Numlock News: October 23, 2024 • Juul, Satellites, Silesaurids
By Walt Hickey
I’m gonna be in the Garbage Day live show tonight at the Bell House in Brooklyn at 7:30 p.m. It’s going to be a really good time! You should check it out if you’re in New York.
Vapes
Some of the most active users of Juul are reporting that they’ve scored remarkably large checks from a class-action lawsuit that alleged Juul misled customers about vapes’ addictiveness and safety. Overall, that ended in $201.9 million being put toward payments for 842,000 valid claims among people who bought Juul products before December 2022. That said, it appears that those who documented their long-term relationship with the vape brand and submitted receipts for pods or pens are making a killing off this, with reports of people getting checks in the amounts of $4,600, $6,200 and $9,000.
Quibi
We all know the story of Quibi, the short-form “quick bites” of content that raised billions of dollars and swiftly imploded after coming to the clear conclusion that people did not want to pay for short-form video and that no other model would emerge. Well, new data indicates that nah, just kidding, people are actually really excited about short-form video and it would be a really great business, in fact, and if anything, Quibi should have just stuck it out a little longer and considered some minor tweaks to its model. Short-form drama apps like ReelShort and DramaBox, which feature one- to two-minute episodes, have racked up $146 million in consumer spending in the first quarter of this year alone, up 8,000 percent year over year, and logged 37 million downloads in that quarter alone. It’s time we rise with one clear voice and tell the Quibi people the truth: Sorry, we were super busy that month, but launch again, trust me, we’d love to watch your shows. For real, just launch again and I guarantee we’ll watch, one hundred percent.
Disaster
Hurricanes cause damage, but even when insured the blow can mean that businesses are unable to reopen and go under. Numbers vary — the Small Business Administration says that a quarter of businesses never reopen after a disaster, but FEMA puts the figure at 43 percent of small businesses that close for good. Within a decade after Katrina hit, for instance, 25 percent of the small businesses in southern Mississippi closed. The dual storms of Helene and Milton have already led to 50,000 applications for relief from the SBA.
Colleen Hagerty, Sherwood News
Comics
The latest data from ICv2 found that comic sales are down 7 percent off the pandemic-era peak as of last year, but are still nevertheless 67 percent above the level logged in 2019, meaning that the popularity of the medium that emerged during lockdown has nevertheless endured. There was $1.87 billion in recorded comic sales last year, about 61 percent of which went through book sales channels, which tends to mean things like volumes of manga and graphic novels rather than the floppies found in your standard local comic book shop.
Chris Barsanti, Publishers Weekly
Satellite
A large communications satellite, Intelsat 33e, has been shattered in orbit, with initial reports of a sudden power loss leading to eventual confirmation from the U.S. Space Forces that the satellite is now in at least 20 pieces. The cause of the disintegration is unknown, but lots of things can break up a satellite, from accidental collisions to increased solar activity and more. This satellite had another thing working against it in that it’s had a history of issues since launching in August 2016, reporting problems with thrusters and seeing faster-than-expected fuel burn, moving up the planned mission end date 3.5 years earlier than expected, along with a similar Intelsat failing prematurely in 2019. Believe it or not, this spacecraft was manufactured by Boeing. The satellite was reportedly not insured at the time of breakup. About 4,300 tonnes of stuff in orbit is human-made debris, which is about a third of all human-made objects in space by mass.
Sara Webb, Christopher Fluke and Tallulah Waterson, The Conversation
Air Protein
Precision fermentation is a bioprocess that allows genetically modified yeast, fungi and bacteria to be used to manufacture protein. It’s been used to make insulin since the ’80s, and these days something like 80 percent of rennet — an ingredient used to make cheese otherwise made from the lining of the stomach of cows — is made in this manner. New companies like Air Protein and Solar Foods are trying to skip that middleman of a GMO cellular organism and take it one step further by just farming and eating the microbes themselves as a way to boost the protein in foods incredibly cheaply. Microbial protein is anywhere from 53 percent to 100 percent more efficient to produce than animal protein.
Claire L. Evans, MIT Technology Review
Dinosaur
One of the most intriguing debates in paleontology these days is what, precisely, was the start of the dinosaurs. Of interest here are the archosaurs, which are reptiles that shared some of the anatomical traits later found in dinosaurs. They’re divided into three groups called theropods, sauropods and ornithischians, the last of which contains lots of the classic, charismatic, herbivorous horned and spiked beasts we know and love. Where those ornithischians emerged from is a bit of a mystery. While the common ancestor is generally thought to come from the Triassic Period, 200 to 250 million years ago, some are arguing that a family called the silesaurids are not, in fact, too early to be dinosaurs, but may be the very first of them, which would add 7 million to 10 million years to the history of those dinosaurs.
Asher Elbein, The New York Times
New Yorkers, come to “Garbage Day presents... America, The Final Season” at the Bell House in Brooklyn at 7:30 p.m. I’m in it. It’s going to be a really good time! You should check it out if you’re in New York.
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Many of the failed small businesses in South Landmass were teetering before the storm. The ones that could get things back organized once basic hoteling and transportation were restored largely were thriving a few years later. They also picked up business from the places that failed.
And people put off retirement to fill the voids left. A relative of mine had quit driving long-haul trucks just before the storm due to health problems. After the storm, he learned how to do glasswork from a friend, and ended up doing that for the next few years (until just before he died).