Blue zones have something else connecting them
Lots of Big Stuff this week.
Hello,
Do you ever have the unnerving feeling that the modern world is really quite bad for us? Just this week I’ve been reminded that non-stick frying pans coat your food in a nice glaze of polytetrafluoroethylene, plastics are now in our brain tissues, whole aisles of the supermarket are essentially poisonous, war is just a thing at the moment and phones have shot our dopamine systems to pieces.
It’s hard to tell what’s alarmist and what’s not. Persuading everyone to eat raw broccoli and live in the woods has become an industry in itself. I would imagine people have had the sense that something isn’t quite as long as this modern global society has been about. It might be a religious thing that has stayed with us. There’s a sense that we’re playing God with the technologies we’ve created, which seems like it can only end badly. That’s the whole point of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, written just 206 years ago.
Does doing stuff we haven’t previously been able to do have to end badly? I don’t think so. I’m pretty glad medicine is where it is and that tractors exist. I don’t think anyone intentionally set out to cause some of the problems we face. The challenge is that we haven’t quite cracked how to navigate the sociopsychological effect of the dissolution of responsibility.
Take the case of Teflon (what better example is there of playing God than stopping halloumi from sticking to your pan?) or ‘polytetrafluoroethylene’ which was accidentally discovered whilst scientists were trying to create a refrigerant in 1938. Several years later (in 1954), Colette Grégoire urged her husband to apply the material which he’d been using on his fishing tackle to her cooking pans. Thus Tefal was born.
As chronicled in the excellent Mark Ruffalo film, Black Waters, this all descended into the classic corporate scandal with a shady conglomerate pumping PTFE into everyone and everything. But like BigPharma and BigTobacco and BigFood and BigOil and BigDefence it seems lazy just to point at this kinda stuff and call it ‘evil’. You’ve got to assume that most people are good so how do you mitigate the fact that big groups tend to brush over some fairly horrific stuff? If you’ve any thoughts, do give me a shout.
There must be a way,
Hugo
BigStuff
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
Wooden skyscrapers offer an alternative to concrete and steel 🏗️ - a new technology called ‘mass timber’ is enabling construction companies to build massive buildings out of wood. Although this does use wood, it is much better for the planet as current building materials are incredibly carbon-intensive. The tallest wooden building is in Milwaukee and is 25 stories high.
The Blue Zone effect is magnified by poor recordkeeping and benefits fraud 🌍 - everyone got very excited about certain areas of the world where people seem to live longer, but a study has found out the main thing linking them is a lack of documentation. In Japan, this is largely because the US bombed all the hospitals (Okinawa was particularly hard hit during the war) and in Greece, 72% of centenarians disappeared when an audit was done.
TikTok study isn’t particularly surprising 🤳 - a survey found that 46% of the accounts followed were ‘mid-tier individual influencers and creators’, essentially internet-native types, whilst celebrities only accounted for 2%. Generally, people prefer entertainment and pop culture to news and politics. Makes sense, a scroll should be a peaceful place.
Big Food is suing Big Food for not playing fairly 🥩- McDonalds is in the process of suing Tyson and nine other suppliers for alleging artificially inflating the price of beef to combat shrinking profit margins. They allege this began in 2015 when these companies suddenly had their collective profits rise 25%.. You’ve heard of Vybz Kartel and OPEC (Oil Cartel), now we’ve got Beef Cartel.
The DoJ is seriously considering breaking up Google 🔨 - they are pretty convinced that Alphabet’s grip on the search and digital advertising markets amounts to an “illegal monopoly” which paves the way for the tech company to be broken up. There are some less dramatic steps they could take, like banning Google from paying companies to prioritise their products.
Nobel prize for the founder of DeepMind 🏅 - the subsidiary of Alphabet has been responsible for using computers to predict the structures of proteins which has driven huge breakthroughs in medicine. Professor Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, won the prize for chemistry with two colleagues who worked on the tools. Hassabis has to do his research late at night, as he’s busy running DeepMind during the day.
GSK to pay out $2.2million to settle thousands of claims 💊 - around 80,000 claims have been made in the US against the British pharmaceutical company with the claimants alleging that its heartburn treatment Zantac caused their cancer. Back in 2019, a Connecticut-based laboratory demonstrated that Zantac could form a carcinogen called ‘NMDA’. GSK has not admitted any liability as part of the settlement.
Extreme weather in Asia is pushing up the price of tea ☕ - benchmark auction prices in northern India are up 30% YoY. Tea has been getting more expensive all year as continuous cycles of bad weather impact crop yields. Some supermarkets are now placing security tags on PG Tips and olive oil.
Blackrock now manages $11.5tn of the world’s capital 💰 - for context the GDP of Japan, the world’s third-largest economy is $4.2tn.The rallying markets have helped achieve this record amount and the momentum is likely to continue as the US election will achieve some level of certainty on what is to come. Blackrock’s bread and butter are Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that look to track different markets or collections of stocks.
Europe is getting into big trucks despite safety fears 🛻 - it’s all well and good driving a massive pickup on the wide-open roads of ‘Murica but as any tank commander from Operation Overlord will tell you, it’s bloody hard driving large vehicles around the French countryside without running over the odd cyclist. A Dodge Ram 1500 is bigger than a Panzer I tank and considerably more dangerous in this day and age. Then again, it’s good to be free.
Quote of the week
“The complexity of things - the things within things - just seems to be endless. I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.” - Alice Munro