Numlock News: January 16, 2025 • Geoglyphs, Grand Theft Auto, Nuclear Waste

Jan 16, 2025

Games

Right now the entire video game industry is eagerly awaiting what exactly Rockstar Games is planning for Grand Theft Auto 6, the $2 billion budgeted AAA game that’s universally agreed to be the top-selling game of the year — and thus avoided with a passion. As it stands, the game isn’t on the calendar beyond “Fall 2025,” which is one contributing factor to the point that none of the actual big games of the year have a proper release date after March.

Kaare Eriksen, VIP+

Red No. 3

The Food and Drug Administration has banned the use of the artificial dye Red No. 3. It’s found in all sorts of food items, and is derived originally from petroleum products. The move will take effect in 2027. As of 2021, the food and drug industry was using around 200,000 pounds of it in a given year. I’m sure there are lots of very reasonable ways to handle this, but I for one intend to exercise my Second Amendment rights in acquiring a rowdy amount of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

Roshan Fernandez and Jesse Newman, The Wall Street Journal

Catch ’Em All

Interest in Pokémon cards has increased substantially over the years, rising from a production schedule of around 1 billion to 2 billion cards per year up to 3.7 billion cards per year in 2020. That rose to over 9 billion cards produced between 2021 and 2022, and then finally to 10 billion cards in 2023. As of 2024, 12 billion cards were printed, which means not only that lock, stock and barrel there have been 64.8 billion cards produced over the life of the game, but also that about 18 percent of all cards ever minted came out in the 2023-24 fiscal year. That said, the frenzy has far from subsided: The latest effort, Scarlet and Violet — Prismatic Evolutions, is in an abject shortage.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

Tourists

Japan welcomed a record 36.87 million tourists in 2024, which is up 47.1 percent year over year. Those tourists spent a total of 8.14 trillion yen ($51.78 billion) last year, which is also up 53.4 percent year over year. Overall, China was responsible for around 18.9 percent of Japan’s tourists. The country is in general pursuing 60 million visitors by 2030.

Chihiro Ishikawa, Nikkei Asia

Geoglyphs

Since the 1970s, there have been 500 geoglyphs uncovered in the Amazon, large archeological sites that can be seen only from above. As it stands, an estimated 16,000 such sites remain undiscovered, and even though lots of them exist in the state of Acre, Brazil, the issue is that agriculture is so profitable there that the land-based art might be destroyed by agriculture-driven tilling. In Acre, geoglyphs cover 13,000 square kilometers, but the thought is that far more have fallen to corn or soy cultivation.

Gabriella Angeleti, The Art Newspaper

Zillow

The insurance industry is trying to react to the ongoing disasters fueled by the impacts of climate change, and it’s getting hard. The number of homes in the wildland-urban area rose from 30 million to 44 million from 1990 to 2020. One analysis found that a number of U.S. homes — 17 million homes worth 19 percent of U.S. housing — were underinsured against floods or wildfires. At the low end, the base case estimate was $1.7 trillion worth of homes in serious danger. The worst case? $2.7 trillion in losses for the insurance industry.

Mark Gongloff, Bloomberg

Underground

In new news on my favorite topic: Sweden announced plans for a facility that will store highly radioactive waste for 100,000 years. There are about 300,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel globally, lots of it currently in cooling ponds, but this new repository at Forsmark will consist of 60 kilometers of tunnels built 500 meters down into 1.9 billion-year-old bedrock at a cost of 12 billion crowns ($1.08 billion). It will take its first waste in the 2030s and won’t finish until the 2080s.

Simon Johnson, Reuters

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