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THANK YOU for subscribing and reading this newsletter. Without the support of each and every one of you, we'd be absolutely nowhere. And if we ever get a big head don't let us forget it.😉

In today's edition:

• 🤔 How’s the US economy doing?
• 👀 TikTok is eying Google
• 🎀 It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.82 minutes to read.

“Enthusiasm is a vital element toward the individual success of every man or woman.”

–Conrad Hilton (1887-1979)

Q3 is over and in the books. Let’s take a look at how various aspects of the US economy are doing as we head into the final quarter of the year.

💼 Jobs: Weekly unemployment claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell below 200,000 last week for the first time since April. There are almost 2 jobs available for every unemployed worker, near an all-time high. (There were always more unemployed people than available jobs prior to the pandemic.)

📉 Stocks: Major US indexes posted three consecutive quarters of declines, the first such instance since 2009. September was the worst-performing month for US stocks since March 2020. (Dow: -8.8% | S&P: -9.3% | Nasdaq: -10.5%)

💰 GDP: The US economy shrank by 0.6% during the second quarter of the year, per the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ latest estimate published last Thursday. It marked the second straight quarter of GDP decline, aka the common definition of a recession – though the US gov’t uses a different method.

📈 Inflation: The Consumer Price Index, America’s most widely-used measure of inflation, rose 8.3% in August from the same month a year ago. That’s down from 8.5% in July and 9.1% in June, which was the highest rate in 40 years.

• Late last month, the Federal Reserve announced its third consecutive rate hike of 0.75% in a bid to tame inflation. Before June, the Fed hadn’t raised rates by that much at a single time since 1994.

💵🌏 The dollar: America’s currency has risen 17% so far this year against a group of other major global currencies, per IMF data. If that number holds (or increases) in Q4, it would mark the dollar’s best yearly percentage gain in history, Reuters reports.

📊 Flash poll: All things considered (employment situation, stocks, inflation, etc.), do you feel better or worse off financially than you were a year ago?

Better

Worse

Unsure/other

🇷🇺🇺🇦 Russia formally (and illegally) annexed four occupied Ukrainian territories on Friday. The move capped a week where the Kremlin held referendums in Russian-occupied territories, widely denounced as illegal under Ukrainian and international law. Also on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced the country is applying for "accelerated" NATO membership – though Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US would only support the traditional, lengthy process.

🇧🇷 Brazilians voted nationwide yesterday following one of the most violent election seasons in history. The world’s fourth-largest democracy headed to the polls in an election pitting incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro against his predecessor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, both of whom are projected to advance to a runoff election. About 40 mainly local Brazilian politicians from the left and right were killed in the first half of this year, while ~170 others were victims of attempted murders, beatings, kidnappings, and/or death threats. And so far in the back-half of the year (July through September 23), 140 attacks on politicians have occurred, per the WSJ.

🇮🇩 A stampede at an Indonesian football match left at least 125 people dead on Saturday. The incident, which occurred in the city of Malang in the East Java province, marks the second-deadliest stadium disaster in modern soccer history. Local officials said the stadium was overcrowded, and the crowd panicked after police fired tear gas at spectators who ran onto the field before the game ended.

On Saturday, the NFL Players Association fired an unaffiliated neurologist who helped evaluate Miami Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa before he was allowed to return to a September 25 game, despite sustaining a head injury.

Hours later, the NFL and NFLPA announced new modifications to the league’s concussion protocol that’ll rule out players who exhibit “gross motor instability” – as Tua did two Sundays ago – regardless of the cause.

🏈 Let’s back up… During the September 25 contest, Tua left the game and entered concussion protocol after visibly stumbling following a hit that caused his head to slam into the ground. (Video)

• He was later allowed back in the game after reportedly passing all concussion tests, and ending up leading the Dolphins to an upset win over Buffalo, the odds-on Super Bowl favorite.
• Tua also started in Miami’s Thursday night game, during which he suffered a second hit to the head that led to him being removed on a stretcher and taken to a hospital. (Video. Fair warning: not for the faint of heart.)
• He was discharged later that night and is reportedly still experiencing headaches, with no timetable for returning to the field.

🧠 Zoom out: The NFL reports concussions are trending downward, from 275 in 2015 to 187 in 2021 – though legal experts have questioned whether they’re fully documented, the NY Times reports.

+Some good news: Concussions this year among players mandated to wear the bubble-wrap helmet-coverings, aka the Guardian Cap (as seen in Hard Knocks), dropped by more than 50% compared to the previous three-year average.

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TikTok scrollers everywhere, you’re about to be reading a lot more – like it or not. According to a notification sent to users in late September, the short/medium(?)-form video platform is expanding the length of descriptions from 300 characters to 2,200 characters. Musical.ly, oh how you’ve grown up.

📱🔍 Driving the move… A desire to compete with Google in search, something Bytedance hasn’t exactly been shy about. And when it comes to expanding captions, this has two benefits for TikTok — both search-related.

1. More traffic: Google already indexes TikTok videos to show them in search results. Now, they’re even more searchable.
2. TikTok’s own search becomes more robust: While the platform hasn’t explicitly said how it ranks search results, creators and businesses can add additional tags and descriptors to make their content more discoverable.

📸 Big picture: Like Mario on a banana peel, Google’s dominance of search may be slipping. More product searches now start on Amazon (61% vs. 49% for search engines). And per Google senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan this past July, “In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search, they go to TikTok or Instagram.”

But don’t count the Mountain View, CA-based tech giant out just yet. It still owns 84% of the global search market, after all. And its recent move to incentivize YouTube Shorts’ creators with a ~50% rev-share sits directly opposite to TikTok – which has gained a reputation in the industry as not being very creator-friendly.

+Dive deeper: Bytedance launched its own search engine in China at the end of August.

💬 Quoted…​​ “A dog wearing a superhero outfit with a red cape flying through the sky.”

Meta unveiled an AI system that generates quick videos based on text prompts, like the one above. And even though this particular tool isn’t yet available to the public, text-to-image/video is going mainstream, baby. Over the last few months:

• TikTok released “AI Greenscreen,” an in-app, text-to-image generator allowing users to type out a prompt the software then turns into an image that can be used as a video background.
• OpenAI made DALL-E, its latest text-to-image AI system, available to everyone.
• Startup Stability.AI launched Stable Diffusion, an open-source text-to-image system.

🙏 Stat of the Day: Suicide rates in the US increased 4% in 2021 after declining for two years, per preliminary CDC data released Friday.

• +Important: If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

🤯 Did You Know?... Every year, 264,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in the US – about one every two minutes. (Just fyi, October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.)

📖 Worth a Read: When Big Tobacco Was Forced to Pay → (The Walrus)

• ☝️ Elon Musk showed off the latest prototype of Tesla’s humanoid robot, named Optimus, during the company’s annual AI Day; Musk claimed the bot will be widely available for under $20,000 in three to five years.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🚘 Speaking of Tesla… the automaker said it delivered 343,830 vehicles to customers over a three-month period ending in September, a company record and 42% increase from last year (though it missed forecasts).
• 🛢️ OPEC+ is considering its largest production cut since the start of the pandemic – 1+ million barrels per day – in a bid to prop up falling oil prices, per the WSJ.
• 👎 Standard & Poor's (S&P), a ratings agency, downgraded the outlook for its credit rating of UK sovereign debt on Friday. | BREAKING NEWS: The UK is abandoning its plan to abolish the top tax rate, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng announced this morning.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 📺 Disney’s suite of 20 TV channels – including ESPN, ABC, FX, and National Geographic – was pulled from Dish Network’s satellite television and Sling TV services after the two companies failed to reach a renewal deal ahead of Friday's deadline.
• 🤖 Bruce Willis’ agent denied reports the actor had sold the rights to his face to a deepfake company called Deepcake; the firm itself also said no such deal existed.
• 🏈 College football: ‘Bama jumped Georgia to take the top spot in this week’s College Football AP Top 25 poll, while Wisconsin and Colorado fired their head coaches yesterday.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🛰️ The FCC announced new rules requiring defunct low-Earth orbit satellites to be disposed of within five years.
• 💊 MIT researchers developed a new robotic drug capsule that can drill through the mucus barrier lining the digestive tract; the researchers say the pill could one day replace insulin injections.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🌀 Hurricane Ian: The storm’s death toll in Florida rose to 58 yesterday, officials said, with more than 1,100 people rescued so far; nearly 700,000 homes and businesses were without power as of yesterday morning, and many of those were also without clean tap water.
• 🇻🇪 Venezuela freed seven jailed Americans in exchange for the release of two relatives of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the two countries confirmed on Saturday.
• 🏛️ The National Archives and Records Administration said it hasn’t recovered all the presidential records that were supposed to be turned over at the end of the Trump administration, per a letter to Congress published Saturday. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 🤔 Can you spot the deepfakes?

On Friday, we asked two questions:

1. Do you think a four-day workweek will ever become commonplace in America? (Background)

• 44% said yes, 42% said no, and 14% were unsure or had a more nuanced opinion. (See the full 360° view.)

2. Is it a good idea for the CIA to fund a company that’s bringing back the woolly mammoth? (Background)

• 29% said it was a good idea, 58% said it was a bad idea, and 13% said they didn’t care.

Monday: SCOTUS begins a new term (w/ a new justice on the bench, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court); the first school day in October🎃

Tuesday: Yom Kippur begins at sundown

Wednesday: International Teachers Day

Thursday: Weekly jobless claims; Google's Pixel hardware event

Friday: September's jobs report; MLB playoffs begin

+Also this week: The Nobel Prizes for Peace, Literature, and scientific fields will be announced

Walking around the UK, you will most likely run into a buzz stop, the country's newest initiative to help save the bees. 

🐝🦋 Bus-y bees... Bus stops all over the country have been adorned with local flora and fauna to attract a range of pollinators, including common bees, bumblebees, and butterflies.

• “We want to roll this out to as many countries as possible," shared creative director Louise Stubbings. "We’d like to do them everywhere, the positive effects are incredible.”

Can you guess the definitions of these Greek/Latin root words?

1. Mir
2. Rupt
3. Naut
4. Sed
5. Sol

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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1. Mir: Wonder (miracle, mirage)
2. Rupt: To break (rupture, interrupt)
3. Naut: Sailor (nautical)
4. Sed: Sit (reside, sediment)
5. Sol: Comfort (solace, console)