By Walt Hickey

Concord

The PlayStation 5 game Concord was released and then yanked from servers within two weeks amid a botched launch and rough sales. Last month estimates of the game’s sales came in at 25,000, with the majority of them on the PlayStation 5 rather than PC, and most of those as digital downloads. However, this means that there are a fairly small number of physical discs of Concord out there, and while as recently as two weeks ago you practically couldn’t give them away, about 300 of them have hit eBay and have been snapped up by collectors at a premium. The going rate for the game discs — copies of which could be had for $40 at retailers — hit a median sales price of $118 as of September 5, settling at around $110 for sales on September 8.

Kyle Orland, Ars Technica

Spot Rates

The price of shipping something from Asia to Europe has fallen sharply, with the Shanghai-Rotterdam rate dropping 14 percent in a single week and the XSI Asia-Europe price dropping by 10 percent to $6,843 per 40-foot container. Spot rates are dropping swiftly, as demand appears to have topped out and monthly shipping volumes declined. Given the longer travel times with ships going around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope rather than through the risky Red Sea and Suez Canal, the season peaked earlier than usual. Transpacific rates dropped a bit as well, but only by around 3 percent.

The Loadstar

Shakers

The Shakers are a utopian religious group that fled Manchester, England, in 1774 for the United States after undergoing oppression for their unique beliefs in a god that was both male and female, pacifism, the equality of sexes and races, communal living, sacrificing desire for the collective good, and celibacy. That last one has meant that the Shakers persist pretty much through converts alone, by necessity. The community peaked at about 5,000 members in the 19th century, when 19 Shaker communities existed around the country. As it stands, today there remain two Shakers, the youngest aged 67, the older 86. They live in the last active Shaker village, in Sabbathday Lake in Maine.

Jordan Kisner, The New York Times

Roblox

The game Roblox is now 18 years old, and it’s never been bigger. The digital building game — and sprawling economic system and player metaverse that constitute it — has 79 million daily active users, its Developer Exchange Program is equivalent to about 18,000 full-time jobs in the U.S., and by the company’s estimates the creator economy around the game produced some $1.2 billion in economic activity from 2017 to 2023. It is five times the size of Minecraft and 2.25 times the size of Fortnite, and players spend 6 billion hours on Roblox per month in the aggregate. That doesn’t even factor in time spent on Twitch and YouTube watching other people play Roblox.

Julia Alexander, Posting Nexus

Firewall

In July, Pakistan launched a firewall in the name of national security, one that critics said was just a way to monitor and regulate content on the internet in the country. It’s had a seriously adverse impact on the country’s startup scene, and has reportedly destabilized access to the internet as a whole and spooked investors. The tech industry is responsible for 1 percent of GDP but 10 percent of Pakistan’s exports, but the heightened government scrutiny of the internet and the firewall has caused internet speeds to drop by up to 40 percent in the country.

Kunwar Khuldune Shahid, Rest of World

Green Guides

The Federal Trade Commission produces the Green Guides, which are the guidelines of what you’re allowed to advertise as a sustainable product without running afoul of false advertising. They’re revising the guides for the first time since 2012, and that means they’re under heavy lobbying right now from the Consumer Brands Association, which is chock-full of representatives from 51 of the most powerful packaged-goods companies in the world, like PepsiCo, Coke, Procter & Gamble, Mondelez, Campbell Soup, Conagra Brands and Clorox. Right now, only 5 percent of discarded plastic gets recycled, which is one indication that maybe the current system of advertising “recyclable” items is fundamentally broken and desperately needs change. As it stands, packaging is “recyclable” if at least 60 percent of Americans have access to a facility that will take the material, and “access” can mean a lot of things.

Lisa Song, ProPublica

Xolair

The drug Xolair is an injection approved in 2003 for asthma, but which was long suspected and long effective as a treatment for severe allergies, with the asthma patients treated with it often no longer suffering severe allergic reactions to foods they were long allergic to. Since it was only approved as an asthma treatment, it could only be prescribed to treat allergies off-label. Doctors can prescribe medication for off-label use at their discretion, so lots of people technically had access to Xolair to treat their allergies, often to great success; however, insurance companies don’t cover off-label prescriptions, which left patients on the hook for the $30,000 to $60,000 annual list price. In 2019, there was finally a large clinical trial for Xolair for food allergies, finding that after 16 weeks on the drug, two-thirds of patients with peanut allergies could eat 2.5 peanuts, which is a big win. FDA approval came earlier this year, and now it’s on the market for millions of people with severe and sometimes fatal allergies.

Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic

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