Numlock News: June 21, 2024 • MoviePass, Dealerships, Shipwreck

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

MoviePass

I regret to inform you that MoviePass is boring now, as the once swashbuckling and economically maniacal application that subsidized a nation’s theater habit for a solid year there has found a damn near viable business model. Earlier this year it announced its first profitable fiscal year, and subscriptions now have a range and a cap on usage, from the $10 Basic to $30 Premium options offering between three and five movies per month. This has led to reasonable consumer behavior, rather than the fire sale of film that imploded a bunch of private equity money. It’s so reasonable that boring old Comcast is investing in it.

Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News

Photography

In the fine art scene, photography as an art form has had a bit of a stigma and sold for comparably less than works in other media. For instance, a photograph is inherently reproducible — a very foundational advantage of the tech, but one that makes it less attractive to collectors who are accustomed to one-of-a-kind objects. Global photography sales at the three main art auction houses fell 16 percent from 2022 to 2023, to $62.4 million, but there are signs that the medium is catching on among collectors, as most of that decline was the result of fewer high-ticket items. Among photographs that sold for less than $5,000, there’s been a 36 percent year-over-year increase in sales value since 2022.

Melanie Gerlis, The Art Newspaper

Ship

On Thursday, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced the discovery of a 3,300-year-old ship and cargo at the bottom of the Mediterranean about 90 kilometers off the coast and 1,800 meters down. This is interesting because the boat and cargo were intact, but especially so because a ship that old has not been found that far out at sea, evidence that the navigation abilities of Bronze Age seafarers might have been better than we otherwise understood. That, and I’m just throwing this out there, may not exactly be the conclusion I’d go with, as the ship was indeed found sunk all the way out in the Mediterranean, and a rudimentary consideration of survivorship bias might lead us to question if, uh, the crew of a boat that did in fact end up sinking is really a paragon of the cutting edge of Canaanite nautical mastery of the era.

Melanie Lidman, The Associated Press

Plastics

A new form of plastics recycling has begun to increase in popularity, and there are concerns that it’s not actually recycling the plastic. In traditional recycling, plastic is cut into pellets or flakes that are melted into recycled plastic products, and 55 percent to 85 percent of the plastic is recycled and 15 percent to 45 percent is lost in the process. In pyrolysis, that’s much lower: 15 percent to 20 percent is recycled into propylene or ethylene, while the rest is converted into diesel fuel, methane, hydrogen or other chemicals.

Lisa Song, ProPublica

Dealers

The question of “what’s it gonna take to get you in the driver’s seat of this 2024 F-150?” now includes “a comprehensive understanding of cybersecurity countermeasures,” as the software that runs 15,000 car dealerships across North America has been hacked and shut down since Wednesday morning. CDK Global produces standard dealership management software, and that system has been compromised by consecutive cyberattacks. Beyond the thousands of car dealerships, it’s also in use at 1,000 heavy truck locations as well, providing appointment scheduling, electronic signing and other logistical aid.

William Gavin, Quartz

Bus Shelters

The Metrobus system in Washington, D.C., has over 3,000 stops, but the city is constrained by a legal maximum of exactly 788 bus shelters, which means the vast majority of bus stops have no amenities and the ones that do have shelters tend to be in wealthier neighborhoods. The reason is that Clear Channel operates the installation and management of the bus shelters as part of a 20-year franchise agreement signed in 2005, and the artificial maximum number of bus shelters in that agreement was set at 788. This agreement expires in December 2025, and the relationship is already fraught, with D.C. and Clear Channel in court over COVID-19-related ad revenue.

Santiago Lakatos, Greater Greater Washington

Tile

To increase crop yields, many farmers use agricultural drainage tile, a pipe system that is present across 50 million acres in the U.S., the vast majority of which (84 percent) are in the upper Midwest. The reason for their installation — at $1,850 to $3,700 per acre — is that annual crop yields go up between 5 percent and 25 percent as a result, diverting excess water out from the soil. The problem, though, is that it speeds up the movement of water that’s contaminated with fertilizers into waterways, without giving it time to filter through soil en route to a culvert. As it stands, 98 percent of drainage tile is in watersheds with excess nitrate and phosphorus levels, as a raindrop that would take a decade to get to a waterway can now be swiftly diverted there, contaminants and all, within hours.

Joy Mazur, Columbia Missourian

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