Image of the Week: Swallow It Up

Kudos to Berlin’s public transport operator BVG for offering this: a day pass that is edible for the season there. Made with rice paper and dusted with “no more than three drops” of hemp oil – believed to have a calming effect – the banknotes can be eaten after use.

“Then you can just swallow your stress and your Christmas ticket,” says BVG, who has a form in that sort of thing; in 2018, he launched a pair of limited edition Adidas sneakers that also functioned as an annual subway ticket (and was much cheaper than a regular ticket). Unfortunately, the € 8.80 edible tickets were only on sale this week.

Even more sadly, the chances of Transport for Ireland introducing edible tickets on Dublin Bus are absolutely zero. (The German word for “Christmas stress,” by the way, is Weihnachtsstress.)

In figures: the inequality of chocolate

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Chocolates Behind Eighth carries on an advent calendar sold by Dutch ethical chocolate suppliers Tony’s Chocolonely.

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Chocolates behind the 9th and 24th doors on the calendar. The company, which also sells bars made up of uneven pieces, designed the “unevenly divided” calendar as a “conversation starter” to highlight the inequalities in its industry.

1.56 million

At least as many children work in illegal conditions in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire because the price paid for cocoa is too low, according to the company, while 30,000 adults and children are forced to work. “We don’t think that’s okay,” he tweeted.

Get to know: @Metaverse

Australian artist Thea-Mai Baumann had happily used the Facebook-owned Instagram handle @metaverse for nine years, posting her work on the account and using it to promote her augmented reality business Metaverse Makeovers. Everything changed at the beginning of November. Five days after Facebook announced it was renaming Meta as part of its effort to become a “metaverse business,” Instagram shut it down and said it had been “blocked for pretending to be someone.” another “.

Attempts to rectify the situation with Instagram failed and she was “wiped off the Internet” for a month. It wasn’t until a New York Times reporter inquired with Meta that Instagram admitted the account had been “improperly deleted” and apologized, reinstating Baumann’s account two days later. His fear that the metaverse culture is being “corrupted” by the “technology brethren of Silicon Valley” seems reasonable.

The list: the people of the time

Elon Musk – and controversially not vaccine scientists – was named Person of the Year by Time, a designation that’s not an honor or award, but simply a reflection of impact, according to the magazine. Past selections include Donald Trump, Joseph Stalin (twice) and Adolf Hitler (in 1938). But who in the business world came before Musk?

1: Walter Chrysler. In 1928, the automotive industry pioneer was the second recipient of what was then known as Time’s Man / Woman of the Year (mostly just the Man, to be honest). His company merged with Dodge Bros that year, and then he opened New York’s Art Deco Chrysler building.

2: Harlow Curtice. The man who ran General Motors for five years was the man of the year in 1955, when GM became the first company to achieve a net annual profit of over $ 1 billion.

3: Ted Turner. In 1991, the CNN founder (83) was Time’s choice in a year in which its 24-hour cable news network televised Operation Desert Storm and the Gulf War in broad sense – a conflict often equated with video game warfare thanks to its real-time coverage. .

4: Andrew Grove. In 1997, the CEO of Intel – who was the chipmaker’s third employee when it was founded in 1968 – was cited as “the person most responsible for the amazing growth in power and potential of electronic chip innovation ”.

5: The computer. Bill Gates (shared with Melinda French Gates and Bono, for whatever reason), Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg were all Time picks, but in 1982 the magazine got right to the point and named a Machine of the Year. . The blurb on the cover read “the computer moves in”. It never moves.