Numlock News: May 30, 2018
The company behind the largest game of last year is suing the company behind the largest game of this year, with PUBG Corp. taking the Korean unit of Epic Games to court over allegations they infringed on their copyright. Both games involve the mechanic of having 100 contenders compete to be the last player standing. In February, Fortnite first passed 3.4 million concurrent players, which topped the PUBG record of 3.3 million set in January. The silver lining? My first attempts to read up on I.P. law were related to the nightmarish Gordian Knot of movie licensing deals for Marvel Comics characters, so perhaps this legal fight will teach the tweens of today about the legal system.
Yuji Nakamura and Sam Kim, Bloomberg
Looking at more traditional games, it's been a rough season for baseball, with an average game attendance of 27,207 spectators going into Memorial Day Weekend. That's down 6 percent from the 28,931 average attendance over the same period last season. Maybe the fact that there were more strikeouts in April than there were hits in April has something to do with people deciding to do literally anything else besides attend a baseball game?
Ronald Blum, The Associated Press
Vegas is certainly bullish on the Golden State Warriors winning the NBA Finals over whatever team LeBron James is currently on. The Warriors open as 12-point favorites in Game 1 over LeBron James and several other men who aren't important right now. Indeed, in the seven-game series, according to Vegas the Warriors are the largest Finals favorites to win over James (and his staff) in at least 16 seasons.
David Purdum, ESPN
De Beers, the largest miner of diamonds on the planet, has done the once unthinkable and introduced a new brand that includes synthetic diamonds. It takes about 500 hours to produce a diamond in a lab, and that stone shares the same exact physical and chemical features as one mined by a person who, say, was having an extremely unpleasant time due to the working conditions at their job. The synthetic stones start at $200 for a quarter carat to $800 for a full carat stone, or about a tenth of the price of mined diamonds.
Ivana Kottasová, CNN
The Big Four accounting firms — Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG — audit 97 percent of U.S. companies, and every one of the top 100 corporations in the U.K. These four have greatly expanded beyond simple accounting companies; each of the big four has diversified into a business services company, which critics say has the potential to cloud their essential mission of ensuring accurate accounting.
Richard Brooks, The Guardian
A first-of-its-kind survey that attempted to quantify the impact that #MeToo allegations had on viewership found only two implicated artists — Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. – for whom more people said their viewership habits would change in the wake of the allegations of impropriety. The survey found 46 percent of respondents said the allegations against Spacey would have an impact on whether they decided to watch his work compared to 36 percent who said they would not.
Joanna Piacenza, Morning Consult
In what is the correct position on the mineral if the wrong opinion onthe Nirvana song, the nation of Chile is skeptical that Lithium has the potential to drastically improve its fortunes. The nation sits upon the largest pile of lithium — an essential component in the manufacture of batteries — on the planet, with an estimated 47 percent of global reserves. But Chile has also been burned by this sort of mania before, as it went from being the top fertilizer producer on the earth to a state of economic collapse when processes to make synthetic fertilizerswere created in the early 20th century.
Laura Millan Lombrana, Bloomberg