Numlock News: July 24, 2025 • Westarctica, Latin, Magic: The Gathering
By Walt Hickey
Diplomacy
Police in India have arrested a man accused of operating a fake embassy for years in a rental outside New Delhi, as well as adding fake diplomatic plates on four since-recovered cars that he adorned with flags from several nations. They also recovered 4.5 million Indian rupees (US$52,095) and other foreign currency. The 47-year-old man reportedly claimed he was operating as an advisor or ambassador to — and I want to be clear, this is where the crime goes from “basic fraud” to “possibly the funniest thing you can do to try to get diplomatic plates” — countries called “Seborga” or “Westarctica,” a truly incredible bit. Those names are Latveria and Wakanda-tier names for fake countries.
Rajesh Roy, The Associated Press
Copper
Four ships carrying copper are in a race against the clock to deliver their product to the United States before a 50 percent tariff on the metal takes effect August 1. One of them, a bulk carrier named Kiating, left Australia last Wednesday carrying 8,000 metric tons of refined copper and is now bound for a July 30 arrival in Hawaii after scuttling a previously-planned route to New Orleans. The new route cut 20 days off the journey. Three other ships loaded up with Chilean copper and are currently rushing to American ports to beat the deadline. One is due in Tampa July 28, another anchored off the coast of northern Chile and the third in Panama. The trip from Chile to the U.S. takes 10 to 15 days, so it’s dicey. The difference between arriving ahead of the tariff or a day late for a bulk carrier cargo of 15,000 tons is $70 million.
Yvonne Yue Li, Julian Luk, James Attwood and Archie Hunter, gCaptain
Yarr
Piracy sites, once the bane of the music industry, have largely become a bugbear of the streaming, film and television business. Global visits to music piracy sites totaled just 14 billion last year, only a third of the 42.4 billion visits logged in 2017. In the industry, this is mostly attributed to legal streaming from the likes of Spotify becoming cheap and reliable enough to make piracy unnecessary. There is one area of recent growth, though, namely stream ripper visits, or sites that allow a user to convert a YouTube video into an MP3 or some such. Those have seen a surge in interest lately — 8 billion visits last year, up from 5.1 billion in 2022. They now account for 57.8 percent of total music piracy-related web traffic, vastly higher than the 20 percent it was responsible for in 2017.
Snack Wrap
McDonald’s brought back the Snack Wrap after phasing the menu item out in 2016 when they were trying to reduce the complexity of the menu, and early data appears to show it’s already a hit. Foot traffic to McDonald’s on July 10, which saw the relaunch of the dish, was up 11.4 percent compared to the year-to-date average. That foot traffic remained elevated for the next several days, too. January saw the restaurant make the first attempt in six years to push a value menu of cheaper items, launching the McValue platform.
Hasbro
Hasbro earnings revealed that sales of traditional toys were down 16 percent in the second quarter of the year, accounting for only $442 million of the $980.8 million total. So, where did the rest of the money come from? Magic: The Gathering, which saw revenue rise 23 percent to $412 million in the quarter, driving us ever closer to realizing the long-running joke that Hasbro is a Magic: The Gathering company that incidentally produces toys as a side project. Magic: The Gathering had a phenomenally successful quarter, mostly because of a Final Fantasy card set that smashed sales records and moved more product in a single day than the Lord of the Rings set moved in months.
Cecilia D’Anastasio, Bloomberg
SROs
Single-room occupancies, or SROs, are a once-common reliable form of housing that has since all but disappeared in the United States. These are cheap housing units, the least expensive option, which would be rented for as little as $100 to $300 per month (that’s 2025 dollars, adjusted for inflation!) and were single rooms that had a shared bathroom and kitchen with other tenants. It was an arrangement that ranged from your classic boarding house situation to large buildings. By 1950, SROs were 10 percent of all rental units in major cities and were a small but necessary way for people from all income levels to be housed. A successful attempt to eliminate SROs ensued, and that’s one reason that homelessness — which was rare from the end of the Great Depression to the 1970s — became incredibly common. Had SROs grown at the same rate as the rest of the U.S. housing stock, the U.S. would have 2.5 million such units, which is incidentally three times the number of Americans currently experiencing homelessness.
Rebecca Baird-Remba and Alex Horowitz, Pew
Inscription
Historians have been facing an issue for a while: getting hold of a cool inscription, but a chunk of it is missing. However, researchers at the University of Nottingham noted that language models are explicitly designed to come up with sensible words; that’s literally what they do. They then set about developing an AI trained on the largest combined dataset of ancient Latin texts (some 176,000 inscriptions and 9,000 images) to produce Aeneas, a tool that suggests possible words for missing text. When tested against known inscriptions, Aeneas achieved 73 percent accuracy in restoring gaps up to 10 Latin characters, and still managed 58 percent accuracy when the total missing length was unknown, which isn’t too shabby.
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The SRO item is the most important thing I have read on Numlock. (Nothing against the Magic: The Gathering insights.) Thanks!
The SRO bit is interesting. You do mention the regulatory hurdles, which are, IMO, the biggest problem in housing. I would like my own toilet where I sleep, but I’d probably be okay headed down the hall for a shower….