Numlock News: July 9, 2024 • Napoleon, Reese Witherspoon, Warhammer

Jul 09, 2024

Napoleon

Two pistols owned by Napoleon Bonaparte have sold at auction for €1.69 million to an unnamed buyer, but because this is Napoleon we’re talking about here, it’s obviously far from over and it’s bound to return to the news soon. One reason for that is that the French government’s cultural ministry has classified the items as national treasures. The government now has a 30-month window to make a purchase offer to the new owner, and the weapons can only leave France temporarily.

Kathryn Armstrong, BBC News

Games Workshop

Games Workshop is a $4 billion company that earned a massive £470.8 million in revenue in 2023 and £170.2 million in profit. This enormously valuable and profitable company is the force behind Warhammer figurines, a miniature war-gaming and creation game that produces unpainted plastic designs for their customers to essentially assemble and decorate on their own. Turning intellectual property and plastic nurdles into a fat balance sheet is a good business, but lately the biggest threat to Warhammer is not in fact the Imperium of Man and its unrelenting Emperor of Mankind, but independent businesses with 3D printers who can undercut the official product on price, and offer customized versions at that.

Chris Stokel-Walker, Sherwood News

Celebrity Book Clubs

One of the best ways of getting a book sold is getting a celebrity book club to pick it. For example, 48 out of the 68 books picked by Jenna Bush Hager have made the bestseller list, 68 of Reese Witherspoon’s 97 picks have made it, and every single one of the 27 times Oprah Winfrey picked a book for her book club on the day of its release, it made the list. That’s a remarkable success rate, and an abnormal one. One way they’re able to consistently tap winners is a sprawling scouting infrastructure; Hello Sunshine, which is behind Reese’s Book Club, has two full-time staffers working with a team of literary scouts at Baker Literary Scouting to compile a monthly list of 100 to 150 books for consideration.

Sophie Vershbow, Esquire

Scalpers

The anti-theft protections built into nontransferable digital tickets produced by Ticketmaster have been successfully reverse-engineered by scalpers, who are able to generate and sell them despite the efforts of the major platforms. In a new lawsuit, ticket seller AXS said that brokers are selling counterfeit tickets to consumers on their platform, and the company said they don’t know how the hackers actually pulled it off. According to security researchers, the tickets work similar to the way that two-factor authenticator codes in apps work, sharing a secret token with the user about 20 hours before the event, which generates a new PDF417 barcode every 15 seconds. The hack appears to come from the determination of what that token is, which allows the scalpers to continue to whip up new barcodes even after they sell the original ticket.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media

Bridge and Tunnel

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore also means that hazmat trucks lost their best way through the city. The trucks contain dangerous chemicals and are banned from going through the I-895 Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, given that an incident in an enclosed tunnel at the bottom of Baltimore Harbor would be absolutely disastrous. With the bridge down and the tunnel a no-go, the only major option is a 35-mile detour on the congested I-695 beltway. However, journalists who monitored the entrance to the tunnel for several hours observed 40 tanker trucks going through despite the illegality, more than a dozen of which had prohibited placards. One reason is that I-895 doesn’t have a weigh station where trucks are inspected, and must rely on mobile spot inspections, which they don’t really seem to be doing: From March 27 to April 26, there were just 11 hazmat inspections on the I-895 corridor.

Brenna Smith, Ben Conarck and Mark Puente, The Baltimore Banner

Finance

Dealer financing is a massive profit center for automobile dealerships, and 78 percent of vehicles are dealer-financed. That tends to be a worse deal for buyers: The per-unit finance cost in general is $2,406, which goes up to $3,080 when dealer financing is involved, as there were an average of 4.63 add-ons jammed into every deal.

David Dayen, The American Prospect

Factories

TikTok users by now are familiar with a common type of influencer: one in the employ of some kind of manufacturer that makes things like illuminated signs or silicone molds or paper boxes or glycine. One reason they’re common is that it turns out they actually work really well for generating new leads. One salesman at a Guangdong light box company said the company’s TikTok videos get new customers in the Americas, Europe and Africa; for every 1,000 views on TikTok, the company gets about one business inquiry, and roughly 3 percent to 10 percent of those inquiries eventually become orders.

Viola Zhou, Rest of World

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