Numlock News: April 14, 2026 • Opera, Electricity, Pokémon
By Walt Hickey
Met
The Metropolitan Opera in New York is in difficult financial straits, with their box office revenue for the past fiscal year coming in at only $70 million while its budget stood at $326 million. It’s getting to the point where there are serious concerns about the long-term fiscal health of the organization, sure, but it’s not like they’re selling the fixtures just to keep the lights on. Actually, they’re literally going to do that: the two iconic, massive 36-foot by 30-feet paintings by Marc Chagall titled The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music that soar over the opera’s lobby have gone up for sale. There is a catch, though: as a provision of the sale the paintings cannot be moved, a somewhat unprecedented stipulation of the sale. As a result, the Sotheby’s valuation of $55 million probably includes a bit of a discount, especially given that another considerably more portable Chagall sold at Christie’s in November for $26.5 million.
Boring
A fascinating new study with 1,800 participants across nine experiments found that people consistently underestimated how interesting a conversation about a boring topic might be. When pushed into a conversation about a topic that participants found boring, say about math or onions, they actually ended up enjoying the conversation considerably more than their pre-registered estimate of interest and often would do so again. And this pattern even held true when both parties agreed that the topic under discussion was boring.
James Sliwa, American Psychological Association
Minutes
The average ad load of a movie on a streaming service is often consistently less than the ad load of a television series on that same service. A new analysis from Ampere found that television series on streaming carried an ad load of over five minutes per hour while movies came in at just three minutes of ads per hour, with episodic television viewers getting pushed into an ad break after every 14 minutes of content while movie viewers saw an average of 36 minutes of movie between the breaks. On some streaming services there isn’t much difference between television and movie ad load — the ad loads on Netflix, Tubi, Prime Video, HBO Max and Pluto TV were all generally more even between movies and television, though none of them had more ads on movies — while Disney+, Hulu, and Peacock all had twice as much ad minutes on television than in movies. Paramount+ was an extreme outlier, with about eight minutes of ad per hour of episodic television and under a minute of ads per film-hour.
Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News
Electricity
Energy costs have surged throughout the United States and, with the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, are expected to rise even more. One state in particular has been paying out the nose for electricity: West Virginia, where an immensely powerful coal lobby continues to hold great sway over state politics, has resisted diversifying its energy sources away from the fuel source that has dominated its economy for years, which today means that 87 percent of its electricity comes from coal-fired electric plants, a national high. This has become an albatross because solar, wind and natural gas have just become cheaper. As a result, the state’s average household electricity rate per kilowatt-hour has increased 73 percent from 2015 to 2025, a sharp increase in costs for a state where the median inflation-adjusted income was lower in 2023 than it was in 1970. Because of this, one out of every three West Virginia households spends more than six percent of their income on electricity, the threshold at which one is considered to be energy burdened.
Margie Mason, The Associated Press
Heathrow
London’s Heathrow Airport handled 6.6 million passengers in March, up 6.9 percent year over year, fueled by a 10 percent increase in connecting passengers. As massive airport hubs in the Middle East see widespread cancellations over the regional conflict, long-haul intercontinental routes are moving their connections to Heathrow rather than Doha or Dubai.
IRS
Much of the workforce at the Internal Revenue Service is tasked with identifying and investigating tax cheats, but drastic cuts to the government’s revenue collection arm — which saw 96,410 full-time-equivalent employees in 2025 cut down to 69,032 as of FY2027 — will mean that lots of tax evaders are going to get away with it. Audits of people with at least $10 million in income fell by nine percent last year and are projected to decline a further 39 percent this year. The workforce reductions will save $46 billion in federal spending over the next decade, but those reductions would also reduce revenue collections by $643 billion.
Richard Rubin, The Wall Street Journal
Collectibles
The collectible trading card games market saw a huge uptick in 2025 after three steady years where the business made about $1.5 billion in sales. That revenue jumped from $1.49 billion in 2024 to $2.485 billion in 2025, thanks to product flying off the shelves, a renaissance of the in-store play scene and speculation-fueled buying from those who see the trading card game packs as investments. Pokemon TCG has the highest demand, regularly selling out at stores and in the 1,800 vending machines placed to expand availability. Magic: The Gathering had a banner year, as did relative newcomers Disney Lorcana and the One Piece Card Game.
Correction: An earlier version mistakenly described the sale of the Met’s paintings as an auction; the valuation may be from Sotheby’s, but any sale would not be an auction.
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Should probably dig a bit deeper on those IRS cuts. A large portion of those were staff who hadn’t reached permanent GS status. Also, many of those people were Biden-era hires…..which were lower than GS-12. They weren’t doing taxpayer audits. They were answering phone calls.
This onion-lover (it is a central ingredient in my chili) is never bored by conversations involving said vegetable!