By Walt Hickey

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Cocoa Smuggling

Ivory Coast is the top producer of cocoa in the world, and is in competition with its direct neighbor to the east, Ghana, in keeping the world’s supplies of chocolate precursor stocked. Ivory Coast is looking to set a price for cocoa at 1,850 CFA to 2,000 CFA per kilogram starting in October, hiking the price by about 23 percent, which would push the price of cocoa to $3,140 to $3,400 per ton. A shortfall in the harvest pushed prices of cocoa futures to $11,000 per ton, and right now the December contract for cocoa is trading above $7,500 per ton. One issue for the country in accurately forecasting supply is increasingly rampant bean smuggling: Ivory Coast and Ghana have a pretty porous border, and Ivory Coast lost 150,000 to 200,000 tons of beans to smuggling this season.

Baudelaire Mieu and Mumbi Gitau, Bloomberg

Gambling

Lots of states right now are legalizing gambling, authorizing new casinos, and essentially pulling out all the stops when it comes to mobile gaming with the argument that it’s a boon to the states in the form of tax revenue. That said: is it though? It’s a rerun of what happened a few years ago, when lots of states gave the go-ahead for gambling in casinos. The issue is that a new casino in the middle of, say, New York isn’t just pulling money that would have otherwise been spent at a casino in Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but usually ends up hoovering up money that would have been spent on existing amenities. Indeed, one study found that for every dollar spent by a state’s residents in a casino, state revenue actually fell by 7 cents.

Pat Garofalo, Boondoggle

Beetles

A new study has found that dung beetles are very capable of effectively working in pairs, as long as it’s a male beetle and a female beetle working together to move a ball of dung. Same-sex beetle collaborations were found to end in fights. However, pairs of beetles could move their signature balls of animal droppings over obstacles that are up to 20 centimeters high in experiments, balls that were around 10 times their own body weight. The ability to help each other move an object without knowing its eventual destination is generally thought to be a skill possessed by only humans, but it turns out we’re far from alone in the ability to, when needed, work on some aimless piece of crap because someone else thinks it’s important. Nature never ceases to inspire.

Lund University

Books

Total book sales were up 5.6 percent year over year in the first half of 2024, hitting $6.3 billion. That’s fueled by a 6.7 percent increase in sales of books for adults, as well as hot markets in the religion section (up 15.6 percent in the first six months) and the higher education book market (up 8 percent). Fiction for adults was up 11.3 percent, and sales of digital audiobooks were up 20.4 percent. The only areas where sales slipped were in children’s and young adult fiction and nonfiction, and the sales bump in adult nonfiction was vastly outpaced by the rest of the market. The signals are clear here: Americans want bibles, college textbooks and romantasy, and everything else can go screw. The first author to successfully blend those three incredibly disparate genres will make a fortune, perhaps a book featuring a sexy academic getting through romantic entanglements all while investigating biblically-informed mysteri— dammit, I realize I’ve just accidentally reinvented Dan Brown. That’s on me.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Regulation

A new survey asked respondents what industries should be more regulated and what industries should be less regulated. Generally, respondents preferred more regulation over less. The industries that the largest numbers of people said ought to be more regulated included artificial intelligence (72 percent favor more regulation, 5 percent less), pharmaceuticals (66 percent favor more, 10 percent less), social media (60 percent favor more, 15 percent less), firearms (57 percent favor more, 20 percent less) and health insurance (56 percent favor more, 16 percent less). That said, there are lots of industries that people felt really didn’t need that much more of a heavy hand, including fashion (20 percent favor more regulation, 17 percent less), entertainment (27 percent favor more, 16 percent less) and tourism (30 percent favor more, 14 percent less). The biggest year-over-year gains in demand for regulation were in AI (up 15 percentage points between 2023 and 2024), grocery (up 8 percentage points) and food and beverage (up 6 percentage points).

Taylor Orth, YouGov

V2X

“Vehicle to everything” tech (also known as V2X) is a communication system where vehicles can transmit speed, location and other information to anyone willing to listen. The tech has been around for a while, and early implementations in places like Brno in the Czech Republic can make traffic signals adapt to demand and emergency services needs. The U.S. Department of Transportation has announced its own national deployment plan with a target of having three-quarters of intersections in the United States equipped with V2X tech within 12 years, with a more specific hope of reducing traffic deaths (over 40,000 last year, up 24 percent over 10 years) and pedestrian deaths (7,522 in 2022, a 40-year high). One issue is that such a system really needs a critical mass of equipped vehicles for the whole thing to work: An estimated 70 percent of vehicles on the road need V2X for a 50 percent chance of effective communication with infrastructure.

Maria Clara Cobo and Fola Akinnibi, Bloomberg

Theaters

Hollywood’s having an all right 2024 at the box office, with a few outperforming hits like Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 giving exhibitors a little breathing room financially. The National Association of Theatre Owners is reporting that eight cinema chains in North America combining for 21,000 screens will plow $2.2 billion into new theater upgrades, which include more theaters installing luxury recliners and laser projection technology, improving the food, and upgrading more screens to the premium theater offerings and Imax, as well as adding arcades and bowling to some locations. The industry’s near-death experience in the pandemic and rising threats from streamers seem to be motivating thinking around what exactly movie theaters are for and the best way to actually improve that kind of experience.

Etan Vlessing, The Hollywood Reporter

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