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OVERWORLD:
-Gen Z doesn’t care for office jobs-

TWO BETWEENS:
-Google has been watching you all along-
-Japan is not happy about Oppenheimer-

THE DEPTHS:
-Graphite - the rock that saved humanity-

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
— George Carlin

✦TREND PICKS✦

Economy

Gen Z says no to office jobs, they’d rather weld and plumb

Zoomers... What are they like? Doom scrollers? Main characters? Incapable of communicating without memes?

You'd think that a generation raised by content creators and who only express emotions through Pepe the Frog are simply born to be internet-workers.

That does not seem to be the case. With tuition robbing families, mass layoffs, and tech careers causing spine damage - trade jobs don't seem so bad.

WSJ dubbed them the “toolbelt generation,” as Gen Z is actually trying to become plumbers, welders, and electricians.

Here are some numbers:

✦The times, they are a-changin'✦

Despite decades of stigma around trade school being for no-good-failures, Gen Z has found an unmatched safety with trades.

That stigma is the same one that made the jobs undesirable. Millennials and Gen X got it bashed into their skull that white-collar email jobs were high-status.

Now, blue-collar workers are retiring while we still need fucking plumbing cause the world is taking extra big shits from all those TikTok recipes.

In all seriousness, society does not work without plumbers, electricians, and vehicle maintenance - and we’re running out of them.

The result is high wages for any kid willing to get in there and weld some pipes. So, Gen Z is picking up slack (not Slack, slack).

More numbers:

✦QUICK HITS✦

Future & Metro Boomin’s album ‘We Don’t Trust You’ debuts No. 1 with 251,000 U.S. sales, setting up a chart battle with Beyoncé's upcoming 'Cowboy Carter'.

Tesla stock dropped 7% yesterday after news that it delivered 386.8k vehicles in Q1, short of an estimated 450k. The reason: German factory shutdowns, low demand in China, and high demand for plug-in hybrids.

Discord’s April’s Fools Prank "Discord Loot Boxes are here," amassed 628m views in 17 hours, due to accidental viewbotting via an in-app notification, surpassing the GTA 6 trailer's record.

Cancer signs could be spotted long before symptoms, according to new research. Cambridge's Early Cancer Institute, backed by an £11m donation, aims to detect and treat cancer early by understanding cell changes years before tumors develop.

ChatGPT no longer requires you to log in to use it. But if you don’t log in you’ll lack features like saving and sharing chats and prompts.

Microsoft is separating the Teams app from Office, responding to EU antitrust concerns of an unfair competitive advantage against rivals like Slack and Zoom.

Tekken fans have been spamming producer Katsuhiro Harada to add a Waffle House stage because drunk Americans always fight at Waffle House. He doesn’t even know what Waffle House is.

Read: Avoid blundering: 80% of a winning strategy

 😭 Google has been watching you all along
Hahaaaa!! You thought they didn’t see you when you went Incognito on Chrome? Silly human. Your League of Legends porn has been compromised.

In fact, they’ve even collected your data.

Luckily for you, a big ass lawsuit made sure that Google will delete "billions of data records" from users in Incognito, per WIRED.

The agreement, emerging from a 2020 class action lawsuit, reveals Google's extensive data collection practices, even during supposedly private browsing sessions.

The funniest part: The lawsuit was effective, but Google isn’t going to stop collecting data from Incognito.

They’re simply going to update the Incognito splash page and privacy policy, clarifying that data collection occurs regardless of browsing mode. Was the issue that they were collecting data or that they didn’t tell us?

It’s actually looking like a win for Google: They were supposed to pay a $5 billion penalty because of all of this, but now they’re paying zero and get to keep gathering data. Whatever.

🇯🇵 Japan is not happy about Oppenheimer
While you were enjoying that back-to-back viewing of Barbie and Oppenheimer, their critical acclaim, and cultural impact - Oppenheimer had not even been released in Japan.

Which is significant, simply because it’s a film by Americans about the most terrible thing that happened in Japan’s history.

The bombs celebrated by “Barbenheimer” memes killed an estimated 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki, maimed and wounded tens of thousands of others, and caused higher rates of cancer survivors.

So, the movie was held back for sensitivity reasons, until last week. The film premiered in Japan eight months after its global release - with a trigger warning for sensitive viewers.

Now, Japan is reacting: Many Japanese are rallying against the glorification of J. Robert Oppenheimer without adequately depicting the bombings' horrors.

By leaving Japan out of the perspective, critics say the film doesn’t quite understand the consequences that followed.

Christopher Nolan himself has noted that the film is intended to capture Oppenheimer’s perspective, so it doesn’t go beyond that.

Maybe 3 hours of runtime wasn’t that long after all.

THE DEPTHS

History

Graphite - the rock that saved humanity

There’s a problem with the human brain. It loves information - and for survival purposes, it loves spreading information across generations.

“How is that an issue?”, you just thought. Spoiled human.

Sending information across time is very easy to do today. You just write it down, wherever the fuck, and it stays around long after you die.

But for most of human history, that hasn’t been a thing.

Mostly, information has been word-of-mouth. And if you’ve ever played the whisper game, you know how easily “Don’t eat this berry” turns into “My legs are hairy.” It’s not reliable.

Actually, writing has only been around for 5,500 years. That’s nothing - humans have been around for 150,000 years.

Even when we first started to write, it was kinda scuffed. For example, many civilizations etched knowledge into wet clay tablets that then dried - which is a long, arduous process. Also, you just end up with a heavy ass block that you can’t edit.

But one discovery changed everything...

✦A legend enters the arena - graphite✦

Enter the ultimate conduit of all human knowledge: graphite. Every civilization that suddenly tried out graphite has never looked back.

Might seem trivial today, but graphite is a one-of-a-kind writing tool. It’s erasable, versatile, consistent, and ridiculously accessible. No writing tool had all those qualities, ever.

Of course, graphite exists everywhere in the world. It’s a rock just like any other rock.

In the West, use became widespread when a gigantic deposit of graphite was found in Cumbria, England, in the 1500s.

It changed everything. No more finicking with quill and ink, no more fading charcoal - graphite solved it all.

From marking livestock to being a coveted resource for Elizabeth I's military needs - graphite’s portability, erasability, and precision became the gold industrial standard in the West.

✦The first pencil (300 years later, lol)✦

The French military officer Nicholas-Jacques Conte patented the first modern pencil in 1795, enclosing a mix of graphite and clay in wood.

This design was not entirely new, as Italians Simonio and Lyndiana Bernacotti had experimented with a similar concept in the 1560s. But do they have a patent? Didn’t think so.

In the time of chatbots and AirDropping nudes, it is easy to forget what got us here.

None of this would have been possible without a damn pencil. So please, don’t overlook the pencil - it literally took us hundreds of thousands of years to get it.