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Articles to Read.
Political discourse nowadays is enough to depress anyone, and the media don’t help by ignoring good economic news. But buck up, Americans: Worker wages are growing much faster than previously reported.And in June wages and salaries grew at an annual rate of 5.5%, which is a rocking 4.1% after adjusting for inflation.
This is far more than the 3.1% year over year increase in average hourly earnings that the Labor Department’s jobs report showed for June. One reason for the disparity may be that employers are hiring millions of younger, lower-income workers, which may be depressing average hourly earnings as older, more highly paid workers retire.
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A meaty problem: solving the global protein crisis
As income grows in emerging economies, people change their diet to include more protein. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation predicts our demand for food will rise by 70 per cent come 2050 - with demand for meat seen rising faster than this because of changes to the diet of the fast-growing middle class in Asia and Africa.
One innovative solution is a radical shakeup of what farm animals eat to raise productivity and reduce environmental impact. But it’s no small matter changing the global animal feeds industry - which its trade association says is worth about $400 billion a year.
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I don’t understand people who say they don’t want to retire. Especially those who have the means to and just don’t. If I had the choice I would have retired yesterday.
Now, when I say retire, what I really mean is having the freedom to be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want, without worry of financial burden—a form of Barista FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) if you will. I feel as if I will always be wired to make money to support myself and my family.
Retirement should be the part of life when the most difficult thing to do is nothing. Yet, for a lot of people, they are completely consumed by their work life and don’t leave any room for their home life. So, when they reach retirement age, they don’t know what to do with themselves. They realize that they’ve lost their work identity and may have never really had a true home identity. The goal should be to retire from work, not your life situation.
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His mission: Meet 10,000 people, one at a time, for an hour at a time. His goal: Human connection.
Every day, Rob Lawless, 28, introduces himself to a stranger. Some days, he sits down with two new people. Most days, he meets with four. Why? Lawless, a self-described, full-blown extrovert, is on a mission to make friends. The process is one he loves so much that he’s turned it into a full-time job.
“I’ve heard it takes 90 hours to truly feel like you know someone, so I see these hours as just opening the door with people, getting us one step of the way,” says Lawless. “Going from college, where I had a lot of really great friends, to sitting 12 hours in an office, I was driven to get back to that place of community.”
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How Mosquitoes Changed Everything
The most dramatic conquest by mosquitoes came when old diseases encountered a new continent. When Columbus arrived in the New World, the mosquitoes there were pesky but carried no diseases. (Winegard chalks this up to different farming practices here: far less cultivation and disruption of natural ecosystems, and less direct contact with animals through husbandry. Syphilis was perhaps the only disease to ride the Columbian Exchange eastward.) But the blood of the new arrivals, and the mosquitoes that crossed with their ships, changed everything. Just twenty-two years after Columbus stepped onto Hispaniola, a census revealed that the local Taino population had dropped from between five and eight million people to just twenty-six thousand. Along with smallpox and influenza, mosquito-borne diseases led, by Winegard’s estimate, to the deaths of ninety-five million indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, from a pre-contact population of about a hundred million.
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When I get Lunch, Part II: The Tasty-Unhealthy Scale
The first relevant variable is how the food tastes. Like attractiveness, the tastiness of any given food item is subjective, though with considerable consensus around different food types. The directly relevant tradeoff for how tasty any given food type is how healthy it is. There is considerable debate and disagreement about what people consider healthy. Judging by its popularity in supermarkets, many consumers still look for “fat free”, while that is a label that tells me to look elsewhere. Either way, it’s far too often the case that things which taste good are unhealthy for us, especially when we consider the quantity of unhealthy food that we are tempted to consume.
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BILLIE EILISH And the Triumph of the Weird
Eilish’s debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, was released this past spring and has already been streamed more than 2 billion times.
Eilish comes in for soundcheck, then recruits her dad and Finneas and a few crew guys for some Frisbee on the grass, which quickly devolves into a wholesome hip-hop dance party. She heads inside to cool off with a gluten-free vegan burrito (a lifelong vegetarian, she has never eaten meat — although she did once accidentally swallow an ant in a glass of soy milk). She washes it down with sparkling water, because her mom doesn’t like her drinking soda.
Eilish’s dirty little secret is that, for all her boasts about villainy and dad-seducing, she’s actually a pretty good kid. She doesn’t drink. She’s never even tried drugs. Her song “Xanny” is all about how pills are dumb. True, she curses like she’s auditioning for Veep. But improbably, her album doesn’t feature a single curse word.
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More to Check Out:
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Container Farms
- Food trucks have multiplied in Seattle — and with that come growing pains
- Why people get away with being rude at work
- Boram, 6-year-old South Korean YouTuber, buys $8 million property
- Here’s How America Uses Its Land
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