Welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week’s newsletter we’ve got a doomed (?) plan to plant a trillion trees by 2030, coverage of the Australian federal budget, how our sense of economic reality is distorted, and a novel way of brewing coffee.
But first … how rich are you really?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that everyone is “middle class”. But Guardian Australia’s data team wanted to ground this a little more. We created a quiz that will show you how you and your household compare with the rest of Australia, your neighbours, those the same age as you, etc.
If you want to see how your income and wealth compares you can take the quiz here.
Four charts from the fortnight
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1. A budget in charts
Guardian Australia has extensive coverage of the budget including the winners and losers and our interactive guide. But if you’re after a charty breakdown it’s hard to go past Greg Jericho’s analysis.
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2. Income support is below the poverty line
Sticking with the budget – despite a recent recommendation of the government’s expert panel, there wasn’t an increase in income support. Here’s the latest in our One Big Chart series, showing how unemployment payments (jobseeker) are significantly below the poverty line.
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3. Don’t we know how good we have it?
One of the big puzzles in the US presidential election – but echoed around the globe – is the apparent disconnect between national economic fundamentals (inflation, growth etc), people’s perceptions and their own circumstances. Here’s an interesting piece from John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times, about how the media may be to blame.
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4. More trees, please
Marc Benioff, a Silicon Valley billionaire has a plan to protect or plant 1 trillion trees by 2030. And it isn’t going great. The pledges by companies and governments so far amount to less than 15% of that goal. Less than 0.3% have actually been planted or conserved so far.
You can find more info and some great visuals here.
Spotlight on … aid in Gaza
Unrwa have created a dashboard of supplies going through the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings
Bloomberg used this and other data for this story about fuel and aid shipments into the territory
Reuters has maps and satellite imagery of trucks parked near the crossings
Off the Charts
In very important research for lovers of cold brew coffee, researchers from the University of NSW, University of Queensland, and the University of Sydney have built a device they’re calling an “ultrasonic coffee brewing machine”. Essentially, they’ve modified an espresso machine to have a transducer attached to the portafilter so they can blast the coffee with ultrasonic sound waves, thus speeding up the process of extracting the coffee flavours into water.
This chart compares the flavour profile of traditionally-made cold brew coffee to cold brew coffee made using an ultrasonic reactor with a 1-minute and 3-minute brewing time. Normal cold brew has significantly more dark chocolate flavours, while the 3 minute brew has more sour and bitter flavours:
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