By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Jordan

Michael Jordan, the famous cordwainer, has been trying to sell his 56,000-square-foot estate north of Chicago since 2012, and it has not yet worked. He allegedly spent $50 million building it and listed it for $29 million in 2012. It didn’t sell, so he bumped that price down to $14.855 million as of 2015, a figure from which the GOAT has not yet budged in the intervening near-decade. Even as the general course of inflation has kicked something like an implied 25 percent off the sale given his hold at the price, nobody’s budged. Jordan has also paid around $1 million in taxes since it was listed. Perhaps he can consult with one of his more financially levelheaded teammates, such as Dennis Rodman, for advice.

Sarah Paynter, The Wall Street Journal

Music

A federal indictment unsealed Wednesday alleges that a North Carolina man orchestrated a massive fraud of royalty payments from streaming services, producing AI-generated music and programming bots to play that music 4 billion times. According to the feds, the scheme involved as many as 10,000 fake streaming accounts, which in 2017 could stream songs 661,440 times per day, bringing in royalty payments for fake bands up to $1.2 million per year. As of June 2019, two years into the project, the feds allege he was earning around $110,000 a month from the scheme, and in an email from February he boasted making $12 million in royalties since 2019.

Maia Coleman, The New York Times

Electrolytes

No longer must beverages merely quench thirst; no, now we need them to do stuff for us, filling them up with various desirable chemicals and then letting those “electrolytes” improve our “performance” or whatever. Last year, the United States electrolyte drink market was around $11.8 billion in size, and by 2034 that’s expected to increase steadily to a $21.3 billion industry. It all started when people began drinking Pedialyte — a medical supplement for infants — as a cure for hangovers, and ever since, the race has been on to produce electrolyte powders, hydration beverages and more.

Patrick Sisson, Sherwood News

Ships

In 2022, the United States had five large oceangoing commercial ships on order, compared to 1,794 such ships in China, 734 in South Korea, 587 in Japan and 319 in Europe. According to the U.S. Navy, China’s shipbuilding capacity is now about 232 times as much as the United States’, and what domestic shipbuilders remain are mostly propped up by the Jones Act, which has all kinds of other issues. The United States has never had a particularly robust commercial shipbuilding industry, and was not really good at converting wartime production into a stable business: Within three years of World War II, ownership of global shipping tonnage was down to 48 percent. Even during the Liberty Ship times of World War II, the American industry wasn’t anywhere near as efficient as Britain’s industry on a labor-hour basis. The United States hasn’t accounted for more than 5 percent of global new ship tonnage since 1960.

Brian Potter, Construction Physics

Bombs

There are 1.5 million tonnes of munitions on the seafloors of the Baltic and North seas, remnants of the World Wars. The process of removing them is getting urgent, as weapon casings are breaking apart and will release carcinogens into the seas, so even if the acute risk of getting killed by one of the bombs might decrease, the chronic risk might start rising sharply. After the war, all the major parties had to get rid of their armaments, and many of them just dumped them at sea rather than try to decommission them on land. Lots of that took place in German waters given the, uh, general global disposition toward that particular territory at the time.

Paul Hockenos, Hakai Magazine

Norway

Of the 78,832 new passenger cars sold in Norway this year, 68,435 were electric, and last month 94 percent of the new cars registered were electric vehicles, a high-water mark. Norway has a bunch of incentives in favor of EVs, including a higher tax on internal combustion vehicles, as well as lower parking fees for EVs and the ability to drive in the bus lane. The three most popular models were the Tesla Model Y, the Volvo EX30 and the Skoda Enyaq.

Ben Kesslen, Quartz

Beetlejuice

The new movie Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is projected to bring in $100 million to $110 million in its opening weekend according to independent analysts, while the distributor Warner Bros. is sticking by a more conservative $80 million projection. If accurate, that’s good for the second-largest opening in September behind It, which made $123 million in 2017. The film opens 36 years after the original Beetlejuice, which became a cult classic. It’s also a big moment for star Michael Keaton (known for Minions and Batgirl) and director Tim Burton, the beloved director of Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland and Dark Shadows.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

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