Numlock News: March 20, 2026 •Old Growth Forests, Smugglers, Synthetic Eclipse

Mar 20, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Tobacco

Australia has the most expensive cigarettes in the world, following a devoted anti-tobacco campaign. While the campaign has been incredibly successful in reducing the smoking rate — the percent of Australian adults who smoke daily fell from 22.3 percent in 2001 to 10.6 percent in 2022 — the $1.50 (Australian dollars) per cigarette tobacco tax has Australia’s two million smoker die-hards turning to the black market for their tobacco. A pack-a-day habit costing A$240 (US$171 in USD) makes the illicit market for cigarettes smuggled into the country attractive, especially at A$10 to A$20 per pack. This has, in turn, been a huge financial injection for organized crime. The government has beefed up enforcement, seizing 2.6 billion illicit cigarettes and 509 tons of loose-leaf tobacco last year. However, the cigarettes themselves are so cheap to make — cost of goods sold measured in pennies — that the smugglers don’t take all that much of a hit when the cargos are seized.

Shaun Turton, Nikkei Asia

Movies

The movie business is thriving, just not here; in China, domestic box office receipts hit $7.45 billion last year, up 22 percent year over year. It also hit 1.238 billion admissions (up 22.6 percent) across the country’s 93,187 cinemas. Last year alone, China added another 2,200 venues. Sure, 2026 numbers are down a bit, but that’s mainly because this time last year, Ne Zha 2 was already on its way to becoming the top-grossing animated movie of all time.

Matthew Scott, The Hollywood Reporter

Eclipse

In a tremendous stroke of good luck, the European Space Agency announced it has managed to re-establish communication with a spacecraft on a two-year mission to simulate solar eclipses. Proba-3 has two spacecraft on the mission. One is a 1.4-meter shield that is designed to perfectly block the Sun’s light in order to simulate an eclipse, a phenomenon that would be observed by a coronagraph on the second satellite traveling in tandem with it. That second spacecraft experienced a malfunction on February 14 when it lost its orientation, leading to a solar panel being moved out of synch with the sun, which then drained the batteries and pushed the craft into survival mode. However, it appears that the lost observatory has been tumbling, allowing some sunlight to hit the panels and giving the team a brief window to re-establish a connection and reorient the spacecraft correctly. The hope is that the blackout wasn’t too damaging and that the observation of the Sun’s corona will proceed as hoped. Total solar eclipses that facilitate this kind of observation occur just 60 times a century and last only minutes on Earth, but Proba-3 can pull one off for 10 to 12 hours of observation every week.

Agence France Presse

Retail

According to CoStar, service-oriented tenants now outpace goods-based retail when it comes to leases on retail square footage, with service tenants rising from 40 percent of leasing 15 years ago to just over 50 percent today. As more shopping moves online and as service establishments like gyms, spas, salons and fitness studios remain fully planted in the real world, service establishments have decisively secured a lead. Goods-based retailers lease 96.58 million square feet, and service-based retailers now claim 98.14 million square feet.

Kate King, The Wall Street Journal

Wine

Now’s a great time to get into wine. A confluence of factors has resulted in lots of vino previously off the table for oenophiles on a budget being now priced within reason. For one, the case for wine as an asset class or as an investment has been teetering. If there was a wine bubble, it’s popped. The Liv-ex Fine Wine 1,000 index, which measures secondary market wine prices, has fallen 27 percent off its high notched in September 2022, meaning that many of the people buying wine only as an investment have lost their nerve. Instead, they’ve plowed the money into an S&P 500, which is up 87 percent over the same period. Further, lots of the investors who actually like wine and got into collecting are aging and realizing that the math is no longer in their favor. The volume of imbibing it would take to consume a collection (five bottles a day?) is simply not viable. The result is that if you actually like drinking wine, it’s the best time in years to get your hands on a bottle of good stuff.

Felix Salmon, Bloomberg

Marriage

The number of marriages in South Korea increased by 8.1 percent in a single year, rising to 240,000 marriages in 2025. That’s the third straight annual increase since 2022, the nadir of a decade of declining marriage numbers. Attitudes towards marriage among young Koreans have shifted, as have the social mores around other gender norms that make getting hitched easier. For instance, the share of first marriages where the woman is older than the man is now above 20 percent for the first time on record.

Kim Jaewon, Nikkei Asia

Train Dreams (2025)

A new study published in Science mapped the carbon storage of Swedish forests and found that old-growth forests stored 78 to 89 percent more carbon than managed forests when looking at living trees, dead wood and the soil down to a depth of 60 centimeters. This is a somewhat surprising result — the difference in carbon storage between old-growth and managed forests is three to eight times the difference of previous estimates — and it was painstakingly discovered after ten years of research and extensive fieldwork. This means that converting an old-growth forest into a managed forest through logging and replanting still drastically reduces the landscape’s carbon storage.

Lotte Billing and Anders Ahlström, Lund University

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