Numlock News: May 1, 2024 • Blues, Brakes, Velveeta
By Walt Hickey
Blues
The blues, the musical genre, have had a characteristically difficult time, and have been financially suffering. Now, if there’s a genre that is downright built for such conditions, it’s blues, but the numbers are rough right now for artists. There are glimmers of hope — streaming numbers hit 2.5 billion streams last year, up 41 percent since the 1.7 billion streams in 2020 — but the scattered nature of the genre and the wide number of small artists means that your typical blues musician is not benefiting from the transition to streaming, and lesser-known artists would kill for a chance to make a deal at the crossroads under the current economic conditions besetting the genre.
Velveeta
Not quite cheese, not quite not, the notorious rectangular prism that is Velveeta is a keystone ingredient in many American dishes, though the less said about what precisely the processed cheese product is, the better. Me and Velveeta go way back — my childhood home claims Velveeta as its core innovation — but Kraft Heinz has big plans for the substance beyond mixing it with pasta shells and emulsifying mac and cheese. As the person from the Los Alamos of Velveeta — and it’s left as an exercise to the reader as to whether nuclear weapons or processed cheese product has had a more profound impact on the trajectory of the American experiment — it comes as a shock that Velveeta is launching queso formulas in jars, so if the block is unsettling now you can dabble in near-cheese in a charming jar, where cheese-adjacent material has long dwelled. According to the company, they moved 125 million pounds of Velveeta loaf last year, which the company said can serve 20 people in a sitting.
Christopher Doering, Food Dive
Paramount
Cable company Spectrum is down to the wire with Paramount over the fate of a number of cable channels, as Spectrum wants to drop several of the less popular channels and bundle more streaming services. For instance, MTV2, MTV Classic and other MTVs beyond the main fixture are on the table, with MTV2 securing just 48,000 viewers on average during prime time in 2023, down 13 percent year over year. In fairness, where else can you find a different episode of Ridiculousness playing at the same time as the episode of Ridiculousness currently airing on MTV? It’s a pickle. Other networks in peril are BET Her (which averaged 41,000 viewers in prime time), BET Hip-Hop and BET Soul.
Mask
Razer, the gaming equipment company, came out with a device in October of 2021 that purported to offer users similar capabilities as an N95 respirator, claiming that the Zephyr unit and its filters were FDA-registered, lab-tested, and offered better protection than cloth masks. As we all recall, October 2021 was a pretty interesting time in everyone’s lives, and these claims found purchase, with the company making over $1 million for their efforts. Much of those claims turned out to not be true, and a third-party test found that it reached a maximum PFE level of 86.3 percent with the fans on, a figure that is considerably lower than the 95 percent advertised. This led to an extensive complaint from the FTC, and this week resulted in a $1,171,254.33 proposed settlement that would claw back every dime of revenue made from the Zephyr, plus a $100,000 civil penalty.
Fall Guy
The Fall Guy, the excellent new feature from Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, is projected to earn over $30 million this weekend to kick off the summer box office, with the Barbenheimer pair hoping to potentially open to $35 million to $40 million. It was a pricy flick — $130 million budget — but the movie is opening well internationally, and may benefit from positive buzz. Among its challengers will be Challengers, but a real fascination will be the re-release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which is counting on a combination of nostalgia as well as a total lack of memory regarding the actual quality of that film. That said, I’d watch the pod race on the big screen for $15, no question.
Nearsighted
In 2000, 23 percent of the global population was nearsighted, a figure that is projected to rise to 50 percent of the global population by 2050 given current trends. That carries a massive health care cost. In the United States, spending on contacts, eye tests, glasses and related expenses is as high as $7.2 billion per year, and the global rise of myopia is only projected to fuel that. Studies have linked myopia to a lack of time spent outdoors, with one paper finding that studies pegged the odds of myopia decreasing with every hour spent outdoors per week.
Andrew Herbert, The Conversation
Automatic
A new rule finalized Monday by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration will require automatic emergency brakes in all cars sold in the U.S. by 2029, which would kick in when the vehicle detects an oncoming crash with another vehicle or a pedestrian in front of the car. The projection from the NHTSA forecasts that it will prevent 360 deaths and at least 24,000 injuries every year. The total cost of implementing the rule is projected to be $354 million in 2020 dollars.
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Shells & Cheese, a hot dog w/out a bun, a domestic beer, and MTV Classic sounds like a solo night at home for a forty-something dude. Yes, I resemble that, but…
I (now) have a car with optional emergency braking, which I disabled after one experience—my car, it turns out, is a Nervous Nellie, I had PLENTY of room to stop and was doing so. Much as I disliked that experience, I have also been hit by a car as a pedestrian, which sucked way more. After writing this I’m thinking I should enable the braking again….