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Your daily dose of nonsense - 17 July 2020
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TikTok and geopolitics
The people on TikTok are amazing. They provide limitless amounts of mindless entertainment to you, sober or otherwise. And all was going good for the app. It even hired former Disney’s former Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer & International Kevin Mayer as its CEO.
There’s just one problem - it’s owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. That is perceived as a liability. So much so that India banned it nationally. Ever wondered how that affects TikTok? Below is the breakdown of TikTok usage from December 2017 to December 2019 according to App Annie, a mobile market data and analytics platform. India collectively spends the most time on TikTok.
And now, the United States is considering banning the app to. So what does TikTok do in response? What do you do when government policy is going to dictate how you go about your business?
Yes, showing up to vote during elections helps us lay people. But when you have more firepower (i.e. money) you hire lobbyists (aka Influence-as-a-Service). And TikTok has just hired lobbyists on both sides of the political spectrum. For example, according to this report, they have hired:
David Urban, a key player in Trump’s 2016 win in Pennsylvania and an adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign;
Michael Hacker, former senior adviser to House Majority Whip James Clyburn (Democrat-South Carolina);
Michael Bloom, a former senior adviser to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat -California).
And if all else fails, they could always up sticks and make it an American business.
Ikea’s new meatless meatballs
According to this Ikea video and this corporate write up, they are now making meatless meatballs. According to them, they sell 1 billion meatballs. I can definitely believe them.
The new meatless balls would be made out of “yellow pea protein, oats, potatoes, onion and apple”, and they would have 4% of the climate impact of the standard meatball.
I think that mentioning that saving the environment as the sole motivator for selling this meatball is brilliant. If you sold it from an animal cruelty perspective, probably many already feel jaded with this approach, or even feel antagonised with the whole holier than thou feel. Bringing this aspect up might wreck the whole thing up.
Anyway, for the rest of us, Ikea posted the recipe for their meatballs for you to make from scratch on Twitter (go to this link for original size photo):
The Bank of Mexico’s cash contingency plan
In a disaster, say an earthquake or a hurricane, many things get destroyed and you would also need to stock up on supplies. Some of the things that get destroyed would probably include electrical power lines, internet cables etc. If you aren’t looting, chances are you're going to need cash to buy stuff because everything else don’t work.
If you are in Mexico, the central bank has got you covered - it owns planes to fly cash to places that are in need of that sweet smelling paper. According to this document (in Spanish), it will send money to the airport in its armoured vehicles, fly the cash in its Bombardier CRJ700 or the two De Havilland Canada DHC-8, and distribute the cash locally.
And if you go on planespotters.net, you can even find their registration numbers:
University admissions and the lottery of life in numbers
According to this National Bureau of Economic Research paper (paywall):
Using publicly released reports, we examine the preferences Harvard gives for recruited athletes, legacies, those on the dean’s interest list, and children of faculty and staff (ALDCs). Among white admits, over 43% are ALDC. Among admits who are African American, Asian American, and Hispanic, the share is less than 16% each. Our model of admissions shows that roughly three quarters of white ALDC admits would have been rejected if they had been treated as white non-ALDCs.