Numlock News: April 30, 2024 • Kansai, Domino's, Dodecahedrons

Apr 30, 2024

Domino’s

Domino’s sells about 1.5 million pizzas every day, and it’s become more and more profitable owing to a number of deals struck with third-party delivery companies and an emphasis on carryout. Same-store sales are up 5.6 percent year over year. As of last year, your average Domino’s location was putting up $162,000 in profit for a franchisee for the year, up from $139,000 in 2022, and poised to track up to $170,000.

Ben Coley, QSR Magazine

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission has fined the big three wireless carriers in the United States $196 million for sharing customer data without user consent, a scandal that was revealed in 2018. The fine was first proposed in 2020, and then finalized today. T-Mobile was hit with an $80.1 million fine, AT&T with a $57.3 million fine and Verizon with a $46.9 million fine, and T-Mobile is also on the hook for a $12.2 million fine owed by Sprint, which was bought by T-Mobile just after the penalties were proposed. The vote to finalize the penalties was 3-2.

Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica

Bags

The world’s airline companies mishandled an average of 7.6 pieces of baggage per 1,000 passengers in 2022, a seemingly inevitable challenge to adequately loading, stowing and transporting millions of bags. However, perfection is indeed possible, as seen by Japan’s Kansai Airport, which has not lost a single item of baggage in 30 years since it opened in September 1994. That’s thanks to an incredibly efficient loading and unloading process and, despite handling 10 million baggage items in 2023, a pretty high level of perfection. Now, I’m certainly not ruling out the possibility that Kansai is pulling some sort of “nobody dies at Disneyland” myth maintenance by dragging unattended or lost luggage out to the parking lot before promptly misplacing it, but I must concede that’s somewhat more elaborate than the straightforward answer.

Chihiro Matsutomi, Nikkei Asia

Moon

China has revealed a key result of the Chang’e-1 mission, which surveyed the moon from 2007 to 2009, producing the Geologic Atlas of the Lunar Globe, which doubled the resolution of the Apollo-era maps. It took over a decade to make, reveals 12,341 craters, 81 basins and 17 types of rock, and was made at a scale of 1:2,500,000, twice the resolution of the 1:5,000,000 map produced by USGS using data from the Apollo missions.

Ling Xin, Nature Magazine

Roll For Initiative

A Roman artifact found in the United Kingdom near Lincoln in 2023 will go on public display, a remarkable and mysterious object that takes the form of a metallic dodecahedron, a 12-sided object which is about 3 inches tall and weighs 8 ounces. It’s one of 33 dodecahedrons found in Britain, and is believed to have been buried 1,700 years ago. Some think the dodecahedrons served some kind of religious function, others consider it could have been a proof of concept made by smiths to articulate skill, and yet others make Dungeons & Dragons 5e jokes and wonder if it’s inappropriate to compare first-century Britons to the barbarian class.

David McKenna, BBC News

Goldfish

Campbell Soup’s Goldfish crisps are a billion-dollar snack business, and is a major priority for the company. They’ve been the subject of countless limited time offerings in the past four years, moving well beyond the basic cheddar and pretzel flavors that have defined the snack for much of its 62-year run. In 2022 they launched Mega Bites, and rolled out limited time flavors like Dunkin’ Pumpkin Spice Grahams and Frank’s RedHot, the latter of which was successful enough to merit a permanent launch of the varietal. It even threw out the playbook and made a potato-based Goldfish to get a potato chip-esque flavor. Perhaps owing to that versatility, Goldfish are the fastest-growing cracker brand in the country, and sales are up 33 percent over the past three years according to owner Campbell’s.

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

High Tide

The number of high-tide floods in cities along the Gulf Coast has been rising, and their frequency is upending centuries of settlement and threatening billions of dollars’ worth of damage along the coast. The projections suggest that the flooding seen lately — itself incredibly destructive — is just the beginning, with high-tide floods in the Gulf region projected to be 15 times more frequent in 2050 compared to the frequency seen in 2020. Some of that is because the cities themselves are subsiding and getting lower even as the waters are rising, which has exacerbated the impacts of the rising seas. In Galveston, the sea level is 8.4 inches higher in 2023 than it was in 2010, in Wilmington, NC, it’s 7 inches higher, in Pensacola it’s 6.5 inches higher and in Naples it’s 4.9 inches higher.

Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis, Kevin Crowe and John Muyskens, The Washington Post

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