Numlock News: September 3, 2024 • Penny, Hawk-Eye, Burning Man
By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
X
On Friday, data released by Fidelity showed that the investment giant currently values its stake in X, previously known as Twitter, at 72 percent of its original valuation prior to Elon Musk taking it over. They’ve valued their stake in the company down from $316 million to a mere $88 million. Based on that estimate, as well as filings to the SEC from the eight largest initial investors, it appears that the overall stake of Elon and his partners has lost $24 billion in value over the course of his management, a fairly unheard-of evaporation of corporate capital outside of, say, a massive scandal, economic collapse, or a meteor just hitting an office park.
Faiz Siddiqui, The Washington Post
Boats
The market for electric boats is a small fraction of the market for electric cars, but it is a growing one, valued at $5 billion worldwide in 2021 and poised to reach $17 billion by 2031. One of the companies at the forefront of trying to electrify speedboats and pleasure boats is Arc Boats, which targets the higher end of the boat market, at least until the technology involved gets cheap enough to start nibbling at the mass market of boats. Gas-combustion boats are pretty expensive to run, with it easily running $300 to $600 in fuel costs for a particularly enthusiastic day on the lake. Even better is that they’re actually quiet, so you don’t have to yell over the engine noise while still going at top speeds.
Michael Liedtke, The Associated Press
Hawk-Eye
Hawk-Eye Innovations is a subsidiary of Sony, and even if you haven’t heard of them, you’re playing in their world. They’re behind the instant-replay technology in soccer and American football, and they’ve got fascinating player-tracking tech called SkeleTRACK used in the NBA, but one sport everyone’s really excited about is tennis, where their tech is reshaping the game and many argue making it fairer as line judges get help or are outright replaced by the bots. It’s good to track a ball within 3 millimeters, and the tech that goes into actually figuring out the location of that ball also allows its designers to recreate an entire match in VR. The system uses a set of 12 cameras around the court tracking the ball at 70 frames per second, which allows a sophisticated computer to triangulate the position of the ball in space at all times.
Aquaculture
In 2022, the amount of seafood made from aquaculture or farm-raised seafood surpassed the amount captured in fisheries. That year, 38 percent of it was raised in a marine system, like in the ocean, whereas 62 percent of it came from land-based, usually freshwater systems. A new study found that the carbon footprint of the marine-based systems is 40 percent to 50 percent lower than the land-based systems. The main reason is that the saltiness of the ocean facilitates different kinds of bacteria that break down the waste of these facilities, bacteria that convert 0.07 percent of carbon to methane, compared to 1 percent to 10 percent of land carbon.
Penny
Pennies keep being made, but they’re caught in a trap where people are given them but generally have no need to spend them. This means that while the American one-cent piece is the single most-produced coin in the history of coins, an estimated 240 billion of them are just lying around the United States, practically doomed to never be used, roughly $7.24 in extraneous pennies for everyone here. It gets weirder when you realize what the actual life cycle of a coin is, particularly the centrality of Coinstar terminals for the whole operation: 92 percent of Americans live within 5 miles of a Coinstar machine, and they’re the main way coins get recycled within the system, not the Fed or the Mint. One problem for them is that pennies make up around 49 percent of the average jar of coins, but just 6 percent of its value. This means people are given pennies they don’t use, hand them to Coinstar to ship to warehouses, which then give them back to banks and businesses, which return them to customers who will just keep them around until the next trip to, yes, Coinstar.
Caity Weaver, The New York Times
Gold
A new study published in Nature Geoscience found that earthquakes may be responsible for the conditions that coax raw gold from the particles of gold floating in quartz. The theory goes that the earthquakes stimulate the necessary electrical charges to clump gold together. According to the study, earthquake-related deposits were responsible for 75 percent of all the gold ever mined. The conclusion here is simple: We have to make sure the billionaires never hear about this, because we’re one Bond villain with an earthquake machine and a penchant for gold away from a really bad time.
Burners
The latest data out of the Playa is that about 70,000 people attended Burning Man this year, the gathering in the desert that constructs a temporary city and engages in art, music, and all sorts of self-reliant activities. That’s down from around 77,000 last year and off from a pre-pandemic peak of 78,850 in 2019. There are a couple factors potentially at play — it’s pretty expensive to be radically self-reliant in a desert this week, last year’s event saw disastrous rains that stranded thousands and may have harshed the vibe, and lots of casuals may be taking a step away from the event — but either way, it’s a shift for the event. It is still nearly double the size of what it was as recently as 2006.
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Canada did away with the penny years ago. We should do likewise. As well, it would be much more prudent (not to mention cost-effective) to get rid of the dollar bill and replace it permanently with a dollar coin, but people here are regrettably unwilling to adapt.
I’m mostly all for going electric, and I adore my electric car (so fast!), but I spend a lot of time on the water in a wind powered boat, and I am terrified by the idea that the same yahoos who try to run us down now could potentially do so faster, and quietly.