truly recyclable. For a number of years, to try to solve the puzzle of building a better cup, Starbucks hosted a “Cup Summit” at MIT featuring many of the big coffee companies. The Cup Summit has been discontinued, but now Starbucks has teamed up with McDonalds to offer a million dollar prize for anyone who can solve the problem. It took Dunkin’ Donuts ten years to develop a better cup. Everybody runs on Dunkin.’ Except the earth. The earth struggles to process Dunkin’s famous foam cups. Beyond the recycling issues, Dunkin’ needed to build a cup that could accommodate its resealable lid. Dunkin’ prides itself on its re-sealable lids, which are much better than just the run-of-the-mill re-closable lids used by most drink purveyors. After ten years of prototyping and testing, Dunkin’ believes it finally built the perfect cup. Their new cup, which they will be rolling out next spring, features a layer of air sandwiched between two layers of responsibly sourced paper.

Check out the recently posted Friday Fives from the past three months.

May: Pupu Platter, Japanese Train Efficiency, Opportunity Zones, Ridesharing in Healthcare, Ode to Lebron

June: Pupu Platter, Eating Poop, Cyber Crime Sniffing Dogs, Unfulfilled Sexual Desires, Alex Honnold

July: Pupu Platter, Bill Browder (x2), Best Buy, The Facebook Model

******

Click here to receive the Friday Five in your Inbox.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade