This Week I Learned: Social Scores, Non-Profits, Blue Zones
Alright, I’ll keep this short and let you get to item number one, because it’s one of the craziest and scariest things I’ve learned in a long time. But make sure to stick around for the last two as one has to do with the good-hearted non-profit folks, and the last with living longer. Kind of.
Real Life Black Mirror Episode
I still remember the first time I watched episode one of Black Mirror. Where people had a public social rating visible to everyone. Well, this week I learned that it’s actually being developed in China.
The “Social Credit System” was sold by the government as a way to increase trust and good behavior, and is mandatory for everyone. You get points for doing good things, and lose points for bad things, like jaywalking, or buying too many video games.
The consequences of a poor score? Banning you from travel modes, throttling internet speed, keeping you from certain schools or jobs. And even taking away your dog.
Non-Profits and the Workforce
I work at a non-profit. So I subscribe to organizations in that space, and others that talk about the space at a high-level. One such organization that does amazing work is Mighty Citizen.
In a recent article which focused on Coronavirus, they dropped a statistic that surprised me. Non-profits make up 10% of the US workforce. This makes non-profit employees the third largest workforce in the entire country.
The Blue Zones
The so-called Blue Zones of the world are places that have an unusually high number of centenarians. Or people that live to be 100 years old. As someone who is self-admittedly obsessed with living as long and healthy as possible, I’ve been interested in the Blue Zones for a while.
Recently however I learned a trivial fact about them which has nothing to do with aging. It’s that Dr. Giovanni Pes, who essentially discovered the Blue Zones, named them so because while he tracked all the living centenarians, he did so with a blue marker. Because that’s what he had on hand.
