Numlock News: June 1, 2023 • Coconuts, Panthers, Psychedelics
By Walt HickeyWar of 1812In 2012, Maryland inexplicably decided to release a vanity license plate design commemorating the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, best known in popular culture as the one that prompted an unplanned gut renovation of the White House. This became the default plate in Maryland from 2012 to 2016, and there are currently 798,000 active War of 1812 license plates on the road, helpfully directing Marylanders to a convenient website — StarSpangled200 dot org — where presumably they could learn more about that war. Anyway, someone forgot to renew that domain, which now redirects to an online casino in The Philippines. PesticideThe U.S. Geological Survey oversees a database called the National Pesticide Use Maps, which pretty much does exactly what it sounds like in tracking pesticide use since it began in 1992. This has lots of scientific applications, with its data fueling over 500 peer-reviewed studies, and has been used before by researchers to trace incidence of cancer to use of certain pesticides. However, due to budget constraints, the USGS is scaling back the program, will no longer publish annual preliminary data, and is significantly reducing the tracking from over 400 chemicals at peak to just 72 compounds that the USGS considers especially important. The schedule change will save the agency $100,000 per year, but scientists expect that will undermine the efforts to understand where the 540 million kilograms of pesticides used in the U.S. every year end up. Consider The CoconutCoconut water does $600 million sales annually in the United States, and 50 percent of that is Vita Coco, which has expanded its marketshare from around 42 percent over the course of just three years. Sales were up 18 percent at Vita Coco in 2022, and following the path blazed by the cranberry juice people in the 1940s, the company is trying to get its product into more bars in order to expand beyond the roughly 11 percent of homes that keep coconut water in the fridge. It’s a pretty auspicious time to be hawking coconut water, as the rest of the beverage aisle is dealing with fairly fearsome inflation; sport drink prices are up roughly 70 percent year over year, but thanks to a significant decline in shipping costs Vita Coco prices are up just 6 percent. Christopher Doering, Food Dive Double BlindThere’s renewed interest in psychoactive and psychedelic drugs from a clinical or scientific standpoint, with drugs such as MDMA, ketamine and even LSD the subject of scientific inquiry regarding their possible efficacy in treating things like major depressive disorder or PTSD. The problem is, it’s actually pretty hard to effectively run a double-blind randomized clinical drug trial when you’re talking psychedelics, as the placebo group is pretty good at discerning they’re in the control group based on the mere fact that they’re not tripping balls. One analysis looked at randomized trials of psychedelics conducted from 1940 to May 2020 and found that while 94 percent claimed to be blinded, only 17 percent actually assessed whether the blinding worked. SmokingSweden has the lowest smoking rate in the EU, with 5.6 percent of Swedes over 15 smoking every day as of last year, well below the 18.5 percent rate over the whole EU and down substantially from the 20 percent who smoked 20 years ago. While decades of anti-smoking campaigns and laws bear some credit, Sweden is also the place that invented snus, a smokeless tobacco product that’s banned everywhere else in the EU but Sweden gets to keep because when it joined the EU the country successfully secured an exemption given its cultural history there. Karl Ritter and Charlene Pele, The Associated Press Tanned, Rusted and ReadyThis Saturday begins the Stanley Cup, with the Vegas Golden Knights facing down the Florida Panthers, the latter after a Cinderella run through the playoffs that finished with a 4-0 sweep of the dominant Carolina Hurricanes. The thing is, that victory happened 10 days before the puck drops in the finals, and there’s a worry that may make the Panthers a littler rustier compared to the Golden Knights, who just wrapped on Monday. The rest might not be as important as the rust: Including Florida, there have been nine teams in NHL history with 10 or more days of rest before game one in a best-of-seven series, and those previous teams won the series just 37.5 percent of the time, and had a win percentage that was 17.6 percent lower than their expected win percentage. WhistleblowingThe truth continues to pay, with a whistleblower who flagged bribery at the Swedish telecom Ericsson to the SEC receiving a $279 million whistleblower award based on the $1.1 billion settlement that the company reached with authorities in 2019. Under SEC rules, whistleblowers can get 10 percent to 30 percent of fines collected in civil enforcement actions that stem from a tip in cases where the SEC collects over $1 million, and it’s led to many stepping forward to flag corporate malfeasance for a healthy fee. This $279 million award beat out the previous record, a $114 million award issued in 2020, and are so high because Ericsson paid one of the highest ever monetary sanctions for a violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Mengqi Sun, The Wall Street Journal Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today. 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: Working · Cable · Ringmaster · Hard Seltzer · Enhanced Geothermal · Hoop Muses · Subsea Cables · Wrestling · Tabletop Renaissance · BTS · Baby Boom · Levees · Misdirection · Public Domain 2022 · NIMBY · Undersea Life · Bob vs Bob · Instant Delivery Curse · Monopoly · Twitter · Crypto · Rotoscope · Heat Pumps · The Ruck ·Tabletop · Mexican Beer · The Chaos Machine · [CENSORED] · Podcast Industrialization · Fantasy Shows · Law Dork · Chinese Box Office · Box Office Recovery · Giant Hornets · Graphic Novels ·Sunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018You're currently a free subscriber to Numlock News. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
Key phrases
Older messages
Numlock News: May 31, 2023 • Angelsharks, Acela, Splash Mountain
Wednesday, May 31, 2023
By Walt Hickey Canaries In 1973, Tenerife on the Canary Islands finished a massive infrastructure project that today would be considered dubious at best, hauling in 240000 tonnes of Sahara sand to
Numlock News: May 30, 2023 • Lighthouses, Sure Thing, Jazz
Tuesday, May 30, 2023
Numlock News is now five years old!
Numlock News: May 26, 2023 • Eggs, Yeezys, Zibo
Friday, May 26, 2023
By Walt Hickey Have an excellent weekend! We're off on Monday in observation of Memorial Day, see you on Tuesday. Eggs The price of a dozen eggs has crashed back down to earth, falling from $5 per
Numlock News: May 25, 2023 • Mermaids, Robocalls, F-35 Lightning
Thursday, May 25, 2023
By Walt Hickey Robocalls Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia are suing Avid Telecom, alleging that the company was responsible for transmitting millions of robocalls into the American phone
Numlock News: May 24, 2023 • Betelgeuse, Chinese Food, Lofi Hip-Hop Radio Beats To Relax And/Or Chill To
Wednesday, May 24, 2023
By Walt Hickey The Original Score to Star Trek (2009) In the music industry, the subset of music designed to help listeners sleep, study or relax — think of stuff like lofi hip-hop beats to relax and/
You Might Also Like
🎙️ Meet the Secret Weapon Behind Sci-Fi’s Biggest Franchise
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Plus: A novel anti-aging treatment revitalized mice immune systems — will it work in humans?
Squeezed by African Coups, Biden Cozies Up to the World’s Worst Dictator
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Famous for its repression and torture, Teodoro Obiang's Equatorial Guinea got an aid delivery from US Special Operations forces. Most Read Elon Musk Fought Government Surveillance — While Profiting
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
Thursday, March 28, 2024
I watched 15 hours of COVID origins arguments so you don't have to - but you should! ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏
SIROTA’S SIGNALS: This Graph Explains The Discontent
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Plus, a nonprofit health care system secretly becomes a debt collector, regulators may help you find cheaper credit cards, and Big Tech's plan to keep preying on kids. SIROTA'S SIGNALS: This
Is Biden on track for defeat? The debate, explained.
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Plus: How happy are you? What will SBF's sentence be? And more. March 28, 2024 View in browser Good morning! If you've consumed any kind of news about the 2024 presidential election cycle
Boat Probe, Opening Day, and a Cadbury Raccoon
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Facts, without motives.
These 50 companies have donated over $23 million to election deniers since January 6, 2021
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Then, according to the report of the bipartisan January 6 Commission, Trump engaged in a "multi-part conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020
Numlock News: March 28, 2024 • Orcas, Visas, Dragons
Thursday, March 28, 2024
By Walt Hickey Visas As part of the budget signed into law on Saturday, $50 million has been allocated to the State Department to cut down on the passport backlog and reduce the long wait times for
☕️ Not so rational actors
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Robinhood is playing the long game with its new credit card... March 28, 2024 View Online | Sign Up | Shop Morning Brew PRESENTED BY Aura Health Good morning. It's Opening Day for Major League
What A Day: The promised Lands
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Alabama's first election since the state's IVF fiasco yielded a Democratic blowout. Wednesday, March 27, 2024 BY CROOKED MEDIA – Former Neil Gorsuch clerk and current Trumpist Mike Davis,