Ruction

A disturbance or quarrel.

The Ruction is a weekly rundown of the top ten emerging issues from the past seven days shaping commerce + culture.

The Ruction is for communication strategists and global business executives.

#TheRuction #Caracal #China #WindPower #StellaMcCartney #Mylo #Mushrooms #Leather #TokyoOlympics #FrenchBulldogs #AmericanKennelClub #LabradorRetrievers #MajorLeagueBaseball #YouTube #Spain #32HourWorkweek #SmallTown #COVID19 #Seafood #Fishmongers #Pickleball #Astroscale #SpaceJunk

The Ruction | Edition 14 | March 19, 2021

1. China installed 52 gigawatts of new wind power in 2020 compared to 17 gigawatts in the US: China’s wind power investments cemented its position as a global leader, as nearly 60% of all global wind power installations came from China last year.

2. Stella McCartney introduces her first garments made of Mylo, the “leather” alternative grown from mushrooms.

There’s no silver bullet for reversing fashion’s environmental impact, but McCartney believes we’d make significant progress if we just nixed one material: leather.

McCartney has been working with Bolt Threads to develop and scale its most promising plant-based innovation: Mylo, an “un-leather” grown from mycelium, the vegetative part of a fungus. (It isn’t “mushroom leather”; think of mycelium as the underground root structure of a mushroom.)

3. Tokyo Olympics: A March survey found that 56 percent of respondents in Japan opposed having the Olympic Games as planned, the highest level of opposition among the six countries surveyed. Opposition to the games going on as planned was 55 percent in the United Kingdom and 52 percent in Germany, while in the US, the opposition was only 33 percent, incidentally tied with the level of support for the games going on.

4. 66,500 French bulldogs joined the American Kennel Club registry last year, making them the second-most popular breed of dog in the US behind only Labrador retrievers.

5. Major League Baseball renewed and expanded its broadcast agreement with YouTube for the 2021 season, upping the number of streamed games to 21.

6. Spain is poised to try a 32-hour workweek, which would allow workers to spend less time at the office without any change in pay.

The test run was proposed by Más País, a left-wing party that has argued that longer hours don’t necessarily lead to higher productivity, and it is now in talks with the government to figure out the exact details of the arrangement.

7. Small-town natives are moving back home: Grace Olmstead in the WSJ writes for many young people, returning to struggling communities means exchanging prosperity for a more rooted life.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Pew Research Center reports that 52% of adults age 18 to 29 lived with their parents in 2020, the largest share since the Great Depression.

8. Seafood fraud happening on a vast global scale: Guardian analysis of 44 studies finds nearly 40% of 9,000 products from restaurants, markets and fishmongers were mislabelled.

In one comparison of fish sales labeled “snapper” by fishmongers, supermarkets, and restaurants in Canada, the US, the UK, Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, researchers found mislabelling in about 40% of fish tested. The UK and Canada had the highest mislabeling rates in that study, at 55%, followed by the US at 38%.

9. Why pickleball is the sport of the year (or should be, at least) by Rachel Khong in NY Mag.

Pickleball has had a 650 percent increase in numbers over the last six years, according to USA Pickleball Association (USAPA).

“Pickleball is like tennis with a Wiffle ball.”

10. Astroscale, the British company on a mission to tidy up space: Ben Spencer in The Times writes a British craft pioneering efforts to clear junk from the Earth’s orbit will attempt to grab a satellite traveling at 17,000mph.

There are 8,000 tons of debris orbiting the Earth, in 128 million pieces ranging from vast sections of spent rocket to tiny but deadly flecks of metal.