Numlock News: June 25, 2024 • Hot Ones, Great Red Spot, Quartz

Jun 25, 2024

Wings

As many restaurants look to hot wings as a way to boost profitability and get an edge, so too does Buzzfeed. The media company has come to own Hot Ones, a rare bona fide internet hit, a wings-themed interview show that has made for some sensational television over the course of its run, purchased through Buzzfeed’s $300 million acquisition of Complex in 2021. The company, which has a market cap of $78 million and over $100 million in debt, has begun to spin off its assets, including the rest of the Complex brand for $109 million. It’s now trying to sell Hot Ones’ owner, First We Feast, initially asking for $70 million as the price. First We Feast is profitable, generating $30 million in annual revenue.

Lucas Shaw, Bloomberg

Quartz

A celebrity-driven push claiming that crystals have healing properties has led to dangerous working conditions among the laborers who supply the crystals hawked by such New Age sellers. It’s an industry where the high end can go into the tens of thousands of dollars, and just a particularly neat-looking crystal can fetch more than enough dollars to justify hauling it out of a mine in South Africa. Workers might earn $4 for a 10- to 12-hour workday in places like China, India, Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of Congo. A small-scale mine in South Africa would sell to a dealer in bulk, at $6.50 to $19 per kilogram regardless of quality. They’ll clean it, process it, and send it through a serpentine supply chain before landing in your standard Western wellness shop.

Alexandra Wexler, The Wall Street Journal

Beer

For years, the NCAA had laws governing the sales of alcohol in sports stadiums, but those rules have begun to change swiftly. Today, 55 out of 69 Power Five conference schools serve alcohol in their stadiums’ public sections. That can be a serious revenue-driver for schools, but another slightly more concerning trend is a race to the bottom when it comes to beer pricing, as some arenas count it as a point of pride as to how cheap their cheapest stadium beer might get compared to rivals. A $2 Natty Light is certainly one way to up enthusiasm and juice home-field advantage.

Pete O’Connell, Vine Pair

Disc World

The availability of physical media — Blu-Rays, UHDs, DVDs — has been slipping in some places like Best Buy and Target, while other companies have dived right in. Barnes & Noble, already undergoing a transformation, started expanding its Criterion Collection product line in every one of the 620 locations it’s got nationwide. The rise of vinyl in the music business as an alternative revenue stream has some retailers thinking the time is ripe for such momentum in physical discs. About 44 percent of packaged-media sales are e-commerce, as a number of independent distributors like Diabolik and Grindhouse fuel the market, even if Amazon does control 80 percent of that. In brick-and-mortar retail, Walmart’s market share is still 45 percent, but Barnes & Noble is feeling ambitious in the space and thinks its 3 percent market share is just the start.

Thomas K. Arnold, Media Play News

Salton Sea

A new study of the Salton Sea found that shorebirds (which have declined 37 percent since 1970) have become reliant on the biofilm of the California inland saline lake, which is chock-full of nutrients and has become an essential stopover for birds on the Pacific Flyway. The number of birds that might rely on the Salton Sea in a single day — 250,000 shorebirds counted once — is double the levels seen in the 1990s, in no small part because the lake’s shrinking. Irrigation drains no longer reach the lake proper, and 6,000 acres of wetlands have emerged in the past eight years.

Andrea Jones, Audubon Society

Ships

Transits through the Suez Canal were down 80 percent in May 2024 compared to the same month in 2023, as shipping companies deal with ongoing attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea by Yemen-based rebels. The alternative routes — going around Africa or through the Panama Canal — add serious time and cost to transits, with trips between East Asia and either Europe or the East Coast extended a median of 10 to 14 days.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

The Spot

Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a centuries-long, planet-sized storm on the gas giant, and while we know it hasn’t been around forever, figuring out when precisely it formed is of interest. It’s existed since at least 1831, but astronomers of the 1600s reported seeing such a spot, which has left open the possibility that it’s been around for quite some time. A new paper argues that they’re in fact different spots, given the location of each and their movements. The “permanent spot” of Cassini in the 1600s probably disappeared in the mid-1700s to the 1800s, while the Red Spot is thought to have been in existence for 190 years.

Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica

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