Numlock News: December 13, 2023 • Macy's, Wolves, New Horizons
By Walt Hickey
Today’s the last day Hachette can confirm pre-Christmas delivery if you order You Are What You Watch direct from the publisher! Makes a great gift for any pop culture, data or movie fan, and it’s 20% off.
Up The Wolves
The livestock industry in Colorado is suing to block the reintroduction of wolves into the state’s wild lands. A 2020 ballot measure gave the green light to bring wolves back to Colorado, as the return of an apex predator would have significant benefits for the state’s ecosystem. Among documented cases of wolf attacks on livestock across 10 states, wolves killed or injured just 425 cows, 313 sheep and lambs, 40 dogs, 10 chickens, five horses and four goats, which is 0.002 percent of herds in affected states, and that’s given an estimated 7,500 wolves in 1,400 packs roaming the contiguous U.S. Colorado, which plans to release 30 to 50 wolves over the next five years, already said they will pay fair market value up to $15,000 to ranchers per animal lost to a wolf attack. The reintroduction is slated to begin with up to 10 wolves, caught in Oregon. Indeed, advocacy for the restoration begins at home: Fellow New York City residents, I want you to join me at the forthcoming Queens Community Board 2 meeting to insist we return an active wolf population to Astoria.
Matthew Brown and Jesse Bedayn, The Associated Press and Jesse Bedayn, The Associated Press
Macy’s
Macy’s is an iconic department store, an establishment with over a century of history that currently has a market capitalization of $4.8 billion as of Friday. However, some don’t see it that way. Some see Macy’s as an incredibly successful real estate company that incidentally operates some stores on rather valuable land. Macy’s owns about 300 of its 783 stores, and owns another 102 locations on leased land. That’s a pretty solid real estate portfolio, one that had been estimated to be worth $6 billion, more than its actual market cap. A consortium of investors has submitted a buyout proposal valued at $5.8 billion, a 32 percent premium, and it’s aroused interest because one of the firms involved in the proposal mostly focuses on real estate.
Suzanne Kapner, The Wall Street Journal
Watched
Netflix released a new report detailing broad viewership data for 18,000 titles over the course of the first six months of this year, which it says accounts for roughly 99 percent of the viewing on the platform. While analysts will be dissecting this thing for days, a few cool things have emerged, one of which is what kinds of movies are actually doing well on streaming. Of the 100 most-streamed titles — movies, or seasons of television — there are 11 movies, and five of them are comedies, a sign that a genre that has struggled at the box office and in cinemas is indeed maintaining a toehold still on streaming. Of the top 100, over 30 are in Korean or Spanish, and 69 of the 100 are Netflix Originals. Of the balance of licensed shows, it’s lots of stuff that Netflix hasn’t been able to do well, like long-running broadcast procedurals.
Julia Alexander, What I’m Hearing+
Broadway
The Broadway League, which represents the theater producers and owners on Broadway, reported that the 2022-23 season saw 12.3 million admissions, down 17 percent from the peak 2018-19 season. Tourists remain an essential part of the equation for Broadway — only 35.3 percent of attendees were from New York and the metropolitan area — and the slow recovery there has presented issues. The crowd skewed toward women, who made up 65 percent of the audience, and averaged 40.4 years of age, the youngest crowd in 20 seasons of data. Here’s a fascinating statistic: The average annual household income of a Broadway theatergoer is $271,277.
Rails
Amtrak is getting feisty about cascading delays that it attributes to commercial freight railroads violating a federal standard that gives passenger rail preference and aims to improve on-time performance. For the first time, Amtrak is complaining to the Surface Transportation Board about the delays on the Sunset Limited line, which connects New Orleans and Los Angeles on rails that are 90 percent controlled by Union Pacific. Amtrak is saying that passenger trains are regularly forced behind slow, long freight rail and must wait, one reason that the on-time performance of the route has fallen to 19 percent in 2022.
Yahoo!
Several former Chinese political prisoners are suing Yahoo over the management of a fund set up to benefit cyber dissidents, which they argue was largely plundered by the people the company put in charge of it. In some cases, the political prisoners were jailed because Yahoo outed them to law enforcement, and the Yahoo Human Rights Fund was launched in 2008 to settle a lawsuit over the company’s ties to a number of cases where Chinese Yahoo email users went to prison because of political speech. The suit alleges that of the $17.3 million that was pledged to support the humanitarian and legal aid needs of the dissidents, only 4 percent of that was actually disbursed in the form of support. Indeed, the lawsuit revealed that $3.5 million of that $17.3 million was specifically set aside in a sub-trust to settle future lawsuits Yahoo might face. The suit estimates that 800 to 1,200 people imprisoned in China for online speech may have qualified.
Eileen Guo, MIT Technology Review
Newer Horizons
The New Horizons probe completed its main goal of taking some excellent pictures of Pluto, and is continuing its way into the Kuiper Belt with a new mission to take pictures of cool stuff that’s way out there. It’s got a plutonium-238 generator with an indeterminate amount of time left, and the team operating the spacecraft has drawn up plans as to which instruments they’re going to shut down over the course of the next couple years in order to preserve power as output declines. NASA has announced that the mission’s funded through at least 2028 or 2029, and the spacecraft has already discovered over 100 new Kuiper Belt objects and passed by 20 of them close enough to spot surface details. New software has made it so that new objects can be found faster than ever, and it’s giving the probe plenty to do as it’s hurled toward the abyss of interstellar space.
Today’s the last day Hachette can confirm pre-Christmas delivery if you order You Are What You Watch direct from the publisher! Makes a great gift for any pop culture, data or movie fan, and it’s 20% off.
There’s also a few signed copies left at Astoria Bookshop if you’re eager for an autographed book! They’re getting another shipment shortly so there will be even more there soon.
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I’m in the middle of a great book by Brendan Ballou titled Plunder. It’s about private equity in America and there’s some great facts about the negative impact of private equity on retail businesses, specifically using it as nothing but a real estate bank. If these guys take control of Macy’s, you can probably kiss it goodbye within 10 years.
I’ve thought about a trip on Sunset Limited. Long month in a sleeper around the country in a roomette. Probably DC --> NOLA --> LA --> ?? --> CHI --> NYP --> DC.