Brief - The Hustle

Digits: Space chorizo, app use, and cats

Written by Jacob Cohen | Aug 8, 2022 5:36:17 AM

1) A French scientist tweeted an image of “Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us”… or so people thought. Turns out it was a piece of chorizo.

2) People spend a lot of time on their phones, especially in Indonesia and Singapore, where the average Joe spends 5.7 hours a day using mobile apps. That equates to ~87 entire days in apps each year.

3) In celebrity news, Bitcoin is down 60% since Matt Damon’s Crypto.com ad; Reese Witherspoon’s NFTs are down ~75%; and EthereumMax is down 98% since Paul Pierce said it made him more money in weeks than in a year at ESPN.

4) Apparently, the dev team for “Stray” — a popular new game about a cat who “must untangle an ancient mystery to escape a long-forgotten cybercity” — is made up of ~80% “cat owners and cat lovers.

5) We recently surveyed 2.3k renters and 740 landlords about a delightful and uplifting topic: rent increases. Among many things, we found 71% of renters saw rent hikes in 2021-22 at an average increase of 14.6%.