“Why are we struggling so hard to figure out how to use Trends or tweets or shares to predict elections when Google actually knows exactly how we are going to vote.” In Quartz, Robert Epstein imagines a day (in the not too distant future) when big data could make actual voting obsolete. (But election day is the one day of the year many of us feel compelled to leave the house.)

+ Foursquare measured foot traffic patterns at a bunch of Chipotles, and accurately predicted the company’s quarterly growth.