Numlock News: September 27, 2024 • Coconuts, Jeweled Lotus, Tokyo

Sep 27, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! Thanks to everyone who grabbed a copy of the newly-released audiobook to my book, You Are What You Watch, if you liked the book leave a rating.

Burgers

The average price of a fast food restaurant burger in the second quarter of 2024 was $8.41, up 16 percent over the past five years. At McDonald’s, even, the average Big Mac was $5.29, up 21 percent over the same period. In general, it’s not looking great for the long-term future of burgers as a cheap food, given that the price of beef is harder to bring down and keep under control than the price of, say, poultry, one reason that everyone started taking chicken sandwiches actually seriously and our nation was plunged into a ceaseless Chicken Sandwich War.

Deena Shanker, Bloomberg

Supersenior

The tight end on the University of Miami’s football team is a 26-year-old ninth-year senior who, due to an injury-plagued career, is still playing college football despite entering university in 2016. While in the rest of the world universities have more vestigial functions such as “education” and “research,” in the United States those are pretty much secondary to higher education’s core function of facilitating highly lucrative athletic competitions. Cam McCormick redshirted his freshman year at the University of Oregon, tore an ankle ligament in 2019, and then tore an Achilles in 2021. He played a full season for Oregon in 2022, but transferred to Miami in 2023 and is in his final season.

Jason Gay, The Wall Street Journal

Tokyo Minute

Japanese corporate workers were long under a great deal of pressure from employers to tolerate all manner of indignation or imposition, but things are changing as the active job-to-applicant ratio has fallen from 1.6 to 1.3. This gives incumbent workers more leverage, and one specific issue is getting attention amid a burst of new Tokyo office space: distance to train. For offices in the five central wards of Tokyo, the average walk to a station is 3 minutes, 42 seconds, and 64 percent of office space is within four minutes of a metro stop. At issue is the 7 percent of that central real estate with over an eight-minute walk from the metro, which workers are signaling is too far and too much of a schlep.

Leo Lewis, Financial Times

Magic

The most popular playing format in Magic: The Gathering is Commander, but this week the playing community has been sent into chaos following the ban of four particularly useful cards from tournament play, including “Dockside Extortionist,” “Jeweled Lotus,” “Mana Crypt” and “Nadu, Winged Wisdom.” This is a big deal particularly because the ban makes these cards worth vastly less on the secondary market, where each would sell for between $80 and $100 a card. This decision, effectively, wipes out millions of dollars of value pretty much instantly, and it’s got the game stores that serve as both some of the most prominent hosts and organizers of Commander play as well as intermediaries on the secondary market ticked off and feeling a bit ripped off, with one describing it as “potentially the biggest shock to the secondary market” in the history of the game.

Stan Golovchuk, Polygon

Cabs

New York City, a famously well-run and incorruptible place, don’t Google it, has been contending with the potential collapse of the taxi industry due to the threatened insolvency of the primary insurer. This week, in order to stave off a collapse, the City Council will introduce a law to cut the minimum personal injury protection coverage for commercial ride-share cars in New York from $200,000 to $50,000 in an attempt to lower premiums and lighten the financial pressures on American Transit Insurance Co., which insures upward of 60 percent of the city’s 120,000 cabs and ride-shares. New York is one of 12 states that require personal injury protection coverage, and New York City’s coverage level requirement is one of the highest in the country, implemented in 1998 after several prominent crashes. One negative consequence is that they’re attractive to fraudsters, as a DFS report from 2023 found that 75 percent of all fraud claims received were suspected “no-fault” insurance fraud.

Laura Nahmias, Bloomberg

Four Days

In 2022, 8 percent of full-time employees said they worked four days per week, up from 5 percent in 2020. The four-day workweek is catching on in Australia and Europe more so than in North America, but advocates say it has a lot of perks. A four-day workweek cuts down on burnout, which can be just as expensive for employers as it is unpleasant for workers, and the eight hours that get cut from the 40-hour workweek tend to end up being those least productive eight hours of the week, on balance, pushing people to drop some of the more senseless meetings.

Cathy Bussewitz, The Associated Press

Coconut

The market for coconut meat is expected to grow at an annual rate of 7 percent to 9 percent over the next five years, reaching $1.5 billion by 2028. While coconut juice has already become fairly mainstream, the rest of the bits on the inside have grown slower, mostly through yogurt channels. It’s a bit of an acquired taste, but with more and more people looking for healthier options, many are indeed acquiring it. After rising needs for coconut oil, coconut water and coconut cream, at a certain point we’ve really got to stop beating around it and just eat the damned things.

Elizabeth Flood, Food Dive

This week in the Sunday Edition, I spoke to Kim Bhasin, who wrote “The Man Who Made Nike Uncool” for Bloomberg on September 13. You may have heard: On September 19 — six days later — the CEO was out, replaced by a longtime Nike lifer. As far as results go, needless to say this is considered to be a pretty solid story. Kim can be found at Bloomberg.

Last day, for real:

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