🍪 W44 - 🔞 What's your age?
Disclose your age to use the internet, Our throwaway addiction & The space station battle
Hi,
and welcome to the 13th edition of your favourite Wednesday bite, with again some bite-sized knowledge to make you popular at dinner conversations and bar chats.
In this edition:
Disclose your age to use the internet
Our throwaway addiction
The space station battle
And some additional 🍞 Crumbs & 🧠 Brain game
Happy reading.
Regards,
Steven
Btw, building an audience for this newsletter requires effort, so by sharing this newsletter you can enlighten others and help me grow. Thanks in advance for your help.
☕ Grab a coffee, take a bite 🍪
5 min to chew through this one.
Not subscribed yet? Subscribe now!
① 🔞 Disclose your age to use the internet
More and more activists, parents and regulators are demanding better ways to protect children online, which became quite obvious with a published internal document of Facebook knowing about Instagram being harmful to teen girls but not doing anything about it.
In light of these demands, over the past years, governments have been implementing stricter rules when it comes to using certain websites.
People in Japan must provide a document proving their age to use the dating app Tinder.
The popular game Roblox requires players to upload a form of government identification.
Laws in Germany and France require pornography websites to check visitors’ ages.
And these rules are likely to become even stricter.
Potential issues with age verification
While in the past you could manually input your date of birth, stricter systems will require you to provide verification by either legal documents, credit cards or a photo ID.
The question will be if everyone will feel ok with providing such information to a website platform.
Mr. Errington in Britain said YouTube had asked him for a credit card when he tried to watch “Space Is the Place.” He doesn’t have one. And he said he felt uncomfortable uploading a photo ID.
“I wasn’t prepared to give out this information,” he said. “So the movie remains a mystery.”
Concerns can also be raised when it comes to the security of your information saved within these platforms. Will the documents/information you provide only be used for 1-time verification or will it be stored in the platform with a potential risk of being hacked?
Another issue with providing proof as verification is the ability to remain anonymous. Many people created an online persona entirely separate from their offline one, which will be at risk, like sex workers, political dissidents,…
And last but not least, authoritarian governments can misuse the argument of protecting children to limit online speech, as China often tends to do.
So in short, expect more strict verifications to come, the only question will be how they’ll be executed.
Source: The New York Times - 6 min read
② 🗑️ Our throwaway addiction
How will we be remembered?
According to Waste Age, an exposition from the Design Museum, it’ll not be for game-changing materials, nor the mastery of technology. It’ll be trash.
“The production of waste is absolutely central to our way of life, a fundamental part of how the global economy operates.”
In the 1920s, light bulbs were so long-lasting that an agreement was made between their suppliers (General Electric, Philips,…) to standardize life expectancy to 1.000 hours (while they could last at least 2.500 hours).
Apple was fined $500M in 2020 for slowing down older phone models to encourage consumers to buy the latest handsets.
Waste age
Waste age wants to be a powerful wake-up call to manufacturers, retailers and, most crucially, government regulators in how we create and deal with waste.
About 7% of the world’s gold supplies are trapped inside existing electronic devices, meaning that, according to some estimates, by 2080 the largest metal reserves will not be underground but in circulation as existing products.
What’s more, one tonne of extracted gold ore yields 3g of gold, whereas recycling one tonne of mobile phones yields 300g. So waste dumps and landfill sites are the new resource-rich mines.
The exhibition includes designers who are already working on what a future of “above-ground mining” might look like, exploring how objects and buildings can be dismantled and their parts reused.
At a time when global construction waste is set to double to 2.2bn tonnes a year by 2025, their joint calls to re-use what we already have couldn’t be more urgent.
France is the first country in Europe to implement a Repairability Index, adopted in January, which requires manufacturers to provide clear information on the repairability of smartphones, laptops, washing machines, televisions and lawnmowers, and award their products scores out of 10.
Of course, this is just a drop in the ocean. To reduce waste and cure our throwaway addiction manufacturers need to create with sustainability in mind, while we need to think about re-use and recycling first.
Source: The Guardian - 5 min read
③ 🛰️ The space station battle
The International Space Station (ISS), a beacon of hope, unity, and technological achievement has been orbiting for more than 20 years (having been launched November 20, 1998) and is showing signs of ageing.
There is a general consensus that it can remain orbiting through 2028 or 2030, but a succession plan of NASA is needed. Especially since China recently launched its own Tiangong space station in April.
Presently, NASA spends about $4 billion annually for its low-Earth-orbit program, while in 2021 it only received funding of $101 million for a “commercial” space station. So for a new space station to take off, more funding and support is needed from “private” companies willing to enter the space station era.
Recognizing the maturing US commercial space industry, NASA intends to become an "anchor tenant" of one or more privately developed space stations and has opened up applications for companies to become part of their commercial stations program.
Space was already “hot” with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson racing to be the first in space, so some companies have already stepped forward to be part of the space station “race”.
See also: 🚀 Space Tourism Is a Waste
Who’s in the space station race?
Axiom Space envisions using its station for private and government astronauts, manufacturing and 3D printing, satellite servicing, and perhaps even a space-based data centre.
Their plan is to launch its first privately built module connected to the ISS in 2024, with having its own free-flying entity by 2028.
Nanoracks, partnering with Lockheed Martin wants to launch its free-flying "Starlab" space station in 2027.
The facility will include a large inflatable habitat, a metallic docking node, a power and propulsion element, a large robotic arm, and a state-of-the-art laboratory for science, research, and manufacturing.
The facility will have an initial capacity for four astronauts to live and work there continuously.
They see their commercial space station as a "beachhead" for future space settlements, be it on other worlds or in large, space-based habitats.
Blue Origin (owned by Jeff Bezos) and Sierra Space, announced they would lead the development and construction of a large modular space station named "Orbital Reef", with a large core, habitat and science modules, ready by the second half of this decade.
It seems that when looking at the sky at night in the next years, more flashing lights will be visible.
Source: Ars Technica - 11 min read
🍞 Crumbs
Tesla shares slide 5% after Elon Musk asked Twitter to sell 10% of his stock
Paris To Become 100% Cycling City Within Four Years, Reveals New Plan
Caution! These emojis mean different things in different countries
Quentin Tarantino enters the NFT wave and offers seven uncut scenes from 'Pulp Fiction'
Microsoft CEO lays out post-pandemic vision for work — including a new metaverse concept
Facebook is backing away from facial recognition. Meta isn’t.
🧠 Brain game
As number 1 and 2 are quite obvious, what is the 3rd most popular second language in the world?
In 13 countries, Russian is taught/used as the secondary language, following French as number 2 (14 countries) and English as number 1 (55 countries).
See the whole list at Visual Capitalist.
Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment 😉
If you like this newsletter, hit the 🤍 button below.
👇