One emerging theme from this week I’ve found is the constant unveiling of hidden things in the seemingly normalcy of life. Ride-sharing is great they said, but is it really? Retiring early is the dream they said, but what are the adverse affects of this? Youtube is the best source today to learn in the modern era, but at what cost?

The fun in reading these articles is it really makes you reconsider how we’re sold convenience, goals to strive for, or even simple consumer services. So much is hidden in life that we need to continue to decrypt to understand.

Cities sharing the burden

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A study published last year by San Francisco County officials and University of Kentucky researchers in the journal Science Advances found that over 60% of the slowdown of traffic speeds in San Francisco between 2010 and 2016 was due to the introduction of the ride-hail companies.

Traffic speeds in San Francisco’s downtown core fell 21% to 13.7 miles an hour in 2016, from 17.4 miles an hour in 2010. Without the addition of Lyft and Uber, traffic speeds would only have fallen 6.7% to 16.2 miles an hour, according to Joe Castiglione, a San Francisco County official who was a co-author of the Science Advances study as well as a related analysis.

A F.I.R.E is brewing

How Millennials Could Make the Fed’s Job Harder - The New York Times

They love the idea of retiring early. That could diminish Federal Reserve’s firepower.

Millennials, who are roughly between the ages of 24 and 39 and have not lived through pronounced price spikes, already have the lowest inflation expectations of any adult generation. Their belief that costs will not increase could eventually slow actual price gains by making it hard for businesses to charge more. The Fed’s main interest rate includes inflation, so that would leave it with even less room to cut.

It may not come to this. Millennials could become more worried about inflation as they age, giving companies more room to lift prices. Their difficult post-recession entry into the labor market means many are laden with student debt, so it’s unclear if they will be able to retire young. But many indicate that they want to leave the work force early — an ambition that economists say could spell macroeconomic trouble if realized.

“It would lower interest rates — that’s certainly true,” said Joseph Gagnon, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “It would be a double whammy: It directly raises savings” and “it would further reduce the need to invest in factories and offices for these people.”

The gamers being gamed

YouTube Gaming’s Most-Watched Videos Are Dominated by Scams and Cheats | WIRED

YouTube is littered with bot-driven videos promising big in-game riches—that also try to steal your personal information.

In January, all seven of the most-watched YouTube Gaming channels weren’t run by happy gamers livestreaming the game du jour. They were instead recorded, autoplaying videos advertising videogame cheats and hacks, sometimes attached to sketchy, credential-vacuuming websites, according to one analytics firm. The trend has continued into this month, with five of the top seven most-watched YouTube Gaming channels last weekend advertising cheats.