Well, it looks as though we are back on a semi-regular schedule. Here are things that caught our eye as we went about our business.
What’s the world’s second most used resource? Did you guess sand? Neither did I. Anyway, like water, it is getting scarcer.
Related to sand, rising agricultural commodity prices are encouraging US farmers to pull their land out of conservation reserve programs, leading to increasing dust–really soil–storms.
We explored some possible futures of the gig economy in our Futures of Work report. Now, Wal-Mart is paying employees to deliver goods to customers on their way home from work.
In other retail news, this story on Amazon cutting Prime membership fee for poor consumers reveals that nearly half of American households are Prime members. Wow.
Finally, electricity use per capita in the US peaked in 2007 and has been falling yearly every since. The reason? Increased use of LED and CFL lights, which have cut electricity demand by 50 billion kilowatt hours per year.