Numlock News: June 12, 2026 • Nurdle, Dead Pool, Cable

Jun 12, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Napster

In what must come as a shock to absolutely nobody, the oft-traded corporate corpse of music file-sharing service Napster has once again found its way into the legal system, with U.S. authorities accusing a North Carolina man of fraudulently obtaining an ownership stake in Napster by promising to invest $3.6 billion that he absolutely did not have. The indictment, unsealed yesterday, claims that over the course of 2024, the man obtained 239 million shares of Infinite Reality (a quarter of the shares) by pretending he had access to $55 billion in cash, of which $3 billion would be invested in the company. After purchasing the streamer for $207 million in March 2025, Infinite Reality changed its name to Napster. In 1999, Napster launched as a file sharing service that was legally speaking nuked from orbit by record companies; it was eventually sold to Rhapsody in 2011, then MelodyVR in 2020, then Hivemind Capital Partners and a crypto company called Algorand in 2022, then of course the 2025 acquisition by Infinite Reality, with the acquisition of Napster repeatedly serving as a canary-in-the-coal-mine for whenever a market niche has obviously passed its top.

Rachel Scharf, Billboard

Nurdles

In 2025, the MSC Elsa 3 sank 15 miles off the coast of southern India, and while the 84 million metric tons of diesel, 367 million metric tons of furnace oil and 13 overboarded containers of hazardous materials were a problem, it’s the 70,000 bags of nurdles on deck that were one of the most diabolical issues. Nurdles are the raw materials used in plastic manufacturing, bean-sized blobs that are melted in the course of making larger plastic items, and only 7,920 of the 71,540 bags on MSC Elsa were recovered. The remaining 1.6 million kilograms of tiny nurdles subsequently washed ashore, resulting in a beach where researchers are still finding 1,500 to 3,500 pellets per square meter of beach.

Kamal Thiagarajan, bioGraphic

Dead Pool

The Glen Canyon Dam is in trouble, as the Colorado River reservoir at Lake Powell has been taxed by decades of drought, and this summer will be a trying one for the dam. At full pool, Lake Powell’s surface reaches 3,700 feet of elevation, a level not reached since 1998. At 3,590 feet, it’s considered at Fish Pool, the minimum level Powell needs to keep smallmouth bass from getting downstream, which is a problem for native fish down there. We are well past that minimum: Currently, Powell is at 3,528 feet. At 3,370 feet, Powell is at Dead Pool, below which the river outlets literally cannot be used and no water can pass through Glen Canyon. At 3,500 feet, the Bureau of Reclamation declares de facto Dead Pool, where the agency will begin to halt releases, expecting downstream impacts and instability to both power and water supply.

Jonathan Thompson, High Country News

Cable

According to a new MoffettNathanson analysis, the number of subscriptions to bundled television came in at 40.9 million subs, down 9.7 percent compared to 45.3 million subs in the same period last year, and down 20.3 percent from Q1 of 2024. Since March 2020, major providers have shed 48.7 percent of their video customers, losing 38.8 million households, and when you go back a decade, that’s a loss of 57.1 million bundled subscriptions since Q1 of 2016. When counting in gains made by vMVPDs (like YouTubeTV, Sling TV, Hulu and Fubo), the loss is a little less grisly, as 62.2 million homes now subscribe to some kind of video service. Still, that’s a loss of 27.5 million homes cutting all ties with pay TV since 2020.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Climate

The latest Indicators of Global Climate Change report has been published in Earth System Science Data, the efforts of a team of over 70 scientists from 56 institutions across 17 countries. It found that human activities pushed global warming to 1.37 C in 2025, and that Earth will surpass 1.5C in about four years. Global greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high as of 2024, reaching 56.8 billion tons of CO2 equivalents.

University of Leeds

Scale

While the United States and France are the leaders in the global nuclear power industry, with the most and second-most in the world, China is getting serious about nuclear power and has been able to scale its fleet, and fast. In 2024, the average time it took to build a new reactor in China was five to seven years, compared to a global average of nine years and a recent U.S. average of 15 years. The reason is that in much of the world, every nuclear reactor has been a special unique snowflake, custom from beginning to end, while China set about standardizing the process and setting up a uniform project management system, even going so far as to build them in batches of six or more at a time.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Deep Space Network

The Artemis I mission four years ago caused issues for NASA’s Deep Space Network, which is a global array of antennas that communicate with far-flung spacecraft and which was diverted away from those science missions and towards the uncrewed moon mission. The situation articulated just how in-demand the DSN is, with currently about 40 missions relying on the antennas in California, Spain, and Australia. Every time one of NASA’s missions outlives its original intended mission, it adds a burden to the DSN, and over the next 10 years, another 40 missions are projected to need the DSN. The system needs help: Last year, one of the three antennas in California was damaged while tracking the Juno spacecraft near Jupiter. It’s been inoperable ever since and will cost $4.1 million to $4.6 million to repair.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

A little FiveThirtyEight reunion in the Sunday edition this week as I spoke to Neil Paine about the current moment sports. We covered the NBA finals — exciting stuff for your local Queens resider — The Stanley Cup and the World Cup all in one go. You can find him at Neil’s Substack for daily updates on all things sports data, his Sherwood newsletter Scoreboard diving into prediction markets, and you can find him in your ear with his NASCAR podcast, Podracing.

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