Numlock News: April 10, 2024 • Curling, Lefties, Smugglers

Apr 10, 2024

Gold

Authorities in Hong Kong have made what officials say is the single largest gold smuggling bust in the city’s history, identifying 146 kilograms of gold that have been disguised — extremely cleverly, I might add — as machine parts. The estimated value is over $10 million, and the shipment was intercepted en route from the gold trading hub to Japan. The gold was disguised among two air compressors, with parts that were just painted gold moulded into gears, screws and motor cores.

Hannah Ritchie, BBC News

Meat

Meatpacking can be a dangerous business for workers, and the large companies that control the industry have long sought to automate the more tedious and physically taxing elements of the labor. A new Tyson chicken processing plant in Virginia cost $300 million to build out, and can produce 20 percent to 30 percent more chicken nuggets, strips and wings with 250 fewer workers, capable of producing 4 million pounds of chicken products per week. In 2023, meat processors spent 5 percent of their capital investments on advanced automation, much higher than in the past, in the quest to make a robotic butcher.

Patrick Thomas, The Wall Street Journal

Curling

A consortium of investors has bought the Grand Slam of Curling from Sportsnet, the Canadian media titan that has owned and produced the sport of curling’s flagship tournament. The Curling Group thinks this sport is ready to explode beyond simply the Olympics bump. It’s watched by 30 percent of Canadians and has an estimated 284 million fans globally, according to a Nielsen report from 2022. That said, the five events of the Grand Slam of Curling have all taken place in Canada historically, and while the schedule will remain for some time, the hope is to expand into territories that have begun to fall in love with the slippery sport. However, the sport may face an uphill battle making inroads into new areas that are not charmed even by the quadrennial appearance in the Olympics, and if there’s one thing curling is ill-suited for it is uphill battles.

Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico

Ships

Orders for shipping vessels that use alternative fuels are up, with the first quarter of the year seeing 68 new orders for alternatively fueled ships, up from 44 orders in the same quarter of 2023. Worldwide, the size of the global fleet that uses liquid natural gas rather than bunker fuel to move is over 500 ships, but the newest preferred fuel is now methanol. Last year, there were 1,281 orders in total for new ships, of which 298 used alternative fuel propulsion, up 8 percent compared to 2022.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Opening Night

This year’s Tony Awards eligibility cutoff is April 25, and a whole lot of shows are trying to open before the deadline hits. All told, there are 14 Broadway shows opening over the course of just 11 days. It’s an attempt to remain fresh in the minds of Tony Award voters, but needless to say it means a whole lot of turnover very quickly, and will pretty much overnight increase Broadway’s nightly capacity by about 40 percent. The new shows will add 110,000 seats every night, increasing the 240,000 Broadway seats available on a given night as of the end of March to fully 350,000 seats by the end of April. The industry is rebounding, with grosses up 8 percent in the last week of March compared to the same period last year.

Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter

Arenas

Stadium naming rights are a major business comprising hundreds of millions of dollars changing hands so that companies have the right to slap their name on professional sports venues. Incidentally, the evolution of stadium names over the decades paints a fascinating picture of the American economy. As recently as the first half of the 1990s, 93 percent of pro sports venues were unsponsored, a figure which today has collapsed to just 13 percent. The turn of the century saw a spate of dot-coms, then energy companies and airlines, while retail and food companies came and went. Financial companies have been racking up arenas, as have insurance companies.

Neil Paine, Sherwood News

Lefties

Many baseball pitchers and hitters deliberately attempt to pitch or hit left-handed despite otherwise being right-handed in the rest of their lives, given the advantages that lefties have on the mound. That specialty is a big help on the job market, as while just 10 percent to 12 percent of the general population is left-handed, overall in Major League Baseball lefties were responsible for 26 percent of innings pitched. The telltale sign of an autodidactic ambidextrous batter is the throwing stance; all told, 95 position players bat left and throw right.

Kristie Rieken, The Associated Press

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