By Walt Hickey
Ships
Between mid-July and mid-September, the assessed value of a five-year-old Very Large Crude Carrier (VLCC) tanker ship increased from $145 million to $172 million, an 18.6 percent increase. The value of 10-year-old vessels increased by 32 percent over the same period, rising from $115 million to $152 million, and the value of 15-year-old vessels rose from $83.5 million to $135 million. This is somewhat shocking since the average price of ordering a new VLCC is, in fact, roughly $135 million. This subverts years of shipping industry logic — old ships are not supposed to cost as much as new ships — but if anything, underscores the value of time, given the long lead time needed to get these vessels and the fortunes that can be made with them now that oil is this expensive. The Baltic Exchange VLCC average hit $722,946 per day as of September 18, an 800 percent increase in the earnings that one of these ships can produce compared to the $79,700 per day in the same period last year. While that benchmark is not exactly the same as the cash earned by each vessel, these ships are still producing hundreds of thousands of dollars per day over what’s typical, so a 15-year-old ship available right now has earned its premium over a yet-to-be-laid-down keel any day.
Weathering With You
Tokyo has hit 34 consecutive days of rain, a new record. The El Niño pattern has brought unseasonably high levels of rain outside the typical rainy season of June, which has caused flooding. Records for Tokyo precipitation began in 1886, and the previous record for most consecutive days with rain was 33, in June and July of 2019. The record for rain in the month of September was set in 1958, at 670.9 millimeters; Central Tokyo has received 629 millimeters of rain through Monday, three times the normal level.
Fastballs
Major League Baseball notched a record high for fastball speed, with batting averages remaining near all-time lows. Four-seam fastball speed averaged 94.8 miles per hour this past season, up from 91.9 miles per hour when tracking began in 2008. This year, there were a record 5,687 pitches that came in at 100 miles per hour or higher, smashing the record of 3,880 pitches in 2023; in 2008, there were only 214. In a rare “Tungsten Arm” O’Doyle meets Spiders Georg situation, there is a bit of an outlier in Jacob Misiorowski, who threw 1,115 of those 100-mile-per-hour pitches. That said, it’s become astonishingly rare for a pitcher to actually throw a complete game; there were just 21 of them, down from 104 in 2015.
Ronald Blum, The Associated Press
Resident Evil
Resident Evil, the Zach Cregger hit film, has provided a big lift for Resident Evil, the video game franchise. In the week after the movie’s release, the daily player count of the Resident Evil 2 remake — which takes place contemporaneously with the events of the film — jumped by 48 percent from 78,000 to 116,000 daily players, the Resident Evil 4 remake saw player count jump by 24 percent (from 119,000 to 247,000) and Resident Evil Requiem, which came out earlier this year, got a modest bump of 20 percent from 118,000 to 143,000 players. Not all of that is directly related to the movie, whose release coincided with a significant sale of the games, but it is clearly directing some people to the games.
Rhys Elliott, The Alinea Insight Newsletter
Corruption
Americans as a whole believe that corruption is relatively common in the highest levels of the federal government, though tend to think it’s relatively rare among mid- and low-level employees of government agencies. As it stands, 68 percent of respondents think that many or most cabinet officials and department heads are corrupt, with a further 27 percent responding that “only a few” are. That figure is higher among elected officials like senators and representatives, where 75 percent of respondents said that many or most are corrupt.
Books
A new paper published in Current Opinion in Psychology assessed evidence that reading fiction books has strong and repeatable benefits, finding that reading fiction in particular was a stronger predictor of verbal skills than reading nonfiction. One long-running study the paper looked at found that teenagers who spent more of their free time reading became adults who were more socially connected, seeing family and friends more often. A study of 3,500 older adults found that those who read books survived 23 months longer than nonreaders, an association that held strongly for books compared to newspapers or magazines, and from a cohort of readers where 87 percent read fiction.
Tamarisk
Tamarisk, also known as saltceder, is a plant that is invasive in the western United States but was planted there liberally by early settlers who hoped that the plant, which is tolerant of dry and salty soils, could stabilize streambanks. That geoengineering plan worked too well, and the tamarisk actually outcompeted local flora and increased the salinity of the soil around them to the point of being inhospitable to other life, both locking riverbanks up and turning them into conduits for wildfire. The USDA in 2001 gave the go-ahead to release the tamarisk leaf beetle in an attempt to rein the plant in, and now that we’re 25 years since the release, the effect is not what was originally hoped. One issue is that the hoped-for tamarisk culling would put more water back in rivers, but it appears that the plant is not the water villain it was originally believed to be; a reassessment of the 200 gallons-per-day water demand of tamarisk plants was likely an overestimate, and the true figure was closer to 32 gallons per day.
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while the longevity association with reading is interesting, it has a high probability of being only that, an association with no causal arrow. I suspect that there are other factors which are causing both such as socioeconomic status.
Skinner: Well, I was wrong; the lizards are a godsend.
Lisa: But isn't that a bit short-sighted? What happens when we're overrun by lizards?
Skinner: No problem. We simply release wave after wave of Chinese needle snakes. They'll wipe out the lizards.
Lisa: But aren't the snakes even worse?
Skinner: Yes, but we're prepared for that. We've lined up a fabulous type of gorilla that thrives on snake meat.
Lisa: But then we're stuck with gorillas!
Skinner: No, that's the beautiful part. When wintertime rolls around, the gorillas simply freeze to death.