Sunday Soup: Perfect Credit, Chick-fil-A’s Robots and Regulating Social Media
These are the articles, streaming ideas, and books that caught our attention this week.
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From advertising moves by Amazon AMZN to one person’s effort to obtain a perfect 850 credit score to how all that anti-social behavior may be changing us, these are ingredients in this week’s Sunday Soup.
If you have a recommendation you’d like to share, feel free to share it in the Comments section below!
Now enjoy this latest offering.
Articles 📰
How ‘Disaster Girls’ Are Cashing in on the Digital Economy
"Rachel O’Dwyer’s book Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform described an online economy spilling over into real life. It’s a place where cold, hard money is replaced by gift cards, wish lists, phone credits, bitcoin and even emoji. The implications are vast, driving rapid changes in banking, politics and the way we live today. In this Next Chapter, O’Dwyer explains how some young women are molding their identity to profit from this non-cash digital world."
Amazon Is Selling Its Adtech to Other Retailers, Taking Direct Aim at Firms Like Criteo
"Amazon built a $50 billion ad business by selling sponsored placements on its website and app. Now, the ecommerce giant wants to do the same for other retailers."
One Man’s Attempt to Get a Perfect 850 Credit Score
"Credit scores are also playing a more influential role in our lives right now. No longer just a tool to help lenders decide whether to approve loans and how much to charge, credit scores are now an all-purpose ranking system. They are used to decide whether you can rent a home, what your insurance premiums should be and even if you can get a date."
"Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality."
The Coming Battle Between Social Media and the State
"Just because one wants a thing to be regulated, that does not make it capable of actually being regulated. If a thing is unpleasant or unwelcome, the instant demand is that something should be done, and that the unwanted thing can be regulated so it cannot happen. The notion that all we need to make the world a better place is “better regulation” is deeply embedded in our culture. And one thing for which the cry for regulation is made is social media platforms. If only they were “better regulated”, the popular sentiment goes, then various political and social problems would all be solved. But there are two problems with regulating social media platforms."
Chick-fil-A’s Lemon-Squeezing Robots Are Saving 10,000 Hours of Work
"Squeezing 2,000 lemons a day was such a pain for staff at Chick-fil-A Inc. that the company enlisted an army of robots to do it. In a plant north of Los Angeles, machines now squeeze as many as 1.6 million pounds of the fruit with hardly any human help. The facility, larger than the average Costco store at roughly 190,000 square feet, then ships bags of juice to Chick-fil-A locations, where workers add water and sugar to whip up the chain’s trademark lemonade."
And with the mention of lemons, we’re angling to give this a whirl this week:
Lemony Grilled Scallops and Blistered Long Beans
Of course, we’ll want something sweet to finish, and that means a hat tip to Ben and David over at the Acquired podcast for alerting us to Dandelion Chocolate.
What We’re Streaming 📺📲
Business Wars: The Unraveling of Boeing
Behind the Numbers: The Future of Digital in 2025
What If You Eere Caught in a Spiral of Violence?
The Reading List 📖📚
The Secret Hours by Mick Herron
"Two years ago, a hostile prime minister launched the Monochrome inquiry, investigating “historical over-reaching” by the British Secret Service. Monochrome’s mission was to ferret out any hint of misconduct by any MI5 officer—and allowed Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle, the two civil servants seconded to the project, unfettered access to any and all confidential information in the Service archives in order to do so.
"But MI5’s formidable First Desk did not become Britain’s top spy by accident, and she has successfully thwarted the inquiry at every turn. Now the administration that created Monochrome has been ousted, the investigation is a total bust—and Griselda and Malcolm are stuck watching as their career prospects are washed away by the pounding London rain.
"Until the eve of Monochrome’s shuttering, when an MI5 case file appears without explanation. It is the buried history of a classified operation in 1994 Berlin—an operation that ended in tragedy and scandal, whose cover-up has rewritten thirty years of Service history."
