Numlock News: March 29, 2024 • Trading Cards, Kite Fights, Breadfruit

Mar 29, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Kite Fighting

A popular competitive sport in Brazil is kite fighting, where competitors try to cut down their opponents kites while avoiding getting their own kite severed in the process. It’s dangerous in some ways — falling sharp kite strings called cerol are a problem when confronted with roads, utilities or pedestrians. As a result, kite fighting has been banned in 15 states in Brazil and lots of municipalities, but renegade creators and their legions of fans continue to engage in the game and promote it online. São Paulo authorities claim that the number of personal accidents associated with the sharp strings increased from 17 to 25 from 2021 to 2023. It’s particularly dangerous for motorcycle riders, and some governments are making string-cutting antennas that can be installed on bikes mandatory, with the city of Campinas giving away 2,100 protective antennas away last year.

Matheus Andrade and Daniela Dib, Rest of World

Census

The Office of Management and Budget has decided to proceed with a plan to expand the data collection about race and ethnicity in the 2030 census, which has long been sought after by researchers hoping to get a more nuanced view of the composition of the country. The decision will offer seven categories, along with instructions that say to select all that apply, which will help capture respondents of multiple races, and will for the first time break out Middle Eastern or North African as a new racial or ethnic category, one which previously was just under the government definition of “White.”

Hansi Lo Wang, NPR

Breadfruit

Breadfruit is a popular plant grown in many places around the world where it’s hot and wet, but one which has evaded American palates. One way or another, the country is getting hotter and in some places wetter, and so the territory for breadfruit is expanding, with some thinking it’ll have its moment soon. A single tree can produce 400 pounds or more of fruit in a year with no human intervention, it’s calorie and calcium dense, it’s got starchy flesh, it can produce fruit quickly, and it lives for decades. The downsides are that the trees have no tolerance for cold and that current varietals spoil quickly, best for two to three days before softening; researchers in Hawaii are testing out new varieties for different conditions.

Zoë Schlanger, The Atlantic

ABV

The Euro 2024 soccer tournament begins in June, and hundreds of thousands of fans from England and Scotland will likely travel to Germany for the festivities. The U.K.’s government has been attempting to encourage their notoriously well-behaved football fans to be normal abroad, and the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office has been leaning on one point in particular: Yeah, the beer is going to be stronger there, so keep that in mind during the benders to come. Lagers in the U.K. tend to come in at 4.4 percent alcohol by volume, while the beers in Germany are 4.7 percent to 5.4 percent ABV, which doesn’t sound like all that much more, but in the aggregate likely means a more robust form of hooligan on German hooch.

Hannah Staab, VinePair

The Heart of the Cards

Fanatics has made an enormous splash into the sports merchandising business, but in no part of this is that more clear than in trading cards. The company was worth $31 billion as of December 2022, and its collectibles division reached $1 billion in annual sales last year. They got there through a series of audacious moves that put them up against incumbents like Panini and Topps. The latter was controlled by former Disney honcho Michael Eisner until Fanatics scooped the rights to Major League Baseball cards out from under their nose, beguiling Topps’ intentions to go public and prompting Topps to sell to them for $500 million. Fanatics then snagged the rights to NFL and NBA cards from Panini, and then things started going to court. The confrontation is getting serious, including a roiling suit where Panini accused Fanatics of anticompetitive tactics as well as undermining their business by buying up GC Packaging, a company that produced 90 percent of its cards.

Kim Bhasin and Alessandra Migliaccio, Bloomberg

Roll for Loot

Hobby game sales were flat in the United States and Canada last year, up 1 percent year over year to an estimated $2.885 billion. Flat is good; flat means that the explosion seen in the hobby games market during the pandemic, when the market popped from $1.65 billion in 2019 to $2.7 billion in 2021, is still sticking, which is likely a relief to the companies that make trading card games, collectible miniatures, card games, board games and role-playing games. The bulk of that is in the collectible trading card and miniature games, with $1.55 billion going toward that, but with hobby board, card and dice games coming in at a respectable $525 million and role-playing games at $200 million.

Milton Griepp, ICv2

Bonds

Bloomberg’s bond indexes made the seemingly inconsequential decision to reclassify some bonds sold by utilities to raise funds for repairs after a disaster not as corporate bonds, but rather as asset-backed securities. As esoteric as that sentence might sound, the effect has been unmistakable: Collectively, the price changes that resulted from that decision will add $3 billion in costs over the life of the bonds, which will lead to higher utility bills for consumers around the country. The reason is that lots of the massive institutional investors that buy up those bonds are prohibited from buying up asset-backed securities, and since demand is smaller, interest is higher, and the costs get passed on to electricity customers. That $3 billion is a lot of money, even in context; there are $31 billion in recovery bonds outstanding in 2024.

Andrew Ackerman, The Wall Street Journal

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Hunter Walker and Luppe Luppen, authors of The Truce: Progressives, Centrists, and the Future of the Democratic Party. I loved this book, which is wild, because I generally don’t go for political books for personal reading but knowing Hunter and Luppe and their clearheaded and compelling reporting made this one a bona fide page turner. We spoke about Obama’s influence on the party, how parliamentary systems view former leaders, and how Democrats intend to draw in young voters. Walker can be found at Talking Points Memo and on Bluesky, and Luppen can be found at Pawprints and on Twitter.

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