By Walt Hickey
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Oil!
Costco has hiked the price of its private label Kirkland Signature motor oil and capped the amount that customers may buy in an attempt to stave off hoarding and reselling. A five-quart two-pack now costs $58, up from about $30 it had been selling for last year, and customers may buy two boxes per week. It’s also limiting purchases of Mobil 1’s one-quart six-pack to five per membership. A barrel of Brent crude hit $109 on Monday, up from under $72 in July; with diesel and gas prices going up sharply, oil companies make more profit when they refine crude oil into diesel or gasoline instead of motor oil, and the incentives are aligning for a possible supply crunch in motor oil.
Michelle Chapman, The Associated Press
Wild Dogs
A pack of male African wild dogs from Zambia’s Kafue National Park went out in search of mates, settling into new territory after undergoing one of the longest recorded land journeys made by an African mammal. The males’ circuitous odyssey across Zambia to a new home near the top of the Great Rift Valley Escarpment took them 419 kilometers from home as the bird flies, but a journey that ended up being 4,126 kilometers as the wild dog meanders.
TBD
An Electronic Frontier Foundation analysis of Flock Safety search logs for its fleet of automated license plate readers found specious reasons provided for thousands of searches made by cops across the country. The analysis found that officers around the country punched in reasons for searches that included “LOL”, “LMAO”, “idk” and more as justification to query the surveillance system. More than 30 agencies ran over 6,300 searches with the Orwellian reason of “TBD,” which is short for “to be determined,” and the data included a large number of reasons that were just button mashes on the keyboard. In one incident appearing in the data, a Goshen Police Department officer searched 6,474 automated license plate reader networks, including data from 82,413 cameras, with the justification “idk”. Naturally, Flock took this abrogation of the right to protection from unreasonable search seriously by removing the text box that said “reason” and making it into a dropdown menu so that the cops can stop embarrassing Flock when this data gets released.
Rindala Alajaja and Dave Maass, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Jason Koebler, 404 Media
Woolly Rhino
The woolly rhinoceros died out 11,000 years ago, and a new analysis of 183 fossils from across the Eurasian continent has determined that unlike the woolly mammoths, whose genetic diversity emerged in high-latitudes, the woolly rhinoceros’ genetic diversity emerged in temperate regions. The recovered 29 mitochondrial genomes and 14 nuclear genomes indicate that the species’ genetic diversity evolved in the temperate parts of Eurasia about 460,000 to 420,000 years ago during a glacial-interglacial transition, and the Altai region in what is now southern Russia near China and Mongolia was likely a longtime refuge for the species.
Garbage Time
The volume of blowout games is growing in Major League Baseball, with this season already seeing the sixth-highest share of games decided by at least 10 runs (4.51 percent), the fifth-highest share of games decided by 15 or more runs (0.59 percent) and the eighth-highest average margin of victory (3.58 runs) in the modern era (since 1970). This, combined with the league-wide strategic push toward maximizing the overall utility of pitchers, has led to the emergence of the non-pitcher closing pitcher. Last Friday, when the Cincinnati Reds were on the tail end of getting smoked 20-0 by the Milwaukee Brewers, instead of sending a person whose profession is “baseball pitcher” to the mound, they sent out a position player just to get the team out of this game without tiring out their bullpen. Position players account for 0.36 percent of all innings pitched this year, an all-time MLB record, double the 0.19 percent seen in 2021 when the trend began to take off. As recently as 2006, zero innings were handled by a position player. This, in turn, is leading to a dubious trend: 0.9 percent of all MLB runs this season were allowed by a non-pitcher pitcher, as batters are delighted to harvest cheap dingers off the meatballs they throw.
Malls
Malls are, if not back, at least doing alright these days after a Darwinian bloodletting that saw 200 mall closures since 2008. Compared to other real estate, the 900 or so remaining malls are doing rather well; since 2022, the private market value of malls, according to Green Street, is up five percent. Meanwhile, the same statistics for other forms of real estate are down, some slightly (healthcare down seven percent, industrial down eight percent) and some down sharply (offices down 33 percent).
Kate King, The Wall Street Journal
Straits of Magellan
Concerns about the state of the Panama Canal and the long lines to traverse it have some shipping companies weighing the Old Ways: sending a ship around South America by way of either Cape Horn and Drake’s Passage or the Strait of Magellan. After all, that’s how we did it before the canal; how hard could it be? Very, very hard, marine insurer Swedish Club is taking pains to remind people, insisting that even as rainfall runs 34 percent below historical averages in Panama and inflows are 44 percent below normal, the logistical situation at the Panama Canal would have to get exceedingly dire indeed for a go around the continent to be a superior option. First off, there’s a reason it’s not called Drake’s Easy Tropical Journey Through A Managed Canal, and going through an open ocean route through some of the harshest weather conditions in commercial shipping — heavy seas, violent vessel motions — and the talents of crews who are more accustomed to the canal route will be tested on that kind of voyage. Second, the Straits of Magellan are indeed more sheltered, but their narrow channels and the potential need for a pilot under Chilean regulations may form a bottleneck of its own if that route becomes more popular.
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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.
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But did the wild dogs find love???