Numlock News: September 11, 2025 • Koala, Smuggler, Copper

Sep 11, 2025

Copper

Over the coming years, a copper market that has been relatively balanced for some time is expected to swing hard into a deficit. A current copper surplus of 162,000 tons is projected to gradually and then swiftly fall to a deficit of 1.44 million tons by 2035. Right now, the metal is going for $9,800 a ton, but that is projected to swing up to $11,500 per ton in the next two years. The reason is two relatively considerable new sources of demand: data centers requiring 4.3 million metric tons of copper over the next decade and a surge in military spending. If global military spending rises from the current 2.5 percent of global GDP to 4 percent, which is where it was at the end of the Cold War, that would require an additional 170,000 tons of copper demand just for bullet casings, jet fighters and missile systems.

Ed Ballard and Rhiannon Hoyle, The Wall Street Journal

Smuggling

An Egyptian doctor has been sentenced to just six months in U.S. federal prison after being caught at JFK International Airport with 590 ancient artifacts (that appeared to have been very recently excavated) concealed in bubble wrap. This was just one node in a sprawling smuggling scheme responsible for channeling looted objects from Egypt into the international art market. While the government’s attorney wanted three years and some financial penalties as part of the sentence in order to discourage future smugglers, the doctor’s guilty plea was enough to get it down to just six months.

Alton Yan, The Art Newspaper

Travel

A new database analyzed every known and observed overseas trip taken by the primary heads of government and state from over 200 countries between the years 1990 and 2024. It is a fascinating look at the evolving global order in the aftermath of the Cold War. In the aggregate, you’re talking over 100,000 trips taken by leaders. Some countries run an inbound imbalance — U.S. presidents have taken over 500 overseas trips since 1990, while foreign leaders have made over 6,000 to the United States. However, the UN General Assembly is indeed in New York, and that might be skewing the data a bit. In general, world leaders are traveling more, with the 1990s averaging 1,508 overseas trips by heads of government or state annually, a figure that rose to 2,734 trips on average since 2010. African leaders now account for about 30 percent of the trips taken, up from 20 percent at the beginning of the dataset.

Kylie McKee and Collin J. Meisel, The Conversation

LoFi

The LoFi Girl livestream, which for years has featured an animated loop of a studious young woman listening to lo-fi hip hop beats radio to relax and/or chill to, has become a brisk business at this point. It is also a bona fide tastemaker in the scene, somewhat to the consternation of certain artists in the lo-fi space who worry that one YouTube channel might have too much sway over the fate of their genre. ChilledCow — longtime listeners will recall the original name of the project — had 1.6 million YouTube subscribers in 2018, which (fueled by the pandemic) rose to 5 million subscribers through 2020. Today, 15 million subscribers follow not just the one main video but an interconnected series of livestreams with significantly different vibes, the whole of which is almost certainly a multi-million dollar streaming business.

Nicole Carpenter, 404 Media

Sharks

A new study from the University of North Carolina published in Frontiers in Marine Science found that those frontiers indeed do extend to grocery stores throughout North Carolina, where they sequenced the DNA of 29 products barcoded as “shark.” This included 19 filets sold in grocery stores, seafood markets and Asian specialty markets, as well as 10 samples of jerky ordered online. All told, 93 percent of the samples were ambiguously labeled as merely “shark” or “mako shark.” However, further genetic examination found 11 different species of shark represented, including three species listed as critically endangered, such as the great hammerhead, scalloped hammerhead and tope. This is startling; the hammerheads, for instance, are essentially the lions of the ocean — apex predators —and they’re being sold as just “shark” for $2.99 a pound.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Golf

Lots of the golf industry in the American Sun Belt is buoyed in the wintertime by Canadian “snow birds” — retirees who spend the winter months in the United States. That being said, the industry is seeing flashing red warning lights across the board for this winter. Many Canadian consumers see the experiences of a New York association of golf courses as a cautionary tale when it comes to availing themselves of American products and services. The New York Golf Trail, according to data shown at a National Golf Course Owners Association membership meeting in August, has seen an 83 percent drop in bookings by Canadians in the same year it’s seen a 38 percent drop in sales overall.

Brendan Coffey, Sportico

Koalas

Australia has approved a chlamydia vaccine for koalas in its quest to rid the native marsupial of a scourge that claims the lives of about half of all koalas. The official monitoring program estimates 95,000 to 238,000 koalas live in the eastern states, while 129,000 to 286,000 live in the southern states. In some areas, wild koalas are being driven to extinction by chlamydia, with infection rates around 50 percent and some as high as 70 percent. Vaccine trials found that deaths in the wild decreased by 65 percent. The single-dose shot can now be rolled out nationally.

Agence France-Presse

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