By Walt Hickey

This is the last edition of Numlock News of 2024! We will see each other again on January 2. Thanks so much for reading, have a restful week, happy holidays and happy new year!

Elf

Over 21 million elves have been sold since 2005 as part of the Elf on the Shelf series of Christmas-themed toys and/or surveillance state subsidiaries, hitting a sufficiently critical mass where those who abstain from the practice of jamming an elf in their house have to explain to their kids why they don’t have one and other kids do. Obviously, I’m on record here, and there’s no minimum age to talk to a child about the scourge of authoritarianism, the inevitable creep of surveillance, and bipartisan enthusiasm for drastically increasing the state’s power to observe citizens and curtail their rights, and the right, nay, obligation of free individuals to take extensive means to undermine compliance in attempts to limit the fundamental rights of man. I am also aware that invites other questions about Santa, though, so I do tend to agree with the compromise of indicating that “you guys are on the Nice List cusp, but kids who get elfs assigned to their house have a lot of work to do to get off the naughty list…” while also in due course adding “…and also remember that the Burgermeister Meisterburger was elected by very the people he eventually crushed, there’s a mobile WiFi deauther device in your stocking, and the default password on most Hisense camera devices is 0000.”

Jennifer Calfas, The Wall Street Journal

Iraq

On November 20 and 21, Iraq conducted its first census in decades. The last time the country had a full census was in 1987, and the 1997 census excluded the Kurds and was beset by Saddam Hussein’s classic bit of just making numbers up to rack up the score. Needless to say, it’s a pretty momentous moment for a country that is regaining stability after two decades of war. The survey had 70 questions, but didn’t inquire about ethnicity; that kind of question can get dicey in the region, one reason that countries like Lebanon still rely on their 1932 census. The full results will take months to count up but the early data is interesting — with a population of 45 million it’s still the largest Arab country east of the Nile — and encouraging too, with 60 percent of the population of working age, meaning that the country is actually in a pretty ideal demographic position for strong economic growth.

Ariel I Ahram, Foreign Policy

Cheggy

The U.S. egg industry kills 350 million male chicks per year because they’re not of use to the egg industry because they cannot lay eggs. This practice is pretty brutal — right after being sexed the males are immediately ground up. There are tech fixes, such as a new machine popular in Europe called Cheggy, developed by the German agricultural concern Agri Advanced Technologies. The first two of which in the United States entered use at hatcheries in Texas and Iowa. The issue for the American hatcheries is that it only works well on brown eggs, and in the United States white eggs account for 81 percent of sales. A system that will be able to detect the sex of embryos in white eggs is expected within five years.

Scott McFetridge, The Associated Press

Motors

Honda and Nissan are going ahead with the merger, aiming for 2026 to complete the tie up that will create the third-largest automaker in the world, behind Toyota and Volkswagen. The move is definitely not a rescue of the ailing Nissan company, which we know because for whatever reason everyone in the business world and government keeps saying that it is definitely not a rescue of the ailing Nissan company, completely unprompted, and repeatedly to any device that’s recording. One motivator for the government to get the deal done is that 8 percent of the working population of Japan works for an automaker or a related job.

Peter Landers, The Wall Street Journal

Weather

Damages from weather disasters hit $92.9 billion last year, according to NOAA, and years of increasingly damaging weather events have provoked a reaction in the insurance market, with costs up 13 percent from 2020 to 2023. Those are being driven by premium increases in some of the areas most prone to disasters, and a big driver in turn is the rising cost of reinsurance, which is the insurance bought by insurance companies which itself has increased in costs 100 percent between 2017 and 2023. It’s not like the home insurance companies are having a great time: for the fifth year in a row, insurers paid out more than they brought in with premiums, and in 2023 they paid out $1.11 in claims for every $1 they made.

Polly Mosendz and Eric Roston, Bloomberg

Canoes

Native societies such as Tinglit, Haida, and Tsimshian people made a life across what is now southeast Alaska and British Columbia using sophisticated boat-making techniques that converted entire trunks of massive trees into dug-out canoes. Several years ago, a timber scout found a fascinating site far from the waterline in an old-growth forest: fallen trees with trunks missing up to 10 meters of trunk, and then the real jewel: a single canoe that had been carved out but not hauled away, an archaeological stroke of good luck, about 140 years old. The canoe will remain where it is, but it’s been 3D scanned and the team behind that plans to make digital models of up to 20 more that have been found abandoned in forests.

Joshua Hunt, Hakai Magazine

Tortilla

The United States tortilla market is valued at around $6.7 billion, and one company, Gruma, had net sales of $3.6 billion. Gruma, which makes Mission and Guerrero brand tortillas and Maseca brand corn flour, is also responsible for a 20th century innovation that made the flour derived from corn act more similarly to the flour derived from wheat. Ordinarily, corn is boiled, nixtamalized, rinsed, milled, aerated, and then cut into dough. That makes corn flour harder to work with than wheat flour, hence the innovation, but it’s also controversial, as critics say it makes most tortillas taste bland.

Kristen V. Brown, The Atlantic

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