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Good morning and welcome to Veterans Day. We'd like to extend a heartfelt thank you to all those who have served or are serving in the U.S. millitary. 🇺🇸
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.44 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.39 minutes.)
+PS: It's 11/11. Make a wish !
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time."
–Og Mandino (1923-1996)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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Squid Game Exposed An Issue...
 Image: LanguageWire
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🎁 There aren’t enough translators available to keep up with the streaming industry’s demands.
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“I can tell you literally, this industry will be out of supply over demand for the upcoming two to three years. Nobody to translate, nobody to dub, nobody to mix –– the industry just doesn’t have enough resources to do it,” David Lee, the CEO of Iyuno-SDI, one of the industry’s largest subtitling and dubbing providers, told Rest of World.
📺 Why it’s a big deal: The scale and reach of streaming giants are leading to more and more foreign content consumption – which is great, up until viewers realize the subtitles are a little funky. Seventy percent of people who encounter bad subtitles just stop watching the show or movie, per a recent study by the EGA.
*WARNING: Incoming pun.*
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Another problem: Sometimes the essence of the original script gets lost in translation (lol!). You may have already run into this video on TikTok from bilingual Korean-American influencer Youngmi Mayer, who argued that important nuances were absent from the English version.
🤔 What’s going on ?... One reason is pretty simple – translator pay isn’t all that attractive. Netflix pays $13 per minute for translation of Korean audio into English subtitles, and only a fraction of that figure ends up directly in the pockets of translators (for context, the first version of a 100-minute feature film takes about two weeks to complete).
The second reason is a little more interesting – poor subtitle quality in languages outside of English is most likely the result of an industry practice called “English templating.”
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In simple terms, this means the film was first translated from its original version into English, and then translators cue off the English version to craft subtitles in different languages.
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Tracing the Squid Game translation train gets us: Korean → English → German, French, Spanish, etc.
👁 Looking ahead... Efforts to automate translation through AI can’t replace humans yet, leaving streaming platforms facing a big question: how much are we willing to sacrifice on quality to subtitle our catalog ?
+Elsewhere in streaming: Growth at Disney+ slowed in the company’s fourth quarter to around two million new subscribers. This brings the service’s total number of subscribers to 118.1 million; analysts were expecting ~125 million.
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📝 The Inflation Report Is In
 Image: Imgur
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🎁 The Consumer Price Index (CPI), a key inflation measurement, increased by 6.2% in October compared to a year ago, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report published yesterday.
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📈 Why it’s a big deal: That’s the fastest 12-month pace since 1990 and the fifth straight month of yearly inflation above 5%.
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In other words, NEWSFLASH – prices are increasing at historic levels due to a combo of high demand, pandemic stimulus funding, labor shortages, and supply chain bottlenecks.
🔀 Today, we’re switching things up... Most newsletters covering this will probably focus on the historic price increases due to inflation – but in reality, that’s nothing new to those of us who are paying attention.
Instead, this section will focus on everywhere prices are currently DECREASING (don’t worry, it’s a short list):
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Medical care commodities, a term that encompasses medicinal drugs and medical equipment and supplies, are 0.4% less expensive on average than last year.
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Airline fares are 0.7% lower compared to last month and 4.6% lower than October 2020 (when prices were ~20% less than 2019).
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Alcoholic beverages cost 0.2% less on average than they did last month. Prices are still elevated from last year, but have risen slowly compared to a sharp increase in demand.
📝 The bottom line: It’s cheaper than last month to get Drunk on a Plane. But outside of that, you’re probably spending more today than a month (or a year) ago.
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🔥💸 Sponsored by Munk Pack 🐿️🔥
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The (Hitch)Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy of Snacks
The story starts seconds before the rumble of your tummy hits the ears. You know – that time when the little voice in your head starts chirping, “It’s imperative we go to the fridge to receive nourishment immediately” (or something to that effect, we’re not mind readers).
🌌 Come on, the Snack Galaxy awaits…
- Step 1: Buy tasty snacks. But if your sole focus is taste, you’ll probably be drawn to unhealthy snacks – and that’s no good. On to step 2…
- Step 2: Make sure said tasty snack is nutritious. Prepare and...
- Step 3: Enjoy a full belly and clean energy.
🚀 So, where are we headed first ?... That one’s easy: to the Granola Bar cluster of planets within the Munk Pack sector. Real-world translation: Munk Pack is a dope company that makes low sugar, GMO-free, gluten-free, plant-based, and just straight-up delicious granola bars (they come in 6 flavors, AKA “planets”).
- So no matter which one of the six planets you ultimately choose to visit first, you’re guaranteed to get an out-of-this-world snack experience featuring high-quality, real ingredients. Seriously… we’ve never met a team more dedicated to creating super-tasty and healthy snacks.
Use the code DONUT at checkout for 20% off a purchase.
Which planet will you visit first ?
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🏛️⚖️ January 6th Plays Out in the Courts
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 The storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6; Image: John Minchillo/AP
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🎁 A federal judge late Tuesday rejected a request by former President Donald Trump to block the disclosure of White House records to the House committee investigating the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
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Trump’s lawyers filed a suit last month to stop the National Archives from turning over the records from his time in office, unsuccessfully arguing the materials were covered by executive privilege – a policy aimed at protecting presidents' abilities to have candid conversations.
📜 Background: The January 6 House committee has been probing the events surrounding that day since being formed in July, issuing its fifth and sixth batch of subpoenas on Monday and Tuesday.
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The DOJ is currently considering whether to charge former Trump strategist Steve Bannon with contempt of Congress for defying a committee subpoena issued in September.
⚖️ Zoom out: Some 210 people have been charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding police officers or employees during the January 6 Capitol assault, per the DOJ.
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Yesterday, a New Jersey gym owner who punched a police officer was the first person to be sentenced for assaulting a law enforcement officer during the riot.
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His 41-month prison term is the longest among the 32 Jan. 6-related sentences handed down so far and is seen as a likely benchmark for dozens of others who engaged in violence.
👁️ Looking ahead… Trump’s court battle isn’t over just yet – his lawyers in the executive privilege case filed an appeal soon after Tuesday’s ruling, meaning its fate will ultimately be decided by federal appellate courts.
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📣🗣💬 This Week's Poll Results
Yes – “The trade disputes, invasions into other countries, Hong Kong, the camps they’re imposing on a specific ethnicity, the propaganda, restraints on information and freedom of speech, the boasting on international waters, the commentary and the relationships China has with North Korea and Russia are all obvious behavior pointing to the next world war.”
No – “It's the same principle as the cold war – we will form alliances, impose tariffs, and potentially even have some proxy wars, but I don't think we will ever have an actual fight with China because of the ramifications it can have on human kind.”
Unsure – “I’m not sure we’ll be in a traditional arms war but rather an escalation of the war of ideas and technology that has already begun. It seems China is already at war with our government, economy, and culture, but not technically our military.”
+Note on Sample Size: We received 3,017 responses. 👏🥳 Some may have been lightly edited for grammar or clarity.
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… "I'm going to lean into it hard. I'm going to own this. I'm getting business cards made. But all of my friends will destroy me and I expect them to. And that's why they're my friends." –Actor Paul Rudd, who was named People’s Sexiest Man Alive yesterday.
🔢 Stat of the Day: The average professional now spends more than half of their workweek in meetings (21.5 hours), according to calendar app Reclaim.ai.
📖 Worth a Read… Time millionaires: meet the people pursuing the pleasure of leisure
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
 Image: Google Maps/Newsflash
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☝️ A mysterious car parked on an Italian street for 47 years has become a tourist attraction (guess which one); it’ll now be removed, restored, and turned into a monument. Oh – and the story behind it is pretty cool, too.
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📺 YouTube will start hiding the public dislike counts across its platform in an effort to prevent smaller channels from being the focus of "dislike attacks"; the company also says it will encourage “respectful interactions between viewers and creators.”
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🌴 The Michelin Guide is coming to Florida; it’ll be Michelin's fifth U.S. destination once it launches (New York, D.C., Chicago, and California).
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🚘 EV start Rivian raised ~$12 billion in its public debut yesterday, closing trading with a market cap of ~$86 billion (more than Honda and Ford and a touch under GM); it was the largest debut on a U.S. exchange since Facebook in 2012 and the seventh biggest since 1995.
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🇺🇸🇨🇳 The U.S. & China released a joint climate action statement at COP26 yesterday. (From the Left | From the Right | Read the statement)
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📝 CNN obtained the operations plan for the Astroworld Festival. What it did and didn’t include.
+Bonus: The best inventions of 2021.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🚀 Spin to Win
 A suborbital accelerator in New Mexico; Image: SpinLaunch
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🎁 A startup called SpinLaunch is building an alternative method of launching spacecraft to orbit that uses kinetic energy instead of rocket fuel as its primary method to get off the ground.
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- The company has raised $110 million to date, and recently conducted its first test flight of a prototype at its suborbital accelerator in New Mexico (pictured above).
⚙️ How it works… The concept is pretty wild: essentially, SpinLaunch wants to use a large vacuum-sealed centrifuge and hypersonic tether to spin a spacecraft at a high enough velocity to escape Earth’s atmosphere (up to 5,000 miles per hour).
- The company said its first suborbital test flight used ~20% of the accelerator’s full power capacity and reached a test altitude “in the tens of thousands of feet.”
💬 What they’re saying: “I find that the more audacious and crazy the project is, the better off you are just working on it – rather than being out there talking about it,” said SpinLaunch founder and CEO Jonathan Yaney. “We had to prove to ourselves that we could actually pull this off.”
👁️ Looking ahead… The company is finalizing an agreement to relocate from New Mexico to an unnamed “coastal location” able to support dozens of launches per day.
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🤗 Dose of Positive
👯🚛 Emma & Elbert
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 Images: Laura Johnson
We all had our own obsessions as a little kid. For six-year-old Emma Grace, it's TRUCKS. Big or small, the Alabama girl with special needs just loves them.
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On Tuesdays and Fridays, one truck stops by with her favorite person inside: Elbert the sanitation man.
📸 Two peas in a pod… Emma and Elbert are an unlikely pair of best friends. When Emma went back to school in-person this year, she even asked if she could take him with her.
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Touched by the gesture, Elbert had a custom necklace made with their photo on the front and the words “You are the best part of my day!” on the back.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🇷🇺 Once Upon a Time
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How many different time zones are there in Russia ?
A) 7
B) 9
C) 11
D) 13
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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Simply:
1. Copy your unique referral link.👇
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Ambassador Rewards and Progress → |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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C) 11
The globe is split into 24 different time zones and Russia covers 11 of them.
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That’s the most of any country in the world (not including overseas territories; France technically spans 13 time zones). The U.S. and Canada are tied for second with six time zones.
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