Numlock News: March 15, 2024 • Elvers, UFOs, Hyundai

Mar 15, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Also, for those as completely hooked as I am, there are a mere two levels left in the quest to beat every Super Mario Maker level before the destruction of the archives. Those also so engaged, thanks for reaching out.

Cars

In China, hundreds of factories are either idle or will soon be idle because they are in the wrong part of the auto industry, namely the part that is concerned with internal combustion engines. As of 2023, China produced 17.7 million cars with an internal combustion engine, which is down 37 percent since 2017. Meanwhile, the number of vehicles produced overall is at an all-time high, 30.1 million, bolstered by 9.5 million new energy vehicles. The shift over the course of just six years has posed challenges. For instance, a $1.15 billion Hyundai plant in Chongqing that was built in 2017 with the intention of putting out 300,000 cars per year has since been flipped for a quarter of the investment, as the gas-powered cars it was built to produce fall precipitously out of fashion.

Edward White, Financial Times

Elvers

On a pound-for-pound basis, elvers — baby eels — are some of the most valuable fish harvested in North America. Selling for $2,009 per pound last year, predominantly to Japanese markets, the young eels are caught in rivers and streams, and for the time being have only been caught in significant amounts in Maine. The current quota for elvers in Maine is just under 10,000 pounds per year, which some have thought about cutting amid habitat concerns, but given the sheer value of the catch has some highly-motivated harvesters.

Patrick Whittle, The Associated Press

Lunch

A new study out of the University of Alberta looked at the impacts of 23,000 fires across North America between 2017 and 2020. It’s long been the case that night mitigated the fires as cool air and moist ground stymies the advancing embers, but lately as the climate has warmed it’s been more and more common for fires to simply burn through the night. The researchers identified 1,095 fires that burned on through morning, and found that the main contributing factor was dryness and vegetation on the landscape. The period from 2000 to 2021 was the driest 22-year span in the southwestern U.S. in the past 1,200 years. Overall, 20 percent of large wildfires which burned over 1,000 hectares had an overnight burning event, and the top 10 worst fires had 27 nights of overnight burning.

Chelsea Harvey, E&E News

Google

Google is best known as a tech company, but it’s got a formidable food business nonetheless, as it seeks to feed its armies of workers in a crucial tech perk that helps it maintain talent. The company’s food waste, however, threatens its ambitious climate goals, so it’s trying to make the whole operation more efficient without ticking off workers. The company prepares over 240,000 meals per day across 386 cafes, as well as 1,500 microkitchens and 49 food trucks in a fairly expansive operation. For perspective, there are only 360 Cheesecake Factory restaurant locations in North America, so the company is really operating at an impressive logistical scale, and a tweak as simple as adjusting when eggs are prepared cut food waste for the dish by 44 percent.

Deena Shanker, Bloomberg

UFOs

A new survey found that 63 percent of American adults — including 83 percent of people who think there is definitely life on other planets — think that the U.S. government knows more about UFOs than it’s telling the public, compared to just 11 percent who said that the government has told the public everything it knows. That said, while UFOs are often associated with hypothetical alien spacecraft in the popular imagination, the term itself is deliberately ambiguous in no small part due to decades of technological and aeronautical skullduggery between espionage-loving superpowers. All told, 32 percent of respondents said that UFOs are always the result of human of other terrestrial activity, another 32 percent said that they might be the result of alien spacecraft visiting Earth, and 36 percent were not sure. That said, 18 percent of respondents said that they themselves have seen something they thought was a UFO. I for one am exhausted by these senseless and useless conspiracy theories, and now if you’ll excuse me, I have to resume clicking the Kate Middleton trending topic and spread conspiracies about the British monarchy, just as my ancestors would have wanted.

David Montgomery, YouGov

Gigs

Delivery drivers around the world must contend with platform bans related to the reviews received from customers on the apps, and in many situations the only way to continue working for delivery services in a city is to pay someone else to maintain a profile on their behalf. In Brazil, when a gig worker is banned from an app like iFood, often they will find their way back into employment by paying 50 or so reais ($10) per shift to someone renting them their profile. Part of that is due to the consolidation in the industry, as iFood controls 80 percent of the food delivery market. According to the gig work union in Brazil, up to 30 percent (500,000 gig workers) may be using someone else’s account to work.

Laís Martins and Daniela Dib, Rest of World

Mary Jane

While many states have begun to legalize the sale of cannabis, plenty of parts of the country are still banning it, and nevertheless in those places a vibrant marijuana trade remains. Growing that grass requires sophisticated operations, as as the original entrenched interests have bailed out of the pot industry in pursuit of legal markets, local organized crime syndicates have taken over. Oklahoma is a major site for illegal weed grows, and as it stands the state is home to some 3,000 illegal grows linked to foreign mafias, and there’s somewhere between $18 billion and $44 billion worth of marijuana grown illegally there annually.

Sebastian Rotella and Kirsten Berg, ProPublica, and Garrett Yalch and Clifton Adcock, The Frontier

This week in the unlocked Sunday edition, I spoke to Allegra Rosenberg, who wrote “How Antarctica’s history of isolation is ending — thanks to Starlink” for MIT Technology Review. This story was great, it was a history story, a tech story, and most importantly of all a people story, about the fascinating lives and challenges of the people who spend large parts of their lives on the poles. Technological leaps have changed life for these people, and a new shift is very literally on the horizon. Rosenberg can be found on Twitter and at AllegraRosenberg.com.

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