Numlock News: October 7, 2025 • Zombies, Endurance, Chess

Oct 07, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Shipped

The cost of shipping a 40-foot container from Shanghai to Rotterdam was $1,613 at the end of last week, and the cost of sending a box from Shanghai to Genoa is $1,804 per container. Those prices are down 58 percent and 53 percent, respectively, from a year ago. Additionally, spot rates for Shanghai-Los Angeles were down to $2,196 per container and are projected to decline steadily for the rest of the year.

The Loadstar

Cupcake Gambit

The No. 2 chess player in the world, Hikaru Nakamura, is catching heat for playing several low-level tournaments to qualify for the Candidates, the most prestigious chess tournament, which requires that players have at least 40 games a cycle in order to qualify. Nakamura prefers to stream and keeps a light tournament schedule, so as of June 1, he has played just 18 classical games. This prompted what he called a “Mickey Mouse” tour, in which he parachuted into the Louisiana State Championship and the Iowa Open Championship to smoke a bunch of randos in 11 games. Granted, those he defeated often seemed delighted enough to brush with celebrity and were appreciative of Nakamura’s genuinely good feedback. But it did prompt FIDE to change the rules; now, the 70 players with a FIDE rating above 2,650 would no longer risk their Elo rating if they did choose to pull Nakamura’s gambit.

Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson, The Wall Street Journal

Zombies

Japan has had a cohort of corporations that economists deemed “Zombie Companies,” those that have not gone bankrupt thanks to Japan’s central bank keeping interest rates low. This is (from a market’s perspective) actually somewhat bad: inefficient firms should at some point go under, replaced by more efficient companies. If these companies don’t go under, you have a whole chunk of the economy just squeaking by, barely servicing their debts and underutilizing assets. In America, corporate bankruptcy is a tool — a way for people to both take risks and unwind bad bets, allowing creditors and entrepreneurs to conclude their business with as much of a clean slate as one can hope. Japan doesn’t share the mentality that, for instance, a person who goes bankrupt can very well become the president eventually. So, companies that should probably throw in the towel tend to persist. That said, in 2024, the number of zombie firms declined for the first time in seven years, with bankruptcies rising to 10,070, the most since 2014.

Kanoko Matsuyama, Bloomberg

Hockey

Roustan Hockey is the last producer of hockey sticks in Canada; it is 60 miles southwest of Toronto and has origins in the 1800s. They produce 400,000 wooden hockey sticks per year and sell them under the Christian, Northland and Sherwood brands. About 100,000 of them are bound for the United States. That level of southern exposure has become a liability, as shipments have been held up at the border, and other supplies produced by Roustan (such as goalie pads) were hit with a 200 percent tariff.

Kelvin Chan, The Associated Press

Insurgent Brands

While the largest food companies continue to hold the larger part of the market share, “insurgent brands” have been scooping up a whole lot of the growth. Just two percent of food, beverage and household products drove 39 percent of the incremental category gains in 2024, which was double their share from the year before. This has put the large food hegemons in an unpleasant position, where their wealthiest consumers have been flocking to the new, more niche brands while their most budget-conscious consumers are shifting to store brands and private labels.

David Wainer, The Wall Street Journal

Endurance

The discovery of Endurance on the seafloor off the coast of Antarctica has unleashed a wave of new scholarship about the failed polar exploration. One researcher has found a fascinating thing about Endurance, namely that it actually wasn’t constructed for the kind of mission it was sent on. This fact, Ernest Shackleton knew. Some ships in the 19th and 20th centuries were built specifically to deal with sea ice, built to be more oval in shape with a shallower keel that makes it harder for ice to crush. Endurance didn’t have any of those features, and other polar ships of its time could withstand 1.7 to 2.7 times as great a compressional load.

Colin Barras, New Scientist

Windy

Critics of wind energy say that it’s not windy enough in winter to make the projects worthwhile. However, first-year data from the earliest commercial-scale offshore wind project shows that there’s nothing to worry about on that front. South Fork Wind operated at 47 percent capacity from June 2024 to June 2025, in line with other wind projects and exceeding the output of some fossil fuel facilities. Indeed, generation was strongest during winter. In fact, a modeling from New England’s regional grid operator (based on a 16-day cold snap in 2017-18) concluded that an 800 megawatt offshore project would have saved the region $40 million to $45 million.

Benjamin Storrow, E&E News

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