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Numlock News: December 6, 2023 • Chipmunks, Lorcana, Diamond Dust

Dec 6

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By Walt Hickey

Thanks so much to the folks leaving reviews for my book. If you liked my book, it would be amazing if you could leave a review for it on Amazon. Right before the holidays is when the volume of reviews gets really important for the visibility of books, so if you enjoyed You Are What You Watch, please say so, word of mouth is really important right now. It doesn’t take that long, and means a ton to me. That also goes for Barnes & Noble too.

Dust in the Wind

Dust Identity produces an invisible dust made out of diamonds that can be used to uniquely mark products to prove their authenticity. Most of their business so far has been in aerospace and defense, essentially safeguarding a rather critical supply chain and ensuring that components in important hardware is legit. They tag items with unique and invisible marks of diamond dust blended into polymer. Now the company is branching out, and has raised $40 million in funding in order to enter into the lucrative markets of sports memorabilia, luxury goods and art authentication. That industry has had its fair share of brushes with counterfeit goods, and if it’s good enough for the industry of AirBus and SpaceX it’s probably good enough for the industry of eBay and StockX.

Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg

Chipmunks

“The Chipmunk Song” is a staple of the holiday season, a pitched-up harmony novelty song from the late 1950s that not only has become a somewhat inexplicable hit, but also launched the entire Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise. Even setting aside television, just the four live action Chipmunks movies alone have grossed $1.4 billion worldwide, and all of that can be traced back to a ridiculous novelty record that today has accumulated 112.4 million streams, most of which have happened in just the past five years. The song’s endurance is lucrative: Billboard estimated that it brings in $300,000 per year annually in revenue for the master recording and publishing.

Steve Knopper, Billboard

Printing

When a company has an initial public offering, they have to print out a long legal document called a prospectus that can stretch into hundreds of pages. This is not a task for your home HP inkjet, as the SEC has lots of formatting rules for these documents which, to be entirely clear, almost nobody actually reads. Typically companies outsource the production of the about 100 necessary copies of this document to specialized firms such as Donnelley Financial Solutions. That company worked on prospectuses for 70 percent of IPOs in the U.S. over the past six years, and business is good: Arm Holdings and Birkenstock each paid around $900,000, Square paid $450,000 for theirs in 2015, Pinterest paid $850,000, Lyft paid $320,000, and even when Instacart didn’t print any whatsoever, just drafting it cost them $161,189. Man, I’m in the wrong publishing business.

Corrie Driebusch, The Wall Street Journal

San Francisco

Efforts from the city of San Francisco to rein in car burglaries appear to be working amid a major push to catch burglars. From September 1 to November 26, 2022, there were 6,703 documented smash-and-grab car burglary reports. Over the same period of this year, that’s down to just 3,399, even after a year where the rate of theft had until September been otherwise stable. The solution has been a crackdown helped by bait cars placed at tourist hot spots and popular targets, and then after catching would-be thieves, attempting to target the entire organized theft ring.

Rachel Swan, San Francisco Chronicle

Fox in Henhouse

The COP28 U.N. climate summit is hosting over 100,000 participants, but more than ever before those participants are including lobbyists for the fossil fuel industries. All told, there are 2,456 representatives from fossil fuel companies, vastly more than the 636 fossil fuel lobbyists present at COP27, with the 2,456 oil shillers alone coming in at more than any single country delegation beyond the host UAE and Brazil, which appears slated to host COP30. Over the past 20 years, fossil fuel lobbyists have in the aggregate scored at least 7,200 passes to attend this conference, meaning the army of lobbyists coming to this one composes a pretty solid chunk of the entire history of fossil fuel attendance.

Arielle Samuelson, HEATED

Polar Bears

The reliable detection of polar bear dens is important for people who work in remote Arctic climates, but the very nature of the dens themselves — with entrances covered in snow — makes this hard to do. The current state of the art for the oil and gas companies that transport equipment through polar bear habitats in Alaska is to use forward-looking infrared, or FLIR cameras that can detect bodily warmth underneath the snow. However, thanks to the long-term effects of those oil and gas companies, temperatures overall are warmer, so the FLIR cameras are less than reliable. A 2020 study found that FLIR failed to find 55 percent of polar bear dens, which is not exactly comforting to know. A new study published in Ursus investigated the possibility of using radar to detect polar bear dens. On a radar output, bears look like a large mass of water suspended in snow, which is technically exactly what they are from a certain perspective, I guess. This technology got the percentage of bears detected up to 66 percent, which is a considerable improvement.

Andrew Chapman, Scientific American

Lorcana

The current “Big Three” trading card games are Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon Trading Card Game and Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game, but two entrants into the market could stand to make that into the Big Five. Those games are the One Piece Card Game and Disney Lorcana, each of which are positioned to tap into massive reservoirs of fandom and appear to be doing what they must to be going mainstream: Based on November 2023 sales, Lorcana has three sealed products in the top 10 and One Piece has two, with the balance made up by the incumbent Big Three franchises. Evidence that these things are going mainstream is borne out by the price of booster boxes declining back down to earth amid rampant collector speculation in their initial launch. Lorcana’s The First Chapter booster boxes — which contain 24 sealed booster packs, or 288 cards per box — had been fetching $328.04 at the beginning of the month, vastly higher than the $143.76 MSRP. As of the end of November, that had declined to a far more reasonable $190.35 per booster box, a 42 percent drop that is going to be necessary if an actual competitive or casual scene has any chance to develop.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICv2

Check out my book! Makes a great gift.

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