I’m going to make an argument that, maybe, inflation has its benefits.
NASA releases its results on how earthlings would respond to an asteroid strike.
And everything is racist.
Dumbass of the Day
Not Really a Tragedy
Another business is being killed by inflation.
According to the New York Post:
Hooters abruptly closed dozens of “underperforming stores” – the latest chain to shutter restaurants as inflation batters US consumers.
The famed chicken wings brand, known for its skimpy uniforms, cited “pressure from current market conditions” for its decision to close an unspecified number of stores.
“Like many restaurants under pressure from current market conditions, Hooters has made the difficult decision” to close select locations, a spokesperson told The Post on Monday.
Roughly 40 of the 300 restaurants worldwide were shut, including in Florida, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Texas and Virginia, according to Nation’s Restaurant News.
Later in the article:
Hooters’ closures come as other popular chains close their doors.
Seafood chain Red Lobster shuttered 93 locations last month before filing for bankruptcy, while Applebee’s, TGI Fridays, Boston Market and California Pizza Kitchen also recently closed restaurants.
Cracker Barrel’s CEO recently admitted the chain is “just not as relevant” as it used to be as its stock has been in freefall.
Overall, restaurant spending has slowed amid high dining costs, falling in four of the past six months, according to Census data as reported by NBC.
Maybe inflation ain’t that bad. Hooters sucks and should have closed ages ago.
I Wonder How That’s Going to Go
According to the New York Post:
What if a never-before-seen asteroid barreling in our direction was likely to strike Earth?
That’s the hypothetical scenario NASA astronomers tested with a recent simulation in which officials attempted to plan for an asteroid that had a 72% chance of hitting Earth in just 14 years.
After the theoretical timeline was posed to a group of nearly 100 government representatives in April, NASA found that the best plan they made to counter the horrifying doomsday scenario had several “high-level gaps,” according to their presentation.
“The uncertainties in these initial conditions for the exercise allowed participants to consider a particularly challenging set of circumstances,” Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer emeritus at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a news release.
“A large asteroid impact is potentially the only natural disaster humanity has the technology to predict years in advance and take action to prevent.”
In the exercise, asteroid sizes ranged from 60 to 800 meters, with the most likely size to occur being between 100 and 320 meters.
To complicate the scenario, scientists said the looming asteroid then passed behind the Sun, making it impossible to observe from Earth for at least seven months.
The experiment was the first to use data from NASA’s DART (Double Asteroid Redirection Test) mission, the first technology for defending Earth against potential asteroid impacts.
NASA notes in their release that applying this technology to an actual threat would require “many years of advance planning,” however the test stood as a way for the agency to measure readiness for a potential threat of an asteroid.
“These outcomes will help to shape future exercises and studies to ensure NASA and other government agencies continue improving planetary defense preparedness,” said Johnson.
Of Course It’s Racist
According to the Daily Mail:
A taxpayer-funded project is set to research connections between milk and colonialism, it was revealed yesterday.
Academics at an Oxford museum will research the ‘political nature’ of milk and its ‘colonial legacies’.
One of the experts involved has previously argued that milk is a ‘Northern European obsession’ that has been imposed on other parts of the world.
Dr Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp said the assumption that milk was a key part of the human diet ‘may be understood as a white supremacist one’, as many populations outside Europe and North America have high levels of lactose intolerance in adulthood.
The new project, ‘Milking it: colonialism, heritage & everyday engagement with dairy’, has won funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
The council itself is funded by the Government through the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and awards around £110million to researchers at universities and independent organisations.
The milk project will be based at the History of Science Museum in Oxford, which announced it had received funding. The size of the grant has not yet been revealed.
The museum said: ‘By focusing on communities intersecting industry, aid and government regulation, the project aims to centre on heritage as a vital framework for understanding how colonial legacies influence contemporary issues and affect people’s lives.
‘Through milk diaries, archival research and participatory podcasting, it will investigate historical engagement with milk, building networks with consumers and producers in Britain and Kenya.
‘The project will question both the imagined and real aspects of milk, revealing the intimate and political nature of this everyday substance.’
Dr Zetterstrom-Sharp, a University College London associate professor at the Institute of Archaeology, and Dr JC Niala, head of research at the History of Science Museum.
It Always Comes Down to the Greenbacks
According to Al Jazeera:
Skye Murphy, who is 22 years old, has lived with type 1 diabetes since she was 14. In the past month, she learned that there would be a 30-to-60-day delay in receiving her medication Humalog, an insulin drug made by Eli Lilly.
While announcing a shortage in March, Eli Lilly said several key insulin medications would be out of stock for several weeks, which, as reported by CNN, was because of a “brief delay in manufacturing”. The company has since scrubbed details on the shortage from the news release.
More than 38.4 million people in the United States have diabetes and rely on insulin for their survival. In context, that is more than the population of Tokyo, one of the world’s most populous cities.
Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly is one of three pharmaceutical companies that control the global insulin market. It competes with France’s Sanofi and Denmark’s Novo Nordisk. But Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly are of particular note. The two companies control 75 percent of the global market – and both have insulin shortages impacting people who rely on the medication.
Later in the article, we find out one of the reasons why insulin production has dropped:
Over the last year, the White House touted its plan to cap insulin costs for consumers at $35. US President Joe Biden showcased the efforts in his recent State of the Union Address. Thanks to cooperation with several pharmaceutical giants including Eli Lilly, Sanofi and Novo Nordisk, prices tumbled.
Prices dropped by 70 percent for Eli Lilly, 75 percent for Novo Nordisk, and 78 percent for Sanofi.
But even as the price cap kicked in, a new study from Yale University published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) showed that pharmaceutical giants have been charging significantly more than it costs to produce the drug.
But there’s more:
Novo Nordisk is now focusing on another set of medications called GLP-1 receptors, which regulate the gut hormone that affects hunger. The market for these is more lucrative. GLP-1 receptors are also intended for diabetes, but are now used more widely as a weight-loss medication – semaglutide, more commonly known as Wegovy or Ozempic.
Other pharmaceutical companies are also trying to make gains on Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 receptors, including Eli Lilly, which, too, has an insulin shortage even as it is ramping up production of Zepbound and Mounjaro, Novo’s GLP-1 competitors.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/5/2/what-is-behind-the-insulin-shortage-in-the-us