Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!
In this week’s newsletter we have charts on the revenue required to pay for all this AI infrastructure, how natural disasters are distorting the US home insurance market, and how much little sex gen Z is having.
But first … whither group voting tickets?
In Australia, Victoria is the last state still using group voting tickets (GVTs) to elect its upper house. This is where voters can vote “above the line” for a party, which then gets to decide where the vote goes after the party’s candidates are eliminated.
GVTs have long been exploited, with backroom deals between parties allowing little-known candidates to leapfrog rivals who received far, far more primary votes. As happened in 2018:
With Victoria’s electoral matters committee recommending group voting tickets be abolished this week, we took a deep dive into what exactly they are, and what the various options are to replace them and reform the system.
Four charts from the fortnight
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1. An incredible loss
Julian Fell and Georgina Piper at the ABC have a devastating story of a man who lost more than US$180k gambling in a crypto casino, including more than US$40k in just eight days:
Content warning: the ABC story contains references to suicide.
Elsewhere the ABC also had this dire story about rental affordability and some nice charts using the latest wave of the Australian Election Study.
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2. Harder and harder to insure
In 2020, about 222,000 Californian homes were covered by state-run or state-backed insurers of “last resort” as private companies wouldn’t cover them. With many of these homes increasingly prone to natural disasters, that number jumped by more than 100,000 in 2023.
Reuters have a wonderfully designed visual story looking at how climate change is driving this trend and how these non-profit insurers may be feeding a vicious cycle.
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3. Stacks on stacks on stacks
There’s been a rich vein of charts looking at the “AI bubble” recently, but this one from the Washington Post really caught our attention:
It’s not just because its a bar chart – The Crunch’s chart of choice. But that, according to JP Morgan, the tech industry will need an extra US$650bn in revenue every year just to earn a 10% return on all this investment. For context, Google’s 2024 revenue was US$350bn and OpenAI has annual revenues of about US$20bn.
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4. More distribution charts, please
A lot of fancy graphics focus on means and medians and other summary stats, hiding all the nuance of the actual distribution of the data. There’s a great exception in this story from Works in Progress:
Really recommend a click through to this fascinating story about how English is becoming easier to read. Bonus: there’s a scatterplot!
Bookmarks
The Guardian, CNN, Straits Times and Reuters all made visual guides on the Hong Kong apartment fires
Pie charts from the 1940s
How critical minerals power our daily lives
The latest in Robert Simon’s gentle introduction to GDAL series
An interactive explainer on the World Bank’s Statistical Performance Indicators
Bloomberg made a graphic novel ($)
Off the Charts
Our colleague and perennial Crunch favourite Mona Chalabi has a bunch of beautiful charts and stats on the sex lives of (American) gen Z-ers:
There is a lot in this article, from one-night stands to monogamy and even politics.
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