A good hack to become slightly famous for 15 minutes is to put 3x more effort into computing a single important number than most people who talk about it. This is not a high threshold since common estimates for many important numbers have had like 5 minutes of work put into them.
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Your competition might literally be a well-intentioned bit of precocious data munging by a 9-year-old, as the plastic straw case showed wfaa.com/article/news/n
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My contribution to the genre. Afaik this graph I made 11 years ago is still the best graph tracking % of free agents in US historically. I put in like 20 minutes of effort based on 2 sources I just happened to know about. 15 minutes of fame 🙂 ribbonfarm.com/2008/10/29/clo
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A few interesting numbers/graphs that I think would take less than a day to estimate at 3x better than what’s out there (keeping in mind that many cases there are *no* estimates out there)
1. Energy use by banking industry (for use in bitcoin conversations)
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2. Percent of consumer goods that go straight to landfill after purchase without being used, for various lifestyles (“basic material efficiency of lifestyles”) for use in sustainability conversations
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Packaging is a minefield. A small fraction of environmental impact, second-order effects make it net negative perhaps (reduced breakage/loss of primary materials) but the target of extreme hostility because it is so visible, plasticky, and inconvenient/bulky to dispose of
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