Numlock News: October 16, 2019 • Casino, Grades, VSCO
Numlock News: October 16, 2019 • Casino, Grades, VSCO
By Walt Hickey
Gamble
MGM Resorts has sold the Bellagio Casino in Las Vegas to Blackstone Group for $4.25 billion, or roughly 27 times the amount stolen from the Bellagio Casino in Ocean’s Eleven. MGM also sold Circus Circus plus another 47 acres to a real estate investor for another $825 million. They’ll continue to operate the casinos, leasing them back from the owners, as they attempt to become a landless casino. The annual rent for the casino is $245 million, proving that the greatest heist of all is a real estate investment trust.
Christopher Palmeri, Bloomberg
Apple TV+
On November 1, Apple will launch a slate of nine television shows. The company — better known for its iconic hardware like the Apple Lisa, its revolutionary mobile devices such as the Newton, and the game-changing “text messaging, yet blue” — is betting big on services, as it hopes to leverage some fraction of its 1.4 billion users to pay $5 per month for access to several television shows. What they may lack in content they certainly make up for in market penetration, as an analyst estimated they could scoop up 100 million TV+ subscribers by 2023 to generate $7 billion to $10 billion in revenue. Worst case scenario, Apple TV+ is just a wealth transfer from the Apple Corporation to Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, so I’m cool with it either way.
Lesley Goldberg and Natalie Jarvey, The Hollywood Reporter
Owls
The Fish and Wildlife Service is enacting a $5 million program to kill up to 3,600 owls in Washington, Oregon, and California, and we should probably hear them out. So far, they’ve killed over 2,400 barred owls, which are native to the East Coast and are out-competing the native spotted owls, an endangered species that has long been in decline. The barred owls reproduce more often, have more babies, and eat the same prey, and now outnumber the spotted owls. Proposed in 2012, the program began in 2015, and it’s hardly the first time the government tried to shoot its way to conservation — it’s legal to kill sea lions and some seabirds to protect endangered salmon, and cowbirds to save the warbler — but picking a team in this owl vs. owl fight has been controversial.
Phuong Le, The Associated Press
Used Cars
An analysis of 2,429 used vehicles across 12 states and at 28 AutoNation dealerships found that fully 285 had un-repaired safety recalls. With over 300 dealerships, AutoNation is the largest car retailer in America and about one out of every nine of their used cars contained defects per the report, which is from the US PIRG Education Fund and the Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety Foundation. Of those vehicles, 69 contained the infamous Takata airbags that have been linked to 24 deaths. Currently, it’s prohibited to sell a new vehicle with an unfixed recall, but no such law exists that prevents used cars under recall from being sold.
NBA
The NBA sees teams play 82 games per year in six months, over 50,000 miles per season of travel, which is 20,000 more than NFL teams face. In 2018-19, teams played every 2.07 days, had 13.3 back to back sets and on average flew 250 miles per day for 25 weeks. Needless to say that kind of schedule has a pretty serious strain on sleep health. The league is wising up: they’ve reduced back to back games for the past five seasons and there will be 12.4 per team this coming season on average.
Grades
In a situation that would have legitimately destroyed my fragile emotional state as a youth, today’s parents can now check their children’s grades on a day-to-day basis. On one hand that is a beneficial display of educational transparency on behalf of schools, but on the other hand it is basically a tool designed to torture parents with a mildly obsessive nature about the well-being of their children. The data bears that out: Jupiter Ed Inc. is one developer of online grade books for four million students worldwide, and while 50 percent of families with access to the grades never actually log on, 14 percent of them — one in seven families! — check their children’s grades at least once a day. In order to cool their jets, 8 percent of schools have gone so far as to take grades offline. There’s a reason parent-teacher conferences are like once a quarter, tops.
Julie Jargon, The Wall Street Journal
VSCO
VSCO is a photo enhancement software that lets photographers crank up the saturation on their images to make them pop. It’s also spawned a very specific subculture over the past several months, the carefree and beachy #VSCOgirl on Instagram and TikTok. That inadvertent publicity has been seriously great for the app, as 21 million of the 200 million downloads since 2011 — about 10 percent — have happened since May, and it now sits at number five in Apple’s App Store for 'photo and video’ apps and number three in Google’s photography sections. Not bad for accidental advertising related to a social media burn.
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Previous 2019 Sunday special editions: Game of Thrones · Concussion Snake Oil · Skyglow · Juul · Chris Ingraham · Invasive Species · The Rat Spill · The Sterling Affairs · Snakebites · Bees · Deep Fakes · Artificial Intelligence · Marijuana · Mussels ·
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