Numlock News: July 15, 2025 • Curveballs, Stunt, The Line
By Walt Hickey
The Line
In an update that I’m sure nobody could see coming, the government of Saudi Arabia has asked consulting firms to conduct a “strategic review” of their attempt at a futuristic city in the desert known as “The Line.” Perhaps it’s slightly more accurate to frame this as the government of Saudi Arabia (having spent the past several years forking over gigantic amounts of money for consultants to tell them that this colossal $2 trillion boondoggle is a sound policy) is now asking them to draw up plans to drastically downgrade the municipal planning version of Ftizcarraldo. The real issue? Brent crude prices are currently around $71 a barrel, and Saudi Arabia needs a price of $96 a barrel to balance its budget. If it wants any of the crown prince’s projects to be covered by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabia needs that price to rise to $113 a barrel.
Zainab Fattah, Abeer Abu Omar and Christine Burke, Bloomberg
Former
The best job in America is “former senator,” according to a cursory viewing of campaign finance. The rigors of power simply give way to spending whatever’s left in the campaign committee funds on stuff you want. New documents filed with the Federal Election Commission from the campaign committee of former Senator Kyrsten Sinema revealed $391,000 in spending during the second quarter, despite the senator no longer running for public office. This spending appears to stretch the limits of what’s legal to do with campaign cash, including $71,000 on American Airlines tickets, $4,661.33 for event tickets for a security detail, $616 in Aspen for security detail ski tickets and more. The campaign committee has about half a million left to burn.
Fertilizer
The current ratio between the price of corn and the price of fertilizer is now one of the worst in history. Corn farmers need to sell over 150 bushels of corn to pay for a ton of potash fertilizer — the worst on record. The corn-to-fertilizer price ratio for the nitrogen fertilizers urea and UAN are respectively the third-worst and second-worst of any June on record. This means that the cost of the U.S.’ important agricultural inputs is going up, even though the prices the corn and grain go for are low, putting significant pressure on farmers. One issue? The third-largest producer of urea fertilizer is a country called Iran, and it is not great to ship things in and out of there. The single largest producer is Russia, and that is a whole thing too. China, meanwhile, is restricting exports of phosphates and will likely only export 4 million tons this year, less than half their typical exports of 8 million to 10 million tons.
Pallets
Wood pallets are a crucial part of the global economy, but go missing constantly, which is annoying because those are often rented. While they’ve fueled many a bonfire, this actually ticks off freight companies and their suppliers something fierce. Peco, an American company, manages a stock of 20 million pallets, and the U.S. produces something like 513 million pallets per year. Given those numbers, one logistics firm estimated that 14 million pallets worth £140 million were missing in Europe as of the mid-2000s.
Liz Breen and Kamran Mahroof, The Conversation
Curveballs
The curveball is dying in Major League Baseball, with just 8.1 percent of all pitches thrown in the style last year, down from 10.7 percent in 2019. All told, that translates to 22,962 fewer curveballs thrown in 2024 compared to five years ago. For some teams — the Athletics among them — the curveball has all but disappeared, accounting for just 2.5 percent of pitches this season. They are the slowest pitches — averaging just 80.2 miles per hour — but tend to be loopier, and the style these days is fast balls. While there were only 214 pitches over 100 miles per hour in 2008, this season we’re on track to reach 3,252.
Ronald Blum, The Associated Press
Cheer
For years, two dueling factions in the cheerleading-adjacent sports world have been locked in a fight for recognition from the National Collegiate Athletic Association. One (acrobatics and tumbling) draws more of its competitors from the world of artistic gymnastics, while the other (stunt) draws largely from the world of competitive cheerleading. The latter has had its case pushed most vociferously by Varsity Brands, the multibillion-dollar behemoth of the competitive cheerleading world. Stunt serves as Varsity Brand’s way to retool the all-star cheer model to something that could be NCAA-friendly. This was long seen as a zero-sum fight where only one cheer-adjacent sport would get called up to the collegiate big leagues. This assumption is why the NCAA decision in May to grant full championship status to both acrobatics a tumbling as well as stunt by spring 2027 was so surprising. They’re distinct disciplines. According to USA Cheer, 95 percent of stunt athletes at the college level come from traditional cheerleading, while according to the National Collegiate Acrobatics & Tumbling Association’s data, 43 percent of their participants came from artistic gymnastics, 27 percent from competitive cheer and 11 percent from spirit or sideline cheer.
Pipes
A new study out of the University of Quebec determined where urban maple trees were getting their water from, and the answer is “Wow, there’s way more leaky water pipes than I had expected.” By measuring the various levels of lead isotopes in the trees — some more associated with air pollution, others linked to geologically old isotopes found in mines producing lead water pipes — the study found that trees in parks tend to contain lead from normal air pollution. The city street trees, on the other hand, tend to have higher levels of the latter. Maple trees need 50 liters of water per day, and Montreal’s pipes leak something like 500 million liters of water per day. So, perhaps it’s better to think of that water system less as “riddled with leaks and also lead” and more as “a sprinkler system that incidentally distributes water to Montreal homes.”
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This was an especially good newsletter!
The fertilizer price issues will lead to very real and serious problems for farmers.