Numlock News: June 14, 2024 • Galaxy, Edmonton, Przewalski’s Horse
By Walt Hickey
Have an excellent weekend!
Canadian Dollars
The Edmonton Oilers are in the Stanley Cup Final for the first time since 2006. Despite being one of the smallest sports markets in North America, the Oilers still managed to be the fifth-highest revenue team in the NHL during the 2022-23 season, with net $281 million of revenue sharing and this year’s venture to the final likely putting this season’s total over $300 million. This is impressive in no small part because the Canadian dollar is worth US$0.73, only slightly above the 20-year low. With seven teams in Canada, that’s an issue for the NHL, which used the statistic of “hockey-related revenue” to derive the salary cap and payroll minimums. A one-cent shift in the exchange rate can swing the value of the hockey-related revenue by US$20 million. Complicating things for the squads is that Canadian teams collect their revenue in CAD, but pay their players in USD, a problem that from 1995 to 2004 got so bad that the league rolled out a Canadian Assistance Plan to send checks to Canadian teams affected by the exchange rate.
Broadway
The Tony Awards are this Sunday, recognizing the work that takes place in 41 theaters in Manhattan. Three companies own the vast majority of those theaters, 17 of them belonging to Shubert, nine theaters belonging to Nederlander, and seven theaters owned by Ambassador Theatre Group. The private equity-backed British outfit owned two houses until last year when it bought most of Jujamcyn, which had five theaters, in a $300 million deal. That has injected some new blood into a generally stable industry, and the ATG has big plans for its U.S. venture; the private equity ownership has some concerned about what it means long-term for the industry.
Horses
For the first time in 200 years, the rare Przewalski’s Horse has returned to Kazakhstan, thanks to an initiative by the Prague Zoo to reintroduce the animal to the steppe. Seven horses were airlifted from Europe to Kazakhstan, and they’re already doing well. The species went extinct in the wild in the 1960s and was last seen in Mongolia, which along with China has reintroduced the horse over the past several decades. The Prague Zoo, which was entrusted with the future of the horse following World War II, orchestrated the reintroduction of 34 horses to Mongolia, which have now bolstered the population there to over 850 horses. They intend to bring in another 40 of them over the next five years to supplement the nascent Kazakhstan herd.
Impulsive
According to New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority, emergency brakes were pulled on subway trains 1,700 times last year, even though only 30 of those were for legitimate emergencies. Those fake pulls can add hours in the aggregate to commutes, and can cause injuries. Compared to peers, the MTA makes it unusually easy to pull an emergency brake, though newer trains have moved the trigger to a small cabinet rather than just leaving it dangling in the car, inviting anyone to give into l'appel du vide and heed an impulsive thought. Usually, if you want to obnoxiously stop trains in New York on a feckless whim to vindictively sabotage the subway, you have to be elected the governor first.
Stephen Nessen and Clayton Guse, Gothamist
Uranium
As more and more countries see nuclear as a viable way out of their upcoming green energy deficits, the price of minerals has skyrocketed. Over the past five years, the price of lithium is up 17 percent, the price of copper is up 66 percent, the price of gold is up 75 percent and the price of silver is up 99 percent. But the price of uranium is now up 233 percent, and with 61 nuclear power plants under construction globally, 90 in the planning stage and 300 proposed, all sorts of uranium projects that didn’t make sense a few years ago make a whole lot of sense today.
Geoffrey Morgan and Jacob Lorinc, Bloomberg
Insurance Retreat
A new study from Victoria University of Wellington seeks to peer into the future to figure out when precisely insurers will begin to bail on major cities on New Zealand’s coasts given the rise in seawater. The researchers looked at 10,238 properties in four major cities that currently have a 1 percent chance of extreme coastal flooding. They modeled the next several decades given the current expectations of storm surges, erosion and shoreline recession, and determined that there will be a 99 percent chance of a partial insurance retreat from the areas within a decade, and then a 99 percent chance of a full insurance retreat within 20 to 25 years.
Hitchhiker’s Guide
The James Webb Space Telescope has identified a new galaxy that holds the title of oldest ever observed, JADES-GS-z14-0, which was captured by the JWST just 290 million years after the big bang, or about 2 percent into the current lifetime of the universe. The JWST is operating in that exciting realm of physics where distance and time are the same thing, as it’s capturing light that took billions of years to traverse the universe to faintly arrive here, a snapshot back in time. This new galaxy beats out the previous record observed in 2022, JADES-GS-z13-0, which was observed when it was 325 million years old. The new celestial spotting, z14-0, has a redshift of 14.32, the highest ever recorded, and it’s exceptionally bright, with a diameter of 1,700 light-years.
Riis Williams, Scientific American
This past week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Fola Akinnibi, who wrote “New York’s Biggest Produce Market Is at a Breaking Point” for Bloomberg. This was a fascinating story about a really interesting an unique place and the challenges that this kind of unknown infrastructure has when it has to grow. We spoke about the grocery store supply chain, the scale and impact of the market, and where the money for a renovation would come from. Akinnibi can be found at Bloomberg and on Twitter.
Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.
Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.
Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.
Previous Sunday subscriber editions: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs ·
Yeezys · Armed Forces · Christmas Music · The Golden Screen · New York Hotels · A City on Mars · Personality Change · Graphics · You Are What You Watch ·
Comics Data · Extremely Online · Kevin Perjurer · Kia Theft Spree · Right to Repair · Chicken Sandwich Wars
Sunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018
There are so many negative stories out there about humanity and our wiping out of countless animal/insect/plant species that the story about the Przewalski’s Horses made me smile. Finally, some good news.