Last week, ulltra-fast fashion brand Shein confidentially filed for an IPO. The eleven year-old company is known for creating very low cost garments that it can produce quickly for its predominantly Gen Z customers. Today the company has a private-market valuation of $66 billion but is seeking a valuation as high as $90 billion during the IPO process. On this week’s episode of Most Innovative Companies, we spoke with Shein’s head of strategic communications Peter Pernot-Day to learn more

Senior Staff Writer Elizabeth Segran also came by to give us more context on the company’s controversies. Allegations against the company have included that it uses forced labor in the manufacturing of its clothes. Like other fast fashion companies, Shein has also been criticized for its clothing’s negative environmental impact.

Here are a few insights about the business from Pernot-Day, in his own words.

On Shein’s business model

“Our business model is something we call the on-demand model. We make small batches of garments, typically about 100 to 200 pieces. We’ll then load those designs up onto the site, and we’ll see how our customers interact with them. Are they responding positively to these new designs and these new features? If they are, we’ve got a demand signal. We can go back to our network of third-party suppliers and make more to meet what we expect demand will be. This frees us from having to do seasonal collections. It [also] means we have extremely low inventory levels and so we waste virtually nothing.”

On Shein’s PR effort to bring influencers to its factories that generated a lot of negative headlines

“One of our values as a company is to try to be as transparent as we can be. Our desire to show that was why we did the influencer trip. Some people have criticized us for that. One thing that I don’t think is fair is that the influencers themselves were personally attacked. The intention was to show people that we are a responsible company, and we treat our suppliers with respect. It remains our intent to this day to share our supply chain and how it works with our customers.”

How Shein describes working conditions in its factories

“We have a supplier community empowerment program where we invest both in the physical infrastructure of our suppliers and in the human capital component. We want to make sure that workers at supplier facilities have access to educational opportunities, access to safe working environments, and access to educational and childcare opportunities for their children. When you’re looking at garment production on a global scale, that really means that you have to have access to high-quality suppliers and that those suppliers have to have access to the best people. Our suppliers are compensating their garment workers much more than the average around the communities that they work in. I believe a garment worker in China or Brazil or Turkey is likely paid less than a garment worker in Los Angeles, but I do think that our suppliers’ compensation structures are fair and are designed to exceed the markets where they compete for labor.”

How Shein thinks about fast fashion regulations

“When I talk about regulations, I think I’m more interested in directional positioning. For example, pushing recycling products so that recycling capabilities are more available to customers. So that if you wanted to recycle a garment, there’s a civic engagement [campaign] to take that into your recycling bin the same way you would a plastic water bottle. I [also like] the idea of public-private partnership on funding some of these technical developments. How do we invest in chemical recycling? How do we invest in research and development to get new fabrics and new fibers available for production? Those are ways in which we could really see some dramatic changes in benefits.”

To hear more from Pernot-Day and get some analysis from Elizabeth Segran, listen to the latest episode of Most Innovative Companies.

Four years ago, The Walt Disney Co. seized control of its streaming destiny. Instead of continuing to provide content to the likes of Netflix,  it rounded up its storied brands—Disney itself, Marvel, Pixar, Star Wars, National Geographic—and folded them into a family-friendly video platform called Disney Plus. The result of intensive planning and investment, the service launched with great expectations and met them, signing up 10 million subscribers on its launch day. It reached 87 million in its first year, and had 164 million by the time it celebrated its second anniversary.

Months before Disney Plus’s debut, Disney had filled in another part of its streaming strategy when it acquired most of 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets. The $71 billion acquisition gave it a controlling interest in Hulu, the venerable streaming service whose value proposition—something for everybody, including vast quantities of programming aimed at adults—complemented Disney Plus’s family focus. Last month, Disney announced plans to bring Hulu fully in-house by acquiring the remainder from Comcast’s NBCUniversal.

From the start, Disney Plus subscribers could opt for a package deal that also included Hulu (as well as ESPN Plus). This bundle offered a wealth of stuff, initially for the bargain price of $13 a month. Yet it didn’t represent a real unification of Disney’s streaming options. Disney Plus remained Disney Plus, Hulu remained Hulu, and subscribers had to traverse between two entirely different apps to watch everything they were paying for.

Now, with a new beta version of the Disney Plus app that launched this week, The Kardashians and Only Murders in the Building will coexist with Bambi and more variations on Star Wars than I can keep track of, all in one place. That’s because the beta incorporates nearly all of Hulu’s content into the Disney Plus interface. (A subset restricted by licensing agreements will remain absent, as will Hulu’s live TV service—and the stand-alone Hulu app isn’t going anywhere.)

For bundle subscribers, this integration means easier access to more entertainment options, including Hulu Originals as well as shows from a bevy of sources: broadcast networks, cable classics such as MTV and History, and beyond. But for Disney, making it possible required paying off years of the kind of technical debt that accumulates when you operate multiple services and often don’t have time to stop and think about their future.

“While the launch of this will be a simple Hulu button in the [Disney Plus] app, the complexity underneath to deliver that to you has [required] a lot of work,” says Aaron LaBerge, the president and CTO of Disney Entertainment & ESPN. “For example, the content libraries between Hulu and Disney Plus—over 70,000 pieces of content—were encoded differently. The playback output had different specifications. The metadata attached to each of those assets was different.”

By streamlining the process of putting video anywhere someone might want to watch it, Disney isn’t just making it possible for Hulu to have a home inside Disney Plus. It’s also making investments it hopes to benefit from for years to come, as maximizing the value of its myriad brands in a digital world grows only more essential.

Streaming realities

Since Disney Plus’s 2019 launch, the streaming landscape has shifted considerably—mostly away from its early unbridled optimism and toward hard-nosed economics. Like other major players, Disney has been making tough decisions: It’s trimmed its content investment, raised subscription prices, cut its subscriber goals, and begun cracking down on password sharing.

In the end, Disney Plus’s future rides on the basic question of whether a large and growing number of consumers feel they get enough out of it to justify the monthly cost, which currently ranges from $8 for the stand-alone ad-subsidized tier to $90 for a bundle offering ad-free Disney Plus, Hulu with Live TV, and ESPN Plus. Bringing Hulu into Disney Plus was an obvious way to help people watch even more of what they pay for, fulfilling Disney CEO Bob Iger’s mandate after his November 2022 return to better integrate the company’s experiences.

“We live in a world where people have multiple subscriptions,” says LaBerge. “They’re in Max, they’re in Netflix, they’re in Hulu, they’re in Disney Plus, they’re in Prime Video. And they don’t know what’s where. So we believe that for our content, putting it all in one place for you to easily find, applying personalization to recommend content you may like, and not having to send you into another app was really important.”

Disney’s yen for integration isn’t just about what consumers see. For years, it’s been working on the kind of behind-the-scenes integration necessary to make quicker progress on its most important initiatives. When I interviewed LaBerge for a 2016 story, he was ESPN’s CTO. In 2018, his responsibilities expanded to encompass all of Disney’s streaming efforts, a role he has maintained through further corporate restructuring. LaBerge remains based at ESPN’s campus in Bristol, Connecticut, which has evolved into an East Coast hub for Disney’s broader technical operations.

At a company with assets as numerous and far-flung as Disney’s, centralized oversight isn’t something that can be imposed overnight. In his office in Bristol, Michael Cupo, senior VP of business operations for Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology, shows me a slide of a massive timeline laden with technology projects in progress or on the horizon. It name-checks Disney-owned properties (from Good Morning America to Latin America’s Star Plus, a rough Hulu equivalent) along with third-party names (Apple Vision Pro, IMAX) and several projects represented only by intriguing code names. Only this year, he acknowledges, has Disney reengineered itself enough to avoid getting bogged down by the sheer overload of competing interests.

And even then, it’s not easy. Do stakeholders throughout the company love the rigor it’s trying to bring to the process? No, Cupo says, they hate it: “Everyone wants their thing done, and it’s about us prioritizing the thing that’s most important to the business.” Presumably, they feel a little bit better about that prioritization when it’s their thing that rises to the top.

By the time integrating Hulu into Disney Plus was a priority, some of the necessary technology was already in place. Disney Plus, for instance, got parental controls last year, allowing it to accommodate such R-rated Marvel items as the Deadpool movies. Despite such progress, much remained to be done to bring two platforms with radically different histories into alignment, updating each one along the way. Hulu, which launched in October 2007, dated from streaming’s primordial age. It reflected many decisions made long ago by people no longer associated with the service, and sometimes lagged behind the current state of the streaming art.

“For example, in Hulu, a video asset has five pieces of art that describe the content,” explains LaBerge. “It’s the cover art, the poster art, small thumbnail, large thumbnail, etc. In Disney Plus, there are 27 pieces of art attached, which allows you to do a bunch of different creative things.”

Meanwhile, Disney Plus, though far more modern, was constrained by its founding goal of getting big fast, which had trumped longer-term concerns. “Any platform decisions that would have been made to stabilize or standardize or operationalize things, it was like, ‘We need to grow as quickly as possible,'” says Cupo. “What we’re doing now is going through and fixing those things.”

Indeed, Disney Plus’s original underpinnings were so inflexible that even rolling out price hikes had historically required allocating engineering resources. Now, according to Cupo, Disney has “actually built a platform so that, with a couple of button clicks—bang!—they can just go do it from a business perspective.”

Work in progress

The current incarnation of Disney Plus incorporating Hulu is labeled as a beta for a reason. There are some obvious affordances that Disney is still working on as it gets ready for the official release, scheduled for March 2024. For instance, it plans to build out full-blown hubs for the many content providers that make up Hulu, so subscribers can peruse what’s playing on FX or Nick Jr., for example. At first, only Disney Plus subscribers whose plans include Hulu will see that the Hulu content is there at all. Once the app leaves beta, the company plans to reveal it to non-Hulu subscribers, too—providing it with an opportunity to tout the benefits of upgrading their plans.

Beyond that, Disney hasn’t yet done anything to integrate the user profiles on Hulu and Disney Plus, which would allow subscribers to have one identity spanning both apps. For the moment, they’re as walled off from each other as if the two services in question were Netflix and Paramount Plus. “There’s no way for us to physically link two different profiles and their interactions without sending the user through some sort of wizard where we’ve got to be like, ‘Is this you, or is this you?'” says Jason Wong, Disney Entertainment & ESPN Technology’s senior VP of product management. “And we’re not looking to do that at this time.”

Still, even if there are some logical steps Disney might take to improve the Disney Plus-Hulu experience, it’s already implemented an array of technologies core to its high-level streaming ambitions. And when something offers the promise of a strategic edge, the company is particularly willing to commit to internal development rather than defaulting to off-the-shelf solutions.

Take advertising, for instance. An element of Hulu from the start, it came to Disney Plus in late 2022 with the addition of a basic ad-supported tier, which let Disney court subscribers who’d otherwise have been scared off by price increases. Adding ads to a service formerly devoid of them sounds inherently thorny. But LaBerge says Disney was able to pull it off in six months, because it had spent three and a half years building its own ad-serving platform, an effort that was bolstered by taking control of Hulu back in 2019.

Earlier on, Disney, like many streamers, relied on Google and other outside specialists to serve its ads. But: “When you use a third-party ad platform, it’s kind of lowest common denominator in terms of functionality, because they have many different customers that they have to moderate,” says LaBerge. “Whereas there was a lot of bespoke work done in Hulu that we thought was advantageous.” By controlling its own platform, Disney can mix brand advertising it sells directly and ads it gets from programmatic networks “to maximize revenue for the company and relevance to the user, which is very hard to do,” says LaBerge.

Another fundamental upgrade relates to the various elements that make up a video stream—the content itself along with items such as maturity ratings, network bumpers, and preroll teasers. In the past, they all got burned into a single file and were part of it forever. Streaming the same content in a different context—say, in a country with a different rating system—required burning a new file. “It felt incredibly inefficient,” says Wong. “One of the things that we’ve now introduced with Hulu on Disney Plus as a technical platform improvement is the ability to dynamically stitch together videos in a seamless way so that all the discrete assets can be composited together.”

Even if some of what Disney has been implementing involves overdue renovations, it’s not a mere repair job. Instead, the company is creating building blocks it can apply throughout its portfolio. That includes streaming offerings that don’t even exist yet—such as an a-la-carte version of ESPN that includes all of its familiar cable-TV programming, a long-awaited service that Disney says will launch in 2025

“The veneer of those experiences might be slightly different based on the brands,” says LaBerge. “But the quality of the video you see, the seamlessness and pristine quality of the advertising, how we monetize that, how you log in with us, how we track what you’re doing so that we can personalize your experience—all that will be the same across every single touch point across The Walt Disney Company. Which is a massive competitive advantage.”

That still doesn’t guarantee success for Disney Plus, Hulu, and their present and future Disney stablemates. But in a business as fraught as streaming, execution is everything—and the technological details Disney has been obsessing over could be crucial.

Last fall, on a farm in Northern Wisconsin, a farmer spread 1,421 metric tons of crushed volcanic rock on his fields before planting soybeans and corn. The rock dust, from a startup called Lithos, serves two purposes: For farmers, it increases yields. It also helps capture carbon.

The startup spun out of academic research at Yale less than two years ago. Now it’s working with more than 80 farms in nine states. And in a new deal, buyers including Stripe, Alphabet, and Shopify have committed to pay the startup $57.1 million to remove 154,000 tons of CO2 over the next four years.

While some other companies use large machines to pull CO2 from the air, Lithos speeds up a geological process. When rain falls on certain types of rocks, a chemical reaction helps capture CO2. The carbon eventually runs off fields to waterways and reaches the ocean, where it’s permanently sequestered. Lithos helps that happen more quickly by spreading crushed rock in a specific way on fields. For each farm, the company uses its software to develop a custom plan based on the farm’s own soil chemistry.

“Many types of rocks naturally absorb CO2 out of the atmosphere—they just do it over really long time scales. Enhanced weathering companies are trying a number of different approaches to make that go faster—to suck the carbon out of the air in months or years rather than hundreds or thousands of years,” says Nan Ransohoff, head of climate at Stripe, who also leads Frontier, a group of businesses that are working together to help carbon-removal startups scale by committing to buy their services. For Frontier, the new commitment to buy carbon removal from Lithos is its largest to date.

On the Wisconsin farm, six months after the rock dust had been applied, measurements showed that the process had permanently removed 175 metric tons of CO2 from the air. (That number reflects the net benefit of the whole process, so emissions from the transportation of the rock dust are subtracted.) The farmer, Paul Lapacinski, also saw his yields increase on one field by 36%.

“I’m all about wanting sustainability and making things better on the farm. But it all comes down to the economic impact when it starts,” Lapacinski says. “Anytime something can add to the productivity of your land, with things like they are—especially with the rise in fuel and fertilizer costs—the better.”

The volcanic rocks, called basalt, are easy to find in large quantities as waste at quarries. And farmers already use another type of rock dust to improve their soil, so adding the basalt to fields can easily be incorporated into their routines. “The infrastructure already exists,” says Lithos cofounder and CEO Mary Yap. “It doesn’t require new technological innovation or new breakthroughs for us to scale this.”

Studies suggest that the approach, called enhanced weathering, could potentially remove as much as 2 billion to 4 billion tons of CO2 from the atmosphere per year by the middle of the century, or around 40% of all of the carbon removal that needs to happen.

Other approaches to carbon removal will also be needed, and Ransohoff says that Frontier is building a diverse portfolio of solutions. But enhanced weathering is promising, she says, “in part because it has the potential to reach gigaton scale at low costs, and to do so in a relatively short period of time compared to other pathways.”

It can be challenging to measure how much carbon has been removed by enhanced weathering. But Lithos’s approach to measurement, developed by one of the cofounders at Yale, can analyze samples from fields at a relatively low cost. Right now, the startup has “thousands of soil samples flying around to our different laboratories for measurement,” Yap says. But eventually that data will be able to inform models that can accurately predict the amount of CO2 captured without the need for continual sampling.

The company is aiming to capture a billion tons of CO2 this decade. That’s possible, Yap says, because of strong demand from farmers who want to participate and no shortage of materials. The challenges that remain are operational. “One of them is a logistics gap,” she says. “We need to find the right number of truckers and work with the railroads to move the stuff around at massive volumes.”

The new deal with Frontier will reportedly help the company speed up its timeline by three or four years. To reach the billion-ton goal, the company needs “to drive cost curves down by improving efficiency in every aspect of operations,” Yap says. “The Frontier deal allows us to up the pace of rigorous, responsible data generation—helping us prime the pump before hitting the gas for responsible and quantifiable levels of scale.”

The fastest growing brand of 2023 was one that hardly any consumer knew about the year before: ChatGPT.

That’s according to decision intelligence company Morning Consult’s Fastest Growing Brands report for 2023. The report ranks the top 20 brands based on the growth of the number of consumers who say they would consider buying something from the brand over the course of the year.

Given that ChatGPT has dominated headlines throughout 2023, it’s little surprise that it would be one of the fastest growing brands of the year. However, ChatGPT is only the top brand when all generations—Gen Z, millennials, Gen X, and baby boomers—are factored together. When looking at the fastest growing brands by generation, some of the results couldn’t be more different.

Besides the rise in artificial intelligence, another trend had a big influence on the fastest growing brand: economic uncertainty. That influence is especially true when looking at the brands that were the fastest growing among Gen Z. Brands that went viral on TikTok during the year also saw rapid growth among Gen Z.

Here are the top 10 fastest growing brands across all U.S. adults in 2023:

1. ChatGPT
2. Starry
3. Zelle
4. Shein
5. Twisted Tea 
6. Southwest Airlines 
7. OpenAI 
8. Facebook 
9. Instagram Reels 
10. Coke Zero Sugar 

The top 10 fastest growing brands for Gen Z adults:

1. Kraft 
2. NYX Professional Makeup 
3. Holland America Line 
4. Modelo Especial 
5. ChatGPT 
6. Clinique 
7. Keystone Light 
8. Planet Fitness 
9. Google Workspace 
10. Fox Nation 

Morning Consult notes that Clinique and NYX Professional Makeup had products that went viral on TikTok. Dollar General also came in at No. 15 on the list, due to “a combination of economic uncertainty and social media virality,” said Morning Consult’s Nicki Zink.

The top 10 fastest growing brands for millennials:

1. ChatGPT 
2. Shein 
3. Coke Zero Sugar 
4. Twitter/X
5. Apple TV 
6. Facebook 
7. Major League Soccer 
8. Starry 
9. HP Instant Ink 
10. Waze 

The top 10 fastest growing brands for Gen X:

1. Zelle 
2. ChatGPT 
3. Harley-Davidson 
4. StubHub 
5. Jeep 
6. Booking.com 
7. Grubhub 
8. Twisted Tea 
9. Hilton 
10. Starry 

And the top 10 fastest growing brands for baby boomers:

1. Southwest Airlines 
2. Lipton 
3. Google Search 
4. Ruffles 
5. YouTube Shorts 
6. Nestlé Pure Life Water 
7. Gain 
8. Zaxby’s 
9. CVS CarePass 
10. Diet Pepsi 

Morning Consult’s full Fastest Growing Brands Report 2023 reveals the top 20 fastest growing brands for all the categories above, which include Amazon Pharmacy, Kate Spade, Apple iMessage, Captain Morgan, and more. You can access the full Fastest Growing Brands Report for 2023 here.

To arrive at its rankings, Morning Consult asked consumers if they would consider purchasing from brands in January 2023 and again in October 2023 and subtracting the share who said the same between the polls. A total of 1,586 brands were analyzed and sample sizes ranged from 1,069 to 17,661 responses.

Peach Fuzz has been crowned Pantone’s Color of the Year for 2024. A soft, warm shade that is nestled between pink and orange, Peach Fuzz is meant to be peaceful and cozy. It evokes comfort, kindness, and tenderness.

It is everything 2023 hasn’t been—and that is almost the point.

“I think we can all look through these past years and be pretty clear that this has been a time of ongoing turmoil, and that our need for nurturing empathy and compassion has grown ever stronger,” says Laurie Pressman, VP of the Pantone Color Institute.

Peach Fuzz marks the 25th anniversary of the Pantone Color of the Year program, which launched in 1999 with the decidedly Zen “Cerulean” blue. As always, today’s announcement has unleashed a carousel of collaborations, from a Motorola phone in Peach Fuzz to limited-edition Ruggable rugs, doormats, and bath mats featuring peach tones. The Pantone team has also imagined a wide range of applications, from hair dyes and blushes to velvety jackets.

Now, arguably any pastel color could provide the calming effects of a soft peach, but there is more to the Color of the Year than arbitrary color therapy. Every year, Pantone spends more than six months scouring markets from fashion to cosmetics to home decor. This year, the team noticed peach tones popping up across the board, from J.Lo’s Oscars gown to snapshots from design guru Kelly Wearstler’s portfolio to lip gloss shades and fuzzy slippers. “You want to reach out and touch this color,” Pressman says. “That was a very important part of our message.”

As Pantone team members scour, they are looking for a common theme, as well as a mood that rises up above the others. In that sense, the Color of the Year is less a pigment prediction and more a reflection of the times—a mirror of people’s aspirations. “It’s things that we’re looking for that color can hope to answer,” Pressman says. “So it’s not ‘I’m angry, it’s going to be a red.’ It’s ‘I’m angry. What’s going to calm me down?’”

This year has served up enough reasons to be angry, and it is certainly naive to buy into the idea that a single color can capture the zeitgeist, or even brighten up the mood when it is this dark. But Pantone’s COTY 2024 is a clear reminder of the company’s mission as it was stated from the start: to remind people that color can convey a powerful message—or in this case, a cry for peace.

Unfortunately, ghosting just doesn’t happen in the dating world. The practice is quite common in the professional world when it comes to job hunting. Talk to any recruiter and you’re likely to hear stories about how they had a promising candidate for a position, but that candidate just stopped replying to them. The recruiter, in other words, had been ghosted.

But just how common is ghosting during the job hunt and what are the reasons that job seekers decide to suddenly ghost prospective employers? The jobs site Indeed has just released an interesting report that gives us some insight into the matter. Specifically, the report, titled, When Candidates and Recruiters Vanish, reveals:

• 78% of job seekers admitted ghosting an employer prior to 2022.
• 77% of employers said ghosting had become more common among job seekers during 2022 versus previous years.
• 75% of U.S. job seekers and 74% of employers say ghosting has become entrenched in the hiring landscape.
• 23% of job seekers who ghosted an employer said doing so made them feel empowered. 
• Yet 59% of them regretted ghosting, and 36% felt guilty about it.
• Still, in 2023, 62% of job seekers said they planned to ghost again.

The report also found that 70% of job seekers felt it was “fair” to ghost employers. This comes down to the fact that job seekers have long been at the receiving end of ghosting. Many who submit applications never hear back from the employer and often, the recruiter will be the one who ghosts the job candidate.

But payback isn’t the main reason job seekers ghost. According to Indeed’s survey, the top five reasons are:

• The job isn’t the right one for the job seeker
• The company isn’t the right one for the job seeker
• The pay offer wasn’t adequate 
• The benefits were not adequate
• The job seeker received another job offer

So what should recruiters and employers do if they want to avoid being ghosted? This is where there’s a sharp divide between what employers believe and what job seekers actually say would stop them from ghosting.

Employers believe that improved communication and transparency, reducing the hiring process length, and offering flexible schedule options would prevent them from being ghosted.

But job seekers disagree. The top three things that job seekers say would prevent them from ghosting an employer are higher pay, better pay transparency (by offering the job’s salary range up front), and better benefits.

In other words, for job-seeking ghosts, it’s, understandably, about the money.

To arrive at its results, Indeed used Censuswide to conduct surveys of 1,507 U.S. job seekers aged 18 to 64 who have ghosted employers in the past. Those surveys were carried out between between April 26, 2023, and May 9, 2023. Additional surveys of 1,502 U.S. employers who have been ghosted during the hiring process were conducted between April 26, 2023, and May 3, 2023. Surveys were also conducted in the United Kingdom and Canada.

Meta is rolling out end-to-end encryption for calls and messages across its Facebook and Messenger platforms, the company announced Thursday.

Such encryption means that no one other than the sender and the recipient—not even Meta—can decipher people’s messages. Encrypted chats, first introduced as an optional feature in Messenger in 2016, will now be the standard for all users going forward, according to Messenger head Loredana Crisan.

“This has taken years to deliver because we’ve taken our time to get this right,” Crisan wrote in a blog post. “Our engineers, cryptographers, designers, policy experts and product managers have worked tirelessly to rebuild Messenger features from the ground up.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised, back in 2019, to bring end-to-end encryption to its platforms after the social media company suffered a string of high-profile scandals, notably when Cambridge Analytica accessed user data on Facebook. Privacy advocates again shined a spotlight on Meta after Nebraska investigators reviewed private Facebook messages while investigating an alleged illegal abortion after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court.

Meta, whose WhatsApp platform already encrypts messages, said the feature can help keep users safe from hackers, fraudsters, and criminals.

Meanwhile, encryption critics, law enforcement, and even a Meta report released in 2022 note the risks of enhanced encryption, including users who could abuse the privacy feature to sexually exploit children, facilitate human trafficking, and spread hate speech.

The new features will be available immediately, but Crisan wrote that it would take some time for the privacy feature to be rolled out to all of its users.

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Back in the late 1970s, the term “golden handcuffs” was popularized to explain why ambitious professionals were choosing to stay at corporate titans, like General Electric and Procter & Gamble, rather than exploring other opportunities or starting their own businesses. The reason being that the generous compensation packages were simply too good to leave.

Today, that same concept can be applied to the U.S. housing market: Ultralow mortgage rates, which were available during the pandemic, now function as a type of golden handcuff. Many homeowners with these low rates are uninterested in moving. The reason is that if they were to sell their homes and buy something new, they would be exchanging their ultra-low 2% and 3% mortgage rates for something in the 7% to 9% range (with some back door exceptions). The potential payment shock is simply too steep for many would-be sellers/buyers to handle.

For instance, consider a borrower with a $500,000 mortgage at a 3% interest rate, resulting in a monthly principal and interest payment of $2,108 over a 30-year loan. However, at a 7.08% mortgage rate (Monday’s average rate), that same payment would skyrocket to $3,353 per month.

That math explains why, in November 2023, there were 16% fewer new listings on Realtor.com (316,990) as compared to November 2021 (377,450).

While transactions are still occurring every single day in the U.S. housing market—housing never stops—existing home sales are presumably right now about as low as they can go.

Simply put, this so-called “lock-in” effect (i.e. the financial shock that occurs for homeowners when they consider giving up their current mortgage in exchange for one at today's rates) has drained what I call “churn” (i.e. people selling their home to buy something new) out of the market.

As a result, transaction volume in the resale/existing market is primarily made up of life events that force sellers' hands: death, divorce, job relocation.

“Rapidly deteriorating affordability in this cycle has already caused significant decreases in housing activity, specifically existing home sales, but has left national home prices more or less unscathed. As we have detailed in numerous research reports, the biggest reason is the lock-in effect. Homeowners have not experienced the decline in affordability . . . They have locked in low, fixed-rate mortgages for 30 years that have simply disincentivized them from listing their homes for sale,” wrote Morgan Stanley researchers in a recent report to investors.

Morgan Stanley added: ”In other words, homeowners represent 'strong hands' in this cycle.”

The first car lined up at 3:30 a.m. Employees didn’t even show until 5, and food didn’t leave the drive-through window until 6.

Technically, McDonald’s new drink-and-snack-focused spin-off concept called CosMc’s (announced this week) isn’t even open today. But operators had determined that during the first store’s soft launch, they wouldn’t turn anyone away. And by the time my Rav4 rolled up at 10 a.m., a 45-minute line of vehicles had spilled beyond the four-lane drive-through and into a generous strip mall parking lot. The team expected most customers to order between one and two items—a drink and maybe something else. Eager Midwesterners, drawn to the glossy “CosMc’s blue” building, were ordering three, four, or (many) more items. And yes, I was among them.

As we previously reported, CosMc’s is a concept and a learning lab; the first is located in Bolingbrook, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago where McDonald’s corporate team watches from nearby. Aimed at a market that’s dominated by players like Starbucks and Dunkin’, CosMc’s offers no burgers, fries, or seating area (inside or out). Nothing else about it is finalized, other than a plan to open about 10 more locations in Texas by the end of the year.

Inside CosMc’s

Sidestepping the drive-through for a moment, McDonald’s corporate team invited me inside to take a look at the store’s unique design. I was greeted by a gray and white room—a bare-bones entry space that won’t be included in future stores—that’s decorated with a hand painted CosMc’s mural.

Walking through a door, I entered the kitchen. It’s designed like a long rectangle, and the layout couldn’t be simpler. One half is dedicated to beverage prep—with rows of drink dispensers, coffee machines, and flavor shots. The other half is dedicated to hot foods, which mostly means egg sandwiches and baked goods. Whereas most everything about CosMc’s is on the table to change, this kitchen layout sounds like it’s largely finalized following almost exactly one year of development since the project kicked off in 2022.

Unlike McDonald’s, there are no grills and no fryers, and the exterior facing wall is almost entirely windows, which allows several spots from which to serve cars their food, but is also meant to provide something of an open kitchen feel to customers driving through. In any case, the benefits to employees are palpable. The windows bring a significant amount of natural light into the kitchen—a requirement I recall Chef Grant Achatz demanding for his kitchen staff at Alinea, his Michelin 3-star restaurant in Chicago.

The CosMc’s crew, which had only been in training for the past two weeks, was surprisingly convivial as they prepped orders. Outfitted with CosMc’s uniform swag—including tees, bowling shirts, jean jackets, and custom Air Force 1s—it seemed no one had spilled fluorescent violet dragonfruit topping onto their kicks (yet).

Braving the four-lane drive-through

Anxious to try the menu myself, I hopped back into my car and waited in line. But despite having more than ample time to think, I opted to panic-order at the king-size digital order sign, hypnotized by a rainbow of hyperbolic foods. I snagged a Sour Cherry Energy Burst (an electric pink slushy with canary yellow boba), a Tropical Spiceade (magenta with dragonfruit floating on top), a turmeric spiced latte (which was refreshingly brown). For food, I tried a Spicy Queso Sandwich and hash browns. One small, but important, feature of the ordering experience: I could pay for my order at that sign, or I could pay when I pulled around to pick up the food. CosMc’s is trying to acknowledge people should just be able to pay however/whenever they want.

As I rounded the corner, the crew handed me food in surprisingly premium, gift-style CosMc’s paper bags. Then, because CosMc’s, again, has no dining room* or outside seating, I shame-parked in an Aldi’s lot and tried it all.

I’ll say this: I could certainly taste what CosMc’s is going for. This is statement food—a collection of flavors-as-brand finding their formula. But I do imagine McDonald’s will choose to refine and rebalance the menu significantly before scaling the store. My two fruit drinks were both super sweet and tart. I’m a boba-sucking machine, but the Sour Cherry Energy Burst was essentially a mouth-puckering cherry Life Saver that blows out your palate. The Tropical Spiceade had a similar boldness of flavor that negated much nuanced difference. These are four-sip drinks for me. I’m sure there’s a market for them, but give me something closer to the classic boba baseline, too.

I was relieved when I took my first sip of the turmeric latte, which was something like a latte with floral notes. I’d order it less sweet in the future, but I would try it again. I also, like a moth to the flame, found myself admiring the rest of the CosMc’s drink menu, curious to try even more. I could have just gotten a cold brew. I wonder how that tastes! But I suspect my descent into debauchery was by design. (Notably, this drink menu was so enticing that I heard only one customer had ordered a Coke product all day.)

The Spicy Queso Sandwich was pleasant—and frankly, I liked it more than the breakfast sandwiches I’ve tried at Starbucks. The fluffy egg on a locally made Turano roll tastes less like McDonald’s than a Chicago rendition of the egg-and-cheese. The queso was one of three cheeses that blended with a welcome kick, and fried jalapeno chips on top were legit delicious—I’d eat them as a side. But the sausage tasted straight off of the McDonald’s menu, meaning it was almost anachronistic in the context of CosMc’s. (FWIW, I also think the sandwich would be better with no meat.)

Alongside the sandwich, I had the Savory Hash Brown Bites, mostly because I couldn’t imagine ordering the McPops donuts or anything else sweet with three sugary drinks already in tow. The hash browns were tasty, like, if, say, McDonald’s had formulated them with the sole goal of improving the Dunkin’ hash brown bites. They’re larger, crispier, a little less oniony than what Dunkin’ offers, and not nearly as rich as that McDonald’s hash brown patty (something I haven’t eaten to completion in 15 years).

This entire pseudo-food review is really just my way of saying, after eating at CosMc’s, I did find myself a bit dizzy, and almost hopeful that the menu will end up being pared back a bit—or at least, presented in a way that mix and matches drinks and treats in complementary ways.

It was also clear that CosMc’s is absolutely not aiming to be McDonald’s. I’d probably compare it most closely to Starbucks, albeit with the tuning knobs turned up. Everything from the beverage line to the branding seems designed to be more colorful, more expressive, more in-your-face. And as CosMc’s stores spread, it’s easy to imagine these glimmering blue buildings side-by-side with beige Starbucks and Dunkin’s, promising a slightly exaggerated experience, and making competitors look dull by comparison.

I do hope the CosMc’s team considers its own impact on the broader landscape of food. McDonald’s shapes the way America eats as significantly as any company in the world, and it would be a grand lie to pretend that’s had no consequences on our health or our environment. As it launches a new brand, free of decades of tradition and consumer expectation, McDonald’s has a unique opportunity to do something I wish it had done from the beginning: Not kill the excitement or treat factor—hell yes, you deserve that ice cream cone and a zany cartoon mascot—but to also offer people a healthy, sustainable, and satisfying meal on the go. The egg sammies don’t feel like a bad start. Just give me some irresistible veggies in the mix, and maybe we’re good? And, you know . . . perhaps a bathroom or a few nice picnic tables?

I already know McDonald’s can convince me to eat things I shouldn’t; CosMc’s greatest opportunity could be convincing me to eat the things that I should. Because if CosMc’s doesn’t take that step, well then, eventually Starbucks, Dunkin’, or some other player will. And that will be the new store concept I’d love to see pop up everywhere.

*After eating “at” CosMc’s, I drove to Panera to write this.

So, what’s your p(doom) score?

The term that began as a half-serious inside joke on tech message boards to describe the odds that AI destroys humankind, has broken into the mainstream. The buzzword is p(doom), and it provides both AI experts and average know-nothings a common scale to describe where they stand on the question of whether AI is going to kill us. It’s “the morbid new statistic that is sweeping Silicon Valley,” the New York Times writes.

P(doom) officially stands for “probability of doom,” and as its name suggests, it refers to the odds that artificial intelligence will cause a doomsday scenario. According to tech columnist Kevin Roose:

It’s become a common icebreaker among techies in San Francisco—and an inescapable part of AI culture. I’ve been to two tech events this year where a stranger has asked for my p(doom) as casually as if they were asking for directions to the bathroom. “It comes up in almost every dinner conversation,” Aaron Levie, the chief executive of the cloud data platform Box, told me.

The scale runs from zero to 100, and the higher you score yourself, the more you’re convinced that AI is not only willing to eliminate humankind, if necessary, but in fact, is going to succeed at carrying out that task.

As AI grows more sophisticated, fears over the consequences do too. P(doom) offers an unequivocal way to show where you stand on this pressing existential question. For instance, it’s fair to assume someone whose number is 80 will be horrified when industry leaders warn—as OpenAI’s, Google DeepMind’s, and Anthropic’s CEOs did this May—that future AI will be capable of wiping us out as facilely as a pandemic or nuclear bomb. It may all sound like the singularity debate redux to seasoned doomers—just scored using a much more tweetable metric.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has put his p(doom) at 10 to 25, depending on which day you ask. FTC Chair Lina Khan, often seen as one of AI’s leading combatants, told the Times hers actually lives down at a quite calm-ish 15. Meanwhile, Emmett Shear, OpenAI’s 72-hour interim CEO during Sam Altman’s weekend-long interregnum last month, says his p(doom) can shoot up as high as 50 on bad days. (On good ones, it’s 5.)

By now, most people active in the AI field have volunteered some kind of number, even if they believe it’s a stupid question. A recent survey of AI engineers found that their average p(doom) score was 40. Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin—who has warned about AI’s existential threat—is only a 10. OpenAI superalignment colead Jan Leike puts it anywhere from 10 to 90, while Center for AI Safety director Dan Hendrycks recently updated his number from 20 to greater than 80. Elon Musk has said he is a 20 or 30. Tech reporter Casey Newton is a 5—which appears to be Times columnist Kevin Roose’s number as well.

Renowned software engineer Grady Booch says his score equals “P(all the oxygen in my room spontaneously moving to a corner thereby suffocating me).” And Eliezer Yudkowsky, cofounder of Berkeley’s Machine Intelligence Research Institute and an OG AI doomer, says his number is higher than 95. (“The designers of the RBMK-1000 reactor that exploded in Chernobyl understood the physics of nuclear reactors vastly better than anyone will understand artificial superintelligence at the point it first gets created,” he tweeted just this week.)

Just like in Las Vegas, though, having a bunch of p(doom)s, even those of smart people, doesn’t reveal if the house is going to win or not. “Nobody knows whether AI is 10% or 2% or 85.2% likely to kill us, of course,” Roose points out, noting we possess myriad ways of complicating the odds, too: “Would it still count as ‘doom’ if only 50% of humans died as a result of AI? What if nobody died, but we all ended up jobless and miserable? And how would AI take over the world, anyway?”

To many, those may sound like worthy follow-up questions. But probably not to everyone. Take this poll of X users last week by Garrett Jones, Bluechip’s chief economist. He asked what the chances are that p(doom) is actually negative, and nearly one-third of his respondents picked better than 90%.

What mysteries might a time-lapse of a single cell unlock, and how might it transform our understanding of disease and the body’s most granular processes—over the long term and in real time, to fuel new medicines? On Thursday, a powerhouse academic trio of the Allen Institute, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), and the University of Washington announced the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology (SEAHub) to take on that exact groundbreaking work: a collaborative to develop biotechnologies that create a historical biological record down to the single cell level and give scientists clues on when and how to intervene against burgeoning diseases.

The science at the heart of SEAHub is a foundation for future discovery in the life sciences, says Rui Costa, a brain scientist, molecular biologist, and CEO and president of the Allen Institute—the nonprofit neuroscience and cell-biology research behemoth created by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen in 2003 and key contributor to a milestone “brain atlas” mapping the inner-workings of the brain published last month—in an interview and guided tour of its Seattle headquarters with Fast Company leading up to the institute’s 20-year anniversary Thursday.

“Can you imagine if you take a cell, and you’d have a little recorder of how many inflammations or infections I had?” says Costa. “Or what did my body experience using the cell’s natural sensors? So, through the intelligent genomic design of a few cells, you could have live recorders of your history.”

That technology, in turn, means that you can take a spontaneous response or a mutation at the genetic level and capture its effect on a cell. From that cellular effect, you can climb up to an effect on your body, such as, say, painful inflammation that might indicate an immune system disease—the kind of thing your doctor would notice when you visit the clinic with those symptoms.

“I could say, hey, about one year ago, there was a large inflammatory response in your organism, you know, something happened here,” explains Costa. “Of course, you don’t have awareness of that, but there are ways our body can record things that happened.” In lay terms, the implication is, scientists and drug developers would have powerful new tools to see exactly how a cell changes over time and the moment that spurs that biological event—a real-time crystal ball, giving them a glimpse at, not just the best biological targets, but the best biological moments to intervene before a disease can take root.

Executives from the Allen Institute and CZI, and lead scientists from UW Medicine who will be leading the Seattle Hub for Synthetic Biology, compare the effort to a “smart watch” for the genome that has the potential to revolutionize drug development strategies and foster untold future discovery.

“Currently, when biologists take measurements, we’re limited to either observing how a few things change over time with a microscope or to measuring everything, but only at the moment in time that we break open the cell,” said Jay Shendure, executive director of the new hub and a medical scientist and professor of genome sciences at UW Medicine, in a statement. “With the kind of genomic smart watch that we’re aiming to build, one could recover the full autobiography of each cell rather than only the last page.”

Priscilla Chan, cofounder and co-CEO of CZI, draws similar comparisons and their implications for our understanding of genetics, cells, disease, and their interplay with our environments. “By developing new technologies to measure and understand the history of our cells over time, including how they are impacted by the environment around them, genetic mutations, and other factors, we can expand scientists’ understanding of what happens at the cellular level when we go from healthy to sick, and help pinpoint the earliest causes of disease,” said Chan in a statement announcing the research hub.

The democratic nature of the synthetic biology hub’s work is key for Costa, who believes the true excitement lies not just in the technology, but in the quixotic quest for scientific discovery and collaboration.

“Discovery changes the world. So, the sharing of knowledge is empowering people,” he says.

If you hadn’t heard about superconductors before 2023, odds are you know what they are now. Researchers raised eyebrows early in the year with claims of operational room-temperature superconductors, though none has been substantiated, and one paper from researchers at the University of Rochester was retracted by the journal Nature at the authors’ request in November.

But the hunt for a superconductor—that is, a material that can conduct electricity without resistance—that can operate at room temperature is nothing new.

Right now, superconductors can operate only at very cold temperatures. So, finding one that could work at room temperature without needing to be kept in a cold chamber could revolutionize everything from power grids and medical equipment to quantum computing. But physicists first have to figure out how to make them work.

A Dutch physicist discovered the phenomenon of superconductivity in the early 20th century, and since then, labs around the world have tested materials that can reach a superconductive state at warmer and warmer temperatures.

So, how do these materials manage to conduct electricity without resistance, and what sorts of technological possibilities lie on the horizon, with superconductor research improving every year? Here are three stories from The Conversation’s archive that explore the history, science and future of this incredible physical phenomenon.

1. Physics behind the phenomenon

How is it even possible to generate a current with zero electrical resistance, the basis for superconductivity? In order to do so, you must keep your conducting metal cold. Really cold. Like, hundreds of degrees below zero.

“At normal temperatures, electrons move in somewhat erratic paths. They can generally succeed in moving through a wire freely, but every once in a while they collide with the nuclei of the material,” wrote Mishkat Bhattacharya, a physicist at Rochester Institute of Technology. “These collisions are what obstruct the flow of electrons, cause resistance and heat up the material.”

Normally, the nuclei of all atoms vibrate constantly, and they can bump into each other. In superconducting materials, the electrons in the current pass from atom to atom while vibrating at the same frequency as the nuclei of the atoms in the superconducting metal. This means that instead of colliding and generating heat, they’re moving in a smooth and coordinated way. And it’s the cold temperatures that allow for this coordinated movement.

2. A century of superconductivity

Mercury was the first material discovered as a superconductor, by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes in 1911. His team had to cool liquid helium to -454 degrees Fahrenheit (-270 degrees Celsius) to observe the effect. They used wires made of mercury to send a current through the material, and then measured the effect of electrical resistance as “near enough null.”

Onnes and his team repeated the experiment several times to make sure the effect they’d observed was, in fact, superconductivity, and they also troubleshot all other possible explanations for the effect—electrical faults, open currents, and so on. But they kept finding the same result, and after three years of testing, Onnes was able to demonstrate currents with truly zero resistance.

“Superconductivity has always been tricky to prove because some metals can masquerade as superconductors,” wrote David D. Nolte, an author of history of science books and a physicist at Purdue. “The lessons learned by Onnes a century ago—that these discoveries require time, patience and, most importantly, proof of currents that never stop—are still relevant today.”

3. A superconductive future

One of the most important applications of a future room-temperature superconductor would be decreasing the heat wasted from electronics. Not only could electronics like cellphones and computers run much more quickly and efficiently, but on a larger scale, electric grids, power lines, and data centers could decrease their wasted heat. This could be a huge win for the environment.

“If we succeed in making a room-temperature superconductor, then we can address the billions of dollars that it costs in wasted heat to transmit energy from power plants to cities,” wrote Pegor Aynajian, a physicist at Binghamton University, State University of New York. “Solar energy harvested in the vast empty deserts around the world could be stored and transmitted without any loss of energy, which could power cities and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

A type of superconductor made from a ceramiclike material discovered by scientists at IBM in Switzerland could be one path to a room-temperature superconductor. Already, this class of materials has been shown to work at higher—though still frigid—temperatures, closer to -300 F (-184 C) than conventional superconductors like Onnes’ original mercury wires.

But while a room-temperature superconductor could revolutionize electronics and energy transmission, the right material still remains elusive. As Aynajian puts it, a room-temperature superconductor is quite literally “the next million-dollar question.”

Mary Magnuson is an assistant science editor at The Conversation.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Meta: Facebook and Instagram’s parent company announced Purple Llama, a project that prioritizes safety tools and best practices amidst the AI renaissance and the risks coupled with it. Read: Announcing Purple Llama: Towards open trust and safety in the new world of generative AI

Grok: The ever-controversial billionaire Elon Musk released his “anti-woke” alternative to ChatGPT, Grok, to X Premium Plus users. Read: Elon Musk’s selling point for ChatGPT competitor Grok may be its fatal flaw, experts say

Shein: The fast fashion company, which currently has a private market valuation of $66 billion, confidentially filed for an IPO last week. Despite allegations of inhumane conditions for its factory workers, Shein’s low cost offerings continue to thrive among its Gen Z customer base. Read: Shein IPO: What it could mean for the fashion industry

Maternal mortality has been on the rise in the U.S. at the same time that childcare, healthcare, and housing costs are rising. A new initiative in Denver hopes to help combat those issues by improving the mental and physical health outcomes of mothers-to-be and their newborns.

Pilots for guaranteed income—regular cash payments as a supplemental form of assistance—have greatly increased. Between 2020 and 2022, more than 48 pilots were created, usually for low-income individuals, and at times targeted to particular populations, from formerly incarcerated people, to artists, to new fathers.

While most guaranteed income pilots are financed by governments or nonprofits, a new Denver-based program is the first to be funded entirely by a private company.

This week, 20 participants received their first of 15 monthly checks of $750 via debit card. The recipients are all pregnant women in the Denver area, in their second or third trimesters, and experiencing economic hardship.

The program was the brainchild of Katherine Gold, CEO of Goldbug, an infant clothing distributor in Denver. Gold herself was a single mother while raising her son and running her business—and it was difficult, even though, as she says, she had the resources to do so. “It was overwhelming,” says Gold. “I couldn’t imagine, without that privilege, how difficult [it would be].”

Goldbug, which was founded in 1968 by Gold’s father and counts about 60 employees, distributes its clothing under different brands to mainstream stores. Gold wanted to support her customers, especially after reading about the spike in maternal mortality rates in the U.S. “We’re not serving Bergdorf Goodman here,” she says. “We’re serving Walmart and Target customers. What is really going to make a difference in their life?”

She worked with the nonprofit Impact Charitable to design and implement the guaranteed income program. “I make children’s products,” Gold says. “You want to have people around you who actually know what they’re doing.” Impact Charitable has run a dozen direct cash assistance programs, having distributed $38 million to 25,000 people.

A major focus of the pilot is to include underserved groups: 70% of the recipients are women of color, and the cohort is half urban and half rural. Most guaranteed income programs tend to focus on urban participants, even though rural residents often can find it harder to access healthcare.

Supporting pregnant women is not a new pursuit for Goldbug, which donates to a local Denver doula program and provides meals to women with high-risk pregnancies via a Colorado charity. Along with the new pilot, Goldbug spends about 8% of profits on these projects.

Ashley Hudgens, 34, is one of the participants in downtown Denver. She had decided to take time off of work to alleviate stress, and then found out she was pregnant. “I could totally use the help,” she says. “I’m struggling.”

Hudgens received her first check this week. “$750 is not a huge amount,” she says, “but it’s good enough to get your feet on the ground.” She’s using the cash to settle bills, buy clothes and supplies for her first son, who is 13, and pay for Ubers to bring him safely to and from school.

She likes that it’s recurring and predictable, and that she can determine how to use it, which isn’t often the case with government benefits. “It’s really a blessing knowing that you get this money, and you don’t have to spend it [only] on this, that, and the third.”

Though this is the first in Colorado, there have been multiple guaranteed income programs for pregnant women in recent years, including one in New York, and another in San Francisco for Black and Pacific Islander women.

They’re helpful because of their “two-gen approach,” says Jourdan McGinn, director of economic mobility at Impact Charitable. “By investing in one individual, you can not only change the trajectory of the mom, but also fundamentally change the trajectory of their child.”

New research from Columbia University has suggested that pregnancy represents a “critical window” of funding, which can help women and their children afford better healthcare, nutrition, housing, and goods, relieving some financial stress. Past cash transfer programs have helped improve both mental and physical health; initiatives in Spain and Uruguay led to reductions in low-birth weights.

But the private funding here is new. While it’s easy to be skeptical of the private sector and its motives, McGinn says it can fill financing gaps left by often-scant public funds.

What’s more, Gold says, “the private sector can move faster without all the red tape.” She says businesses can afford to be more entrepreneurial, in trying different things, and then reshaping them quickly if they turn out to be lacking.

Still, this is a small pilot. The goal isn’t necessarily to expand it, but rather to learn from it—via a policy team that will be evaluating the data. That team, which includes experts from Impact Charitable, the Women’s Foundation, and the Colorado Health Foundation, meets monthly to review progress.

But long term, the objective is to contribute to the growing national evidence of guaranteed income’s efficacy and influence governments across the country to do the work. “I don’t think that the private sector can take it all on,” Gold says. “If we can ignite the conversation, and learn and iterate, that’s what’s really important. And I think the private sector can do that better than the public.”

For many, waking up on Christmas morning to a tree overflowing with presents and stockings peeking over the mantel isn’t just a child’s fantasy—excess can be an iconic part of the holiday season. But even if you’re all about the joy of giving (or getting), the truth is that those gifts can generate an absurd amount of waste. So in the spirit of doing a little bit to lessen the environmental toll of the season, Fast Company collected some of our favorite plastic-free gift ideas. Perfect to pop under the tree, slip into a stocking, or gift yourself for making it through the holidays.

Beauty and Fashion

Shampoo bars ($10)Kitsch has developed shampoo bars that work as well—or arguably better—than traditional liquid shampoos that come in a bottle. My favorite is the Rice Water Protein bar, which has an amazing scent and leaves my hair soft and shiny. There are conditioner bars too. And, as a bonus, they look better in the shower than a bunch of plastic bottles. —Adele Peters

Eye patches ($25)As a self-proclaimed night owl, I’ve invested a lot of time into attempting to erase my under-eye circles. About six months ago I started using Dieux Skin’s “forever” eye patches, which are designed to help products better absorb under your eyes. I’ve noticed a difference with my circles. What I love about the patches—besides that they can be reused for years to come—is that they don’t have to be paired with a particular eye cream or serum. Just use your favorite product as you normally would, then stick on the patches for 10 minutes. You’ll look like a functioning member of society, not a sleep-deprived raccoon. It’s a great stocking stuffer for anyone aiming to make their beauty routine more sustainable. —Yannise Jean

Razor ($84)This plastic-free razor is way less intimidating than other safety razors on the market, and way less wasteful than disposable plastic ones. It has a pivoting head and spots for three blades, and it’s comfortable to use. I had previously tried a traditional safety razor to go plastic-free but kept nicking myself or having to go super slow. Leaf’s flexible head curves easily around knees or ankles, and I can swipe pretty quickly. The handle can get a little slippery, but there’s a grip you can add on. It is a bit pricey, but it’ll likely be the last razor you ever need. —Kristin Toussaint

Tiny bags ($12)Even if you already have a plethora of reusable bags, you can always use more, right? Baby Baggus fold up super tiny to fit right into a stocking, and they’re easy to toss in a purse or pocket to make sure you always have a bag when you’re out. Plus, they come in a bunch of cute patterns. —K.T.

Kitchen

Cleaning products (starting at $39)I moved across the country this year and needed to rebuild my arsenal of cleaning products. Seeing all the single-use plastic bundled together in my cart made me want to be more conscientious about my choices, so I turned to Blueland. The company’s multisurface cleaner is gentle on surfaces and has a unique lemon scent that isn’t overpowering. There are also cleaners aimed specifically for the bathroom and for glass and mirrors. They’re great for someone who wants to be more environmentally conscious with their cleaning products but doesn’t want to dish out the initial cost for a starter set. —Jessica Bursztynsky

Sponges ($24)I was given a pack of these spaghetti sponges as a thank you by a houseguest, and they’re now one of my most treasured kitchen items. They’re made of peach pits, and they work incredibly well at getting every kind of pan or plate clean. Scrambled eggs or burned bits stuck on stainless steel pans easily scrub right off. They’re really durable too. I’ve been using the same one for months and it’s still holding its shape, doesn’t stink, and dries quickly. Plus, it’s just more fun to have on the sink than a traditional sponge. —April Mokwa

Cast-iron pan (starts at $27)Seasoned cast iron is a dream to cook with. Properly cared for, it will last for generations—but in a good way, not like the PFAS (“forever chemicals”) found in most nonstick cookware. Lodge makes a wide range of pieces, from traditional skillets to an heirloom-quality hibachi grill. As a bonus, Lodge cookware is usually available at local hardware stores, so you can support a neighborhood business and save some shipping weight. —Daniel Salo

Food and drink

Loose-leaf tea and steel filter ($15 and $11)I drink tea daily and got tired of buying packs of disposable tea bags. Over time, I switched to loose-leaf tea—and I love the variety that Harney & Sons carries. Some of my personal favorite blends are Paris, Apricot, Rose, and Fruits d’Alsace. I buy them in the 4-ounce tins and reuse the tins for all kinds of things. I struggled for a while to find a reusable tea filter, since many weren’t fine enough to not leave tea leaf particles in the cup. These steel filters are endlessly reusable, very easy to clean, and keep all the leaves contained while the tea steeps. —A.M.

Spices (starts at $7)I stumbled upon the Skordo store while wandering Portland, Maine, and bought a couple of its seasonings to try at home. Since then, they’ve easily become my favorites. The blends are delicious, unique, and can make even a boring sweet potato or roasted veggies take on a new flavor profile. There are so many to choose from and so many more I want to try. My favorites so far are the lemon rosemary sea salt, Mediterranean fish seasoning, and togarashi. The glass jars they come in are perfect for grabbing a pinch, and a great size to reuse after the seasoning is done. —A.M.

Silverware to go ($18)Sometimes it feels silly to buy new zero-waste things like a cutlery set when you could just carry your own fork around—but would you really remember to? I was gifted this eco-friendly portable flatware set and quickly found myself taking it everywhere. The set includes chopsticks and a straw, and it’s easier to remember to switch it from bag to bag than to take a utensil out of my drawer. They utensils are made of wheat straw, so they’re super light but durable. Whenever I’m traveling or getting takeout for lunch at work, I no longer need to grab (and then trash) a plastic fork. —K.T.

Miscellaneous

Tools ($28)I wouldn’t call myself particularly handy—and neither would my family. Our place is littered with almost-level bookshelves and “extra” Ikea furniture parts. But it’s still incredibly helpful to have a multitool within reach. I don’t have racks of tools in a garage, but sometimes I need a screwdriver, bottle opener, and wire cutter all at the same time. Like, say, if I want to install a new ceiling light fixture while drinking a beer. For that, the stainless steel Gerber Dime keychain is a great, fully functional, pocket-size arsenal of utility for the handy—and not-so handy—of any household. —Jeff Beer

Plastic-free subscription (starts at $14 per month)It’s theoretically possible to live a plastic-free life, but for most of us it would be extremely difficult. And while it’s always great to try to minimize your plastic use as much as possible, it’s inevitable that some plastic will still cross your path. For those times, Ridwell—a subscription waste-collection service that’s available in several U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Denver, Minneapolis, and Seattle—can collect them for you. Ridwell says it only takes items for which it has found a vetted partner committed to using or recycling them in some way, but it aims to collect items that generally aren’t accepted in curbside recycling programs, such as batteries, light bulbs, plastic films (like Amazon mailers), and multilayer plastic (like potato chip bags). The service is a helpful tool for mitigating the plastic use you simply can’t find ways to eliminate. —Morgan Clendaniel

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Heading into 2023, numerous forecast models predicted that deteriorated housing affordability would translate into a modest U.S. home price correction. On a national scale, a lack of resale supply has stopped a correction from materializing. However, digging into pricing data reveals that certain markets in Texas and Louisiana have experienced modest corrections this year.

Could we see more of this in 2024?

To gain insights into which regional housing markets might still be vulnerable to pricing weakness in 2024, ResiClub examined Realtor.com’s latest “Hotness Score.”

Realtor.com, which has the self-proclaimed “most comprehensive and accurate database of MLS-listed for-sale homes in the industry,” issues a “Hotness Score” every month for the nation’s 300 largest metro-area housing markets. The “Hotness Score” is described as an equally weighted composite metric of a geography’s “Supply Score” and “Demand Score.” Those scores take into account factors like days on the market, inventory shifts, pricing shifts, and unique listing page viewers per property.

Realtor.com’s latest “Hotness Score” indicates that housing markets along the Gulf Coast, including places like Lake Charles, Louisiana, and College Station, Texas, remain the weakest. Some of these Gulf markets are experiencing a pullback in pandemic-era migration, coupled with significant increases in home insurance premiums and increased household distress. In certain pockets, such as Austin, home prices got too far detached from underlying fundamentals during the boom.

On the flip side, there remains a great deal of resilience in many Northeast and Midwest housing markets. Places like Manchester, New Hampshire, and Rochester, New York, just don’t have enough supply to match demand. The result? Elevated house price growth.

As Texas prepares for another winter that could bring more rolling blackouts, leaders at one of the nation’s largest airports, Dallas Fort Worth International (DFW), are preparing for a future where the electrical grid’s capacity is sure to be tested regularly.

It’s not just the strain posed by the extreme summer heat and winter cold snaps of recent years. What’s expected to drive up airports’ power usage like never before is the shift by car rental companies to electric vehicles.

At DFW, Hertz, for one, expects to convert 85% of its fleet to EVs by 2025, the airport’s CEO, Sean Donohue, said at a recent industry conference. It’s a shift that will contribute to the doubling of the airport’s electricity usage by 2030, Donohue said, even as passenger traffic rises by a comparably lower— but still significant—25% during that time.

Though Hertz’s specific EV transition may ultimately be slowed by cost pressures detailed on the company’s most recent earnings call, the march toward EVs—and the notion that airports will need more electrical power capacity—seems clear.

To combat those demands, DFW officials are currently planning a new microgrid that, once functional, will be capable of powering the airport’s entire rental car facility.

Drawing energy from rooftop solar panels and (eventually) batteries, the setup would allow the airport to generate and store energy on site, and then deploy it when the grid is taxed. Picture a 100-degree day when air-conditioning is at full blast and car rental companies are trying to simultaneously supercharge thousands of vehicles. (EVs themselves will also likely be used to act as batteries, perhaps sending power back into the network and sharing power among vehicles in a rental car lot.)

“Ultimately, we want to have the choice of [choosing] the cheapest and cleanest energy source that we can use at any time of day,” DFW’s vice president of environmental affairs and sustainability Robert Horton shared in an interview with Fast Company.

“So, if the math works out that the on-site resource should be used, we’ll have a digital system that helps us to make that decision,” he says.

EVs, microgrids, and net-zero goals

DFW isn’t the only major U.S. airport rethinking how it will power a more modern rental car facility. And it’s certainly not the only airport that should, according to a report this week by the American Association of Airport Executives’ (AAAE) Airport Consortium on Transformation.

Switching a quarter of rental car vehicles to EVs could see combined car rental facilities—with multiple companies located at one site, as is common at airports—draw as much power as an entire airport terminal, the report says. Once EVs make up half those fleets, the usage could be four times that of a large terminal.

Car rental facilities “urgently need more electricity,” the report cautioned, quoting one (anonymous) industry executive as saying that airports “really need to get their heads wrapped around” the electrification requirements of reaching net-zero.

It’s an especially tall task in Texas, where the extreme weather of recent years has exposed the limitations of the state’s power grid.

“Obviously, we have to make sure we’re getting enough supply,” Donohue told an audience at the November 1 Skift Aviation Forum. “But it’s the resiliency, and how do we make sure, from an airport perspective, that we can build in resiliency.”

A microgrid at New York’s JFK

DFW’s microgrid is currently in the planning stages in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL).

The project, which could receive federal funding through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, is a similar concept to the microgrid New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport is planning for its new Terminal One: Starting in 2026, when the first portion of the new terminal is set to open, the microgrid will power the entire building.

Both setups are distinctly unlike the solar farms popping up at airports across the country, as well as from emergency generators that turn on during an outage.

Rather, with a microgrid, energy generated on-site is stored on-site, and then deployed (or not), as dictated by the system’s computer technology. The question, of course, is how big does the solar array have to be in order to cover more than just a small fraction of an airport’s growing needs.

Still, such facilities figure to be increasingly common in the coming years amid the nation’s broader shift to electrical power—both at airports and elsewhere, says Harish Krishnamoorthy, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering.

“Let’s say the power grid is out for some reason. You can still power the local communities—in this case, the airport or rental car facility. This actually reduces the demand on the main grid,” Krishnamoorthy explains, recalling a Texas friend whose at-home, solar-powered microgrid kept their lights on as other neighbors huddled in the dark around fireplaces during the state’s 2021 deep freeze.

The downsides of microgrids

Still, there are some downsides with microgrids, the AAAE report cautions—most notably, the complexity of deploying such a system, which is “essentially like building a small power plant.” Plus, microgrids typically require steep upfront investments (though federal grants can help offset the costs).

A DFW spokesperson tells Fast Company that it’s too early to put a price tag on its planned microgrid. But the long-term, potential cost savings of generating its own power is also part of what interests DFW leaders about the concept—particularly as the 20,000 or so rental cars on-site on any given day increasingly will run on electric power in the coming years.

“We want to get something that is going to benefit us long term,” Horton says. “We know that we need to have a resilient airport operation. We just want to make sure we do it in the right way, in a sustainable way, in a way that’s economically feasible as well.”