Numlock News: March 1, 2023 • West Virginia, Forrest Gump, Shrimp Leather

Mar 1

By Walt Hickey

Country Roads, Do Your Thing

A bill has passed West Virginia’s Senate that would give $25,000 in tax credits to people who used to live in West Virginia but don’t anymore to come back to the state to work. The bill is now in the House of Delegates, and specifically would apply to anyone born in West Virginia or who lived and worked in the state for at least 10 years, and who have lived outside the state for at least 10 consecutive years. The state lost 3.2 percent of its population from 2010 to 2020, the largest percentage of any state in the country, equivalent to 59,000 people, and is the only state in America with fewer residents today than it had in 1950.

The Associated Press

Leather

Global shrimp production hit 4.5 million tons in 2021, up 50 percent over the values in 2015. One waste issue is that about half of that weight is in shrimp shells, which are discarded as a byproduct. Those shells have chitosan, which can be used as an ingredient in all sorts of things, but lately has been applied toward imitation leather. Right now, TomTex can make a square meter of shrimp leather with a carbon footprint of 14 kilograms of CO2, 15 percent of the emissions of cow-skin leather.

Coco Liu, Bloomberg

Cars

Attorneys representing Ohio residents affected by the Norfolk Southern train derailment accused the company of trying to destroy evidence of its liability, and asked a federal judge to give plaintiffs’ attorneys a chance to inspect 11 rail cars involved in the derailment including five cars that carried vinyl chloride. The U.S. district court out of Youngstown, Ohio, suggested Norfolk Southern give plaintiffs until March 3 to inspect the cars, and eventually officials from the railroad agreed to give plaintiffs an extra day. The litigants are currently arguing over soil sample procedures.

Jef Feeley, Bloomberg

Licensing

While nobody's chaffing at state licensing for occupations like nursing or hazmat handlers, many states require arbitrary and expensive licenses to carry out all sort of basic tasks like cutting hair, babysitting, becoming an auctioneer or a travel guide. It's a racket, and one that throws up unnecessary financial blocks between people and a desired craft or trade. One analysis of 102 low-income occupations found that 88 percent of those professions were unlicensed in at least one state, demonstrating how arbitrary it can be.

Jerusalem Demsas, The Atlantic

Ozempic

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic were designed to treat diabetes to manage hunger and lower blood sugar levels, but they've also become increasingly popular for off-label use to cut weight. There are side effects, but it retails for $900 a month if insurance doesn't cover it and that means that rich people are taking it because hey, skinny. Sales figures are astounding: Novo Nordisk, which has semaglutide under patent until 2032, has operating profits up 58 percent since Ozempic's introduction in 2017, and sales of GLP-1 agonists account for 98 percent of the company's growth. Last December 1.2 million prescriptions were filled for Ozempic nationwide, up 64 percent year over year, and companies that track health care data observe the uptick is in people with no prior record of diabetes.

Matthew Schneier, The Cut

Worst Best Picture

A new survey asking Americans for their assessment of every Academy Award Best Picture winner found that the most popular winners of the Oscar are 1994's winner Forrest Gump (net favorability 76 percentage points), followed by Titanic (1997) with a net favorability of 65 percentage points and then Rocky (1976) and The Godfather (1972) with 62 percent and 61 percent net favorability, respectively. This proves that the best ticket to Oscar immortality is just playing on cable nonstop for 30 to 50 years, make a note! This is all fun and everything, but the real goss is what's the least liked: Looking at the movies that have won since 2000, Spotlight (net 8 percentage points favorability) came in lowest, followed by Nomadland and The Artist (2011), which each has a net 14-point favorability, which I have to say really crashes with my personal perspective but de gustibus non est disputandum, you know?

Saleah Blancaflor, Morning Consult

A Cow-Based Planet

A new analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that wild land mammals have a total biomass of 22 million tons, wild marine mammals have a biomass of 40 million tons, while humans weigh in at 390 million tons and the domesticated animals, livestock and urban rats that depend on us weigh in at 630 million tons, a fundamental shift in the biological weight of the planet as a result of human steering. Dogs alone make up as much biomass as all wild land animals, and honestly measuring by weight one would come to think that cows are the dominant species on planet Earth, based on the 420 million tons of them that walk astride the world.

Elizabeth Pennisi, Science

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