By Walt Hickey

Cars

The best business on the high seas has been in ro-ros: that is, the roll-on/roll-off car carriers that move vehicles around the oceans. Since late 2022, the rate for one of these ships has been over $100,000 per day, owing to high demand for such freighters, well above the $15,000 to $30,000 per day rate that they maintained for most of the 2010s. After spiking to $115,000 per day as recently as February, the price of a ship that can haul roughly 6,500 vehicles has finally fallen below six figures per day, hitting $95,000 in November. Part of this is the cure for high prices being high prices: In a quest to capitalize on the trend, the car-carrying fleet will grow 12 percent next year, while demand will only rise by about 1 percent.

Alex Longley, Bloomberg

Be A Real Shame If Something Happened To It

Wildfires have become common in Italy, particularly in the south of the country, and a new study published in Criminology & Criminal Justice argues that the Sicilian Mafia is to blame. The 8,000 wildfires per year in Sicily can consistently be traced to arsons related to vendettas, land disputes, and the mafia, the paper argues, with 70 percent of them caused by arson. The wildfires in question have burned 120,000 acres of vegetation, and wildfires have been found to consistently occur in places with a more significant mafia presence.

Aubrey Spowart, University of California - Berkeley

Humpback

A team of researchers has identified a single humpback whale who made the impressive journey from Colombia in South America — where it was spotted in 2013 and 2017 — to breeding grounds near Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania, a minimum 13,000-kilometer journey that smashes the previous known record for a humpback of 10,000 kilometers. The whale was uncovered as a result of the Happywhale fluke identification program, which adapts facial recognition technology to the unique tails of whales and can trace individual specimens on vast journeys through aggregated photography. The program compares a given photograph to over 900,000 photographs of 109,000 individual whales.

Elizabeth Pennisi, Science

Mets

In the immediate aftermath of a $765 million contract for outfielder Juan Soto, New York Mets owner Steve Cohen sold off two minor league baseball teams for an undisclosed sum, a move which presumably freed up a little walking-around money to poach the player from the Yankees. Cohen will sell the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate (the Syracuse Mets) and the High-A affiliate (the Brooklyn Cyclones) to Diamond Baseball Holdings, a group which has quietly racked up an impressive portfolio of 38 minor league teams, 13 of which are in Triple-A.

Eric Jackson, Sportico

Rocketman

A new survey of 5,273 employed adults found that while 69 percent of workers think they have a great deal or a fair amount of job security, 71 percent said that their pay is too low for the quality of work that they do, and 70 percent said that their pay is too low for the amount of work that they do. Among all employed people, 50 percent considered their current job to be a career, 15 percent said it’s just a stepping stone to a career, and 35 percent said it’s just a job to get by. Overall, 76 percent of respondents said they did “more than what’s expected” at their job, compared to 23 percent who said they do only what’s expected and 2 percent who conceded that yeah, they’re phoning it in.

Luona Lin, Juliana Menasce Horowitz and Richard Fry, Pew Research Center

Battery

A new study published in Nature Energy found that electric vehicle batteries lasted as much as a third longer in the real world than they did in initial expectations from laboratory simulations, arguing that the controlled conditions of lab analysis are actually much rougher on batteries than drivers are. Compared to three years of experimenting on EV batteries through 47 different scenarios, some batteries lasted as much as 38 percent longer — 120,000 additional miles — than what would be expected under lab conditions.

David Ferris, E&E News

Mister Web

Kraven the Hunter, which is less “a movie” and more “a physical manifestation of the satisfaction of the use-it-or-lose-it clause of Sony’s Spider-Man contract,” is projected to bomb in cinemas, staring down a $13 million to $15 million opening across 3,200 cinemas. For perspective, the movie Madame Web still managed to pull off a $15.3 million opening. The movie cost $110 million to produce and is the first, and, one simply must imagine, last movie in Sony’s Spider-Man universe to have an R rating. Somewhat relatedly, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is also out this weekend, and that movie was explicitly made so that New Line Cinema gets to keep the rights to the Tolkien novels while Peter Jackson makes two new movies starring Andy Serkis. Ah, the magic of motion pictures.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

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