Text: An analysis of Australian sewage found that researchers were able to determine demographic data about the source of the material and the wealth of who sat upon the throne. The researchers analyzed samples from 22 wastewater treatment plants across six states and territories, roughly 21 percent of the population of Australia, and managed to do so on the very day that the Australian census was taking place. People in wealthier areas consumed more fiber, alcohol and caffeine, and used fewer tobacco products and illicit drugs. Richer people also used fewer antidepressants, according to a detailed analysis of their poop. However, the type of antidepressants preferred varied by income: working class neighborhoods used more desvenlafaxine, while amitriptyline was linked to higher educational obtainment. Come to think of it, I was wondering why that guy from the Queens County Department of Sanitation came by to ask me to stop dumping industrial quantities of coffee and whiskey into the sewer system.

Text: Japan is now hosting the Rugby World Cup, a six-week-long event where earth’s drunkest nations compete in the sport. Japan likes beer, sure — they drank 53.5 liters per person in 2018 — but a third of tickets have been sold to overseas fans, most of whom are from Britain, Australia, and Ireland, three nations that love to party: Per capita, the U.K. consumes 88.6 liters of beer annually, Australia consumes 97.6 liters and Ireland consumes 117.9 liters of beer per capita. This is leading Japanese beer distributors — such as Kirin Holdings, which brews the official beer of the Rugby Cup Heineken in one location in Japan — on a logistical expedition to ensure that stadiums all over the country are stocked up ahead of what’s projected to be a 40 percent to 50 percent pop in sales for pubs.

Source: Lisa Du and Grace Huang, Bloomberg

Numlock: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-september-19-2019-cctv

Text: Japan is now hosting the Rugby World Cup, a six-week-long event where earth’s drunkest nations compete in the sport. Japan likes beer, sure — they drank 53.5 liters per person in 2018 — but a third of tickets have been sold to overseas fans, most of whom are from Britain, Australia, and Ireland, three nations that love to party: Per capita, the U.K. consumes 88.6 liters of beer annually, Australia consumes 97.6 liters and Ireland consumes 117.9 liters of beer per capita. This is leading Japanese beer distributors — such as Kirin Holdings, which brews the official beer of the Rugby Cup Heineken in one location in Japan — on a logistical expedition to ensure that stadiums all over the country are stocked up ahead of what’s projected to be a 40 percent to 50 percent pop in sales for pubs.

Source: Lisa Du and Grace Huang, Bloomberg

Numlock: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-september-19-2019-cctv

Text: A deportation facility/airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, has become a crucial part of Trump’s plan to deport millions of immigrants. Since January, more than 40,000 people have been shuttled through this system, and over 200 deportation flights have departed from Alexandria. With tens of billions of dollars in additional funding now directed toward Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Louisiana is at the leading edge of an expansive and aggressive nationwide effort to expel immigrants. The state locks up more people per capita than nearly any other in the U.S. Unlike other states, a majority of Louisiana’s prisoners are held in local jails, with the state paying local sheriffs a daily rate per inmate, a lucrative system and incentive for the state.

Source: Brent McDonald, Campbell Robertson, Zach Levitt and Albert Sun, The New York Times

Numlock: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-august-7-2025

Text: New details are emerging about a controversial lotto arbitrage that occurred in 2023, specifically the role that the Texas Lottery Commission played in a drawing where one player bought enough tickets to guarantee that they would win a $95 million jackpot. Lotto Texas is a $1 ticket where six numbers from 1 to 54 are selected, with 25.8 million combinations. Sales are generally around 1 million per drawing, which presents an arbitrage opportunity to spend $25.8 million to buy a ticket with every possible number combination once a jackpot gets sufficiently high. An entity called Rook TX did this very thing, buying virtually all 25.8 million possible combinations, a play planned in Malta and then funded by a London betting company, and which more specifically was carried out by four retailers in Texas who were helped by the Texas Lottery Commission to fill rush orders for dozens of extra terminals, and not challenge methods of entering millions of ticket orders into state terminals with personal iPads and QR codes, leading to a win and taking the lump sum of $57.8 million. The controversy mostly comes down to at what point of being helpful is the Texas Lottery Commission just helping a consortium of gamblers rig the Texas Lotto.

Source: Matt Levine, Bloomberg

Numlock: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-march-6-2025-voyager

Date: 2019-07-31

Text: The U.S. tart cherry market is having a rough time of it thanks to Turkey importing cheap cherries and driving down prices. Michigan is the epicenter of the fight: the state produced 300 million pounds of tart cherries worth $56 million last year, an amount of cherries worth about $107 million in 2014. They’re used for pie filling and juice, while sweet cherries are a much larger $638 million, 344,400 ton crop. Turkey imported 1.5 million pounds of tart dried cherries in 2018 for $0.89 cents per pound, compared to the $4.60 per pound charged by U.S. processors.

Source: Shayndi Raice, The Wall Street Journal

Numlock: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-july-31-2019-

Text: A new analysis from Nordpass of password usage found that the most commonly used password is “123456,” used 103,170,552 times. Other popular passwords include “123456789” and “password” and the enigmatic “qwerty.” Distressingly, Nordpass calculated that 73 percent of the most common 200 passwords of 2020 could be cracked in less than one second, a figure that in 2021 stands at 84.5 percent of the list. The data was drawn from a 4-terabyte database covering around 50 countries, which also helped them determine a bit of local flavor to the easily-guessed passwords, including “steelers” in the U.S., “liverpool” in the U.K., “marseille” in France and “guinness” in Ireland.

Source: Dhvani Solani, Vice

Numlock: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-november-23-2021-propeller

Text: Last year 6.8 million couples in China registered for marriage, the lowest number since records began all the way back in 1986. That’s down from 13.5 million in 2013, and it’s a problem for a country where the birthrate is on the decline and it’s rare for single women or unmarried couples to have kids. Even though the numbers are so far up slightly in 2023 year over year, on net it’s still bad: While an additional 40,000 couples were married in the first quarter of 2023 compared to the same quarter of 2022, divorces were up 127,000 year over year for Q1, more than cancelling that growth out threefold.

Source: Nicole Hong and Zixu Wang, The New York Times

Numlock: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-july-11-2023-los-angeles

Text: Globally, the cruise industry takes in $37.8 billion from nearly 27 million passengers, but the business is still working on balancing the good it does for tourist communities (money, commerce) with the bad (leaving the engine on in port, accidentally running over their whales, et cetera). Take Ketchikan, Alaska, which went from seeing 50,000 visitors per year in the 1970s to an expected 1.3 million visitors this year, 16 percent over 2018 and mostly thanks to cruise traffic. The relationship between the town and the cruise operators is mixed. This year, a projected 30 million will board a cruise ship, 35 percent of whom will go to the Caribbean and the Bahamas, and 5 percent to Alaska. New legislation that reduces the emissions belched into the atmosphere, which also contribute to asthma near port cities, may help reduce the negatives, but fines are just a cost of business in the cruise industry so who can say.

Date: 2026-07-06

Text: Cabo Verde had a Cinderella run at the World Cup, losing to the reigning champs Argentina (3-2) after an unexpected run into the knockout rounds. The country, an island nation home to about 550,000 people, has tourism making up about a quarter of GDP, and given a surge in interest from the world over, the country now hopes to capitalize on its moment in the spotlight to diversify its tourism business. Currently, the country attracts about 1.2 million tourists per year, mostly from Europeans who primarily visit just two of the nine inhabited islands and mainly on all-inclusive packages. This World Cup, and the global goodwill that accompanied it, is seen as an opportunity for the islands.

Source: Bailey Schulz, Skift

Numlock: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-july-6-2026-cabo-verde

Text: The global market for instant noodles is expected to grow 35 percent over the next 10 years and is projected to hit $56.5 billion in 2030. The market has multiple large players, but is still far from a single player holding total control. As of 2025, Nissin Foods and Ting Hsin each have 10 percent of the market, while Indofood, Toyo Suisan and Nongship each have a seven percent share. The remaining 59 percent of the industry is split amongst a bunch of rivals. That said, noodles from Korea are on the rise in the U.S. The combined share of Nongshim and Samyang has increased 6.1 percent to hit 29.6 percent in the United States, while Japan’s Toyo Suisan, Nissin and Sanyo Foods fell 6.6 percent to 63.9 percent.

Source: Nami Matsuura and Hiroyasu Oda, Nikkei Asia

Numlock: https://www.numlock.com/p/numlock-news-november-25-2025-portraits

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