JAN25: 10 Things I Never Knew
This months round up vital information for your every day life.
1. Meet the $6,500 a month pharmacy (medicine sold separate)
Just when you thought a $10,000 a month gym was the craziest membership NYC had to offer Cedra Pharmacy said “hold my beer”. Their highest tier Cedra Grand membership reportedly costs $6,500 a month, of which they donate $500 to a charity of your choice after a year of membership (so don’t worry you can still sleep at night).
Oddly enough Personal training is included in the cost, but a gym membership itself is not (suppose we’ve seen stranger things on the streets of NYC). Even more reassuring for those of us on a budget is that inline with Cedra’s mission to “ensure that you get the care you need, regardless of cost” (or better put despite the cost) they offer financial assistance!
2. A new limbo Queen has been crowned. The video will make your knees hurt
Nothing, I mean nothing, will age you more than watching Shemika Campbell skirt under a 12” limbo pole like you avoiding a bad HR policy. As Michelle Obama once said “when they go low, Shamika goes lower”.
3. A staggering 78% of NVIDIA employees are millionaires
Few things draw top talent to start ups more than the prospect of life changing financial gain. Still, startups are strange beasts. About 90% of startups eventually fail and of the ones that don’t <1% go on to become unicorns. Even unicorn status itself though is not a guaranteed payday - a lesson I learned personally.
The start up I joined as employee #1 almost 8 years ago, has done phenomenally well - most recently having been valued at $7 billion. Yet, having not gone public, and without a liquidation event that potential upside is still all theoretical. This makes it even more impressive that over 3/4’s of NVIDIA employees are millionaires and over half are worth $25 Million or more. If NVIDIA is any indication, AI appears to be as good at making money out of thin air as it does lines of code.
4. A 1400 lb cow can yield as little as 80lbs of steak
If you love red meat even a sliver as much as I do get ready to say “HOLY COW”! Its little surprise how much the cost of beef has gone up since COVID. A non grass-fed Ribeye can cost over $30/lb these days at many meat counters. But even before COVID steaks were not cheap and it all has to do with scarcity and demand.
On a recent episode of “The Economics of Everyday Things” podcast the host dove into the economics of processing a heifer and let’s just say the findings were nothing to moo at. While many factors such as cut, size, and breed affect the final yield lets look at just one variety, the supreme cut, a ribeye.
If you start with the basic anatomy of a cow they have 26 ribs - 13 per side. This means center cut Ribeye yield can be as low as just 2 dozen steaks per cow! When it comes to tenderloin steaks that number gets cut in half (pun intended).
So next time you go to buy a steak of any kind take some solace (at least until you have to swipe that card) knowing you are getting the top 5% of that animal.
5. The Ponzo illusion shows how our brains interpret objects based on their environment
The Ponzo illusion gets its name from Italian psychologist Mario Ponzo (although they say he didn’t actually come up with this illusion). It uses two seemingly parallel lines that actually taper in towards one another (think train tracks running away into the horizon) with lines drawn across them to show how our brains automatically interpret an objects size based on its background.
Besides just being fun, optical illusions remind us that our brains often subconsciously play tricks on us that we must be aware of in our every day decision making.
6. On a typical day Netflix makes up 11% of internet traffic in North America
America officially has a Netflix and chill problem (and mostly the Netflix part, we got no chill). A recent WSJ article highlighted how on a typical day Netflix makes up 11% of the total internet bandwidth used. When you consider all the other things that use internet these days that is mind boggling. For one internet provider during the Paul vs. Tyson fight Netflix peaked at 39% of their total traffic.
For prerecorded content Netflix relies on some 20,000 servers stashed at 5,000 locations worldwide to push the stored content to users homes. Live TV is different however. With no content stored (since its all happening live) everything must be moved in real time from where it happens, to a production facility, then a network of servers, and ultimately your home.
For a company accustomed to streaming pre produced content their foray into live sports was not without stumbles as seen in the many glitches and “unavailable” messages that met viewers throughout the fight. On the flip side if Netflix is able to successfully deliver high quality live content consistently they may be able to form Americas next great Monopoly!
7. Rochester, NY wins another housing record no one wanted
There is a lot to love about life in Upstate NY, namely the 3 months of amazing summer weather, lack of earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires or other natural disasters, and garbage plates. When it comes to housing in Rochester, NY though, my home town, there is a lot to hate.
Last year 14609 felt more like 90210 ranking as the hottest market in the nation - with homes selling in an average of just 8 days. As someone who owns and manages 6 units in that zip (and also grew up in it) I can tell you the pain is real. Then a month ago it was reported that Rochester NY has the highest percentage in the country of homeowners with mortgages where tax + property insurance costs are more than their principle and interest.
Compare the 35% of home owners in Rochester who find themselves in this situation to the national average of just 9% for single family home owners and you can quickly see how a lower median home price does not go very far. It is a painful reminder that the area you buy in may have more of an impact on your mortgage than the price of the home itself. In just 3 years the insurance on my personal home has gone from $1100/year to just under $2400/year without any chance in coverage.
Take it from someone who won the Hungry award at their last company for being the most likely to eat on a zoom call - not all races are worth winning.
8. The average new car loan costs $730 a month
Most of us can remember the first “real car” we purchased. For me it was a new 2011 VW Jetta GLI (autobahn edition of course). I still remember thinking how crazy it was to pay $311 a month for a car and to this day it frames my scope of reference for car payments (aka everything over $311 seems expensive).
However between rising car prices and interest rates todays buyers face a new normal in the realm of purchasing a car, with almost 1 in 5 new car loans costing $1,000+ per month and the average payment clocking in at $730. If you put that same payment away every month for 20 years, assuming an 8% average return, you would walk away $400,000 in your pocket.
Talk about the most expensive way to get around.
9. The weight of water dropped by tanker aircraft’s used to fight the LA wildfires is equivalent to 24 Ford F-150’s.
Nothing brings out the arm chair quarterbacks more than a crisis, and the recent LA wildfires are no exception. There has been much talk about why planes didn’t use the Pacific ocean to refill tanker planes and why larger water drops were not done. Both are very fair questions so I took to the internet to find out.
On the first front, why was the ocean water not used, it comes down to one thing, salt water. Salt is a highly corrosive compound - meaning it causes rapid deterioration of other materials, namely metals. For a tanker to use a salt water payload would require enormous amounts of cleaning and maintenance after each flight to prevent destruction of the tanks and pumps that it comes in contact with. Furthermore salt causes significant damage to soil and vegetation.
For those non-biology majors osmosis is the process by which fluids move through a membrane to create an equilibrium in ion concentration on either side. When you dump large quantities of salt in the soil it causes water to leave the cells of the plant to try and dilute the highly concentrated soil. This causes dehydration and plant death.
The second point, why did planes did not operate at full tank capacity, is less straight forward. There are literally dozens (if not several dozens) of factors that affect the max amount of fluid a tanker plane can load up with. The size of the runway, the amount of fuel needed for the flight, the altitude of flight, the winds, the time it has to refill, and so many more.
One thing not on my bingo card was the weight of water. At over 8 pounds a gallon, a fully loaded Douglas DC-10 tanker plane, like those used in the LA wildfires, is capable of carrying 12,000 gallons of water. If full, it would be dropping more than 96,000 pounds of water onto houses. That is equivalent to the weight of 24 Ford F-150’s.
If you prefer your cars parked in the driveway and not falling through your roof it may be best to yield emergency management to the professionals.
10. BMW set the world record for longest drift. It lasted over 8 hours.
To round us out- the content we need, but don’t deserve. BMW set the world record last month for the worlds longest continuous drift by skidding a car in circles for 8 hours straight. How do you drive for 8 straight hours that you may ask?
Some things are best answered by a video.
