By Walt Hickey

Meth

Myanmar is a massive producer and exporter of methamphetamine all across of southeast Asia, from India to Australia, as a country roiled by war turns to illicit pharmaceuticals to drive their economy. The ample supply and crashing prices have led to a large mass market of hooked laborers, truckers, farmers and students, with couriers transporting meth all over in the form of yaba, a pill containing anywhere from 1 percent to 30 percent meth mixed with caffeine. A sack of 200,000 yaba pills fetches 10,000 baht ($280) for a courier at the border. The flood of meth has sent costs crashing; the per-pill street price dropped from $2 per tablet in Myanmar in 2020 to 20 cents as of 2023, down 93 percent. In Bangladesh, prices dropped from $14 to $18 in 2020 to $1 to $3 per pill in 2023. In some places, it’s cheaper than a cup of tea.

Francesca Regalado, Adam Saprinsanga, Faisal Mahmud, Thurein Hla Htway and Shaun Turton, Nikkei Asia

God Moving Over the Face of the Waters

At least 31 million people will be in the path of the total solar eclipse on Monday, but it seems as if many will have to roll the dice on clouds and other terrestrial interference with the cosmic event. NASA will take no chances as far as gathering scientific information during the event, as two WB-57 planes will fly southwest to northeast during the eclipse, spending seven minutes in the shadow from an altitude where clouds are not a problem rather than the four minutes the rest of us will have to contend with. The planes will take off from Ellington Field near Johnson Space Center in Houston about two hours before the eclipse, fly down into Mexico, and race an eclipse moving 1,600 miles per hour while flying at a speed of 460 miles per hour.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, BBC

Tomorrowland

Autopia in Disneyland’s Tomorrowland is going electric, as the attraction that opened with the park in 1955 finally decides to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles in favor of electrification. As it stands, it’s not like the technology is totally out of reach, as we’re talking about vehicles that currently max out at 6.5 miles per hour, and the only eye-watering part is waiting to return the cart while surrounded by vehicle exhaust. Autopia was always a bit of an oddity in a place that was founded by a guy who was downright obsessed with trains, and this move brings us ever closer to that long-awaited experimental prototype community of tomorrow.

Sammy Roth, Los Angeles Times

VOD

TiVo reported a number of fascinating statistics about the state of the streaming video scene based on their set-top view, reporting that consumers are averaging 11.1 video services as of the last quarter of last year, down slightly from the peak of 11.5 services in the previous year. That decline came from paid services, which dropped from an average of 7.6 services to 7.1 services over the period. The most growth in recent years has been from free, ad-supported video, which increased from an average of just 1.4 such services in 2020 to 4.0 platforms this past year.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Vocations

Graduating high schoolers are flocking to the trades, with the number of students enrolled in vocational-focused community colleges up 16 percent as of last year. The percentage of students studying construction trades is up 23 percent and the percentage of those working in HVAC and vehicle maintenance is up 7 percent. Enrollment growth is vastly outpacing four-year college programs as a whole, which saw enrollments creep up a paltry 0.8 percent.

Te-Ping Chen, The Wall Street Journal

The Big Screen

Filmgoers are loving Imax and premium large-format screens, with more and more box office hits feasting in Imax compared to the pre-pandemic era. When it comes to opening weekend gross attributable to large-format screens, before the pandemic Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was a high-water mark, coming in at 10.1 percent of the opening weekend. Other movies that did well include Spider-Man: Far From Home (8 percent opening weekend big screens) and Avengers: Infinity War (9 percent). Since 2022, that’s been turbocharged: Top Gun: Maverick made 14.3 percent of its opening weekend from big screens, Avatar: The Way of Water made 12.1 percent, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour made 12.3 percent and Dune: Part Two made a shocking 22.3 percent of its opening weekend from big screens.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Snake Oil

New York’s mayor announced his latest elaborate scheme to scare people away from using a perfectly suitable subway by deciding to put some of the money that was stripped away from libraries and other public services toward a quixotic quest to install detectors into the subway. What they detect is, indeed, somewhat ambiguous; the mayor claims that they use AI to detect guns, but they don’t, because over a pilot where 194,000 people passed through the scanners in question, they threw an alarm 50,000 times. Now, New York is truly not Detroit in Robocop, and of those 50,000 alarms, 43,800 were false positives, 7,027 were cops that carried their service weapon through, and 0.57 percent were a non-law enforcement person carrying a knife, weapon, or gun. At no point in the trial did the technological snake oil get any better, and seems to identify people carrying something by sheer coincidence.

Felipe De La Hoz, Hell Gate

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