Numlock News: July 8, 2024 • Minions, Gundams, Despicable Me

Jul 08, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Animation

Turns out that it’s generally a profitable notion to release animated films intended for families, especially during the summer months when kids are off from school. This obviously countermands the established wisdom previously espoused by studios, which held that it’s a better strategy to spend lots of money producing animated films and then swiftly dump them off on streaming services, or of course cancel family films postproduction for the tax benefits, like with Coyote vs. ACME. Two films challenged this foolproof, ironclad game plan, and are reaping the profits for their daring feat of releasing a film for children in a movie theater of all places. Despicable Me 4 made $122.6 million over its first five days of release and a global cume of $229.5 million, all on a budget of $100 million. Inside Out 2 continues to truck along, hitting $1.2 billion globally this past weekend.

Brent Lang, Variety

Berries

Driscoll’s, the dominant producer of berries in North America, has spent years of R&D to expand their production yields and improve the berry product, and their efforts are being rewarded. The American berry market is now worth $9 billion annually, up 40 percent over the past five years, fueled by the flagship strawberry but nevertheless boosted by berries blue, rasp and black. The latest push is Driscoll’s Sweetest Batch, a branding for the premium tier of berry that fetches a significant price premium of around 30 percent.

Ben Cohen, The Wall Street Journal

Monologue

A new study offers evidence that not everyone has an “inner voice” in their heads, and the extent and intensity of that voice varies considerably from person to person, having real impacts on how people think. The study looked at a ranking of 1,037 subjects based on their results of the Internal Representations Questionnaire, which attempts to gauge the extent to which people are engaging with an inner voice, like how much they’d agree with the prompt, “I think about problems in my mind in the form of a conversation with myself.” In the new study, they took 47 participants who had especially high scores on the IRQ and 46 participants who had especially low scores, and conducted a number of tests related to recall and repetition of words, rhyme detection, switching quickly between tasks, and so on. They found that there were considerable differences in performance on given tasks, an argument in favor of the presence and absence of an inner voice. This is wild — I mean, if people don’t have an inner voice, who reminds you of embarrassing things you did 15 years ago right before you go to sleep?

Simon Makin, Scientific American

Gundams

Action figures based on anime and manga products have become very popular outside of Japan, their traditional home base and primary market. This in turn has sent demand up even if the popularity of the figurines produced for the domestic market can’t keep pace. As a result, fueled by overseas demand, prices are way up: The average price of a Mobile Suit Gundam figurine increased 130 percent from 2,812 yen in 2014 to 6,354 yen today. Dragon Ball figurines saw prices spike 190 percent over the same period, with One Piece figurines up 110 percent. Overall, half of revenue from the global sale of anime products now comes from overseas, with international sales growing sixfold in the past decade. That’s all well and good, but how on earth do you expect Shinji to get in the damn robot if it’s more than double the price of a decade ago?

Hitomi Izawa, Nikkei Asia

Socks

The latest salvo in intergenerational warfare is related to socks. If you wear low-cut socks, the youngs think you’re old. No-show socks are out; mid-calf high socks are in. Hanes reports that sales of socks that rise above the ankle are up 5.9 percent since 2021, while sales of the low-cut socks that were recently popular are down 3.8 percent over the same period. Bombas, another sockmonger, said that sales of no-show socks are down 9 percent in April compared to the same month of last year.

Chavie Lieber, The Wall Street Journal

Trash

This year, a team of soldiers and Sherpas funded by the government of Nepal removed 11 tons of garbage, four dead bodies, and a skeleton from Mount Everest, part of a campaign to clean up one of the most important tourism sites in the entire region. The team’s Sherpa leader estimated that there could still be as much as 40 to 50 tons of garbage remaining at South Col, which is the final camp used by climbers before they make a go for the summit. Hauling out accumulated trash is annoying in any natural environment or heavily used trail, but this trash is frozen in layers at an 8,000-meter altitude, which complicates the endeavor even further. The oldest waste found was from 1957, a set of rechargeable batteries for lights; the first successful attempt on the summit was in 1953.

The Associated Press

Nickel

Nickel is an increasingly important element in lots of crucial parts of the economy, particularly around the production of electric vehicles and their batteries. Prices closed at $17,291 per tonne at the end of June, down from the $21,688 per tonne notched at the end of last year. Fitch predicts that at least for this year, prices are going to remain low, estimating $18,000 per tonne given excess supply, but that’s not going to last forever. Even with production in China and a ramp-up of production in Indonesia, they’re forecasting a surge in demand, with prices hitting $21,500 per tonne in 2028 and $26,000 per tonne in 2033.

Mining.com

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