Numlock News: December 16, 2025 • Coup, Hyperion, Glacier
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to new readers, we’ve got a fun newsletter today, plus a plug for a friend.
Hyperion
Meta is constructing a massive data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana, called Hyperion. It’s a massive facility, and Meta got a massive break on the Louisiana sales taxes as an incentive to set up there. The state of Louisiana has a sales tax of 9.56 percent, and if you were going to build out a $50 billion 1-megawatt data center, you would probably spend about $35 billion on GPUs to put inside it. That transaction would ordinarily involve sales tax, which in Louisiana’s case would come to about $3.3 billion. That is, had the state not waived all state, local, sales and use taxes on data center equipment. That is enough money to build 33 new high schools, pay the salary of every public school teacher in the state for a year or pay for seven years of the Louisiana State Police budget. After a construction period where jobs will peak at 962, the number of direct, local jobs produced by the Hyperion data center will be just 326.
Contagious
One interesting argument in geopolitics is the concept of a coup contagion, where a successful coup in a region may inspire or provoke copycat coups in neighboring areas. There is, therefore, concern about a coup cluster in Africa; since 2020, there have been 11 successful military takeovers and 5 attempted but failed coups. New research indicates that while plotters do tend to pay attention to their contemporaries seizing power abroad, that doesn’t mean that it’s off to the races seizing the local radio towers and airports. That is because it is not just the coup plotters taking notes; the existing regime and its allies will also be keeping tabs on neighboring countries to see where things go well or badly.
Salah Ben Hammou and Jonathan Powell, The Conversation
Flat Lighting
Film analysts, essayists and viewers have complained that movies are getting flatter or muddier, as the strategies that filmmakers employ to produce movies these days reward a softer or flatter shoot that can be adjusted in postproduction. This can actually be measured; contrast measures the gap between the bright part and the dark part of a shot, key fill ratio compares how evenly lit the bright parts and dark parts are and shadow hardness measures how crisp various boundaries are. An analysis of a database of 1,024,493 shots of human faces from 3,655 live action films finds some overall trends: declining contrast since 2008, a slight decrease in the key fill ratio since the 2010s and a sharp drop in shadow hardness. But what’s particularly neat is how much genre affects these elements. Movies about sports tend to be very high contrast, while horror, mystery and sci-fi tend to be lower. Key fill rations are low in family films, comedies and musicals, while they are uniformly high in the heavy stuff like mystery, horror, western, history, war and thriller.
Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com
I want to shout out a great newsletter called Semafor Media, written by a friend of mine, Maxwell Tani, and Semafor’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith. It dives into the fascinating political, cultural and financial forces shaping global news organizations. I’m personally a huge fan; each issue is full of really thoughtful analysis and the occasional colossal scoop. In my experience, it’s basically where the news gets its news — check it out and subscribe for free here.
Glacier Melt
At least 4,000 glaciers have melted in the past two decades. There remain 211,000 glaciers that still exist, but a new study modeling climate finds that about 1,000 glaciers are lost annually. That may rise to 3,000 glaciers lost annually moving forward. Current climate trajectory puts the world on pace for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial temperatures, hot enough for 79 percent of glaciers to disappear by 2100. Limiting that to two degrees would rein in the damage to 63 percent of glaciers. Hitting four degrees of warming would mean 91 percent of glaciers are gone by the end of the century.
Ammonia
If you want to grow plants — and let’s take it as a given that a large portion of the world spends most of their day-to-day specifically concerned with such matters — you need nitrogen. If you want nitrogen, these days you need ammonia. If you need ammonia, you generally need natural gas or coal, which is used in the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. Incidentally, it’s also used to produce carbon dioxide. As a result, in order to grow plants these days, you need to emit a lot of carbon, so much so that the production of fertilizer is responsible for 1.8 percent of global carbon emissions. It’s possible to make ammonia without using carbon fuels — “green ammonia,” man, we really gotta work on branding — and swapping it in could reduce the carbon footprint of the Corn Belt by 33 percent. The price of ammonia fertilizer has ranged from $500 to $1,600 per ton over the past five years. In 2024, long-term contracts for green ammonia from the Gulf coast came in at $600 to $800 per ton, sometimes cheaper, sometimes not.
Collection
The largest card grading and authentication business is buying up the third-largest operation in the field, with Professional Sports Authenticator’s parent company buying Beckett, a longtime rival. Sports memorabilia in general and trading cards in particular are a hot commodity these days. Companies that serve as arbiters of value and appraise the condition of various collectibles have been in high demand. Beckett is a distant third in the game: there were 650,000 items graded in the past week, with PSA accounting for over 75 percent of them, rival grader CGC accounting for 18 percent, and Beckett coming in at just three percent.
Cursed Stone That Does 2d6 Psychic Damage
A new survey found that 44 percent of adults in the United States use their smartphones to browse the internet within 10 minutes of waking up, either always or often. I concede I do this. Nothing gets me going quite like staring at a slab of silicon and shouting, “What fresh hell is this?” A similar percentage, 43 percent, said that they use their phone to browse the internet within 10minutes of going to bed, and now that’s just sensible, because how else am I supposed to do such crucial things as discerning the opinions of Californian insomniacs if not plunging my retinas into an ocean of light immediately before trying to sleep? Needless to say, 32 percent of respondents said that their phone was “mostly negative” for their sleep habits, and just 13 percent said “mostly positive.”
We just had Jamie on for a Sunday edition, it was a great conversation, do check it out if you haven’t yet!
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You weren’t lying Walt, this was a really good newsletter!
AI could replace a lot of those jobs in education….especially with student populations considering to drop….