Fort McMurray Insurance Bill Could Run Over $9 Billion: Here’s What We’re Reading Today
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Here’s what we’re reading:
1. Economically, Fort McMurray is the largest disaster in Canadian history
Once the fires settle, the insurance bill for Fort Mac might run up to $9.4 billion, Bloomberg is reporting. According to the National Post, the blaze is now too large to stop without the help of Mother Nature.
And if you haven’t seen this yet, here’s how large the fires are right now, as overlayed onto Canada’s largest cities.
+1: Why are indigenous Canadians killing themselves?
2. Chinese propaganda pages are killing it on Facebook right now
“Only the BBC has more Facebook fans among English-language news outlets than China’s state-television channel CCTV, and its news channel CCTVNews. And the People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, is beating out Fox News, the New York Times, and nearly every one else except CNN and the BBC.”
Quartz looked at the numbers though, and something does not quite add up. Here’s why that’s such a big deal.
+1: What does it even mean to “Like” something on Facebook anymore?
+1: Some of Facebook’s newest users are long-time holdouts, desperate to try Tinder.
3. 3D printing the void
“For a time, the allure of the desktop 3D printer seemed inescapable. Painting our social feeds with techno-utopian blog posts, a wave of optimistic journalism heralded the devices as a personal tech solution to the crisis of productive alienation.”
It’s 2016 though, and like the flying car, the 3D printing revolution still hasn’t arrived. Evan Malmgren at The Awl asks: What gives?
4. The end of prison visitations
From Mic: “A new system called ‘video visitation’ is replacing in-person jail visits with glitchy, expensive Skype-like video calls. It’s inhumane, dystopian and actually increases in-prison violence — but god, it makes money.”
+1: Why America can’t quit the drug war.
5. How to survive Doomsday
In a galactically-paltry 6 billion years, the Sun will turn into a red giant star, swelling to the size of the Earth’s orbit and melting our planet. If humanity manages to make it far, well, then that’s it. So what, if anything, can mankind do to survive?
