News We’re Watching
The Gulf continues to send much less oil to the world than before the Iran war. Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline that bypassed the Strait of Hormuz got shut down last week after drone attacks coming from Iraq. If it doesn’t come online within a month, it could have a seismic impact, keeping more than 100 million barrels of oil from international markets. Already, crude oil prices in the U.S. have shot up in the past few weeks. For more than a year, stockpiles of oil have made this seem like less of a crisis than it is, couching gas prices, but they’re running out. Now, reports the “Great Fuel Crisis” that execs have warned about for months is finally here.
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Even if the Strait of Hormuz fully reopened tomorrow, oil prices aren’t just going to pop down to normal right away. Heightened prices are likely to stick around for a while as the market resets. Making things worse, backups available to cushion oil prices have been working on overdrive, and now many are at their limits. For example, the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve could be used as a source to transition us back to a higher oil supply if the global taps are turned back on. But it’s at its lowest level since 1982 and will take months, if not years, to refill. Then there’s refining capacity. Helima Croft with RBC Capital, an investment bank, told CNBC U.S. refiners are operating at 98% capacity. In other words, even if more oil becomes available to be refined, there’s no spare capacity to handle it.
Sulfur is needed in fertilizer, which, of course, is needed to grow your food. But the price of it has gone haywire. In 2024, it was $46 per ton. In 2025, $180 per ton. Spot prices in July saw a ton of sulfur go for more than $1,000 per metric ton. A spokesman for Mosaic Company, which produces phosphate fertilizer, told AgWeb the prices are SO high that phosphate fertilizer use is expected to drop significantly. Mosaic confirmed with The Indicator that they have already idled two facilities in Louisiana, impacting 300 families. There’s no single number connecting high sulfur prices to food inflation, but Oxford Economics, pointing to higher diesel and fertilizer prices, sees global food prices going up another 4.8% in 2027.
Unfortunately, the U.S. is not immune to the global supply disruption. Several countries in the Middle East, including Iran, are big suppliers of sulfur, but it’s stuck behind the closed Strait of Hormuz. Russia is also a major producer, but its exports are banned to many countries. Now, other countries in need of sulfur are coming to U.S. markets. All this is causing prices to increase, including for Mosaic. So when food prices get higher in 2027, you can tell your friends about this weird mechanic.
For decades, cameras and cops alike have been capturing license plate numbers of offending vehicles. “Black SUV headed to I-9, here’s an impossibly grainy image” (my own made-up scenario). Flock cameras have revolutionized the game by adding machine learning to the mix. If you’re searching for that Black SUV headed down I-9, these AI-powered cameras can tap into a very rich database. So, police departments across the country are each paying well over $100,000 annually total to use them, including in Berkeley, Calif. and Conroe, Texas.
The primary goal: reduce car thefts. We learned that motor-vehicle theft did drop ~11% in the first year after Flock went live. The paper’s co-authors considered the impacts modest. Meanwhile, having always-on cameras monitoring the road can come with its own privacy risks. We spoke to 404 Media’s Jason Koebler about OTHER ways Flock cameras have been used … be prepared for some grim examples.
Reporter Ricky Mulvey explains Flock technology isn’t used for facial recognition. But it does HAVE the ability to do it if Flock or the police wanted to implement it.
“They have introduced not just automated license plate readers that take static images of cars as they drive by, but also pan-tilt-zoom cameras, which are high-definition video cameras that can track people as they’re walking by or driving by or riding a bike or walking their dog,” said Koebler.
To Ricky, this stands out because we’re describing them as automatic license plate readers, which they are … but the company could use them for a whole lot more.
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Listener Mailbag
Lego is certainly a big market! They’ve got movies, they’ve got young customers, adult ones. And these little building blocks are not exactly cheap. There’s a whole section on their website for Lego sets over $300. If you want to build the Death Star, be prepared to break the bank.
The numbers comparing the two industries though, are fairly clean. The GDP of California’s film industry is ~$59 billion. There’s no GDP for a company like Lego, but its annual revenue for 2025 was ~$12.9 billion. A closer figure to compare to GDP would be “value added” – that’s the difference between its gross output and the cost of its inputs – and THAT would be significantly less than $13 billion!
In Our Spare Time
What if you found out in your 40s that your dad isn’t who you thought he was? That’s the conceit of the absolutely addictive narrative series by Matt Katz, a former WNYC reporter. His whole life, Matt tried to connect with his birth dad, who just wasn’t around much. But after taking a DNA test to learn his ancestry, Matt learned he was half Irish. But … both his parents are Jewish! Or so he thought. This investigative memoir series is as much of a page-turner as an audio series can be. I won’t give anything away as much as I’d like to. Listen to the series here.
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