Numlock News: June 11, 2024 • Cricket, Crackdown, Caterpillars

By Walt Hickey

Crackdown

Authorities in New York City have cracked down on illegal weed stores, and now there are about 3,000 vacant storefronts citywide left by pot stores that have up and left town, to the dismay of landlords that had been making a killing from the cash-only businesses. For instance, a weed store in the Broadway McKenna Building was paying $50,000 a month in rent, $156 per square foot annually, well over the $101.46 per square foot average in the neighborhood, and the space will now fetch $40,000 a month. While the heavy hitters in New York retail real estate never bothered with the pot stores — Fifth Avenue, where rents average $2,515 per square foot, did not need to get its hands sticky — the high-margin weed stores that were basically selling untaxed drugs were making a fortune, fueling a bonanza for landlords.

Abigail Nehring, Commercial Observer

Cut to the Chase

An analysis of onion cutting styles found that the two dominant techniques of cutting up an onion are not optimal when it comes to making a perfect, even dice. The classic method taught at most culinary schools — cut the top off, cut down the middle, cubing the onion by cutting first perpendicular to the cutting board along the onion, and then perpendicular to that cut across the onion — doesn’t perfectly subdivide it, because the onion is multiple layers of circles and even cuts don’t cut evenly. The other school of thought is to cut the onion radially (rather than at 90 degrees), and then perpendicular across the onion, the so-called Lyonnaise cut. This too fails, and is worse than the traditional method, with the resulting onion bits having a standard deviation of 48 percent. The best way is to cut the onion at an angle radially — not centered on the center of the onion, but rather, specifically toward a point that is 0.557 onion radiuses below the surface of the board.

J. Kenji López-Alt, The New York Times

Moths

The Northeast and Midwest are in the midst of one of the worst outbreaks of spongy moths on record, with some areas hitting a million caterpillars per acre and some parts of the country in year five of an outbreak. The moths have been in the U.S. since 1869, and have wreaked havoc after escaping captivity. Over the ensuing century, the moths have spread at a rate of 13 miles per year, and from 1970 to 2013 defoliated a cumulative 81 million acres of forest. The U.S. Forest Service spends an average of $30 million a year trying to contain them, but climate change has made the outbreaks, which happen every eight to 12 years, last longer than usual.

Zoya Teirstein, Grist

Flight Etiquette

The latest data surrounding implicit sky law is in, and all sorts of things are apparently cool now, like asking to switch seats with another passenger (51 percent acceptable, 26 percent unacceptable), chatting with a stranger next to you for the entire flight (46 percent acceptable, 29 percent unacceptable), and putting your purse or jacket in an overhead compartment on a full flight (52 percent acceptable, 29 percent unacceptable). Reclining seats remains broadly popular (55 percent consider acceptable, 26 percent unacceptable), while making a phone call somehow has been edging toward acceptability (37 percent ok, 43 percent bad). Other situations in which a few bad actors ruin the whole experience include those who think it’s acceptable to remove their shoes (30 percent acceptable, 55 percent unacceptable), standing up immediately when the plane lands (29 percent acceptable, 50 percent unacceptable), and watching a movie that contains nudity (25 percent acceptable, 51 percent unacceptable). On the last point, my bad, but I mean it’s more the airline’s fault for even stocking Babylon as an option, and in my defense that in-air version was so edited down they just called it My Fair Lady.

Taylor Orth, YouGov

Banks

Banks are asking themselves what exactly it is their branches even do anymore, and adjusting their interior design accordingly. At Citigroup, teller transaction is down 40 percent since pre-pandemic levels, while the number of prescheduled appointments with bankers has tripled since 2022. That’s led to some design changes, making the heavily secured bank facility look increasingly like a coffee shop or waiting room with a concierge. JPMorgan Chase & Co. has renovated 2,300 Chase branches and will redo another 1,700 by 2027, and Bank of America has finished up a plan to make their locations have spacious waiting areas and the right amount of tellers for actual transaction volume, as it too has seen advisory appointments rise 50 percent since 2017.

Fola Akinnibi, Bloomberg

It’s Going Down. They’re Selling Timber.

The military that controls Myanmar has been propping up the country’s economy by getting around sanctions and selling timber to India and China. About 80 percent of the timber leaving Myanmar is smuggled to those countries, with the logs smuggled in oil tankers and humanitarian vehicles. The illegal logging of tropical hardwoods has happened despite export bans, and is fueled by criminal networks looking to deal in black market timber, the proceeds of which fund an oppressive regime. It’s far from a problem unique to Myanmar; officers of the South Sudan People’s Defense Forces provide security and logistical support to logging companies to the tune of $800 to $900 per truck, getting it into Uganda where it’s shipped on to Vietnam and India.

Audrey Thill, Foreign Policy

Cricket

Last week the U.S. defeated Pakistan at the T20 Cricket World Cup, which is one of the biggest upsets ever. Pakistan was the runner-up last tournament and is ranked sixth in the world, while the U.S. is only in the tournament for the first time because we’re hosting it. The reason for the victory, looking a little closer, is a charming story of immigration and why the United States being a desirable place to work makes the country better. At least six of the players on the American team are of Indian descent and several are in the country on work visas, many of them playing on the American national team as a side hobby. The bowler for the final over is an engineer at Oracle who moved to San Francisco from Mumbai when he was a student, and the star hitter from that game moved to Jersey in 2016 to start a restaurant.

Sandip G., The Indian Express and Eric Boehm, Reason

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