Numlock News: September 21, 2021 • Fake Trees, Poison Ivy, New Fish
By Walt HickeyScamsThe Justice Department charged 14 people with operating a scam that created fake rideshare driver accounts for unqualified drivers using a complicated scheme involving GPS spoofing, bots, and stolen driver’s license data. The goal was to reap a harvest of referral bonuses, which can reach up to $1,000 apiece. According to one message, a delivery company paid out $194,800 for 487 of the fake accounts. EmmysHistory was made at Sunday’s Emmy Awards when The Handmaid’s Tale on Hulu did not win any of its 21 nominations, which beat the record for most losses in a single year previously set by Mad Men with 17 nominations in 2012. The show won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in 2017, which made Hulu the first streaming service to haul in a top Emmy, and this year only three shows — The Crown, The Mandalorian and WandaVision — had more nominations. If it’s any consolation I have also lost every single one of the Emmys I was ever up for. New SpeciesFish markets are actually a promising place for researchers to find new species and obtain new samples of fish. The most iconic story in the genre is the rediscovery of the coelacanth at a fish market in 1938, but it still happens, such as when a second species of coelacanth was spotted in 1997 at an Indonesian fish market, or the 2018 discovery of a new deep-sea shark at a market in India. It’s also useful for parasitologists trying to up a sample size, where it takes something like 35 fish to detect all the parasites that might affect a species and conveniently fish markets tend to be able to provide. ViewersSunday’s Emmy Awards scored a viewership of 7.4 million, up 16 percent from the 6.37 million viewers logged in 2020. Across both digital and linear platforms, all told people watched 1.4 billion minutes of the Emmy Awards, which is really good news for awards show fans accustomed to bad news. The last time this many people watched the Emmys was in 2018, when 10.2 million tuned in and the penultimate season of Game of Thrones was dominating the television conversation and there was still, you know, hope. Mónica Marie Zorrilla, Variety Ho Ho HoThe artificial Christmas tree industry is in a dire position due to supply chain disruptions, and the prices for a fake tree this year are poised to rise 20 percent to 25 percent at some retailers. Inbound shipping costs for Balsam Hill, a company specializing in importing medium- to high-end fake trees, will see its shipping costs quadruple compared to 2020, with costs expected to land somewhere between $45 million and $50 million. All told, the artificial Christmas tree market is a $1 billion to $2 billion industry annually, and business is good: in 2020 85 percent of American homes had a fake tree, up from 46 percent in 1992. Paul Berger, The Wall Street Journal IvyEvery year, 10 million to 50 million Americans get a rash from poison ivy and its cousins, plants that cause about 10 percent of all lost-time injuries among the U.S. Forest Service. Climate change is both expanding the range of poison ivy and also making it more toxic. It’s something of an underappreciated affliction, but hope is on the horizon: there’s a vaccine in development that would prevent or mitigate the reaction to urushiol, the active agitator in ivy. This would be a huge advance over the current preferred solution to Poison Ivy, which historically entails calling Batman. Claudia Wells, Scientific American ChildrenFrom 2000 to 2016, the number of children around the world who have to work on farms, factories and mines fell by 94 million, down to 152 million. Over the past four years, those numbers are back on the rise again, with an additional 8 million children having to work. UNICEF warns that the pandemic forced more children back into the global labor force. A review by the World Bank has found evidence that paying parents to keep kids in school can have a significant positive effect on reducing child labor, and existing evidence from Brazil’s poverty program Bolsa Família found it can be done comparatively inexpensively. Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today. The best way to reach new readers is word of mouth. If you click THIS LINKin your inbox, it’ll create an easy-to-send pre-written email you can just fire off to some friends. Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips, or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement. 2021 Sunday subscriber editions: Jeopardy! · Mangoes · BBLs · Summer Box Office · Time Use · Shampoo Bars · Wikipedia · Thriving · Comic Rebound · Return of Travel · Sticky Stuff · For-profit Med School · A Good Day · Press Reset · Perverse Incentives · Demon Slayer · Carbon Credits · Money in Politics · Local News · Oscar Upsets · Sneakers · Post-pandemic Cities ·Facebook AI · Fireflies · Vehicle Safety · Climate Codes · Figure Skating · True Believer · Apprentices · Sports Polls · Pipeline · Wattpad · The Nib · Driven2020 Sunday Edition Archive2019 Sunday Edition Archive2018 Sunday Edition ArchiveYou’re on the free list for Numlock News. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. |
Key phrases
Older messages
Numlock News: September 20, 2021 • Trolls, Dune, Coupon Fraud
Monday, September 20, 2021
By Walt Hickey Welcome back! The Spice Must Flow Dune, which is out in the US in late October, has begun its international rollout in 24 markets and 7819 screens overseas. In its opening weekend, it
Numlock News: September 17, 2021 • Loopholes, Laser Internet, Christopher Nolan
Friday, September 17, 2021
By Walt Hickey Have a great weekend! Last week I did a Q&A with my friend Daniel Levitt over at his newsletter Inside the Newsroom all about the creation and past couple years of Numlock, his
Numlock News: September 16, 2021 • El Chapo, Van Gogh, Taco Bell
Thursday, September 16, 2021
By Walt Hickey The Lottery Mexico's Institute to Return Stolen Goods to the People will raffle off a former property owned by drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán located in a neighborhood in
Numlock News: September 14, 2021 • Geomagnetic Storm, Broadway, Mammoths
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
By Walt Hickey Bollywood Two of the largest film studios in India inked a 10 billion rupee ($135 million) deal to jointly develop 10 feature films, a significant bet on a Bollywood box office that has
Numlock News: September 13, 2021 • Roomba, Fusion, Mad Max Fury Road
Monday, September 13, 2021
By Walt Hickey Welcome back! The Ones Who Walk Away From OmelAWS On Thursday iRobot announced that the new Roomba j7+ would be able to use a machine learning model to identify and avoid dog poop,
You Might Also Like
☕ Four plenty
Friday, April 19, 2024
Cannabis retailers' big day. April 19, 2024 Retail Brew PRESENTED BY Feedonomics It's Friday, and tomorrow, as we note below, is 4/20, the biggest day in cannabis retail. But food brands are
The endless quest to replace alcohol
Friday, April 19, 2024
Plus: garbage e-books and more. Each week, a different Vox editor curates their favorite work that Vox has published across text, audio, and video. This week's recommendations are brought to you by
GeekWire Startups Weekly
Friday, April 19, 2024
News, analysis, insights from the Pacific NW startup ecosystem View this email in your browser Presented by CIBC Seattle tech vet calls rapidly growing 'AI Tinkerers' meetups the new '
Social Speak
Friday, April 19, 2024
Here's a love that does dare speak its name Social Speak By Caroline Crampton • 19 Apr 2024 View in browser View in browser The Formalisation Of Social Precarities Ambika Tandon, Aayush Rathi et al
AI education isn't just about tech know-how
Friday, April 19, 2024
+ wild turkeys disappearing
⚡️ How Google Pushes Phone Photography Past Its Limits
Friday, April 19, 2024
Plus: Microsoft's new AI makes convincing deepfakes worryingly easy.
Friday mailbag edition.
Friday, April 19, 2024
We get into our backlog of reader questions and cover a lot of ground. Friday mailbag edition. By Isaac Saul • 19 Apr 2024 View in browser View in browser Photo by Zeke Tucker / Unsplash Every now and
☕ Computer, take the wheel
Friday, April 19, 2024
Tech Brew takes a ride in a May Mobility AV. April 19, 2024 Tech Brew It's Friday. Tech Brew's Jordyn Grzelewski hopped into an autonomous minivan to get a feel for May Mobility's tech.
LEVER TIME: Democrats Will Not Tolerate Dissent
Friday, April 19, 2024
As part of a revamped and expanded weekly podcast series, David Sirota explores how the DNC crushed 2024 primary challengers — and might have hurt Biden's reelection chances. LEVER TIME: Democrats
Can anyone be neutral on Taylor Swift?
Friday, April 19, 2024
Plus: Dinner party etiquette, the ships saving the internet, and more April 19, 2024 View in browser Happy Friday! Or, rather: Happy Taylor Swift album release day to all who celebrate. I'm