Numlock News: March 4, 2026 • Lights, Cameras, Frozen
By Walt Hickey
Tanker
As the price of oil spikes amid conflict in the Persian Gulf, the cost to send a supertanker along the Middle East to China route has quadrupled since mid-February. From the United States, the cost to hire a ship from the Gulf to Asia has reached $26.9 million, which breaks down to $13 per barrel. That is the largest share of WTU crude oil costs that transit has occupied since 2020. The very large crude carriers can move two million barrels at a time, and are now going for $481,000 a day.
Mortgages
For a number of reasons, mortgage loan applications have been way down for the past three years, with 96 of the 100 lowest weekly index readings since 1999 occurring over that time period. Mainly, the market is cold: home builders have cut back on new construction, the pandemic-era rates were so low that nobody who got one wants to leave them behind and, most importantly, incomes have not kept pace with home prices. In 2021, a family needed an income of $79,600 to qualify for a median-priced home. As of 2024, that figure stands at $126,700. When houses do move, cash is king: the portion of all-cash purchases rose 33 percent from 2020 to 2023. In fact, cash buyers accounted for half of home sales in New York City in the first six months of 2025.
Household Solar
While a handful of market constraints and regulatory impediments have prevented the widespread adoption of household plug-in solar in the United States, lawmakers in 27 states have introduced legislation to give the tech a green light. This is happening particularly in the West, where solar energy is abundant and electricity rates can be rough. Plug-in solar is also known as balcony solar; not the big installations you could slap on a roof, but one or two solar panels attached to a microinverter and then into any household outlet. This has the ability to offset something like 15 percent to 20 percent of energy usage. In famously thrifty Germany, it’s a hit, with some four million units installed.
Lanterns
About 80 percent of all the iconic red lanterns synonymous with Lunar New Year celebrations come from a single small town in China: Tuntou in Hebei province. The craft originated in the region of northern China hundreds of years ago, and Tuntou’s hand-made lanterns have stayed competitive against factory production. That said, city life is attractive for the town’s youth, so a labor shortage may loom.
Cameras
New York City will activate new red light cameras at 50 new intersections a week every week for the next five weeks, with the target of reaching cameras in 600 intersections by the end of 2026. Prior to the expansion, the city was capped at 150 intersections with a traffic enforcement camera. However, the program has been a hit: the DOT reports that in intersections where cameras were installed, red light running is down 73 percent, T-bone crashes are down 65 percent and rear-end collisions are down 49 percent.
Frozen
Frozen food sales were up 45 percent in the 52-week period ending September 2025 compared to the same period a year prior, with sales hitting $87 billion. Sales of frozen meat and poultry were up by double, and frozen snacks were up 70 percent. Fresh food is still the preference, but frozen has got fans, with 15 percent of respondents indicating they believed the quality of frozen food was superior to the fresh food available.
Pierre Delecto, At Scale
A new research paper published on Arxiv conducted a number of experiments using LLMs to try to identify key biographical details of people posting online under a pseudonym. Researchers were able to successfully deanonymize users at a recall rate as high as 68 percent. Another pseudonymity-cracking experiment used a questionnaire filled out by 125 participants to try to identify participants, which succeeded seven percent of the time. Either way, large language models are pretty good at collating this kind of thing, information that might be dripped out bit by bit over years of posting.
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The LLM stuff trying to dig into someone’s background could yield all sorts of really bad hallucinations.
Does something I posted on USENET in 1996 tell you anything at all useful because I laughed at a response?
Or was it really me?
Prove it, Grok.