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Theres a chill in the airand not just from the weather. A newly arrived La Nia pattern is setting the stage for a potentially wild winter, with experts predicting snow-packed northern states, a drier South, and maybe even more late-season hurricanes. Meanwhile, markets caught their own cold snap after fresh U.S.China trade tensions sparked a global sell-off. Still, not all the weeks headlines were gloomy. Uniqlo is going on a U.S. growth spree with 11 new stores planned for next year. But other industries are feeling the squeezefrom whiskey makers battling tariffs and falling demand, to airlines struggling through a government shutdown thats leaving thousands of flights delayed. Throw in a nationwide Listeria pasta recall, a soda study that might make you rethink your next Diet Coke, and the threat of delayed Social Security paymentsand its safe to say this week had something for everyone. Heres a look at what made headlines: La Nia Is Backand Winter Might Get Weird The National Weather Service says La Nia officially kicked in last month, bringing cooler Pacific waters that tend to shake up global weather patterns. Expect snowier-than-normal conditions across the northern U.S. and drier, warmer weather down South. It could also mean more hurricane activity into late fall, even though experts are calling this a weak La Nia. Uniqlo Bets Big on Brick-and-Mortar The Japanese clothing brand known for minimalist staples is going on a U.S. expansion tear. Uniqlo will open 11 new stores next year, including four in New York City and new flagships in Chicago and San Francisco. The move bucks the trend of retailers downsizing as shoppers cut backproof that Fast Retailing, Uniqlos parent company, sees plenty of life left in American retail. Markets Tank After Trumps Tariff Threats Stocks took a nosedive this week after President Trump reignited his trade feud with China, threatening a massive increase in tariffs. Beijings new export controls on rare earth minerals hit tech and defense sectors hardbut ironically sent U.S. rare-earth companies like MP Materials and USA Rare Earth soaring before they cooled off. Crypto investors didnt fare as well, with nearly $125 billion wiped out in a single day. Whiskey Country Feels the Burn Americas whiskey makers are facing a hangover thats about a lot more than tariffs. Spirits exports fell 9% in the second quarter according to the Distilled Spirits Council, and domestic drinking is down to its lowest level in decades. Distilleries in Kentucky and Tennessee are cutting jobs or closing doors, while smaller producers struggle to stay solvent. Your Daily Soda Habit Could Be Hurting Your Liver A new European study suggests that even one can of soda a dayregular or dietcould raise your risk of liver disease by up to 60%. Both sugary and artificially sweetened drinks were linked to fat buildup in the liver and other metabolic issues. Researchers say the safest bet is to skip the fizz and stick with water, no matter how tempting that afternoon “fridge cigarette” sounds. Flight Delays Pile Up During Shutdown If youre flying anytime soon, brace yourself. More than 16,000 flights have been delayed this week as the government shutdown drags on. Air traffic controllers and TSA agents are working unpaid, and airports from Chicago to D.C. are feeling the pinch. With a long weekend ahead, experts say to double-check your flight before leaving for the airportand maybe pack some patience. Kroger Joins the Pasta Recall Parade Kroger is pulling two pasta saladsBasil Pesto Bowtie and Smoked Mozzarella Pennefrom shelves after possible Listeria contamination. The recall affects stores in more than two dozen states and follows similar moves by Walmart, Trader Joes, and Albertsons. At least 19 people have been hospitalized and four have died in a multi-state outbreak linked to ready-to-eat pasta meals. Social Security COLA Bump Could Be Delayed Yes, Social Security checks are still going outbut next years cost-of-living increase may be stuck in limbo. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which calculates the inflation data needed for the 2026 adjustment, is mostly furloughed during the shutdown. Without those numbers, the SSA cant finalize the expected 2.7% boost in monthly benefits, leaving retirees waiting for answers.
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E-Commerce
If you’ve ever been startled while watching a show on a streaming service that was interrupted by an unreasonably loud commercial and thought to yourself, that should be illegal, soon it will be. At least in California. California Gov. Gavin Newsom this week signed a bipartisan bill into law that bans video streaming services that serve customers in the state from airing audio of commercial advertisements that are louder than the video content it accompanies. It goes into effect July 1, 2026. “We heard Californians loud and clear, and whats clear is that they dont want commercials at a volume any louder than the level at which they were previously enjoying a program,” Newsom said in a statement about the legislation, SB 576. The bill was introduced because of a baby. California state Sen. Thomas Umberg, an Orange County Democrat, said he sponsored the bill because of the daughter of his legislative director, a baby named Samantha who was finally put to bed one night only to be woken up by a much louder commercial. “This bill was inspired by baby Samantha and every exhausted parent whos finally gotten a baby to sleep, only to have a blaring streaming ad undo all that hard work,” Umberg said in a statement. The California law is patterned after federal law, extending the rules of the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act to streamers in the state. The 2010 CALM Act was passed by Congress and mandates commercials have the same average volume as the programs they accompany, according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The CALM Act was also meeting a real demand. A 2010 Harris poll found 86% of respondents believed commercials were louder than shows. The law only applies to TV commercials, though, not commercials on streaming platforms, radio, or internet. The CALM Modernization Act, which would have extended the rules to streamers, was introduced in 2023 by a pair of Senate Democrats, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, but it never got a vote. Even if your state passes similar legislation, be warned: the commercials may still sound louder, and there’s a reason why. That’s because even if commercials can’t be louder on average than the programs they accompany, they are trying to be as loud as they legally can to capture your attention in the 30 short seconds or less they have you. In other words, while a TV show might have its loud moments for effect here and there throughout a program, it’s not yelling at you the whole time like a commercial might. “Most TV commercials are created to be loud simply so you can hear the advertisement and get your attention,” Sony says on a support page for handling loud commercials. “[I]f you are watching a program with soft dialog, when the program cuts to a commercial you will most likely hear a boost or fluctuation in the volume.” California’s new law will be welcome news to parents across the Golden State, but if you’re really worried about waking your baby during commercial breaks in a Hulu binge session, subtitles could be your best bet.
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E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. Most of Americas largest homebuilders have publicly stated that the peak 2025 housing market saw softer-than-expected conditions, particularly in many parts of the Sun Belt. This softer housing market environment caused unsold inventory to tick up. Indeed, since the pandemic housing boom fizzled out, the number of unsold completed U.S. new single-family homes has been rising: August 2016 > 61,000 August 2017 > 63,000 August 2018 > 69,000 August 2019 > 79,000 August 2020 > 52,000 August 2021 > 34,000 August 2022 > 45,000 August 2023 > 72,000 August 2024 > 105,000 August 2025 > 124,000 The August figure (124,000 unsold completed new homes) published last week is the highest level since July 2009 (126,000). Lets take a closer look at the data to better understand what this could mean. To put the number of unsold completed new single-family homes into historic context, we have ResiClubs Finished Homes Supply Index. The index is one simple calculation: the number of unsold completed U.S. new single-family homes divided by the annualized rate of U.S. single-family housing starts. A higher index score indicates a softer national new-construction market with greater supply slack, while a lower index score signifies a tighter new-construction market with less supply slack. If you look at unsold completed single-family new builds as a share of single-family housing starts (see chart below), it still shows we’ve gained slack (and have more now than in pre-pandemic 2019); however, this slack, nationally speaking, isnt anything close to the 2007-2008 weakening. While the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t give us a great market-by-market breakdown on these unsold new builds, we have a good idea where they are, based on total active inventory homes for sale (including existing). Much of it is likely in the Mountain West and Sun Belt, particularly around the Gulf area. Indeed, some builders are experiencing pricing pressure, particularly in pockets of Florida and Texas, where resale inventory is well above pre-pandemic 2019 levels. See the screenshot from the ResiClub Terminal below. To offer larger incentives and move some of these homes, many major homebuilders in the Sun Belt are compressing their margins. While homebuilder margins have compressed from the highs of the pandemic housing boom, some look alright compared with pre-pandemic 2019 levels. However, if resale inventory and unsold completed new-build inventory continue to rise next yearand further margin compression becomes necessarywe could reach a point where both single-family permit activity and housing starts activity pull back more. Well keep a close eye on it. Big picture: Theres greater slack in the new construction market now than a few years ago, giving buyers and investors some leverage in certain markets to negotiate better deals with homebuilders.
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E-Commerce
When the federal government shutdown on October 1, it started a chain reaction of income problems for federal workers. Roughly 900,000 government employees are now on furlough. Another 700,000 are working without pay because their jobs are too critical for them to stay home. To add insult to entirely preventable injury, the current administration has indicated that it may not provide the legally mandated back pay to these workers once the shutdown is over. Considering the fact that getting another job during the furlough may require the government employees agency approval (and wouldnt help critical employees working without a paycheck), the shutdown could be a personal financial disaster for hundreds of thousands of Americans. Only 1.8% of all American workers have Uncle Sam for a bossbut that doesnt mean the other 98.2% of us are exempt from furloughs, sudden income loss, or bizarre grandstanding from unrelated departments that lead to you coming in to work for no pay for weeks on end. (Well, maybe not that last one.) Thats why its so important for all workers to know these financial strategies that can help you safely get to the other side of income loss: Calculate your bare minimum budget If you havent done so before your income loss, sit down and figure out your baseline monthly expenses. These are the expenditures that are essential for maintaining your life, such as rent or mortgage payment, utility bills, groceries, transportation, and childcare. Generally, this is a relatively easy number to calculate. Start with your fixed expenses, like your rent and childcare, and estimate your fluctuating expenses like groceries and utility bills, by calculating the average cost over the past six to 12 months. The number you come up with is your bare minimum monthly budget, and it gives you a framework for figuring out how to live sustainably while your income is paused. Contact your creditors If you are carrying credit card debt, student loans, or other debts, contact your creditors to find out if there are ways to pause payments or reduce your monthly payment requirements during the period of income loss. While this will generally increase the amount you owe over time, it can give you the breathing room you need in the moment, and reduce your bare-minimum monthly budget number. Determine if youre eligible for unemployment Furloughed government employees (as well as furloughed private sector workers) may be eligible for unemployment benefits, depending on local and state regulations. Unemployment benefits are generally based on your past earning history and most benefits are limited to 26 weeks. Each state has a minimum and maximum weekly benefit amount for unemployment benefits. For example, in Wisconsin, the minimum weekly unemployment benefit a Cheesehead could receive is $54 and the maximum is $370. These amounts vary greatly from state to state, with Massachusetts boasting the highest weekly maximum at $1,033 and Puerto Rico having the lowest maximum benefit at $190 per week. Unemployment benefits are not available for all types of income loss. Going on strike, having to work without pay (as current excepted government workers are doing), or getting fired for cause would make you ineligible for unemployment benefits. But if you can collect unemployment, these benefits can help keep you afloat until your income resumes. Compare your savings (or unemployment benefits) to your needs Assuming you have savings set aside, you can compare it to your monthly minimum number to determine how many months you can afford to go without your income. In an ideal world, you will have an emergency fund equal to three- to six-months worth of living expenses. That should help you feel more confident about your income loss, since you know you can weather quite a long period without it. Unfortunately, only 46% of Americans have enough savings set aside to cover three months worth of expenses according to a 2025 Bankrate report. If you dont have a robust savings account (or any at all), and youre eligible for unemployment benefits, you can alternatively make the same type of comparison between your monthly minimum number and your potential unemployment checks. Figure out alternative income sources Depending on which agency they work forand if theyre still clocking into a job theyre not getting paid forfederal employees may not be able to take on alternative employment while waiting out the shutdown. But that doesnt mean theyre out of luck for finding other sources of income. For example, a furloughed employee might make a list of things theyre willing to sell and create a schedule for selling them. Having a schedule gives them more time to get the best prices for those items and also provide a sense of security about where next months money will come from because theres a plan in place. Other options include renting out a room in your house or selling your services as a freelancer. Any options for keeping some money coming in while waiting for your primary income to resume can help relieve your financial stress during the shutdown. Dont let the shutdown keep you down Losing your income through no fault of your own feels infuriating and demoralizing, especially if you have no idea when to expect its return. But calculating the minimum you need to maintain your lifestyle can help you feel more in control. From there, you can ask for some breathing room from your creditors and determine if youre eligible for unemployment. Then look at how long your savings and unemployment benefits can sustain you. To make sure the process can last as long as the current political temper tantrum, make a plan for alternative sources of income that you can implement as needed. All this together creates a blueprint for surviving and thriving through income loss, even if it stretches on for a long time.
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E-Commerce
SpaceX’s Starlink orbital internet satellites are falling out of low earth orbit at an increasingly alarming rate, with one to two satellites now reentering Earths atmosphere every single day. According to Harvard-Smithsonian Center astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, that number will only go up as more satellites end their useful lifetime and the low earth orbit (LEO) constellation numbers skyrocket. This is as much a design problem as anything. While the numbers vary, right now there are around 10,200 active satellites in low earth orbit. Of those, about 8,475 are Starlinks. In other words, about 80% of all those satellites belong to Elon Musk’s company. By 2030, the European Space Agency expects the number of satellites in LEO will increase to about 100,000. This is mostly thanks to SpaceXwhich plans, pending regulatory approval, to expand its fleet to a staggering 42,000 satellitesbut also to Starlink-clone networks like Jeff Bezos’s 3,200-satellite Kuiper, and the Chinese GuoWang and Qianfan, which plan to launch a total of 18,000 units combined. Designed to fall Each Starlink satellite has a five-year lifespan. They zip across the sky in low earth orbit. There, objects still feel about 95% of the gravity we experience on the ground. What keeps them from plummeting is their sideways velocity of 17,000-plus mph. These vehicles are essentially falling around the Earth, inches at a time. But even at that altitude, the thin atmosphere creates drag, with air particles hitting and slowing the satellites down. To compensate, they fire up their onboard krypton and argon thrusters, which lift them up to maintain their orbital path. When the fuel runs out, the satellite can no longer boost, its orbit decays, and it comes crashing down. Before that time comes, SpaceX de-orbits the satellites on a controlled crash, allowing them to aim at an empty stretch of ocean as opposed to making a random entry. Why this is a problem As McDowell explainsand SpaceX itself admitssome satellites will not disintegrate upon reentry, though they are designed to do so. They [Starlink satellites] are designed to completely burn up, McDowell said in a recent interview with EarthSky. Now we’re not sure we really believe that they really burn up, but at least for the most part they melt. There have been many other incidents of space objects falling to Earth, including big chunks of space stations like the American Skylab and the Soviet Salyut 7; parts of rockets like a European Ariane 5 nose; satellites like the Russian Kosmos 2251 (which collided with an Iridium communications satellite); and even the trunk of SpaceX’s very own Crew-9 Dragon spaceship. But thanks to the extraordinary number of units deployed, the Starlink constellation represents an outsize concern to everyone on Earthand also to other satellites in low earth orbit. If one of Musk’s satellites crashes against another satellite, it could start a chain reaction called the Kessler Syndrome, which you can see in action in Alfonso Cuaróns film Gravity. This is the nightmare of runaway debris collisions devastating all low earth orbit satellites. A single crash could create cascading debris fields, wiping out the infrastructure of global GPS, communication, financial systems, and weather monitoring. Worst-case scenario, it could plunge civilization into chaos. Right now, SpaceX is essentially launching bullets into an orbital game of Russian roulette. With thousands of Starlink satellites circling the globe, McDowell says that the current de-orbit rate is just the beginning. As the first generation of Starlinks reach their five-year expiration date, we are seeing four or five satellites per day being intentionally plunged back to Earth. This number is set to multiply as more and more Starlinks get to their end of life. As the constellation grows into the tens of thousands, we risk turning our upper atmosphere into a perpetual fireworks show of burning toxic metal that sometimes crashes into Earth. Designed for full demise Back in July 2024, Musks company assured regulators and the public that its satellites were designed for “full demise,” claiming they would vaporize into harmless dust. That turned out to be fantasy: Eight months later, New Scientist revealed that a 2.5-kilogram chunk of aluminum from a Starlink satellite slammed into a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. SpaceX was forced to admit that this piecea modem enclosure lidwas supposed to have vanished completely but didn’t. Musks safety guarantees were proven wrong by a 5-pound piece of metal lying in a farmer’s field. SpaceX claims this has happened only once with a satellite that was part of a failed launch. However, in January 2025 a new fireball crossed Chicago’s sky. As he posted on X at the time, McDowell believes this was Starlink-5693. In response to McDowells post, Michael Nicolls, VP of Starlink engineering at SpaceX,said it was an uncontrolled reentry caused by a faulty component. The worrying bit of his explanation: There is still work to do to guarantee this, especially for satellites with degraded attitude control. But as you noted, the sats nearly completely demise upon reentry.” [my emphasis] Too much junk SpaceX now claims it uses a “belt-and-suspenders approach” to safety, the nerd way to refer to using multiple redundant systems to prevent a single point of failure. It says the risk of human harm is “less than 1 in 100 million.” The company has said that for its Starlink V2 Mini satellite, about 5% of a satellite’s mass could potentially survive reentry, but insists its mostly harmless silicon fragments with the impact energy of a falling apple. Musk claims his latest Starlink V2 satellites are designed with better altitude and attitude controls to target reentry corridors with high accuracyroughly within 10% of an orbit ground track, which translates to about 10 minutes of flight time. SpaceX says it conducts plasma chamber tests simulating atmospheric conditions to better understand how components break up during reentry, seeking to improve prediction of debris survival. But no matter the improvements, every new satellite launched adds to an increasingly fragile orbital environment. SpaceX hasnt replied to Fast Companys request for comment. But theres more to consider beyond potential bodily harm. As these satellites burn up, they pollute the stratosphere with metal particles, creating what scientists call “anthropogenic meteor showers.” Researchers are now raising alarms that these metals, particularly aluminum, could linger for years and catalyze the destruction of the ozone layer. Atmospheric chemist Daniel Murphy told Science magazine in November 2024, Almost no one is thinking about the environmental impact on the stratosphere. Laser mass spectrometry studies detected elevated levels of lithium, aluminum, copper, and lead in the stratosphere, exceeding natural meteor input. These metals come from satellite reentries and may nearly double natural metal aerosol concentrations, threatening ozone protection. Currently, about 2,000 satellite reentries per year emit 17 metric tons of aluminum oxide nanoparticles into the stratosphere. The figure is rapidly rising as mega-constellations multiply. Astronomer Samantha Lawler told Science, We cant keep using the ground and the atmosphere as a dumpster. Heres how the European Space Agency CEO Josef Aschbacher warned about the existence of Musks satellites to the Financial Times back in 2021: You have one person owning half of the active satellites in the world. Thats quite amazing. De facto, he is making the rules. The rest of the world including Europe . . . is just not responding quick enough. We are watching as a billionaires unchecked ambition reshapes the orbital commons without real oversight. Space isnt meant to be Musks backyard. While humanity pays the price, Musk just shrugs and keeps aiming at planetary domination.
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E-Commerce
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