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Numlock News: September 19, 2023 • Ski Slopes, Kibbles ‘n Bits, Rhinos

Sep 19

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By Walt Hickey

Pet Food

People are beginning to cut back on the quality of pet food for their beloved animals, with premium dry dog food shedding 2.9 percentage points marketshare year over year in the quarter ending in July. One reason is that pet food is just as susceptible to price inflation as people food, and prices are up 11 percent compared to a year ago. The rate of sales growth is slowing down, with premium pet food sales up 8.5 percent in the second quarter, down from 21.3 percent growth in the same period of last year. According to Smucker, which recently sold off Kibbles ‘n Bits, 9Lives and Rachael Ray Nutrish to Post Holdings, sales in their pet food segment were down 40 percent to $288 million year over year.

Jennifer Williams-Alvarez, The Wall Street Journal

1883

The biggest show on cable of this year so far is, naturally, a show that finished airing on the streaming service Paramount+ in 2022. In June, the cable channel Paramount Network put 1883, the prequel series to Yellowstone, on its Sunday night schedule in order to fill in some gaps. The 18-month-old show nevertheless found an audience, and more importantly one that treated it pretty much identically to your standard first run of a cable television show, with the cable screening of 1883 nabbing an average of 2.5 million viewers every week, making it the most-watched scripted series of the summer. That success will be followed with CBS airing the first season of Yellowstone on Sundays after football finishes, a 5-year-old cable show hitting a network where only 14 percent of the 24 million CBS Sunday night viewers have seen it on Paramount Network.

Josef Adalian, Vulture

MBAs

Lots of business school graduates will go on to work for management consulting firms or large companies working their way up the corporate ladder, but there is an alternative option first developed at Harvard in the 1980s but which eventually found its best-known home at Stanford: the “entrepreneurship through acquisition” or ETA concept. Essentially, students develop an investment vehicle that they then use to straight up buy a company they believe would benefit from their talents, virtually forgoing the job application process and just jumping right in. The format is increasingly popular in dry times for hiring, and they have a decent track record. According to Stanford’s 2022 Search Fund Study, of the students who eventually found a company they wanted to buy, 138 are still operating, 93 have since sold with a positive return, and only 39 have done so with a negative return.

Matthew Boyle, Bloomberg

Shortage

There is currently a shortage of 15 crucial chemotherapy drugs, one of the worst drug shortages crises in the history of the United States. Beyond oncology, a survey of 1,123 pharmacists found that antimicrobials, hormonal meds, anti-inflammatories and oral liquid meds are low. The drug shortage appeared to have peaked in the early summer, and 309 drugs were running low, a decade high. Among the oncology drugs that are low, carboplatin and cisplatin are dire, with a survey of cancer care sites from earlier this year finding that 93 percent reported a carboplatin shortage and 70 percent reported a cisplatin one.

Shi En Kim, Scientific American

Ski

A paper published in Nature Climate Change in August projected the long-term snow supply at 2,234 European ski resorts and found that at 4 degrees of warming, 98 percent of resorts will face a very high risk of not getting enough snow, and if temperatures are at 2 degrees, more than half would not. According to data released by the Swiss lift operators association, 90 percent of Italian ski slopes rely on artificial snowmaking, as well as 70 percent of Austrian slopes, 53 percent of Swiss slopes, 37 percent of French slopes, and 25 percent of German slopes.

Tristan Kennedy, Wired

Rhinos

A conservation group has bought up a 30-square-mile farm located 100 miles southwest of Johannesburg that is home to 2,000 southern white rhinos, a group thought to be the largest in the world. Originally, the owner of the farm wanted $10 million for the rhinos, but rhinos are not really renowned for their economic vitality. The total number of southern white rhinos is estimated to be 16,800, about 80 percent of which are in South Africa and of which 53 percent are privately owned. Security for rhino facilities can be a massive expense, given how lucrative poaching can be.

Rachel Nuwer, The New York Times

Transmission

Iowa regulators have given a green light to the SOO Green transmission line, a huge win for a proposed connection between two massive U.S. electrical grids, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator and PJM Interconnection. This would be a 525-kV direct current line that would run 350 miles underground next to a railroad from Iowa to Illinois. This is big for a couple reasons, one being that Iowa is in MISO territory, is lousy with wind, and PJM (which covers from Ohio to North Carolina) would like some of that clean energy. The other big perk is that this would add 2,100 megawatts’ worth of transmission between MISO and PJM, which means that they’ll be able to better send electricity between the two grids when one has a surplus and the other a need.

Ethan Howland, Utility Dive

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