Numlock News: August 28, 2026 • Pulpwood, Fizzypress, Mad Honey

Aug 28, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Pulpwood

The price of pine pulp wood has bottomed out in the U.S. South, threatening the economics of the timber industry. The average per-ton price of pulpwood — which goes into making boxes — has fallen from over $11 in 2022 to under $6 today, thanks to improvements in packaging efficiency and improved recycling, as well as imported pulp. Sawmills are able to pad their margins with wood chips, sawdust and pulpwood. And pulpwood is also financially crucial for people who raise timber — the first big payment of a process that can take decades — when trees that are not destined for lumber or utility poles are thinned out earlier in the growth cycle. The price of pulpwood has been a sharp decline in U.S. box shipments per capita, which peaked in 1999 at around 1,450 square feet but today is down to under 1,100 square feet.

Ryan Dezember, The Wall Street Journal

Flock

A new analysis found 19 law enforcement agencies 10 ten different states that spent a collective $920,000 in funds that resulted from opioid settlements on Flock and other automated license plate readers rather than confronting the opioid epidemic. The reporting on where exactly state and local governments are spending the billions of dollars they are receiving from manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies involved in opioids is nationally inconsistent, but nationwide municipalities have come under fire for putting the money toward policing rather than addiction prevention, recovery and treatment.

Schuyler Mitchell, Mother Jones

Mad Honey

Apis laboriosa is the Himalayan cliff bee, which lives exclusively at high altitudes in the Himalayas. The species builds large exposed honeycombs on sheer cliff faces up to 4,000 meters in altitude. Rhododendrons bloom in Spring and are a popular food source for the bees, despite the grayanotoxin produced by the plant. The toxin collected from the nectar collected becomes concentrated in the honey. That honey has been harvested safely for centuries by the people who live there mainly because they are aware that it is toxic in large volumes, but of course tourists and visitors can sometimes have more than a teaspoon of the honey and then need medical treatment because their blood pressure crashes; an analysis of the medical literature from 1976 to 2026 studied the cases of 68 patients, of whom 72 percent were middle-aged men, most of whom ate the honey deliberately as a remedy for high blood pressure or as a marital aid. Locally, the effects of “mad honey” are understood and doctors know to give the patient atropine to ensure a speedy recovery. The problem, though, is now you can buy this stuff on the internet, and there’s no way that your doctor is going to come up with “this dude ate some mildly toxic Himalayan honey in order to score and now his blood pressure is crashing” on their own.

Prayan Pokharel, The Conversation

Bogus

Digital pollsters have to deal with bogus responses from people who are just taking the survey to obtain a reward. As a result, surveys rely on different techniques such as trap questions, automated prescreening and voter file matching. Trap questions are clever, even if they’re not foolproof; Pew Research Center demonstrated their efficacy by asking, for instance, if respondents used any of six different social media platforms, “Fizzypress” among them, which does not exist but nevertheless six percent of respondents claimed they had. Respondents were asked if they had received any of six government benefits in 2023, one of which — payments from the United States Railroad Administration, claimed by nine percent of respondents — has not existed since 1920. Another 10 percent said they had visited the International Space Station, and eight percent had served on a Polar-class icebreaker ship, of which only two were ever built.

Pew Research Center

Fantasy

A new survey found that nine percent of adults planned to play in a fantasy football league this season, with 23 percent of fantasy players involved in three or more leagues. According to the survey, the primary reason that respondents played fantasy football was that they enjoy competition (67 percent), followed by making the football season more interesting (58 percent) and to socialize (57 percent). Given that fantasy sports appears to be the sole remaining venue in which the average American is even passingly interested in learning about the statistical concept of “expected value,” a lot is riding on this. That said, the survey found that 35 percent of respondents indicated they win more frequently than other people while 26 percent conceded they win less frequently than other people — the exact kind of Lake Woebegone imbalance that may indicate people are somewhat less than honest about their fantasy football prowess.

Chris McGuire and John Newell, YouGov

Reviews

An analysis of Yelp data found that the demand premium for businesses with a high proportion of four- and five-star reviews was about 2.9 percent more foot traffic than rivals in their area with worse scores. That is one reason that many businesses attempt to game the customer review system, including planting or buying bad reviews on rivals. As of 2023, over 4,900 businesses had been slapped with a 90-day “Consumer Alert” banner after being linked to gaming reviews.

Benjamin Kessler, George Mason University

Census

India’s 2011 census counted 1.21 billion people, but the country’s population in 2026 remains unclear, and India is embarking on the first census in a decade and a half. It will require three million people to accomplish the task of knocking on every door in the country, with teachers and government workers offered 25,000 rupees (US$262) to pitch in on several weeks of census-taking. This census also includes questions about caste for the first time since British colonial rule.

Satviki Sanjay, Bloomberg

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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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