💰 Hertz, So Good

Image: E.R. Davidson/Hertz

🚘 Details, details: Hertz is in the midst of reinventing itself after emerging from bankruptcy four months ago.

• When travel collapsed last year, the demand for rental cars collapsed, too. Hertz, who also owns Dollar, Thrifty, and Firefly, was forced to file for bankruptcy and began liquidating its fleet.
• This electrification plan, which will eventually encompass almost all of Hertz’s half-million cars and trucks worldwide, is the company’s first big initiative since emerging from bankruptcy in June. It also involves the rental car company building its own nationwide EV-charging network.
• Shareholders seem to approve. The company was up more than 10% in trading yesterday, giving the rental car provider a $12.8 billion market cap. Knighthead Capital Management and Certares Management took over Hertz for $6 billion during its bankruptcy.

📈 Elsewhere... Tesla is cruising. On top of yesterday’s Hertz announcement, the company revealed its Model 3 became the first electric vehicle to top monthly sales charts in Europe this September.

• Plus, earlier this month, the company reported record sales in Q3 despite chip shortages denting the automotive industry.

📝 Bottom line: Tesla hit a $1 trillion market cap for the first time yesterday, joining Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft in the four-comma club. Someplace, somewhere, Russ Hanneman is freaking out.

• On the Hertz side, get ready to see a lot more of Tom Brady. It hired the seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback to star in ads showcasing the new Teslas.

🎁 Mastercard is partnering with digital asset platform Bakkt to allow banks and merchants on its payments network to offer a broad set of crypto services to consumers, the two companies announced yesterday.

Here’s a Riddle For You:

What’s stylish enough for a night out, cozy enough for a night in, luxurious enough for the runway, and versatile enough to follow you from Orangetheory to the grocery store ?

• Answer: The Essentials collection from Sub_Urban Riot.

🤔 What’s Sub_Urban Riot ?... A global clothing brand founded in Venice, CA, at the start of one of the largest financial crises ever. Two college friends told their corporate jobs to suck it and struck out on their own… following rules someone else made up no longer made sense.

What made sense was 1) doing the right thing and 2) making bada** clothing with the perfect combo of positivity and humor – and boy, did it work.

• You’ve seen their Kale sweatshirt on Queen 🐝 herself, tees on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and the Favorite Daughter design.

💎🌳 Affordable & sustainable luxury… You’ll never see $85 shirts from Sub_Urban Riot just because they can… but you’ll never see $9 shirts either.

• Either option comes at a huge cost, whether to you, those making the garment, or to the environment – and that’s not doing the right thing.

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Image: Giphy

🤔 Why it's important: It’s the highest annual number recorded since at least 1960, when the government first began tracking such entries. The next closest is the fiscal year 2000, when border agents apprehended 1.6 million people.

✋ Yes, but… The total number of people who crossed the border is likely significantly lower than the number of arrests. Federal data shows roughly 27 percent of people who crossed the border had already been arrested at least once over the previous 12 months.

📈 What’s the root cause ?... A COVID-fueled economic collapse across much of Latin America combined with a tight U.S. labor market has driven many people to move north in search of work.

• Gang violence, autocratic government crackdowns, and extreme weather events – including a pair of hurricanes in Guatemala and Honduras – have also contributed to a mass exodus of migrants seeking asylum in the U.S.
• In addition, many GOP lawmakers are blaming President Biden’s immigration policies, which are widely perceived by migrants as more welcoming than his predecessor’s.

🔢 By the numbers: Over the last year, border officials have returned over 1 million migrants back to Mexico or their home countries under a Trump-era pandemic policy known as Title 42, which the Biden administration has opted to keep in place.

• Data shows federal agents used the public health order to expel 61 percent of individual migrants and 26 percent of families they encountered.
• In the other cases, families and individuals are typically released into the U.S., after which they travel to stay with relatives or friends and begin the asylum process (which can take years).

👁️ Looking ahead… Following court orders, the Biden administration is expected to reimplement another Trump-era immigration program next month called "Remain in Mexico," which forced asylum seekers to wait in Mexico until their immigration court hearings.

🛰️ The Great Orbital Reef

Image: Blue Origin

Blue Origin describes the Orbital Reef station as a “mixed use business park” that’s also capable of “exotic hospitality” for space tourists.

• This is the third announced commercial space station to date, as a growing number of private companies are looking to replace the soon-to-be-retired International Space Station. (The others are from Axiom Space and Voyager Space/Nanoracks/Lockheed Martin.)

👁️ Looking ahead… Blue Origin said it expects to deploy the Orbital Reef station into space sometime between 2025 and 2030.

Image: CNN

For close to half a century, rock star Randy Bachman – of The Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive fame – has been searching for his beloved stolen guitar.

• The 1957 Gretsch guitar was everything to the singer. When it was stolen from his hotel room in ‘76, Randy said a “part of [him] was lost.”

🌐 You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet… Bachman had long given up his search for the instrument – until a fan named William Long used his internet sleuthing skills to track the guitar to Japanese musician Takeshi, who had unwittingly purchased the instrument at a music shop in Tokyo.

👁 Looking ahead... Takeshi plans on returning the guitar as soon as Japanese travel restrictions are lifted.

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Which of these battery types is the largest ?

A) AA
B) D
C) AAA
D) C

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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B) D

The first D cell was introduced in 1898. It was commonly referred to as a "flashlight battery" before smaller cells became more common.