The Newsletter You Didn't Subscribe To - Pygmy Hippos
Your daily dose of nonsense to start the day with - 13 July 2020
Source: Phys.org
Source: Paul Fahy via The Huffington Post
Source: Marwell Zoo
Jack Dorsey’s universal basic income experiment
Jack Dorsey, who is in the unusual position of being CEO of both Twitter and Square, is reportedly about to go on a universal basic income experiment.
Original tweet here.
Dorsey has a net worth of $7.5bil and is going to spend $3mil on this programme. A drop in the water, but who knows.
Finland ran a UBI experiment from January 2017 to December 2018. 2,000 randomly selected unemployed persons were paid a monthly tax-exempt basic income of 560 euros regardless of any other income they may have had or whether they were actively looking for work.
There were small employment effects from the outcome of the Finnish experiment.
Plants
My friend brought me to this indoor plant shop this weekend. The interior of the shop was genuinely good looking and I believe that many after visiting it, including yours truly, would aspire to have their homes look as good as that. The first thing I noticed, however, was that there was actually a queue to get into this place.
So a couple questions popped into my head:
Has there always been this level of demand, or has demand increased over the lockdown as people stay at home?
Is there no online avenue to purchase plants, or are plants something that you have to see for yourself?
So unfortunately, I couldn’t find sales data that was specifically for plants during the lockdown versus pre-lockdown. But a quick view on Instagram would show you 33,314,458 posts on #plants, along with other related hashtags. And you also have a proliferation of brand new articles aggregating the most popular plants on the social media platform such as this.
But by eyeballing, a good portion of these photos and articles do also come from the pre-lockdown era, which suggests that the demand has always been there. And data for the pre-lockdown era is easier to come by.
According to this survey ran by the Royal Horticultural Society and Ipsos MORI, the market research firm in March 2019:
72% of adults have houseplants; and
80% of 16-24 year-olds have houseplants.
These numbers, along with the Instagram presence, might suggest that this is increasingly a market for young people.
So how big is this market? According to this Royal Horticultural Society October 2019 report on the state of the industry, there are 7,150 businesses dedicated to ornaments and those categorised under “retailers selling other goods in specialised stores”. Here’s the breakdown of turnover:
If I took the midpoint of each interval and used £50mil as the last value, I would get a rough market size of £4.5bil. So it’s small-ish, but not that small.
So is there an online means for people to buy these plants? Why are people still flocking to physical shops?
Well, if anything else, places like the shop that I visited do have an online shop and offer deliveries. There’s also this startup called Patch, which is an online-retailer for house plants that was aggressively advertising on YouTube last year. Maybe visiting a shop is a different experience altogether with the atmosphere and all that people want. But who knows. With the introduction of so many online commerce functionality being offered, including Instagram’s own shopping feature, might push the online selling of plants further.
Coolest bank note - a woman riding a shark
Source: Pinterest
The image above is a 3 Cook Islands dollar banknote. It has a woman riding a shark on the front, which I think is extremely cool, on par with bear cavalries, like so:
According to this site, this is the origin story of the hammerhead shark - she was riding the shark, but she wanted to drink a coconut that she brought along with her. She smashed the coconut on the top of the shark’s head, thus flattening said shark’s head and giving us the hammerhead shark that we know today.
Also noteworthy is that this note is three dollars. You can probably get one from eBay or other resellers. This one is listed at USD 12.99. The Cook Islands use the New Zealand dollar today.
Below is a map showing where the Cook Islands are. It is named after the British navigator Captain James Cook. He was the first European recorded to make contact with the Eastern coast of Australia and to circumnavigate New Zealand, amongst other things.
Source: Google Maps
If you have suggestions for a banknote that is cooler than this, let me know.