Numlock News: November 27, 2024 • Moana, Panama, Cocoa

Nov 27, 2024

By Walt Hickey

We’re off for the rest of the week for Thanksgiving. There will be a Sunday Edition on Sunday, and then we’ll see you all again next week!

Supply

My fellow Americans, it is a challenging time. The world is on the brink and stands on the edge of peril. The omens are ill; the signs distressing; the portents dreadful. According to the latest data compiled by our finest industrialists and researchers, the reality is clear: We are, it seems, cuckoo for cocoa. Prices have reached $9,282 per metric ton, about 30 percent above the price at the same time last year and up 45 percent from their low in October. Globally, chocolatiers are in a panic mode, as companies that exhausted their stockpiles of cocoa awaiting a cheaper price are now stuck with empty warehouses and a need to rebuild cocoa coffers that are at their lowest levels since 2005.

Ilena Peng, Bloomberg

Antiquities

The Manhattan District Attorney is repatriating 30 Mesoamerican objects worth $500,000 to Mexico after seizing them in a looting and antiquities trafficking investigation. Among the items is a Ballgame yoke, from 300 to 600 AD, which is a likeness of a ball used in one of the first known recorded ball games and which likely served as a trophy or as part of a ceremony and a status symbol, basically an ancient Mesoamerican Super Bowl ring, or at least participation trophy. New York is a hub of the antiquities trade and thus also a hub of the black market; over the current district attorney’s term, the Antiquities Trafficking Unit has recovered 2,100 antiquities from 39 countries collectively valued at $250 million.

Torey Akers, The Art Newspaper

Moana

It’ll be a bustling weekend at the movieplex, as Moana 2 hits theaters on the heels of Wicked and Gladiator II debuting. Moana 2 will open in 4,200 North American theaters today. There’s a line where the sky meets the sea, and it’s $135 million, which is what it’s currently projected to make, with the upper end of expectations coming in at $145 million over the five-day Thanksgiving weekend. If it pulls it off, it’ll beat Frozen II’s record of $125 million over the five-day weekend. It’s got a lot going for it: Despite being released way back in 2016, according to Nielsen, Moana continues to remain the single most-streamed movie in the United States, accounting for 11.6 billion minutes watched on Disney+ last year, seven years later.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Fluoride

The incoming Trump administration’s health team has an eye to eliminate water fluoridation in the United States. Municipalities add fluoride to water because it’s an effective public health measure, a powerful way to stem tooth decay and avoid infections. A plan to eliminate public fluoridation has naturally gotten interest in some quarters — in anticipation of a national scourge of cavities, dental supply giant Henry Schein saw its shares spike 7.5 percent on the news — and it could potentially juice the private dental fluoridation industry, which is worth $4 billion as of 2024 and projected to rise to $11 billion by 2034.

Patrick Sisson, Sherwood News

A Man, A Plan, A Canal, A Land Bridge, An Additional Canal, Panama

The Panama Canal is coming off a rough year, when drought forced the canal to reduce the number of daily transits. Typically, 36 to 38 ships pass through the canal every day, but at the worst of the drought only 22 ships were permitted to transit per day, a level that almost went down to 18 ships per day, which was incredibly challenging for the global shipping industry. Now the canal authorities are floating some new ideas to increase throughput, one of which would be a land bridge, essentially a $1.2 billion to $1.4 billion overland corridor where ships would offload cargo, move it by road or rail across the isthmus, and then load it onto a ship on the other side, a somewhat contentious proposal that only Maersk has been especially interested in. That’s in addition to the proposed $1.6 billion new reservoir and dam that would supplement water into Gatun Lake and facilitate another 12 to 13 transits per day.

Ian Putzger, The Loadstar

High School

A high school football team in Virginia grabbed national headlines after the school, the public Hayfield High, straight-up poached a championship football team from the winning school one county over. The school went 10-0 against other schools in Fairfax County and outscored opponents 633-20 in those games. Last week in the playoffs, it went 75-0 in the first half and then played for time in the back half to win 75-7. The second-round game was scheduled for Tuesday when, in a shocking twist, Hayfield forfeited, after a local newspaper’s investigation found texts that appeared to show the school’s athletic director allegedly boasting of a plan to abuse the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act to pretend that key athletes were unhoused, and then use the law intended to protect homeless children to build and acquire a high school football team lock, stock and barrel.

Dave McKenna, Defector and Sravan Gannavarapu and Asra Q. Nomani, Fairfax County Times

Deer

According to the University of Georgia Extension data, deer are responsible for causing $152 million in damages to the cotton crop annually, the single worst pest of any kind for the crop. The data was derived from 525 growers on 449,821 acres, 29 consultants on 352,625 acres, and 16 university personnel on 259,000 acres. Overall, somewhere between 33 percent and 41 percent of those acres of cotton were eaten up in some capacity by deer. Today the population of deer in Georgia is between 1.1 million and 1.2 million, up from 6,000 deer in 1950. Man, we probably should not have killed all those wolves.

Chris Bennett, Farm Journal

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