Numlock News: March 10, 2021 • Counterfeits, Wrestling, Sharks
By Walt Hickey
Switcharoonie
A commodities trader that bought $36 million worth of copper from a supplier in Turkey was shocked to find that they had instead been delivered large containers full of painted rocks. Somewhere before it left a port near Istanbul en route to China someone swapped out 6,000 tons of blister copper and swapped in jagged paving stones that had been crudely spray-painted. Thirteen people have been taken into custody in Turkey related to the scheme. It’s the most audacious case of shipping fraud since that time a delivery of ACME products winding its way through the canyons of New Mexico was fooled by a tunnel that had been painted on a wall of rock.
Peacock
Comcast’s new streaming service Peacock lost $914 million in 2020. The new service brought in $118 million in revenue, but the immediate costs of all that content — including $989 million in intra-company payments to other divisions of NBC Universal — still vastly exceeded money coming in. Executives had already indicated they were willing to stomach an investment north of $2 billion into Peacock while it found its bearings in 2020 and 2021, expanding from merely “a streaming service that has The Office” into a bold vision of “yeah, actually that’s pretty much the extent of the concept here, The Office, come and get it.”
Zebra Mussels
Zebra mussels live in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea ecosystems, but when they leave those waters they wreak havoc on ecosystems and devastate watersheds all over North America. They’re now in every watershed in the lower 48 United States, costing taxpayers $1 billion in damages every year, with the sole exception of the Columbia River Basin in Washington. This week led to a panic gripping the region when on February 25 a Petco in Seattle noticed zebra mussels in a shipment of moss balls, which meant that any flushed fish tank could hold the mollusk spark that takes out the Columbia River. When Fish and Wildlife Service officials arrived, they seized 56 moss balls. However, the California distributor ships 100,000 moss balls nationwide every two weeks — the major pet stores have pulled them off the shelves.
Traffic
In 2019, the average commuter spent 99 hours in traffic congestion, according to traffic analytics firm Inrix. In 2020, that crashed to just 26 hours, about a fourth of the time. All told, traffic delays across the country fell 50 percent, with the aggregate time wasted costing Americans an estimated $39 billion, down from $88 billion in 2019. The biggest beneficiary was Washington D.C., which saw traffic delays drop 77 percent in 2020. New York, where commuters still lost 100 hours last year, remains the greatest city in da friggin’ country [when it comes to the amount of human life squandered to traffic congestion].
Sharks
A new study published in Nature found that the global abundance of sharks is down over 70 percent, mostly attributable to fishing pressure. The same way that we catch tuna and swordfish — long lines with lots of hooks and bait — incidentally is a really good way to also catch sharks. The study suggests that modifications of longline gear to nylon monofilament, which will let the sharks get away a little easier, could help the sharks hold their position, but actually helping the species recover will require significantly more than just swapping out some fishing gear.
Rachel Hopkins and KerriLynn Miller, Pew Trusts
Strike Back
A new paper slated for presentation at the Fairness, Accountability and Transparency conference next week proposes three ways that consumers can gain leverage over the companies that gather, package and sell data about internet users to then advertise to them. One of them is a data strike, where users withhold or delete data; they found that if just 30 percent of users of a movie recommendation system went on strike, the accuracy of the system would fall 50 percent. Another, data poisoning, is distinctly intriguing. It would entail users pumping meaningless or wrong data into the system, like through browser extensions that click every ad served, throwing up digital chaff and stymieing the algorithm.
Karen Hao, MIT Technology Review
Off The Top Rope
Wrestling is a paradox; the viewership for it is in decline, but the core audience remains committed, and that means it’s more valuable than ever. Viewership for WWE Raw in the first weeks of the first quarter of 2021 was down 54.5 percent compared to the same quarter of 2015. Viewership for Smackdown was down as well, but to a lesser extent of only 16.1 percent. However, the core audience of about 2 million fans is powerful, as about half of them subscribe to WWE Network, one reason NBC bought it in the U.S. Three years ago, the rights to broadcast domestic wrestling were worth about $150 million per year; today it’s worth $748.8 million, and by 2023 the total value of domestic professional wrestling rights is projected to top $800 million a year.
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