Numlock News: March 30, 2023 • Folio, Ciclomotores, Pirates

Mar 30, 2023

Latin

The top 25 Latin music tours in 2019 brought in gross sales of $251.3 million on 2.8 million tickets sold. In 2022, the top 25 Latin music tours brought in $990.8 million, and moved 8 million tickets. A huge component of that growth was Bad Bunny, who grossed $373.5 million over the period, but the overall field is growing very, very rapidly and is a particularly bright spot in the music industry. Latin music tour success is growing up and down the chart: At the top, the top six tours of last year each out-grossed the top tour of 2019, and the other 19 tours in the top 25 still out-grossed the entire top 25 tours of 2019.

Leila Cobo, Billboard

Delivery

In Colombia, the main delivery app is Rappi. The delivery drivers are very often migrants from neighboring countries, particularly Venezuela, where a 2019 report found 57 percent of Rappi drivers in Bogotá and Medellín were from. Upgrading a pedaled bicycle to a powered bicycle makes their lives much easier and deliveries go faster, but there's an issue: It can cost 2 million pesos ($415) to buy the cheapest motorcycle on the market, which is a lot of money for drivers who might earn an average of 80,000 pesos ($16.60) a day. A cheaper option is a ciclomotor, a small fuel engine attached to a bike's chain, which can be obtained for about 1.5 million pesos, or about $311. The issue is that these are noisy and pollution-causing, and the issue of how to keep the delivery drivers moving is coming to a head.

José Luis Peñarredonda, Rest of World

Men of Good Fortune

It's a huge week for the Shakespeare fandom, as a collection of five editions of each of the four folios and a first edition of his poems are up for sale at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which I can only assume is basically a comic con for the classics. The asking price for the books is $10.5 million, most of which is the price of the First Folio in the collection which stands at $7.5 million. Only 232 copies of the book are known to exist, and all but 27 of them are in institutional collections. The copy of the Second Folio is on sale for $550,000, the copy of the Third Folio — of which only 27 extant copies are known to remain, just three in private hands — is priced at $1.5 million, and the Fourth Folio is going for $225,000. There are just 65 copies of the first collected edition of Poems out there, and this one is up for $750,000.

James Tarmy, Bloomberg

Nonalcoholic

Nearly 10 percent of all beer consumed in Germany is nonalcoholic, according to the Deutscher Brauer-Bund, the German brewer's association. Germany has been a huge market not just for nonalcoholic beers — with some 700 brands on the market — but also the technology required to produce them. Nonalcoholic beer is normal in Germany, with 680 million liters sold in 2021, and with a centuries-long brewing culture it's also of higher quality and offered in a wider range than the nonalcoholic beer available in other places with similar rates of consumption, like the Middle East or Spain. Somewhat amazingly, the modern era of nonalcoholic beer in Germany began in the early 1970s with an East German brewery that was attempting to make a beer for drivers, AUBI, or Motorist Beer.

Will Hawkes, VinePair

Pirates

A Danish-owned, Liberian-flagged oil and chemical tanker called the Monjasa Reformer was hijacked by five armed people 140 miles off the cost of Port Pointe-Noire in the Republic of Congo. The crew sought refuge in a safe room, but communications channels are down and on Tuesday the vessel was spotted 540 miles further off shore from where it was last seen.

Reuters

Caught!

The two fisherman who were caught with walleye that they had stuffed with weights at a walleye fishing tournament in Ohio pleaded guilty to a felony and a misdemeanor in Cuyahoga County court. The pair of cheaters were originally charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor, owing in no small part to the $30,000 prize in the fishing competition. As part of the plea deal, two felonies were dropped and they copped to felony cheating during a sporting event and a misdemeanor of illegal possession of wildlife. Prosecutors recommended six months of probation, the forfeiture of their boat, and a three-year loss of fishing licenses.

Matthew Richmond, Ideastream Public Media

Warning: This One Is Gross

Roaches are evolving at a remarkable rate to compete with new strategies humans have developed for killing them. For a while, roach bait was made to be sugary and sweet, to attract attention of the roaches. This worked really well, and too well at killing roaches that like sweet things; a new mutation emerged in roaches where they hated sweets. This, however, did end up negatively impacting their ability to mate. Male roaches would secrete a solution containing maltose that tastes sweet in order to attract and mate with female roaches, a disgusting process that takes about 90 minutes. A new study found that the glucose-averse males — the evolutionary result of roaches that resisted glucose roach bait — were now producing a secretion that contained not maltose but the more complex chemical maltotriose, and they were having more sexual success as a result: A study found that sugar-loving male roaches took 3.3 seconds to begin mating, while sugar-free males took just 2.1 seconds and succeeded 60 percent of the time.

Bethany Brookshire, The New York Times

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