Numlock News: March 18, 2024 • Spice, Lyme, Starbucks

Mar 18, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

The Spice Must Flow

Dune: Part Two has grossed $494.7 million globally, and will pass the half-billion mark sometime today. The movie has nearly doubled the domestic haul of the first film, and well surpassed the $433 million that movie made worldwide, a real shortening of the way. This weekend, the movie also passed the $100 million mark in Imax cinemas, meaning it rode that worm to the seventh-fastest film to nail that milestone. Keep it up, and we may get to some of the truly weird stuff.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

The Canal Must Flow

The Panama Canal Authority is indicating that the worst is now over at the critical link between Atlantic and Pacific, after restrictions on transits successfully averted a serious crisis. Thanks to the conservation measures implemented, water levels have fallen by a foot over the course of the year ending March 12, compared to three feet over the prior year. That said, it’s been rough; pre-drought, the canal saw 38 transits per day, but that’s fallen to 24 vessels per day. By the end of the month, however, that will be upped to 27 vessels per day as the authority anticipates the dawn of the rainy season. There’s been a bit of a cost: The new, larger Neopanamax locks conserve water, but make freshwater Gatun Lake more saline with the addition of seawater, and as a result the lake’s salinity will probably hit 0.35 parts per thousand this year, up from a baseline of 0.05 parts per thousand in 2016.

Peter Millard, Michael McDonald and Eric Roston, Bloomberg

The Milkshakes Must Flow

Starbucks is now the second-largest fast food chain in the world, surpassing Subway to be behind just McDonald’s. Starbucks added 3,000 new locations in 2023, bringing its footprint to 38,587, which puts them over the 36,516 Subway locations but just behind the 41,882 locations of McDonald’s. Per location, the milkshake monger is crushing the sandwich artist residency: Starbucks made $28 billion in U.S. sales in 2022, while Subway made just $10.3 billion. McD’s is in an entirely different class, making $120 billion in systemwide sales globally.

Angela L. Pagán, The Takeout

Working

A new survey conducted by political science researchers at Duke and Loyola found that only 116 state legislators in the entire United States currently or most recently worked in manual labor, the service industry, clerical jobs or labor union jobs, out of around 7,400 state legislators in the entire country. That’s 1.6 percent of state legislators, compared to 50 percent of the entire working population of the country. Indeed, 10 states lack a single legislator from a working class job. Alaska has the highest percentage, with three out of 60 lawmakers, while New Hampshire has the highest total, with eight of their 420 legislators.

Robbie Sequeira, Stateline

Tick Tock

A new pill from Tarsus Pharmaceuticals has had a compelling early-stage trial when it comes to a tick-killing medication, one that will kill ticks on people before they can transmit Lyme disease, with effects lasting 30 days. It takes 36 to 48 hours before the Lyme bacteria can be transmitted, and while such medications have existed for animals, the increase in tick-borne disease has prompted an increased investment into human-based defenses. In the Phase II trial, 97 percent of ticks in the high dose and 92 percent of ticks in the low-dose group had died within a day, compared to 5 percent of ticks in the placebo. A month out, the pill was still killing 90 percent of ticks.

Emily Mullin, Wired

Ethylene Oxide

The EPA has finalized its updated regulations of ethylene oxide, which is used to sterilize medical equipment and has been found to be more dangerous than previously known. A 2016 analysis found that it’s 30 percent more toxic to adults and 60 percent more toxic to children than previously understood, with exposure linked to cancers of the lungs, breasts and lymph nodes, and a 2019 study found that 96 such businesses operate in 32 states. The new regulations will cut emissions by 90 percent, but in a concession to industry the rule will take effect within two to three years rather than instantly.

Lylla Younes, Grist

Corruption

Lots of historical film records have been destroyed, deteriorated, lost, or have otherwise thwarted film preservationists, and as it stands the current arrangement with digital media isn’t especially great. Files can be corrupted, disks can fail and servers can break, and this isn’t even theoretical; there’s a famous Toy Story 2 story about how the movie was deleted, but recovered from a remote worker’s computer, and preservationists report that digital records routinely encounter problems already. While libraries are a massive value for studios — the 4,000 films and 17,000 episodes of the MGM library is worth $3.4 billion to Amazon — the preservation is not seeing adequate investment. File formats change all the time, but 150,000 sequential TIFF image files and an audio track are forever.

Gary Baum and Carolyn Giardina, The Hollywood Reporter

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