Lost Cargo, Adverts And More

Lost Cargo

In a typical year, around 1,200 containers are lost at sea due to bad weather, accidents and other incidents.
In 2021, there were so many incidents involving cargo ships spilling their loads, that over 2,900 were recorded lost in the first 6 months of the year.

Adverts

The New York City Subway has adverts and billboards which are all controlled by Outfront Media. According to Outfront Media, billboard and transit advertising demand are falling, with billboard sales dropping by 36% and transit ad sales dropping by 76%. During the Spring of 2021, it became so bad for advertising sales, that Outfront Media were offering the chance to advertise on a billboard for a 90% discount, and some adverts remained in place for weeks after their contract ran out because Outfront Media would rather have an old advert showing than a blank space.

Baby Chicks

Worldwide, over 7 billion male chicks are culled because they are not egg-producing.
Germany and France are planning to outlaw the practice due to the success of science and technology in producing female chicks during fertilisation.
The US egg companies also agreed to ban the culling in 2020, but now 2 years later and little has been done to follow through with the promise. The reason for not rushing to outlaw it? It is 2 cents an egg cheaper to cull males than use specialist techniques to produce only female chicks.

Doomsday Cult

The Doomsday Cult in Japan which carried out a Sarin gas attack on an underground railway in 1995, is back and recruiting new members.
According to Japanese security services, the cult is no longer recruiting from bookstores due to the lack of interest in physical books by impressionable students but has resorted to targeting lonely university students who are wanting to find friends and are struggling to find them online.
According to one press release from the government, over 60 students are recruited each year from this tactic, and universities are now alerting all students to the dangers.

Real Estate

It seems like a great way to make money but being a realtor in America is not the money-maker it would seem. In fact, only the top 1% who have contacts and clients in New York or Los Angeles seem to make life-changing money selling homes.
In 2019, the average inexperienced realtor (one that had only been selling for 2 years or less) made an average of $8,900 a year. For those with longer experience to whether downturns, the average yearly revenue for them was little more than $49,000.
The reason for this is down to too many realtors and too few properties to sell.
A survey in 2021 found that there were 1.4 million realtors in the US, but only 1.04 million properties were listed for sale.

Railways

In the US every year, 57 tonnes of freight is transported by train for every single American.
While freight trains are a safer way to transport goods, that doesn't mean they are completely safe. In 2019 there were over 340 derailments of trains in a single year, of which 24 of them were derailments involving hazardous materials. That is over 150 train cars filled with hazardous materials that ended up in a derailment incident in just a single year.

Cyclones

The National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration have begun to use upper atmosphere monitoring and new supercomputers to predict the strength and direction of tropical cyclones by as much as 15% more accurately, which in real terms gives scientists an additional 36 hours to prepare for things like evacuations, etc.

Californian Aquaducts

The canals and aqueducts of California help provide water to 35 million people and supply the irrigation needs of 5.7 million acres of farmland. They are also the biggest drain on the power grid pumping that water everywhere.
Scientists have suggested placing solar panels over the 4,000 miles of the canals and aqueducts for two purposes. To generate over 13 gigawatts of renewable energy and to stop the wasteful evaporation of over 63 billion gallons of water each year.

Avatar

To prepare for the release of Avatar: The Way Of Water, the studio decided to re-release the original Avatar movie in theatres across China.
The movie ended up generating over $44 million dollars in just 10 days which made it one of the best-performing movies in China, even though it was a 13-year-old movie that had been released a second time.

Homeschooling

In the US, for the past 8 years up to 2020, the number of students that were homeschooled (taught at home by their parents, not taught by a school online) was a constant 3.3% of the child population.
However, due to the fears of COVID-19 and several random school shootings, 2020 saw that figure grow to 5.4% and by 2021 it was up to 11.1%, suggesting parents are rapidly losing faith in schools being safe places to send their children.