Are mini popadoms a type of crisp or just small popadoms?
This and other important questions answered in this weeks stuff.
Hello,
I went to the cinema yesterday and saw Poor Things. It was one of those ones where you're going more for the activity than to watch anything in particular. I’ve seen some strange films in my time but this took things to another level. Hats off to Yorgos for getting it made with a pretty substantial budget. It added to the weirdness that it wasn’t filmed on a potato with some obscure actors. The sets and costumes are from a parallel universe. Emma Stone, who also worked as a producer on the film, is like nothing you’ve seen before but is entirely convincing in doing it.
The film draws heavily on steampunk, which wasn’t a genre I realised I liked or even knew existed until quite recently. It’s basically how someone in the Victorian era might have imagined the future. Steam-powered planes, mechanical computers, that sort of thing. Lots of chrome. The realisation came when I saw a list of films that are influenced by it and I realised they’re all pretty diabolic films but I quite liked them back in the day. We’re talking Wild Wild West, Around the World in 80 Days and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. These films have an average Rotten Tomatoes score of 22% but something about them seemed to click with the young steampunk in me.
Poor Things is proper though, very funny with lots of strong themes. If your sensibilities are Victorian, however, I would probably give it a miss.
Yorgos is a punk rocker,
Hugo
Extraordinary Gentleman
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
The world is getting through a lot of sand ⏳ - it is so in demand that there are organised crime groups illegally mining sand in places like Morocco. Each year the world uses 50 billion metric tonnes of sand, largely to make concrete. It is the world’s biggest extraction industry and the only natural resource more widely consumed than water. This is inevitably causing a whole host of ecological problems.
UK government spending £8 million on King Charles piccies 👑 - I thought my passport photos were expensive but it’s costing quite a lot more to put a picture of the monarch playing dress up in Royal Navy regalia into every public building. It does seem like a lot, I’ve got a mate who works at Snappy Snaps who could have done it for half of that.
Everyone is lobbing satellites into space and it’s getting full 🛰️ - there are already 9,000 up there with a further 65,000 planned. If all of those are launched then 10% of the twinkling objects in the sky will be satellites. The International Astronomical Union (a favourite of mine) has demanded that manufacturers keep their brightness below a certain level. Too right.
AI is helping to stop buses all turning up at the same time 🚌 - you know the deal, you wait ages for one and then three turn up, amirite? Well, now good artificial intelligence is helping with timetables across the UK that are notoriously complicated or “one heck of a challenge” as Simon Pearson, chief commercial officer at First Bus puts it. During a trial period, the use of AI resulted in a 20% improvement in punctuality.
Afrobeats is growing in popularity globally 🎶 - streams of the genre have grown on Spotify by 550% since 2017. Spotify has been putting boots on the ground in Nigeria for several years to grow the genre’s global presence, latching onto what was already a growing wave. Many of the early digital successes of Afrobeat were on other platforms like Soundcloud and Boomplay.
Two blast furnaces are closing at Port Talbot as steel production isn’t commercially viable 🔥 - Tata wants to transition its heavily loss-making operation in the UK to creating steel from scrap using arc furnaces which requires a much smaller workforce. The UK is set to become the only G20 country to not produce its own steel - good for the old carbon footprint, not so good for strategic security.
People aren’t reusing reusable water cups 🍶 - in a tremendous display of late capitalism people are camping outside supermarkets for limited edition Stanley cups, which are absurdly big water bottles. Stanley 1913 (the company behind the bottles) is printing money with profits rising from $70m in 2020 to $750m in 2023. The current president previously lead the reboot of Crocs which transformed them from beach nerd attire to a fashion statement. The irony of all of this is that you actually need to use a reusable bottle about 500 times for it to have less of an impact than single-use bottles. Which is quite hard to do if you're collecting them.
Sainsbury’s is moving out of banking 🏦 - having announced in 2020 that it is going to “put food first”, it’s doing just that as running a bank makes a relatively small amount of money, requires capital investments and is a regulatory pain in the backside. I’ve just remembered I need to get a Nectar Card, I just need to get on with it, it’ll take five minutes, it’s getting ridiculous.
Mini popadoms are crisps, says a judge 👩⚖️ - VAT only applies to specific foodstuffs, so companies often try to claim their products are the thing that’s not taxable. There was a tribunal about the legal status of Jaffa Cakes in 1991, which turned out to be cakes after all, even though they are in the biscuit section. In this instance, Walkers has been arguing poppadoms are not crisps as they’re not made from potatoes. The judge disagreed.
SEO is messing up Google Search 🔎- as you’ve probably noticed, pretty much every result on Google is an article providing advice where one of the pieces of advice is to buy their product. This is thanks to the armies of SEO agencies that make their clients’ content show up first. Some German researchers have proven definitively this is making Google worse.
Quote of the week
“It’s not really my problem if they think I’m weird” - Sid Vicious