For $22,000, Pathway Church bought up $2.2 million worth of medical debt owed by 1,600 people and forgave it. 18 churches have been able to abolish $34.4 million in debt since 2018. [Kaiser Health News]
The 2020 census could lead to the worst undercount of Black and Latinex people in 30 years. “Challenges threatening the upcoming 2020 census could risk more than 4 million people to be missing from next year’s national head count, according to projections from the Urban Institute.”
The Urban Institute projects that as many as 3.68% of blacks (4,000,000); 3.57% of Latinos and Latinas (2,200,000); and 63.1% children under the age of 5 (1,300,000), will not be counted. [NPR]
52% of U.S. parents admit to spending too much time on their cell phones.
1 in 4 parents check their phone at least once per night, 1 in 3 teens admit the same. 61% of parents and 70% of teens check their phones in the half hour before bed. 39% of kids say their parents spend too much time on their phones. [Axios 5/30/19]
Over the last five years there has been a gradual change in the relative use of TV and mobile devices. In 2014 the hours that the average American spent daily on TV rather than their mobile devices was close to 2 to 1 in favor of TV use. That has changed in 2019.
| 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | |
| Hours:minutes of TV use | 4:30 | 4:10 | 4:05 | 3:56 | 3:44 | 3:35 | 3:29 | 3:22 |
| Hours:minutes of mobile use |
2:32 |
2:49 | 3:08 | 3:25 | 3:35 | 3:43 | 3:49 | 3:54 |
| [emarketer 4/19/19] | ||||||||
By 2040, 60% of the “meat” we will eat will come not from dead animals but rather “will be grown in vats or replaced by plant-based products that look and taste like mean.” [The Guardian – 538 6/13/19]
Nearly 3 million students in the U.S. struggle to overcome the so-called homework gap – the difficulty presented by an absence of internet in the home because of cost or availability. 17% of students do not have access to a computer at home and 18% do not have access to broadband internet. [AP/ FiveThirtyEight 6/11/19]
Americans have received some 126 million doses of measles vaccine in the past dozen years. During that time, through a federal program created to compensate such people, 284 people filed claims that they were harmed by those vaccinations. About half of those claims were dismissed. [NYT – FiveThirtyEight 6/19/19]
The World Health Organization’s classification of diseases and related health problems now includes video-game addition. [USA Today/FiveThirtyEight 5/29/19]
Political advertising in the 2020 election is projected to hit $9.9 billion, up from $8.7 billion in 2018 and from $6.3 billion in 2016. [WSJ/Numlock News 6/5/19]
Nikola Tesla predicted the Internet. In 1900, he wrote an article for Century Magazine describing a “world system” of wireless communications that could send telephone messages, news, music and pictures to any part of the world. [Weird World]