Numlock News: September 12, 2023 • Aibo, Elephants, Popeyes

Sep 12

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By Walt Hickey

Aibo Farm

Sony announced it will roll out an “Aibo Foster Parent” program for the $2,900 robotic dogs it sells. This would allow people whose plans have lapsed when it comes to caring for and maintaining their robotic dog companions to donate them. The company then says it’ll refurbish the 2019 ERS-1000 units and donate them to medical facilities, where presumably they can take the job of an actual dog and force it into doggy unemployment. Somewhat disturbingly in this new metaphor for a doggy donation, Sony did concede that some dogs will likely be gutted and scrapped for parts for other Aibo units.

Steve Dent, Engadget

Elephants

As of the 1970s, there were 1.3 million elephants in Africa, a figure which is down to 450,000 elephants. A key thing fueling that population decline is the 20,000 elephants illegally killed every year for their ivory. Synthetic alternatives are seen as a possible way to minimize interest in ivory, perhaps by flooding the market with alternative ivories such as Digory, which is a resin made of calcium phosphate particles. Another one that’s promising is tagua, or vegetable ivory, derived from the Phytelephas tree, which is literally Greek for “plant elephant.” After 15 years of growth, it produces 16 to 18 seed pods per year, each containing 120 nuts, which can then be used to create more vegetable ivory annually than an elephant can in a lifetime.

Krupa Padhy, BBC

Popeyes

Fueled by their blockbuster chicken sandwich, Popeyes is eyeing a massive expansion. They’ve added over 1,300 restaurants since 2017, and now have 4,300 locations. To help convince people to open more and more locations, Popeyes wants to raise average restaurant-level profits from $210,000 as of last year to $300,000 by 2025. To do this, they’re redesigning their kitchens to automate and perfect the process of making the chicken sandwiches, which had presented a significant burden on some kitchens that were faced with 1,000 orders per day when expecting only 60. The average American visits a Popeyes three times per year, considerably lower than the 18 average visits to McDonald’s.

Daniela Sirtori-Cortina, Bloomberg

Argentina

In 2012, Argentina seized and nationalized oil company YPF SA, whose shareholders would go on to sue the country in a U.S. court. Eventually, other investors bought out the rights to their claims, specifically an investor named Buford Capital, which pushed a lot of money and resources into litigating the case for over a decade. Buford’s since paid $50 million in lawyer’s fees to fight Argentina in court, and the wild thing is that it actually worked, and a federal judge in New York ordered Argentina to pay $16 billion to the shareholders of YPF SA, of which $6.2 billion goes to Buford Capital, a 37,000 percent return on investment.

Emily R. Siegel and Bob Van Voris, Bloomberg Law

MTA

New York City is set to implement congestion pricing, where people who want to drive into the downtown core of Manhattan will be assessed an additional fee, the proceeds of which go toward building out transit projects and the assessment of which is designed to push people who now drive into Manhattan into taking that transit into Manhattan. The thing is, city and state leadership appear to be botching it; when London implemented congestion pricing, the city increased bus service by 17 percent, added 300 new buses, and added miles of dedicated lanes. New York has not and will not: Only 6.8 miles of new bus lanes have been painted out of a law requiring 50 miles to be painted this year, and the Adams administration has only bothered to complete 10.2 miles of bike lanes.

Aaron Gordon, Motherboard

Auto Shows

Auto shows, best known as “the thing that came on after when you passed out watching hockey,” are rebounding after attendance cratered during the pandemic. From the 2016 to 2019 seasons, just south of 7 million households attended an auto show every year, clocking 6.5 million households in the last year before the pandemic. After dropping to well under a million, as of the season that ran through spring 2023, only 4.7 million homes were attending. This week is the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, which follows the Munich event last week, two of the “big five” events for automakers that also take place in Paris, Geneva and Tokyo. Times are changing: The German show rebranded away from an “auto” show to a “mobility” show to appeal to crowds that may be shying away from cars in favor of other transportation, while Geneva simply has not happened since the pandemic.

Stephen Wilmot, The Wall Street Journal

Roads

One of the largest maintainers of roads in the United States is the U.S. Forest Service. New York City has 10,000 kilometers of roads, the U.S. Interstate Highway System is 75,000 kilometers of roads, while the U.S. National Forest System has 600,000 kilometers of inventoried roads, plus another 96,000 kilometers of roads that exist but are not maintained or managed. One reason is that the original goal of the Forest Service was to manage and exploit U.S. timber stocks, and to develop infrastructure to aid in that deforestation. It was only in 1960 that Congress directed the Forest Service explicitly to start serving the needs of recreational users. A cool thing that the Forest Service does that others tasked with maintaining roads do not is that they’ll often decommission roads and return them to nature.

Spencer Wright, Scope of Work

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