Our charts for you today explore:
This week McDonald's announced plans to raise wages by around 10% for more than 36,000 workers who work in its company-owned restaurants (not franchises).
This is a big deal for McDonald's, which has more locations than any other fast food outlet except Subway and Starbucks, and it comes just after rival Chipotle announced a hike in its wages last week.
As the biggest fast food chain, what McDonald's does has a big impact on the rest of the fast food industry — which reportedly employs more than 4 million people across the United States alone.
Thanks to data from QSR magazine, we were able to plot average revenue-per-restaurant against the number of restaurant units, for each of the different chains. McDonald's pulls in $2.9m a year per restaurant. Chick-fil-A does a whopping $4.5m. Starbucks, Taco Bell and Burger King do around $1.5m per restaurant per year. The average Subway does just $410k a year. Some fast food restaurants would be able to afford higher wages for its employees more easily than others.
As the tragic images of the escalating Israel-Palestine conflict have circulated around the world thousands of people have turned to Wikipedia to read up on the history of the violence. We found, using data from Pageviews, that 6 of the 10 most-visited pages on the online encyclopedia yesterday related to the conflict, with each one racking up hundreds of thousands of visits.
Wikipedia's weakness
The sensitivity around such a serious topic such as Israel-Palestine emphasises Wikipedia's greatest weakness — that anyone can theoretically edit its content. For relatively low-stakes topics like sports, movies or culture that isn't so much of a problem. Errors are usually caught, and there's little motivation or agenda for Wikipedia's army of volunteer editors to deliberately spread misinformation.
For issues such as Israel-Palestine, the stakes couldn't be higher and bad actors on both sides have strong reasons to misrepresent, change or misreport events — particularly when they are changing so quickly. Wikipedia does a good job of foregrounding when situations are particularly fluid, the top of the page "2021 Israel-Palestine crisis" page reads a disclaimer that says "this article documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses, and initial news reports may be unreliable.". That particular page has had 210 edits in the last day alone, made by 55 different editors.
10 or 15 years ago, students would be lambasted for using Wikipedia to help them with homework. Today, Wikipedia's status as a non-profit organization with decent transparency over who is editing what (and why) has helped it shake some of that early reputation, but for topics like Israel-Palestine, its process is tested to the limit. Often daily.
This week Elon Musk announced that Tesla would not, in fact, be accepting Bitcoin as payment for Tesla cars, citing concerns over how much energy Bitcoin mining uses. For those keeping score this announcement comes only 3 months after Musk announced that Tesla would accept Bitcoin.
According to estimates from Cambridge University, Bitcoin does indeed use an enormous amount of energy — about 150TwH annually according to their estimate. Were Bitcoin a country it would rank 25th in energy consumption, ahead of Egypt, Sweden and Pakistan to name but a few countries.
Why is Bitcoin so energy intensive?
For those unfamiliar with the process, in order to get new Bitcoin, computers are tasked with authenticating Bitcoin transactions, and their reward for doing so is the possibility of receiving some Bitcoin themselves. The way these transactions are authenticated is essentially by solving lots and lots of mathematical puzzles — with entire warehouses of electricity-hungry computers being tasked to solve them.
Musk's concerns about Bitcoin have merit. The strange thing is that his concerns were arguably similarly valid back in February. What changed, Elon?
1) Forbes has released its annual list of the world's 10 highest paid athletes.
2) COVID cases in the US are now down more than 80% from the peak as the CDC says those who have been fully vaccinated can now lose the mask in most situations.
3) Softbank has reported the largest profit of any Japanese company in history, with $45.9bn in net profit for the year ending in March.
4) See math and science in a completely new way with one-of-a-kind interactive visualizations from Brilliant — for ages 10 to 110.**
5) Vitalik Buterin, the creator of cryptocurrency Ethereum, has donated the equivalent of $1bn to the COVID-19 relief fund in India.
6) The one where they all get back together (how many times will you see that headline this weekend?) — 90s sitcom Friends is officially having a reunion, slated to come out on May 27th.
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