Numlock News: March 1, 2024 • Dwayne, Dune, Cocoa

Mar 01, 2024

By Walt Hickey

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Cuckoo for Cocoa Enoughs

The raw price of cocoa has now fully hit the candy business, with prices per metric ton rising to $6,000, up from $2,600 per ton this time last year. The fear is that drought and disease in West Africa will mean prices can only get worse, and this year is truly an anomaly: Every single year since the 1980s, cocoa futures in New York have traded below $3,500 per metric ton, so what comes next is truly an enigma. There are some standard strategies to reduce demand for chocolate long employed by candy companies — chuck a few kids into a chocolate river and get them stuck in tubes, turn them into berries, dump them down a garbage chute, use emerging technology to shrink them — but this issue will be a serious one, and candy companies are searching far and wide for potential executives who are capable of functioning in a difficult business environment based on everyone else in their family residing in a bed all the time.

Ilena Peng, Bloomberg

Notices

The IRS is cracking down on high-earning Americans who have not filed tax returns, sending 125,000 notices to Americans making over $400,000 who simply neglected to file a return between 2017 and 2021. Until recently, the IRS has lacked the staff to find rich tax dodgers and send the nonfilers the appropriate paperwork to provoke an audit. The first 25,000 letters will go to ought-to-have-been-taxpayers with over $1 million in income, and then another 100,000 letters will go to those making $400,000 to $1 million.

Ashlea Ebeling and Richard Rubin, The Wall Street Journal

Sobriquet

Dwayne Johnson, the film actor who previously was known as a wrestler, has officially gained the intellectual property rights to 25 names, insults and catchphrases as a result of his new deal with TKO, the parent company of his former home, the WWE. Yes, Dwayne Johnson now owns the concept of “The Rock” as well as many other ideas, including the concept of “candy ass,” the idea that one ought to “know your role and shut your mouth,” the nom du guerre of “Rocky Maivia,” the affiliations of “team corporate” and “team bring it,” as well as the end-times prophecy of the “Rockpocalypse” and the epitaph of “The most electrifying man in sports and entertainment.” I look forward to the day when John Cena attempts the same, though I shall not be able to see it happen, as he will then clutch the very concept of invisibility.

Todd Spangler, Variety

Nothing

The trend of packed vacations that seek to cram all sorts of adventures into every hour of a trip is over; the relaxation vacation is now on the rise. A new survey of leisure travelers found that the percentage of vacationers who cited rest and relaxation as the motivator for travel rose from 17 percent to 21 percent between September and February, an indication that people are seeking the all-inclusive and the resort scene over exploration and the adventurous.

Allison Pohle and Rachel Wolfe, The Wall Street Journal

Apparatus

A new study published in the journal Cell Reports presents evidence that the Golgi ribbon, which most people know as “the stupidest-looking organelle I had to draw into a cell in biology,” is not, in fact, exclusive to vertebrates, and indeed appears in many other animals such as mollusks, urchins and earthworms. We all remember The Cell — big sphere in the middle, a couple wiggly things for storage, dots for energy and then those gorgeous mitochondria that I literally could draw if I was in a coma — and the Golgi bodies are the gummy worm-looking guys that the teacher glazed over because truth be told nobody really got what they were up to anyway, and the Golgi ribbon is a rather complex version that previously was only thought to appear in vertebrates. Anyway, it turns out they’ve been around for 600 million years, and are found in all sorts of eukaryotes.

Cell Press

Supermajors

Guyana recently discovered oil underneath its coastal waters, and beyond some recent geopolitical implications, it’s also provoked a rare dispute between Exxon Mobile and Chevron. It comes down to Hess, which has been an acquisition target of Chevron. Back in 2015, Exxon discovered some oil off the coast of Guyana, and it owns 45 percent of the project to extract it, while Hess owns a 30 percent stake in the project and China’s Cnooc owns the rest. The primary area of production is believed to contain 11 billion barrels, and production should hit 1.2 million barrels per day by 2027. At issue is a right of first refusal clause, which means that Exxon or Cnooc could argue they gets first pass at buying the Hess stake in the Guyana tract. Chevron argues that it’s buying all of Hess, so that doesn’t matter, while Exxon claims it gets dibs on Hess Guyana.

Kevin Crowley and Rachel Graf, Bloomberg

Dune

Dune: Part Two is crushing it in its opening days, and is projected to open globally to $150 million to $175 million, though Warner Bros. is putting its opening projection at $140 million. The first Dune grossed $402 million worldwide, most of which — $325 million — was from abroad. Now listen, if there’s one thing American moviegoers love it’s a princeling waging jihad to deprive a global empire of energy resources in a desert, so this movie’s going to make a billion dollars worm or no worm.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

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It’s been two great weeks in the Numlock Sunday edition, both unlocked if you’d like a taste of what subscribers are getting:

This week, I spoke to Alex Ward, who wrote the brand new book, The Internationalists. I’m a huge fan of Alex, he covers the fascinating beat of foreign policy, and I’ve been excited for this book since it was first announced. We talked about how U.S. policy abroad has undergone a massive but largely misunderstood revolution over the past several years, how the transition from Trump to Biden led to somewhat surprising changes, and what that means for us. The book is available wherever books are sold.

Then the prior week, I spoke to Nicole Carpenter, who wrote “The video game funding gap: How investors are failing marginalized developers” for Polygon. I loved this because games journalism is such a vibrant and interesting space and I’ve been keen to see some exciting data journalism within it. We spoke about video games in journalism, in the economy, and what it means for the American labor movement. Carpenter can be found at Polygon and on Twitter.

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