In The Zone
Blue Zones
A Blue Zone is an area of the world where people live much longer than average. They have been identified by aging researchers, and featured in literature and a new show on Netflix. On its face, the concept of Blue Zones makes sense - people living simpler lives, eating healthy locally-sourced foods in cute little coastal villages. Why wouldn’t they all live to be a hundred?
Well, one problem with the Blue Zone theory is that many of the small towns with these outsized lifespans are…poor. Which is a leading indicator of not living longer than average. What gives?
Turns out, Blue Zones exist not because they’ve cracked a secret longevity code, but through lousy record keeping. An Australian researcher compiled the data and found some pretty obvious issues:
In the United States supercentenarian status is predicted by the absence of vital registration. In the UK, Italy, Japan, and France remarkable longevity is instead predicted by regional poverty, old-age poverty, material deprivation, low incomes, high crime rates, a remote region of birth, worse health, and fewer 90+ year old people.
You might be thinking: Hang on, poverty and crime predict living past a hundred? Less people over ninety somehow correlates with more people over a hundred? Well:
In addition, supercentenarian birthdates are concentrated on the first of the month and days divisible by five: patterns indicative of widespread fraud and error. As such, relative poverty and missing vital documents constitute unexpected predictors of centenarian and supercentenarian status, and support a primary role of fraud and error in generating remarkable human age records.
Oh, right, yeah. What likely happened is that researchers in the 2000s were looking at people born around 1900, when lots of places did not have ‘state-wide’ birth certification, meaning a systematized recording of their birth. If you think about it, many births in the year 1900 were probably not in a hospital, especially in poor areas with little access to health services. So, instead, parents who bothered to document their child’s existence sometimes took liberties.
Perhaps it is the innate human desire to live for a long time (if not forever) that led researchers to overlook fairly obvious anomalies like these:
Between the 1880 and 1900 census, a period covering 79% of US supercentenarian births, the US population increased by 150% and average life expectancy by twenty per cent. The introduction of complete-coverage vital registration in the USA coincided with this rapid increase in lifespan and population size, and was expected to result in a large increase in the number of supercentenarian records per capita.
Instead, the introduction of state-wide birth certification coincides with a sharp reduction in the number of supercentenarians born in each state. In total, 82% of the GRG supercentenarian records from the USA predate state-wide birth certification.
We’re really supposed to buy that 79% of all supercentenarians (people significantly older than 100) born in the US were born before the invention of penicillin? Also, when state-wide birth certificates became the norm here in America, the number of supercents dropped by eighty percent.
So, we now can see the data were bad in places without proper birth certification. But what about places that kept better records and still had a bunch of very old people?
In countries with more complete birth documentation, high poverty rates were the best predictor remarkable age records.
[…]
Higher rates of old-age poverty are linked to higher densities of remarkably old people: the amount of old-age poverty alone predicts up to seventy per cent of the variation in extreme longevity.
Wait, what? A bunch of poor, old people is still somehow strongly correlated to those same people living well beyond a hundred? How does that make sense? Here’s a clue from the Japanese data:
Prefectures that spend more money on old-age welfare per capita, a disincentive for welfare fraud, also produce fewer centenarians per capita.
Of course! What do old people in poor areas have in common? Poor kids, who might be more than happy to continue to receive public benefits for their deceased elders. Pension fraud is common today, so imagine how much it happened back before technology made it easier to catch:
In 1997 Italy discovered it was paying 30,000 pensions to dead people.
The Greeks had similarly creative approaches to longevity:
In 2011, just one of several Greek social insurance institutes was caught paying the pensions of 1,473 dead people who had ‘survived’ past the age of 90. A subsequent 2012 investigation by the Greek labor ministry was triggered by the “unusually high number of 9,000 Greek centenarians drawing old-age benefits”, a notable figure given the 2011 Greek census found only 2,488 living centenarians
Excellent. It’s disappointing that content factories like Netflix continue to produce television shows giving viewers false hope that if they simply move to Corsica or eat fish soup every day they’ll live past a hundred. In truth, the lives of the poor in Europe and Japan seem much better Americans because, as we’ve discussed, they actually are. They live a bit longer than we do, but only because we’re actively killing ourselves with our lifestyles. Blue Zones are not only a myth, they’re based on data so shoddy a statistics undergrad could (and should) have spotted the flaws. Oh well.
MGM Resorts
Ransomware attacks are so common these days they rarely feature in these pages anymore. Criminals hacking and taking over businesses can be disruptive, or downright dangerous. Gangs attack hospitals and city governments, throwing critical services into chaos. For the average deep-pocketed private business, paying a ransom to recover their network is worth the cost - and probably covered by insurance. What happens if a company doesn’t pay?
Last week, a gang hacked both Caesar’s and MGM Resorts in Vegas. Caesar’s paid $15 million to the crooks, and their services were restored. MGM took a different approach and, well, their casinos were all jacked up as a result:
I knew from videos posted to Twitter that some slot machines would be broken, that all elevators would be unlocked and able to travel to any floor (security guards are checking room keys before anyone can get on any elevator), that parking garages had lost the ability to charge people, that hotel check-in lines would be very long, and that certain casino operations would be cash only.
A tech journalist caught a flight to Vegas to walk around the MGM and see just how bad it was. He found hundreds of broken slot machines, screens displaying errors. Casino billboards were pixelated. Most importantly to the human operations of MGM’s half dozen properties on the strip, food courts and restaurants couldn’t place orders or charge customers, so eating and drinking inside any of the casinos was nearly impossible. Employees scrambled to hand-deliver order slips to the one or two working terminals in the building.
It was not all bad news, though. Kitchen workers could enjoy a respite from the normally hectic pace of casino life:
Two kitchen workers told me that they’ve never seen anything like this, but that for them specifically, the last week has been easy. “It’s been bad for business but not bad for me. We used to have orders coming constantly, from everywhere,” one said, referring to the various digital ordering kiosks in the dining room. “Now there’s only one place you can order and it’s for all the restaurants, so we’re barely getting any orders.”
MGM finally got their systems back up after ten days of outages, but surely the damage cost the company more than the $15 million the hackers wanted. There are ethical dilemmas attached to paying a ransom, to be sure, but a firsthand look at how interconnected every system inside a hotel or casino has become clearly shows how disruptive cyber crime can be.
A Visit to Walmart
I do not often write about personal experiences in these pages, though I am known to grouse about bad things happening in and around my city from time to time. This week I made a fateful shopping decision and decided to dedicate a bit of space to the experience.
I do not shop at Walmart. There are plenty of Walmarts in Philadelphia, but I actively avoid them. I could pretend it’s due to a deep moral objection to the family who’ve become meddling billionaires as a result of the company’s financial success, but in reality it’s mostly because I imagine the in-store experience at the local Super Walmart as a shit show. This concern was immediately validated before I could even park my car. I circled crowded rows, the place packed on a weekday afternoon. The spaces that weren’t full of cars were obstructed by discarded carts, or worse.
Walmart does what a lot of big box stores do now, which is aggressively police their parking lots with the now-ubiquitous solar-paneled security camera array. Large signs plastered everywhere remind the ne’er-do-wells that they are under SURVEILLANCE, because the act of existing in a Walmart parking lot is now a tacit agreement to be tracked by faceless technology firms.
Walking into a Super Walmart and being confronted with the grocery-store-inside-a-department-store is something most Americans are by now accustomed to, but I am a woke elite urbanite and typically shop at smaller food stores. This Walmart’s food selection was, to put it mildly, outrageous. Produce and meat aisles were comparable to big-brand competitors who only sell groceries, but the sheer volume of frozen and snack foods at Walmart was overwhelming - I bought some of those snacks, because why not, right? When else will I get the opportunity to try Doritos queso snack sticks (bad) or Flamin’ Hot Fritos (good)?
My reusable shopping bag brimming with impulse purchases from Walmart’s towering aisles of sugar and starch, I wove my way through the store to the pharmacy, where I waited five minutes for someone to come unlock the cabinet containing such illicit substances as Tylenol and Advil, because nearly everything in the pharmacy was locked.
It is common these days to see products pharmacy and grocery chains believe are susceptible to theft locked away - shampoo, soap, baby formula. We could spend time dissecting the way retail chains humiliate the poor and vulnerable this way, but let’s focus on why Walmart, with its pristine, well-stocked grocery department full of things people need to literally survive, none of it locked up, decided that open access to Excedrin posed an existential threat to the store’s continued financial success.
Drugs in hand, I headed towards a vast expanse of checkout stands. This Walmart had a handful of helpfully-labeled ‘Assisted Checkout’ aisles, meaning a real person would help you pay for and bag your purchases. Then, beyond this squad of Assistants, stretched no less than forty self checkout stations. But! Only three of them were actually working, on the very far end of the store, close to the exit doors. Every other terminal told me to Use a Different Lane.
Despite dozens of perfectly functional but intentionally disabled self checkout machines, I had to wait in line behind a befuddled throng of people asking a bored attendant if they could use a different line. No, they could not. I precariously balanced my items on the eight-inch-wide bagging area as the screen showed me a constant feed of my own face for some reason. Really, the reason was to intimidate me into scanning everything properly - we know all about Walmart using police as their private security force - a vibe reinforced by big RETAIL THEFT IS A FELONY signs hung at each station.
As I said before, I haven’t been to a Walmart in a few years, so I forgot another thing they do - check receipts. While the store could only muster four people to ring purchases, and one person with keys to unlock cabinets in the pharmacy, there were two people checking receipts at the door, because of course. The overt security presence didn’t end there - a private contractor in a big black pickup patrolled the parking lot, honking angrily at people waiting to park. And a cop car idled by the store’s entrance, lights flashing a warning to would-be retail criminals.
The experience messed me up - the aisles of bountiful food, pristinely stocked and stacked, and the rest of the store, a dull gray wasteland of narrow aisles traversing racks of cheap clothing, chintzy electronics, and carceral pharmacy cabinets. Ninety percent of checkout aisles unusable, telling me to fuck off. Needing to prove to someone I bought the things seventeen cameras watched me buy.
I have shopped at the Target a few blocks from this Walmart and they do not lock up the aspirin or funnel me through a gauntlet of security and bag-checks - maybe this is why Target claims they suffer so much more theft than Walmart? Who knows. I am willing to wager that the Walmarts across the river in the affluent, white suburb of Cherry Hill are better staffed and don’t put everything behind plexiglass. But it parts the curtain on how Walmart, and only Walmart has chosen to build and maintain its retail dominance. It lures people in with cheap, plentiful food options, and once they’ve entered through the sliding doors treats them as enemies - a potential threat in need of constant monitoring and surveillance.
Walmart’s scale and pricing power mean it can capture more of the market than its competitors, but it cares so little about the customer experience that it has become openly hostile to said customers - people who may not be able to afford to shop anywhere else. This is not how free markets are supposed to work, but it is how our free markets work, when one company has grown so big and powerful it can staff its stores with skeleton crews and treat its shoppers like criminals, with the confidence they’ll keep coming back for those Low, Low Prices.
Walmart sucks, the people who run it and get rich off it suck, and it sucks that despite providing such an awful retail experience it’s still the best option for a huge number of Americans. Living in the world’s richest country should not require subjecting yourself to an endless stream of indignities to go about your life, but this is the way shit works now. You must fight with your insurer over every medical visit and procedure. You must read the fine print of every credit card and rental agreement and mortgage you sign. You must submit to NDAs and non-competes and arbitration clauses to keep a job. You must bag your own groceries, and risk criminal charges if you do it wrong. You must find someone to unlock the infant formula so your kid can eat. Meanwhile half a dozen middlemen are profiting from your debasement - earning money for doing nothing, entitled to all of it.
It’s not enough for the ultrawealthy to peer down at us from atop their skyscrapers and yachts. They’ve engineered systems to inflict a hundred daily inconveniences upon us to make life a bit more tenuous, a bit less enjoyable. That’s the experience of shopping at Walmart. It doesn’t have to be, but that’s what Walmart has decided it should be, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Starbucks
We can’t end on that sour note, can we? Instead, let’s revisit one of our favorite topics around here: food lawsuits! This time it’s Starbucks in the crosshairs:
Consumers complained that Starbucks' Mango Dragonfruit, Mango Dragonfruit Lemonade, Pineapple Passionfruit, Pineapple Passionfruit Lemonade, Strawberry Açai and Strawberry Açai Lemonade Refreshers contained none of the advertised mango, passion fruit or açai.
Starbucks argued that its menu boards simply describe ‘flavors’ in those drinks and no ‘reasonable’ consumers could have been confused. A federal judge rejected the company’s attempts to dismiss the claims, and offered a downright reasonable critique:
But the judge said that unlike the term "vanilla," the subject of many lawsuits, "nothing before the court indicates that 'mango,' 'passionfruit,' and 'açaí' are terms that typically are understood to represent a flavor without also representing that ingredient."
Cronan also said confusion might be understandable because other Starbucks products contain ingredients in their names - for example, Ice Matcha Tea Latte contains matcha and Honey Citrus Mint Tea contains honey and mint.
This seems…fair. I don’t think Starbucks customers are expecting a fresh fruit smoothie, but surely there’s a way to get mango extract or whatever and swirl a spoonful into a customer’s five dollar lemonade.
Starbucks, like most companies sued over this sort of stuff, claims the lawsuit is ridiculous and if we lived in a country with proper consumer protection agencies who oversaw this sort of labeling, they’d be right! But this is how we do business in America, baby. We must show a jury where Starbucks hurt us on the plastic cup, so our lawyers can collect a few million in fees, and Starbucks is forced to slightly alter its signage.
Short Cons
WSJ - “Starlink hasn’t signed up customers as quickly as SpaceX had hoped. Toward the end of last year, Starlink had more than one million active subscribers, SpaceX has said. The company thought its satellite-internet business would have 20 million subscribers as 2022 closed out, according to SpaceX’s 2015 presentation.”
NY Mag - “Trump is just reporting the facts, here, at least according to Elon Musk’s social-media platform, which is itself unremarkable among its peers — from premium TV streamers to chum-level ad-tech vendors — in its routine production of questionably large numbers.”
NY Post - “The FBI had so many paid informants at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, that it lost track of the number and had to perform a later audit to determine exactly how many “Confidential Human Sources” run by different FBI field offices were present that day, a former assistant director of the bureau has told lawmakers.”
Guardian - “Europe is facing a “severe public health crisis”, with almost everyone across the continent living in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution, an investigation by the Guardian has found.”
Guardian - “Leaders of some of the world’s biggest polluting countries are skipping a UN summit on Wednesday aimed at generating some progress in the spluttering effort to address the climate crisis, during what may be the hottest year ever recorded.”
Intercept - “Thanks to its bloat and political wrangling, the annual Department of Defense budget legislation includes hundreds of revisions and limitations telling the Pentagon what it can and cannot do. To make sense of all those provisions, the Pentagon created an AI program, codenamed GAMECHANGER.”
The Oklahoman - ““The Pioneer Woman” Ree Drummond made the town of Pawhuska, Oklahoma, famous through her farm lifestyle brand, but a recent social media post about an upcoming film is drawing attention to the darker history of the Drummond family’s land.”
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