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Good morning and welcome to Thursday.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.25 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.42 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"Opportunities multiply as they are seized."
–Sun Tzu (544 – 496 B.C.)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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🤖 This Story Was Written By AI
 Image: Gfycat
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🎁 Don’t worry, we’re just kidding… for now. Open-source software developer Github’s AI tool Copilot will now support all popular programming languages, including Java, the company announced yesterday.
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🚗 Driving the news: As much as 30% of newly written code in GitHub is being done with the help of Copilot, and apparently the product is pretty sticky. Half of the developers who’ve tried it since its July launch continue to use it.
🖥 What is Copilot ?... There are two parts to programming, OpenAI’s CTO and co-founder Greg Brockman tells The Verge:
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You have to “think hard about a problem and try to understand it.”
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Once understood, you have to “map those small pieces to existing code, whether it’s a library, a function, or an API.”
Number two is pretty tedious, but that’s where Copilot shines. Built on top of OpenAI’s Codex algorithm, the system takes natural language and creates code based on the direction it’s given, theoretically providing a solid base of code and eliminating some of the manual work. Afterward, the dev goes through and cleans it up.
📈 Zoom out: Companies are increasingly finding applications for – and building business models around – natural language processors like OpenAI’s GPT-3, which can help create things like blog posts and product descriptions.
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The seeming success of Copilot may have more companies experimenting with NLPs like OpenAI’s Codex, which spits out code instead of words.
📝 Bottom line: Even though we’re in the midst of a “no-code revolution,” tools like Copilot are designed to make devs more efficient, not replace them. Demand for software developers grew 25% in 2020 and most programmers spend less than half of their days actually writing code.
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🍾 Champagne Sales Are Close to Pre-Pandemic Highs
 Image: Giphy
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🎁 An estimated 305 million bottles of champagne will be sold worldwide in 2021, according to the General Syndicate of Champagne Winegrowers. In 2019, Champagne houses shipped 297.6 million bottles globally.
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🤔 What’s going on ?... When the pandemic hit last year, social outings, celebrations, and restaurant trips were canceled, sending global champagne sales off a cliff. In May 2020, champagne sales were down 70% in France (which accounts for half of all global sales) and early sales had to be suspended after the industry sold 100 million bottles fewer than expected.
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Whether it’s an increase in social events, unspent vacation funds turning into splurgy staycation funds, something else, or all-of-the-above, this year people are saying “bring on the bubbly.” Champagne sales were up 88.5% in March over previous years, according to data insight firm NielsenIQ.
🔭 Looking (possibly way) ahead… Historically, Champagne sales rally after an economic downturn. Following the Great Recession, the Champagne industry saw seven consecutive years of growth in shipments to the U.S.
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
 Image: Mondadori Portfolio/Hulton Fine Art Collection
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☝️ The only home with a ceiling mural by Italian painter Caravaggio is on sale for $547 million; the property is a 16th-century villa in the heart of Rome that was once considered "one of the wonders of the world."
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🚬 Cigarette sales rose last year for the first time in two decades.
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🪙📈 The Shiba Inu coin (a ‘meme’ cryptocurrency similar to dogecoin) surpassed dogecoin as the 10th-largest cryptocurrency in the world with a market value of ~$36 billion; the coin has increased nearly 1,000% over the past 30 days. Note: This is as of very early this morning.
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🚖 Hertz will offer half of its newly-purchased 100,000 Teslas as rentals to Uber drivers.
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💊 Merck signed a royalty-free license with the UN to allow companies in 105 countries to manufacture generic versions of molnupiravir, its antiviral COVID-19 drug. (What is molnupiravir ?)
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🛂 The U.S. issued its first passport with an “X” gender marker; the option will be available to all non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming persons starting in early 2022. (From the Left | From the Right)
+Bonus: NASA has a tool that lets you record a greeting, then hear how it would sound if you were on Mars.
+One more for the road: Spotify claimed the top spot in Newsweek’s inaugural “America’s Most Loved Workplaces” rankings.
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🔥🍗 Sponsored by Flock 😋🔥
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The First-Ever Chip Made From Chicken
Move over, beef jerky. Smell ya later, pork rinds. There’s a new king in town and its name is Flock Chicken Chips.
Created by chicken-lovers craving a better snack-on-the-go, these super tasty, crispy, made-from-real-chicken chips are low in carbs and packed with protein.
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We’re talking 0-1g of sugar, 0-1g of carbs, and 13+ grams of protein in every bag. Oh, and they’re also gluten and dairy free.
🗓 Flavor of the week… Flock’s Chicken Chips come in four out-of-this-world flavors: Original, BBQ, Salt & Vinegar, and Hattie B’s Nashville Hot. And no matter which flavor you order, Flock donates one meal or the equivalent to hungry families, the homeless, and impoverished elders.
Because we’ve always got your back, DONUT readers get a 20% discount on any Flock order. Just use the code DONUT at checkout.
What are you, chicken ?
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🏛️ How Will Congress Pay for the Budget Reconciliation Bill ?
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 Image: Erin Scott/Reuters
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🎁 Congressional Democrats are considering a range of options to raise enough funds to follow through on President Biden’s pledge to pay for the ~$1.75 trillion budget reconciliation proposal without adding to the federal deficit.
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A proposal to tax America’s billionaires on their unrealized capital gains drew strong interest from Democrats until yesterday afternoon when West Va. Sen. Joe Manchin signaled he would vote against it (effectively killing its chances, as all 50 Dems need to be united).
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Even in its most successful scenario, the proposal would've generated a few hundred billion dollars in extra tax revenue – still far short of the overall cost of the budget reconciliation bill.
👍👎 Back and forth: Over the past few weeks, Democratic leaders have presented several tax proposals – only to have them shot down by centrist members of their own party, namely Manchin and Arizona Sen. Krysten Sinema (who stands opposed to tax hikes on corporations and wealthy individuals).
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But a new proposal unveiled by a trio of senators on Tuesday appears to have the full support of the Democratic caucus, including Manchin and Sinema.
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It would reportedly raise “hundreds of billions” of dollars over a decade by imposing a 15% minimum federal tax on companies that report more than $1 billion in quarterly profits, but have little or no tax liability.
✂️ Cut to the chase… Democrats were also forced to remove several programs from their initial $3.5 trillion proposal after Manchin and Sinema objected to the cost. The new, slimmed-down bill is expected to carry a price tag of around $1.75 trillion, though Dems have yet to agree on final cuts.
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In recent days, they’ve reportedly abandoned plans to include a federal leave program, free community college, and a program aimed at pushing utilities to generate more clean energy.
👁️ Looking ahead… The White House and congressional leaders are hoping to reach a deal today before President Biden leaves on a trip that includes a major UN climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland.
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📣🗣💬 This Week's Poll Responses
 
Zoonotic transmission – “We’ve seen a number of similar transfers in the past such as swine flu and bird flu which lends credibility to the theory. Meanwhile, a lab-created variant doesn’t match the descriptions of what the lab reported.”
Lab leak – “There are too many coincidences that happened near the virology lab in Wuhan. Also, the rapid spread and virulence of a virus directly from animals to humans is reportedly unprecedented. Lastly, the fact that we haven't been able to identify an animal source also seems to point against the animal theory.”
Other/Unsure – “There is not definitive proof yet either way, and I don't know that it matters in the long run, unless we find proof later that it was intentionally spread or that there was extreme safety negligence that could have been prevented.”
+Note on Sample Size: We received 2,446 responses. 👏🥳 Some may have been lightly edited for grammar or clarity.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🪐 Treasure Planet
 The box indicates the location of a possible exoplanet; Image: NASA / CXC / SAO / R. Di Stefano
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🎁 Astronomers may have discovered the first-ever planet located outside the Milky Way.
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- The possible planet was discovered in what’s known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, which is more than 23 million light-years from Earth.
👉 How it went down: Typically, astronomers use what's known as the "transit method" to look for planets. Transits are when a planet orbits in front of its parent star and temporarily blocks part of it, causing a dip in the star's light that’s observable on Earth.
- The researchers in this experiment applied the same basic idea, but instead of optical light, they monitored for changes in the brightness of X-rays emitted from the exoplanet’s star system.
- Using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, they were able to observe an X-ray transit that lasted for three hours.
👁️ Looking (way) ahead… Confirming the planet’s existence is going to take time – like, a lot of time. Its far-out orbit means it’ll be roughly 70 years before astronomers will be able to witness another transit and verify their initial observations.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
🇫🇷 Éléonore for Inclusivity
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 Images: CSMonitor
Éléonore Laloux is well known in the northern French city of Arras for her ability to make people smile. She’s also the first person with Down syndrome to be appointed to public office in France.
- Her overall care for the community and projects to promote disability inclusivity recently earned her membership in the National Order of Merit, the second highest civilian honor in the country.
When she’s not fulfilling her duties as municipal councilor, Éléonore can be found working part time at the local hospital and keeping a packed volunteering schedule.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
👥 Fountain of Youth
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In which country is roughly half the population aged 14 or younger ?
A) India
B) Mali
C) Uganda
D) Niger
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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Ambassador Rewards and Progress → |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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D) Niger
According to the most recent World Bank data, 49.6% of Niger's population is comprised of children under 15 years old. Mali ranks second with 47%.
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