Numlock News: September 23, 2025 • Meteorite, Counterfeits, Casinos

Sep 23, 2025

By Walt Hickey

It’s time for Numlock’s largest annual sale, and it’s the biggest one we’ve ever done: 35 percent off your first year. This is the cheapest a Numlock subscription can essentially ever get. If you like the newsletter, want to get the Sunday edition or just want to support it, now’s the time to subscribe:

Get 35% off for 1 year

Fur

For years, the use of fur in the fashion industry was a lightning rod for controversy and heated protest roiling the business. It dragged the luminaries of fashion into uncomfortable situations, dragging the industrial treatment of the animals front and center at the biggest events. That has mostly subsided at this point since the protestors have won for all intents and purposes, with PETA shifting strategies a bit and working behind the scenes to successfully push brands like Chanel and Gucci out of the fur business. The technology to produce faux fur has advanced and become an altogether successful replacement. The traditional fur business has essentially collapsed over the past several years; Covid-19 outbreaks ravaged Danish mink farms, and reduced demand sent the fur industry’s value plummeting from $14.7 billion in 2013 to just $3.4 billion as of 2023. Fur production also dropped 85 percent in Europe from 2018 to 2023. The animal products still used are less controversial — shearling, for instance, and leather — given that those pelts are the byproduct of the meat and wool industries anyway. Either way: pretty much a clean win for PETA on this one.

Dana Thomas, Bloomberg

Casino

New York State has up to three state gambling licenses up for grabs in the New York City area, which led to eight proposals for various gaming-related projects in New York. Over the past week, each of the three proposals for a casino on Manhattan — one in Times Square, one in Hudson Yards on the West Side and most recently one slated for a parcel near the United Nations — was voted down by community panels, the most recent voted down in a 4-2 vote. Civic leaders are decrying this lost opportunity for Manhattan; after all, without a casino, how else can we possibly expect tourists to get ripped off in the tourist centers of midtown?

Philip Marcelo, The Associated Press

El Ali

Thousands of years ago, a meteorite crashed into what is now Somalia — 13.6 metric tons of iron and nickel that has been locally known as Shiid-birood for centuries. The rest of us know it as the El Ali meteorite. It had rested there relatively peacefully for years, surviving an attempt by the Italian army to remove it during World War II and attempts made by militias after the 1991 collapse of Somalia’s government. In 2019, opal hunters took a 90-gram sample and were able to confirm it was indeed not from this world, and then in February 2020, the stone was removed. At the time, the area was controlled by an affiliate of al-Qaeda; its removal was violent, and it was eventually driven away and sold to a mining company for $264,000. The meteorite then went on to Mogadishu, and since appears to have been moved to China, held in storage in Yiwu. It is selling for $3.2 million if the buyer wants the whole thing, or $200 per gram if they don’t.

Dan Vergano, Scientific American

Shipping

In August, inbound shipping to the 10 largest ports in the United States increased only 0.1 percent, while outbound volume dropped 2.6 percent. This, however, is really out of sorts with the record increases in shipping volume seen in the rest of the world — Far East export figures set a new record and were up 6.3 percent year over year. The tariff-induced slowdown in trade is expected to be a pretty big deal as the rest of the year goes on, particularly as we get to the part of the year where holiday shipping would ordinarily kick off. The National Retail Federation expects that inbound volume in the remaining four months of 2025 will be down 15.7 percent compared to the same four months of 2024.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Top Songs

Summer is now officially over, and there was conspicuously not an obvious “song of the summer.” The decline of programmed radio, the ascent of streaming and personalization and the general disintegration of the mainstream have made it very difficult for any song to achieve the kind of ubiquity necessary to be the song of a season for everyone. In 2016, the top 10 audio-streamed songs in the U.S. as of the middle of the year accounted for 0.16 percent of all on-demand audio streams, a figure that is down to 0.05 percent of the overall streaming this year. Plus, the top of the charts are turning over slower than ever. “Lose Control” by Teddy Swims is still on the top 10 streaming songs after 109 weeks on the charts, meaning that it has as good a case to be the song of this summer as it does to be the song of last summer, and perhaps the summer before that, too.

Kristin Robinson, Billboard

Counterfeits

Authorities in China have cracked down on the rash of counterfeit Labubus from homegrown toy company Pop Mart that have flooded resale apps. It’s an intellectual property crackdown that is considered pretty rich by every other copyright holder contending with dupes that often originate in China. From January to mid-August, authorities have found 237 cases of counterfeiting nationwide and have seized 1.83 million units intended for export to 61 countries. Pop Mart’s own efforts with the U.K., France and other countries have turned up 7.91 million fakes. Turns out the secret to spotting a fake Labubu is you’ve got to count the teeth; a real Labubu has nine teeth.

Tomoko Wakasugi, Nikkei Asia

RV

According to the latest data from the Census, as of 2023, about 342,000 people in the United States live full-time in an RV, boat or van. That is up 41 percent from 2019. A big driver is the cost of living and housing shortages, and according to data from the RV Industry Association, about a third of those residents have children. The majority of these residents also earn less than $75,000 per year. It’s a bigger story than a mere #vanlife trend for young professionals and remote knowledge economy workers, or just retirees living in an RV. With affordable housing shortages in the cities where the jobs are, living in an RV can be the best option for lots of lower-income Americans.

Shannon Pettypiece, NBC News

Numlock doesn’t run ads and can be what it is because of paid subscribers who support it. Once a year in September, we run the best sale we’ve got: 35 percent off your first year. This is the cheapest a Numlock subscription can essentially ever get. If you like the newsletter, want to get the Sunday edition or just want to support the newsletter, now’s the time to subscribe:

Get 35% off for 1 year

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: Dark Roofs · Geothermal · Stitch · Year of the Ring · Person Do Thing · Fun Factor · Low Culture · Romeo vs. Juliet · Traffic Cam Photobooth · Money in Politics ·