The article claims "around 80 percent of families with children in the LAUSD live at or below the poverty threshold". Click the source to find the actual quote, "about 80% of Los Angeles Unified students come from families living in poverty". These statements are clearly not interchangeable - a good reminder to take all statistics from pop journalism sites like this with a grain of salt.
At about 3:18 into the video you can see what appears to be Serafinowicz playing Sassy as the camera moves behind him. Makes sense that faking would be hard from strange oblique angles, so looks like they just skipped it.
> That's because the world in general is doing better than ever in almost any measurable parameter, yet the general notion is that everything is going to shit.
If you're interested in reading more about this phenomenon, I'd recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He discusses how statistics are often presented pessimistically, but if you look at our world as a complete system over time, things really are better than they've ever been in most cases. We just tend to overlook slow and steady improvement because it's boring, as you mention. And, his first global risk we should be on the lookout for is "global pandemic" (published 2018), so that's gotta count for something in supporting his arguments.
Interesting - in the barrage of recent pessimism about the US's covid response, I was unaware of its high testing numbers. Nice to have a little good news.
In addition to merchants, the group which really ends up losing are customers paying with cash/debit, as they don't harvest any CC rewards from their groceries but still pay the inflated price that merchants have to charge to keep up with swipe fees. I'd argue these high fees are a "tax" on those with poor creditworthiness/financial knowhow