Numlock News: August 19, 2026 • Synthetic Stones, Warhammer, MetroCard

Aug 19, 2026

By Walt Hickey

AC

China’s air conditioner producers have had a massive summer thanks to a European heat wave that has made avid buyers out of a continent full of people who had largely rejected the technology. Exports of AC units from China to the EU hit $3.8 billion in the first half of 2026, up 43 percent year over year. TCL said that sales of portable units were up by 90 percent, Haier reported that sales in France, Germany and the U.K. doubled in June and Midea saw revenue in four major European markets increase 70 percent. This is good news for China’s AC business, which has essentially reached saturation domestically; there are 176 AC units per 100 urban households in China, up from eight units per 100 households in 1995.

Karoline Kan, Bloomberg

Warhammer

Games Workshop, the British company behind the Warhammer franchise of tabletop wargaming minifigures, posted $900.3 million in sales worldwide in its latest fiscal year, with sales up seven percent thanks largely to an 18 percent increase in sales through independent retailers. The company produces small sculptures and the paints that customers use to decorate at their leisure. It remains staggeringly profitable; profit after tax was $278.1 million — there are banks with worse profit margins.

Milton Griepp, ICV2

MTA

We are in the final hours of a one-time-only auction being conducted by New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority to unload about thirty remaining MetroCard vending machines. The system transitioned to a tap-to-pay contactless system and has removed the machines from the system; having removed the electronic guts, the MTA is auctioning off a few of the machines for collectors and transit sickos. This is not an auction to dabble in lightly: The MetroCard Vending Machine weighs about 1,050 pounds, spent its entire service life in a Subway station, is 80 by 42 by 36 inches, and has to be picked up at a currently undisclosed location in Queens within 10 days of winning an auction.

Louis C. Hochman, Gothamist

Seat Back

American Airlines largely conceded to its rivals when it came to seatback screens, contending that most people have phones and laptops and the expense of installing screens meant that the airline could probably save some money. Anyway, it turns out American was really wrong on that and is now backtracking, indicating that not only will every seat on new narrowbody aircraft deliveries have seatback screens starting in 2028, it’s also going to retrofit aircraft so that more planes have screens beyond the 140 long-haul aircrafts currently outfitted with the tech in American’s fleet. By comparison, Delta’s got seatback screens on 900 aircraft and United’s got them on 800. American expects to have completed the installation by 2030.

Meghna Maharishi, Skift

Synthetic Stones

Synthetic diamonds have gotten considerably less expensive, while mined stones have held at relatively steady prices for the past few years. The active voice is indeed intentional there, as De Beers and other companies that produce mined stones have worked to keep the prices up (from $6,257 per diamond in January 2020 to $7,543 this past July), while market forces and increased supply have generally pushed the prices of lab-grown stones down (from $3,948 to $857 over the same period). Consumers have responded accordingly; lab-grown stones grew from four percent of the market to 19 percent from 2020 to 2026.

Stacey Vanek Smith, Bloomberg

One Piece

As it stands, there are 14 English-language digital manga platforms in North America. Only three of them existed before 2020, and four of them have launched in the past two years. Manga’s popularity and value as an export have been noticed by the large companies that produce it, which had primarily focused on the Japanese domestic market. They’re now playing catch-up. The big hurdle is that generations of manga readers in English-language markets were trained to access the media through piracy, at first due to assessments of financial risk leading to a decision by publishers to not officially release many works in English, but then subsequently due just to momentum; in 2025, manga accounted for 73 percent of all publishing piracy views, up from half in 2019, with nine out of the 10 top piracy sites being manga platforms hosting unofficial English translations. Legitimizing that fandom and offering official ways to consume it has recently become a priority.

Richardson Handjaja, ICV2

Culverts

In 2011, Tropical Storm Irene hit New England, and in doing so revealed a major liability in infrastructure: culverts. Culverts are the pipes and boxes that go underneath roads, allowing streams to go through. They’re small enough to not be included in the National Bridge Inventory, but can still get washed out during serious storms and cause problems. In the Green Mountains of Vermont, Irene destroyed 960 culverts, cutting off roads and leaving 13 communities cut off for days. A new study looked at the Deerfield watershed in Vermont, where there are 783 culverts, and 242 of them are “articulation points,” which meant that a single failure at that point would cut off at least one neighborhood; across simulations, 30 percent of the population was without a road to a hospital.

Emma Scott, Risk Analysis

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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