By Walt Hickey

Quarterback

In the NFL, teams can take out insurance policies on star players. Some teams do this religiously, while other teams don’t do it at all; it comes down to things like the frugality of ownership and the willingness to gamble the payroll on any given tendon. Not taking out a policy can blow back on teams, like when Aaron Rodgers tore his Achilles after four snaps and the Jets had to eat the $37 million salary because they didn’t spend $1 million to $4 million insuring him. It turns out, though, that the insurance racket is a bit of a clever loophole when it comes to the salary cap, as teams like the 49ers have figured out: The Niners tend to buy a policy on any guy they’re paying more than league minimum, and for a couple of years there San Francisco earned millions back in end-of-year salary cap adjustments. Over 10 years they racked up $54.3 million in insurance credits and other salary cap hacks, double the amount of the team with the second-highest value of adjustments.

Kalyn Kahler, ESPN

Ship

The Department of Justice is suing the operator of the Dali, the cargo ship that took out the Francis Scott Key Bridge and blocked Baltimore Harbor back in March, for $100 million in damages. The claim was filed in the District of Maryland, and the government said it’s also going to pursue punitive damages to stop this from happening again, because obviously the only thing preventing ship operators from careening into major nautical infrastructure is the implied potential threat of some punitive damages in court.

Pamela King, E&E News

Blocked

A new platform called GFWeb tracks when China’s state-operated internet firewalls block websites, and has pinpointed the date that China blocked ChatGPT to March 2, 2023. From January to June of this year, China began censoring 10 AI services, three of which blended religion and AI, a sort of double whammy. Last year saw 77 different websites related to AI tech blocked, including access to Hugging Face on May 7, 2023.

Joanna Chiu, Rest of World

Hollywood

Things are very bad in the Los Angeles-based film and television industry, as a massive pullback from peak production has pushed many of the workers in the entertainment industry, from actors to gaffers, to financial brink. As it stands, the unemployment rate in Hollywood’s industries is at 12.5 percent as of August, the single worst rate for that month since 2000 outside of the pandemic and triple the overall national unemployment rate. The number of filming days in film, commercials, and television in Los Angeles County was 12,572 days in the first half of the year, down by a third from the 17,392 shooting days of the 10-year pandemic-excepted average. This isn’t your average recession.

Max Knoblauch, Sherwood News

Inspectors

New York City has a great restaurant scene, but its Department of Health is struggling to inspect and reinspect them on a timely basis. For instance, when a restaurant gets less than an “A” grade and wants a reinspection after fixing issues, they’re bound to wait between 11 and 13 months before a follow-up inspector is dispatched. In the 2024 fiscal year, the Department of Health reported a 17 percent reduction in initial health inspections, and said the department only managed to inspect 66.4 percent of restaurants, down from 83.4 percent in 2023 and well off the 99.5 percent logged in fall 2019. As of 2024, 86.9 percent of restaurants get an “A.” The Department of Health is actively recruiting more inspectors to shore up the team.

Andrea Strong, Eater

Messi

When Lionel Messi moved from Paris Saint-Germain to the United States to play for Inter Miami, he became the latest superstar spending the tail end of a remarkable career entertaining Americans at soccer, a sport that has resisted the zeitgeist, at least on the men’s side. This action singlehandedly caused revenue at Miami to quadruple, and has given a boost to Major League Soccer as a whole to the tune of an estimated $3.2 billion in increased value of the franchises. The thing is, Messi’s contract ends with the 2025 season, and who knows if he’ll stick around. The $3.2 billion question is whether or not that Messi boost in valuations will persist when the man is gone.

Michael Smith and Guillermo Molero, Bloomberg

Bears

A new study published in BMC Genomics reports that polar bears split off from brown bears and evolved unique features to survive arctic environments about 70,000 years ago, which is more recent than previously thought. The study compared the genomes of 119 polar bears and 135 brown bears as well as two fossilized polar bears, and found that seven specific genes related to polar adaptation emerged around that time, probably influenced by the conditions for bears living at the end of the last ice age.

Bob Yirka, Phys.org

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