How to spy on your neighbors
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
Who Gets the TikTok in the Divorce? The Messy Fight Over Valuable Social Media Accounts
When couples who make their living online split up, assessing the accounts’ future value and divvying them up fairly is a drag.
When Kat and Mike Stickler filed for divorce, their lawyers had a math problem.
Among the couple’s biggest assets was MikeAndKat, a channel on TikTok and YouTube in which they shared their lives with about four million followers. No one knew how to evenly split MikeAndKat between Mike and Kat.
“The judge was like, ‘what?’” Kat said last month during a podcast interview with Northwestern Mutual. “It’s a whole new terrain.”
Social media pays the bills for millions of Americans. But making a living online is more financially complicated than working a 9-to-5. Influencers need an audience to win advertising deals, and changing what they post risks turning followers away. Couples who showcase their love life online face an existential threat to the family business when they split.
For the lawyers charged with pinning a dollar value to the accounts to divide them fairly, it’s way harder than assessing a house or car. Fortunes can swing depending on which ex has the keys to the account. That was Kat’s argument in fighting for control of the TikTok channel.
A Young Teen Gives Birth. Idaho’s Parental Consent Law Snags Her Care
The state’s new law requires parental permission for nearly all health care a minor receives. A 13-year-old’s pregnancy gets caught up in the consequences.
The patient, 36 weeks pregnant, was having mild but frequent contractions. She had come to the emergency room in this small lakeside town because she was new to the area and had no doctor. In most cases, physician Caitlin Gustafson would have begun a pelvic exam to determine whether labor had started. This time, she called the hospital’s lawyers.
Mom-to-be Aleah was only 13 years old. And under a new Idaho law requiring parental consent for nearly all minors’ health care, Gustafson could be sued for treating her because the girl had been brought in by her great-aunt.
What followed were more than two frantic hours of trying to contact Aleah’s mother, who was living in a car, and her grandmother, who was the teen’s legal guardian. The grandmother finally gave verbal consent for the exam — from the Boise-area jail where she was incarcerated on drug charges.
“I was freaking out,” said Anna Karren, the relative who had taken Aleah into her home just days before. What if the hospital couldn’t reach the right person? “They want guardianship papers, and I don’t have them.”
See How Your Neighborhood Is Giving to Trump and Harris
OK, this article is marred a bit by the correction they had to run right at the top — in that they apparently said incorrectly that Biden/Harris had more individual donors in every state than Trump. In truth it's 44 states for Biden/Harris and 6 for Trump.
The real fun with this however is that you can punch in your zip code and find out exactly how many of your neighbors donated to each candidate, and how much money in total. No big surprise for me: I live in a very blue town in a very blue state. I'll be interested to hear if anyone is surprised by what they find.
30 Years On, the ‘Worst Car Ever Built’ Has a Fervent Fan Club
Made in the former East Germany, Trabants have inspired many a mean joke—and a devoted community.
In the 1991 German comedy film, Go Trabi Go, a family from the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) goes on a road trip to Italy in their beloved Trabant 601—the most popular car in East Germany before the collapse of the Iron Curtain. At one point their vehicle’s head gasket blows, and the father makes an emergency phone call. When he tells a mechanic over the line that he’s driving a Trabant 601, the mechanic chuckles and says, “I hope you’ve got some sticky tape.”
Over the years, the “Trabi” (as it’s affectionately known) has been the butt of endless jokes associated with East Germany. With its bare interior, oddly-designed stick shifter, and an exterior made of Duroplast—a rust-resistant, cotton-reinforced resin plastic that’s lighter and stronger than steel (and more importantly, could be manufactured in the GDR)—the standard four-seater Trabi sedan has been referred to as one of the “worst cars ever built,” and “East Germany’s terrible car that will never die.” Add to this its two-stroke engine, the same kind used in lawnmowers and Asia’s tuk-tuks, and it’s understandable why there are quips like “Why does a Trabi have a heated rear window? To keep your hands warm while you push.”
Once the Wall came down, Trabis just couldn’t compete with Western vehicles, and seemingly overnight East Germany’s most coveted car became almost obsolete.
Ice-Cream Tubs of Tampons and Sunscreen From a Whipped-Cream Can: Welcome to ‘Chaos Packaging’
Lesser-known brands try to grab shoppers’ attention with unexpected trappings.
Companies are selling sunscreen in whipped-cream cans, water in tallboys better known for beer and tampons in ice-cream tubs as surprising packaging becomes a sharper tool for marketers.
“When we were designing the product, I said to my co-founder, ‘We won’t be able to afford a billboard for a while,’” said Susan Allen Augustin, co-founder of Flo, the menstrual health company using ice-cream containers. “So I said, ‘We have to make the product a billboard.’”
Marketing and venture capital consultant Michael Miraflor calls the trend “chaos packaging.” Other examples include Illva Saronno’s Engine gin, which comes in motor oil containers, and Moschino’s Fresh Couture perfume, which is packaged in window cleaner-like spray bottles.
Such unusual packaging has supercharged the growth of some new brands. Liquid Death, the drinks company known for selling water and other nonalcoholic beverages in beer-style cans rather than bottles, in March was valued at $1.4 billion. And venture-backed olive oil startup Graza became a millennial favorite primarily thanks to choosing squeezable condiment-like bottles instead of traditional glass.
Cheap Solar Panels Are Changing the World
“This is unstoppable.”
Last month, an energy think tank released some rare good news for the climate: The world is on track to install 29 percent more solar capacity this year than it did the year before, according to a report from Ember. “In a single year, in a single technology, we’re providing as much new electricity as the entirety of global growth the year before,” Kingsmill Bond, a senior energy strategist at RMI, a clean-energy nonprofit, told me. A decade or two ago, analysts “did not imagine in their wildest dreams that solar by the middle of the 2020s would already be supplying all of the growth of global electricity demand,” he said. Yet here we are.
In the United States, solar accounted for more than half of all new power last year. But the most dramatic growth is happening overseas. The latest global report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes that solar is on track to overtake all other forms of energy by 2033. The world’s use of fossil fuels is already plateauing (the U.S., for its part, hit its peak demand for fossil-fuel energy way back in 2007). Energy demand is still rising, but renewables are stepping in to make up the difference. “The really interesting debate now,” Bond said, “is actually: When do we push fossil fuels off the plateau? And from our numbers, if solar keeps on growing this way, it’s going to be off the plateau by the end of this decade.”
How the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade Went From Its Modest Start to an American Tradition
A century on, the country’s most beloved Thursday spectacle reaches new heights.
That first parade held on a relatively mild Thanksgiving Day in 1924, was extolled as “a marathon of mirth” in splashy newspaper ads. It was actually more akin to a modest church carnival on wheels. Comprising a few marching bands, some clowns, some Mother Goose-themed floats and a small menagerie of animals on loan from Manhattan’s Central Park Zoo that occasionally terrified onlooking children with their howls and growls, the procession managed to trudge a staggering six miles, from 145th Street all the way down to Herald Square, to its final destination: R.H. Macy & Company, America’s largest department store.
Despite its modest offerings, the parade still drew a crowd: By the time Santa, pulling up the rear, descended from his sleigh and climbed a ladder to sit on an ornate gold throne above the store’s brand-new entrance on 34th Street, an estimated 10,000 people were there to cheer him on. It was a crowning achievement in more ways than one: Macy’s was celebrating its just-completed expansion to one million square feet of retail space, which now gobbled up an entire city block from Broadway to Seventh Avenue.
Bill, the stinking Wa-Po makes you sign up for a “free” account in order to be able to read the article. What a craptastic way for Wa-Po to do readers.
Regarding Idaho's parental consent law, it includes exceptions for emergency situations where furnishing the health care is necessary to prevent death or imminent physical injury, or after a reasonably diligent effort, the parent cannot be located and further delay would seriously endanger the minor child. She was "new in town" with no doctor; showing up at the ER in an unplanned childbirth situation should be considered an emergency, but apparently the hospital's legal team thought otherwise. They're thinking liability lawsuits, and it's understandable. A 2018 AMA study found that the average cost to defend a medical liability lawsuit was $54K in 2015, up 64% from 2006. Although 68% of medical liability lawsuits are dropped, those dropped lawsuits still cost an average of $30K to defend -- again, AMA data. If a hospital lets lawyers make care decisions, the hospital is guaranteed to get the decision that is least risky to the hospital, not the patient.