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Numlock News: January 3, 2024 • Churn, Darts, Mason-Dixon

Jan 3

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By Walt Hickey

Bookies

Professions evolve over time, and bookies are no exception. Once a stereotypically overworked North Jersey guy working a payphone in a parking lot in Jersey City, since legalization of sports gambling the job could not be more different, and is now staffed by overworked North Jersey guys working a MacBook in an office building in Jersey City. The companies that try to goad American sports fans into intricate parlays or real-time wagers do so with the obsession and focus of a Wall Street trading desk, and experience swings just like one, too. FanDuel simulates each play of a game 10,000 times — a calculation accomplished in one second, after 1.5 seconds spent directly tapping into the pipeline of the official NFL stats feed — to attempt to assign profitable odds to an outcome, and on a recent standard Sunday took in $200 million in wagers on NFL games. A key profit center for the app is intricate parlays, for instance one that required seven things to go right in a Baltimore-Jacksonville game that would cause a $10 bet to become a $457 winner.

Katherine Sayre, The Wall Street Journal

Darts

A new, young star is emerging in professional darts, as the 16-year-old Luke Littler has made it all the way to the final of the PDC World Darts Championship after beating Rob Cross, the 2018 world champ. It’s an electrifying run, and he is the youngest person to ever reach the final, beating the previous record of 21 years and 88 days old set by Kirk Shepherd in 2008. He’ll go on to face Luke Humphries, a massive accomplishment given that at the start of the tournament the young contender was ranked 164th in the world. Winning the whole thing would shoot him up to ranked ninth best in the world, given that he’s only played four senior matches at pro-tier events prior to emerging in the championship tournament. A win today would also secure him a title of youngest title winner, beating Michael van Gerwin who won at age 24 and 9 months.

Callum Matthews, BBC

Mason-Dixon Line

The Mason-Dixon line, which has entered into America’s vocabulary as the transitional line between North and South, is indeed a real line, and Mason and Dixon were real guys, and the drawing of the line — which formally settled the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania after decades of strife — was a really big deal and a rather considerable scientific accomplishment of the 18th century. The line drawn by the pair of surveyors and their crew of over 100 was 233 miles long, and typically accurate to within 100 feet. Volunteers in the area have attempted to prevent the line, which is a physical boundary marked by 226 limestone monuments, one earned each mile, from falling into disrepair ahead of a campaign to get the demarcation protected status by the United States government. Those monuments are now on private property, in remote areas of wilderness, and in general had been lost to time. The campaign to identify and catalog them was a three-year effort that involved 30 volunteers, who managed to find 218 of the often-hidden stone markers along the border. They’re hoping to get them marked for preservation and maintenance.

Ashley Stimpson, Popular Mechanics

Solve For X

Once again, algebra has emerged as yet another vital skill on the world stage as legions of investors must attempt to solve for the value of X, which is indeed variable depending on who you ask. Better known as Twitter, X is for now the name of the social media company taken private as X Holdings by Elon Musk, and which has seen significant volatility in policy and product in the time since. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022, but he had some help, and other companies continued to possess large amounts of stock that, even though the company is not publicly traded anymore, they must attempt to value. One of those companies is Fidelity, a mutual fund, which has disclosed that it has marked down the value of its shares by 71.5 percent since the acquisition. If Fidelity’s reckoning of the actual value of X is accurate, that would indicate the company is now worth only $12.5 billion.

Adam Gabbatt, The Guardian

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Churn

Streaming services are working through how to deal with increasing levels of user churn as increasing prices and rival options push users to cancel subscriptions here and there. As of November, 24.4 percent of streaming service customers had cancelled three or more subscriptions over the prior two years, considerably higher than the 15.1 percent who said the same two years earlier. October and November saw higher levels of cancellations across major streaming services, with Antenna measuring that 6.3 percent of customers cancelled a streaming service account in November.

Sarah Krouse, The Wall Street Journal

Species

There are 1,700 plants and animals listed as endangered or threatened with extinction, and in the aggregate those species get $1.2 billion spent toward their preservation. That top-line number, however, really obscures the reality with the funding situation, as half of that money goes to two fish, salmon and steelhead trout, and of the remaining balance the funding tends to be diverted toward more charismatic endangered species like manatees, grizzly bears and spotted owls. The animal with a budget line that got the least amount of money was the Virginia fringed mountain snail, which had $100 thrown its way toward preservation, but that’s still more than can be said for about 200 plants and animals for which no money at all was spent. All told, 67 percent of spending on endangered species goes toward fish, with 7 percent going to mammals and just 5 percent to birds.

Matthew Brown and John Flesher, The Associated Press

Directionless

A new study from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative found that of 116 directors involved with the 100 top-grossing films of 2023, only 14 of them were women. That’s 12.1 percent of directors, up from 9 percent in 2022, but still only modest improvement from the levels seen in 2018, when 4.5 percent of directors were women. The percentage of directors who were from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups stayed pretty much flat at 22.4 percent of directors, only slightly higher than the 20.7 percent seen in 2022.

Brent Lang, Variety

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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.

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