Numlock News: July 1, 2025 • Olives, Yokozuna, Pistachios
By Walt Hickey
Our longtime friends at Garbage Day are doing three live shows in July at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, and I’m working on them. It’ll be a great time; more details at the bottom of the newsletter, and you should come! Next Tuesday is the first one.
Olives
The global price of olive oil shot up to $10,600 per metric ton in April, up from $5,300 in March. Production of olive oil in Greece and Italy is down, as heat jeopardizes the harvest. The high prices have sparked a spate of olive-related crimes, with people stealing olives and the oil extracted from them in Halkidiki, Crete and Kalamata. This is a big deal in Greece, where olive oil is responsible for not only 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product but also 25 percent of Greek agriculture.
CCP
Membership in the Chinese Communist Party has passed the hundred million milestone, with 100,221,000 people in the party as of last year, up from 86,686,000 at the start of Xi Jinping’s leadership in 2013. While the political beliefs of that many people might be hard to paint with too broad a brush, one possible reason for the swelling ranks of the CCP — including the 21.4 million membership applicants as of the end of December — is that membership makes it way easier to get a job. In December, there were 2.59 million people taking the national civil service exam to fill just 39,700 jobs this year, and another 5.3 million people who applied to take regional-level exams across 23 provinces this year to fill just 166,000 vacancies. Those civil service jobs are good gigs, and the exams have become incredibly popular lately (just 1,017,000 people took them in 2020). Membership in the party thus taps into the most reliable network in the country.
Chun Han Wong, The Wall Street Journal
Container
The annual Containers Lost at Sea report from the World Shipping Council dropped yesterday, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. Per the annual tally, 576 shipping containers were lost at sea in 2024, which is quite a bit more than the record-low 221 containers lost in 2023. But it is still less than half of the 10-year average of 1,274 lost containers. The rerouting of ships away from the Red Sea (where the water is steady but the geopolitics are in turmoil) and around the Cape of Good Hope (where the water is in turmoil but the geopolitics are steady) made for some rocky seas. The converging weather systems there contributed to 200 of those lost containers, or about 35 percent of the total losses. This number is mostly related to three major incidents on the Cape, where 44, 46 and 99 containers were lost.
Yokozuna
The Japanese wing of Burger King is rolling out a 2,590 yen (US$18) Baby Body Burger in association with the Japanese Sumo Association, billing the beastly sandwich as a “yokozuna-rank” burger. The item debuts just before the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament. The burger weighs in at 668 grams, features five burger patties, four slices of bacon and four slices of cheddar cheese. For you, the day that the ill-advised five-patty bacon-laden cheeseburger walked into your restaurant was the most important day of your life. For Wendy’s, it was Tuesday.
WNBA
The WNBA has announced it is expanding and will add new teams to Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. The expansion fee for this round of teams is $250 million, the largest amount ever paid for a new team in a U.S. women’s sports league, and by a lot. The WNBA is already mid-expansion — the Golden State Valkyries began play this season with just a $50 million expansion fee, the Toronto Tempo ($50 million) and an as-yet-unnamed Portland team ($75 million) will begin playing in 2026. Overall, the average WNBA franchise is worth $269 million, up 180 percent compared to a year ago. While the original plan was to only add one new team, interest was so robust that they went with three. Cleveland is slated to begin play in 2028, Detroit in 2029 and Philly in 2030.
Kurt Badenhausen and Eben Novy-Williams, Sportico
Interstellar Navigation
A new paper posted to the arXiv preprint database and slated for publication in the Astronomical Journal describes how the New Horizons spacecraft is far enough away that the stars look discernibly different than how they do on Earth. This is specifically true of nearby stars Proxima Centauri and Wolf 359. The New Horizons spacecraft is now exiting the Solar System and bound for interstellar space. Comparing images taken when New Horizons was 47.1 astronomical units away to images of the same stars on Earth allowed us to calculate how far the spacecraft was from Earth with 0.27 astronomical unit accuracy. It’s the first time that optical stellar astrometry was demonstrated on a spacecraft on an interstellar trajectory.
Pistachios
The massive trend in Dubai chocolate has prompted a banner year for the pistachio industry, with “pistachio chocolate” searches on Yelp increasing 8,942 percent year over year. As for the supply part of the equation, though, pistachios have long been held to a boom-bust cycle. The 2023-24 cycle saw 1.49 billion pounds of pistachios produced, while this 2024-25 season is expected to see only 1.1 billion pounds. This number is relatively small, all things considered, but actually not all that bad for the pistachio off-year. It means that pistachio halves and pieces are going for $10.50 per pound, which is 17 percent more expensive than a year ago. This coming year is projected to be a doozy, well exceeding the record million-and-a-half-pound production volume of last year.
Ilena Peng and Sunny Kim, Bloomberg
Ryan Broderick and the crew at internet culture newsletter Garbage Day are putting on three live shows this summer, and Numlock is a part of them. If you’re in NYC and looking for something fun, learn more about it here and get tickets to the first, second and third shows. It’s going to be very, very fun.
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This is a pretty good denominator, tho!
"Despite these challenges, the proportion of containers lost relative to those transported remains exceptionally low at just 0.0002 percent of the approximately 250 million containers transported globally in 2024."
I live under a rock and this is the first time I heard of pistachio chocolate. So it’s like Nutella 2.0?