Last year, 138,000 San Francisco residents used Airbnb, a popular app designed to connect home renters and travelers. It’s a striking number for a city with a population of about 850,000, and it was enough for Airbnb to win a major victory in local elections, as San Francisco voters struck down a debatable rule that would have placed time restrictions and other regulations on short-term rental services.

The company fiercely opposed the rule, Proposition F, with a nearly $10 million advertising campaign. It also contacted its San Franciscan users with messages urging them to vote against Proposition F.

Most people think of Airbnb as a kind of couch-surfing app. The service works for one-night stays on road trips and longer stays in cities, and it often has more competitive pricing than hotels. It’s a textbook example of the “sharing economy”, but not everyone is a fan.

The app has had unintended consequences in San Francisco. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported last year, a significant amount of renting on Airbnb is not in line with the company’s image: middle-class families putting up a spare room to help make ends meet. Some users have taken advantage of the service, using it to turn their multiple properties into vacation rentals or even full-time rentals. Backers of Proposition F argued that this trend takes spaces off the conventional, better-regulated housing market and contributes to rising costs.

“The fact is, widespread abuse of short-term rentals is taking much needed housing off the market and harming our neighborhoods,” said ShareBetter SF, a group that supported Proposition F. Hotel unions have protested the company’s practices in San Francisco and other cities, saying that it creates an illegal hotel system.

San Francisco is in the middle of a long-term, deeply rooted housing crisis that has seen the cost of living explode. Located on a narrow outcropping of land overlooking the bay, San Francisco simply doesn’t have enough space to accommodate the massive inflow of young, high-salaried tech employees flocking to Silicon Valley. Consequently, the average monthly rent for an apartment is around $4,000.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, some San Francisco residents supported the rule simply because it seemed like a way to check a big corporation. Opponents of Proposition F countered that the housing crisis runs much deeper, and that passing the rule would have discouraged a popular service while doing little to solve the city’s existing problems.

Like it or love it, social media is a major part of life. Teens spend more than half of their waking hours online. They use some of that time to post pictures and create profiles on social media accounts. 【小题1】

Clicking on a thumbs-up or a heart icon is an easy way to stay in touch. 【小题2】 Some social media sites use those likes to determine how many people eventually see a post. One with many likes is more likely to be seen-and to get even more likes.

What’s more, viewing posts with a lot of likes activates the reward system in our brain. 【小题3】 For example, posts related to alcohol may encourage teens to drink. That means that what you like online has the power to influence not just what others like, but even what they do.

【小题4】 And not always in a good way. For example, in one 2011 study, teens doing a driving task in a lab took more risks when their friends were around. Researchers also looked at the teens’ brains during this task. They saw activity in a part of the brain that’s involved in rewards, which suggests the teens were changing their behavior to try to get social approval.

Joining social media can give people a sense of being in the know. But posts may exaggerate (夸大) how well our friends and others are feeling, making them appear much happier than we are. 【小题5】

While there are many milk substitutes (替代品) on the market, most fall short of imitating dairy milk. And while vegetarians around the world have grown accustomed to these substitutes, millions of milk drinkers are unsatisfied with these options, which don’t often taste, look, and blend like dairy milk. That accuracy is exactly what Impossible Foods has set out to develop. “We want milk that a dairy milk consumer will choose,” said CEO Pat Brown at a virtual conference call.

Like the famous Impossible Burger which tastes, cooks, and bleeds like real meat, Impossible Milk will also most likely be soy-based, giving it a protein profile (外形) like dairy milk. While the product is still in development for at least another year, Brown said in the conference call that soy is a very good choice from a nutritional standpoint and a supply chain standpoint, and for those reasons he thinks there’s a great chance that it will be the base protein for their product.

Plant-based milk, meats, and other products have been rising over the past several years as environmental and health concerns have grown, especially among millennials (千禧一代). According to a study by YouGov, approximately 55 percent of millennials surveyed agree with the statement “I am open to substituting meat or dairy products with healthy substitutes”.

And the market is seeing this preference take shape. According to the Dairy Farmers of America, milk sales dropped by $1.1 billion between 2017 and 2018. While at the same time, the Plant-Based Food Association revealed that the sales of plant-based milk increased a lot, making up 15 percent of the total milk market.

As the trend towards choosing plant-based substitutes grows, so do the products, which can now be found in supermarkets throughout the world. With no plans of slowing down, plant-based food substitutes are a micro revolution that is changing the very culture of our food consumption from the bottom all the way to the top.