Numlock News: May 9, 2025 • Diamonds, Gold, Law & Order

May 09, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Gold

A funny thing is happening in the Japanese gold market: trade disruptions caused by the United States have prompted a sale on the metal that revealed rampant smuggling in the country. Essentially, the world is buying up lots of gold these days, and Japan is down to sell, doing so at a monthly rate that’s about five times higher than a decade ago. Based on market prices and the 281.1 billion yen (US$1.94 billion) in gold exported in February, about 20 tonnes of the metal are leaving Japan per month, well outpacing the 190 tonnes exported in all of 2023. But here’s the thing: Japan doesn’t really produce gold. Generally, there isn’t enough to even meet the domestic supply. The country only produces about 100 tonnes per year, often through recycling electronics and making copper. However, given the amount of gold leaving the country, Japan’s customs agency is wondering how the devil that much of it got into the country. Japan imposes a 10 percent tax on imported gold, and it sure looks like a ton of the metal is smuggled in unreported. There are other signs that smuggling from organized criminal syndicates is on the rise. In 2024, authorities seized 1.2 tonnes of smuggled gold, four times the figure in 2023, across 493 cases.

Yohei Hirose, Nikkei Asia

Diamonds

De Beers, the diamond mining colossus, is currently sitting on a $2 billion stockpile of unsold diamonds. This has been understandably frustrating for the company, which is blaming the increasing popularity of lab-grown diamonds for its troubles. People are more and more cool with getting shiny rocks from labs rather than mines, and Walmart said that sales of lab-grown diamonds are up 175 percent last year compared to 2023. De Beers itself tried to get some action in the trend with Lightbox, a fashion jewelry label introduced in 2018 when synthetic diamonds were about 10 percent cheaper than mined diamonds. However, now that synthetics are about 90 percent cheaper than mined diamonds, De Beers is skittish and announced this week that they’re killing off the Lightbox brand altogether.

Elizabeth Paton, The New York Times

Law, Order

Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU have each been renewed for a new season on NBC, with SVU entering its 27th season and the classic Law & Order hitting season 25. As of the end of this season, the two shows will have an aggregate of 1,096 episodes, and at this point, I feel like I really must remind people that New York City is a lovely place. Even though you’re getting hours worth of murders and sickos every week, we actually have things pretty well in hand and the city’s safer than pretty much every other large municipality in the country. NBC says that 44 million people have watched at least some of the two shows this season, and I do think we risk getting the wrong idea across. The third currently running Law & Order: Organized Crime is midway through season five, and again, we really did rein that in, I assure you. Most of those guys moved out to the suburbs and are just doing crypto stuff these days.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Catch Me If You Can

In the coastal waters of Hawaii, mollusks known as horned helmets ruthlessly chase down red pencil urchins for prey in an endurance contest in which each participant is sprinting for their lives. Naturally, since this is an urchin and a sea snail, the speed is not particularly fast: when an urchin detects an incoming sea snail coming directly to its position, it cranks up its speed up from a blazing 8 centimeters per minute to an eye-watering 15 centimeters per minute, attempting to shake the pursuer.

Krista Langlois, bioGraphic

Sheeple

New Zealand has historically retained a remarkably high sheep-to-person ratio, and with a current population of 23.6 million sheep and 5.3 million people, we’re currently talking a healthy 4.5 sheep-to-person ratio. This ratio is, in fact, a steep decrease from 22 sheep per person in 1982, when farming was still the top economic draw. That year, the industry had over 70 million sheep in its care for just 3.2 million people.

Charlotte Graham-McLay, The Associated Press

Trade

AI-powered humanoid robots are doomed to be an early casualty of the trade war, given the escalating tariffs between the United States and China. Generally, U.S. technology powers the brain of humanoid robots, while Chinese companies are 63 percent of the humanoid robot supply chain when it comes to the body, including actuators, sensors and batteries. Because of the trade war, the Americans can’t get body parts at a viable price, and Chinese companies can’t get chips to move those bodies.

Kingling Lo, Rest of World

Insurance

Car insurance rates have been rather high and are due for a decrease, but personal auto insurers have essentially cut off the vast majority of requests to state regulators. In March, there were 482 requests to lower prices due to negative changes in personal insurance rates. However, in April, there were only 95 requests. The culprit will be familiar: since the main cost for insurers is repairing or replacing cars, a process that requires both new car parts and new cars, and since the current price for imported parts and cars is currently set arbitrarily in Washington, insurers are reluctant to reduce rates as they don’t know how much car parts will cost anymore. Given the reciprocal tariff proposal as of mid-April, the insurers estimated claims would cost $31 billion to $61 billion more with the tariffs.

Telis Demos, The Wall Street Journal

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Ty Schalter who’s out with a really delightful project called Fun Factor Pod. The show covers the early history of the video game magazine, and it’s a fascinating look back in time at a really crucial era in media that continues to reverberate to this very day. Ty can be found at FunFactorPod.com, the podcast is available wherever you listen:

Numlock Sunday: Ty Schalter on the dawn of video games media and Fun Factor

Walter Hickey

May 4

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