Good morning, and welcome back. In today’s edition:

• 😬 Things aren’t getting better for Boeing
• 🚀 SpaceX achieves a milestone
• 🤔 How fast can users get addicted to TikTok?

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~4.86-minute read (1,294 words).

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“What you resist, persists.”

–Carl Jung (1875-1961)

If Cuba Gooding Jr. asked Boeing to show him the money, he probably wouldn’t be too impressed.

On Friday, new Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg announced the aerospace and defense giant will be taking a $5 billion charge this quarter in its commercial airplane and defense units, and laying off 10% of its workforce, or ~17,000 employees, in a bid to cut costs.

Ortberg also announced two product-line updates:

• Delivery of the first 777x jet, Boeing’s 777 mini-jumbo successor, has been pushed from 2025 to 2026, putting it now some six years behind schedule.
• Production of the civil 767 Freighter will cease in 2027, after the company builds and delivers its remaining orders.

Boeing and Wednesday’s child are both full of woe

The announcements come amid an ongoing and costly strike involving ~33,000 of the company’s machinists, which has now crossed the one-month mark. Boeing is losing ~$1 billion/month as a result of the work stoppage, according to ratings agency S&P, in large part because the company gets paid for half of what a plane costs after it delivers a customer's order.

And the woes don’t stop there. Regulatory concerns, lawsuits, a mishap involving Starliner that resulted in $125+ million in losses, and a recent leadership shakeup can also be added to the company’s list of issues.

👀 Looking ahead… It’ll most likely take Boeing a while to turn things around; the FAA’s top official has said it’s a matter of years, not months, before the company is stabilized.

Meanwhile, rating agencies have put Boeing on notice with a warning that it may slip into junk rating territory, a move that would make the planemaker the biggest so-called fallen angel in corporate US history, Bloomberg reports. Boeing currently has a cash pile of ~$10 billion, and analysts estimate it will need to raise between $10 billion–$15 billion to maintain its current rating – something the company is currently exploring.

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🏆 The Nobel Prizes for Peace and Economics were unveiled. Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (☝️ left), won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for “its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.” And yesterday, in the final 2024 Nobel announcement, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to a trio of US scientists (☝️ right) for their research on how institutions are formed and affect differences in prosperity between countries.

🌕🌱 NASA is searching for signs of life on Jupiter's moon Europa. Europa is unique among Jupiter's 95 moons in that it harbors a salty ocean beneath its icy crust, making it an attractive location to search for extraterrestrial life, according to planetary scientists. Yesterday, NASA officially launched its Europa Clipper probe – the largest spacecraft it’s ever built – as part of the two-decade, $5.2 billion mission.

🇨🇳🇹🇼 China conducted large-scale military drills around Taiwan yesterday. The drills involved a record-high 125 aircraft, along with China’s Liaoning aircraft carrier and ships, in an exercise that simulated a blockade of Taiwan’s main and outlying islands. Chinese officials said the military drills were intended to punish Taiwan over President Lai Ching-te’s comments last week, in which he rejected Beijing’s claim of sovereignty over the self-governed island.

SpaceX and Starship successfully played catch for the first time over the weekend, in a historic move reminiscent of Kevin Costner and his dad at the end of Field of Dreams.

On Sunday, SpaceX’s ~165 ft-tall Starship spacecraft took off from the launchpad on top of a 233 ft-tall Super Heavy Booster rocket.

Seven minutes after liftoff, the separated booster returned to the launchpad, guided by three of its 33 engines, where it was successfully caught by a set of mechanical arms SpaceX has nicknamed “chopsticks” in the space version of a trust fall. It was the first time the company had attempted this feat.

One small step for reusability

Other rocket operators, both historically and today, use expendable boosters, meaning the rocket is only used once to get payloads into orbit; a one-and-done, so to speak.

SpaceX, on the other hand, is focused on making Starship fully and rapidly reusable – and the “chopsticks” play an integral part in this strategy.

• The idea behind catching the booster is that, in the future, a Starship spacecraft making trips to the Moon or Mars could be stacked back on top of it on the pad and quickly launched again.

👀 Looking ahead… Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's second in command, said last year that engineers "designed Starship to be as much like aircraft operations as we possibly can get it ... We want to talk about dozens of launches a day, if not hundreds of launches a day.”

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“Yesterday, communicating in dreams seemed like science fiction. Tomorrow, it will be so common we won’t be able to imagine our lives without this technology.”

In an experiment straight out of Inception, a Silicon Valley-based neurotech startup named REMspace is claiming its technology enabled two people to successfully communicate in their dreams for the first time in history.

How it (reportedly) happened: The startup says its achievement occurred while the two participants were each at their separate homes in a state of lucid dreaming.

• According to REMspace, the participants used specially designed equipment to exchange a message while asleep.
• One participant received randomly generated words through earbuds while sleeping, then supposedly repeated the word in their lucid dream – and the second participant heard them within their own lucid dream, and allegedly confirmed the word upon waking.

✋ But… The results of the experiment have not been peer-reviewed. And the startup’s leader has an… interesting background. REMspace founder/CEO Michael Raduga made headlines last May after he performed neurosurgery on himself, drilling into his own skull to implant a microchip in an attempt to control his dreams.

Raduga, who said he learned surgery by watching YouTube and practicing on the heads of dead rams, claimed his experiment was a success despite a dangerous amount of blood loss, since the Russian man was able to confirm electrical stimulation can influence dreams.

• ☝️ A life-sized replica of the Iron Throne was the top-dollar item at a recent auction of props and memorabilia from HBO’s Game of Thrones, fetching a sum of $1.5 million; overall, the auction’s 900 lots – including suits of armor, swords, jewelry, and dragon eggs – raked in $21+ million.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Arro

• 💰 US markets rose across the board yesterday (S&P: +0.8%; Dow: +0.5%; Nasdaq: +0.9%). | 🤖 Nvidia shares close at a record-high; the company's market cap surpasses $3.4 trillion, ranking second among publicly traded US companies (behind Apple’s $3.6 trillion).
• 🇺🇸 US consumer sentiment fell slightly in October after two months of gains, per the University of Michigan’s monthly index; sentiment is 8% stronger than a year ago, and ~40% higher than June 2022.
• 🏢 What a Trump or Harris victory would mean for businesses.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• SCOREBOARD: 🏈 CFB: #3 Oregon defeated #2 Ohio State, #13 LSU beat #9 Ole Miss, and #1 Texas cruised to victory over #18 Oklahoma; see a full Week 7 recap. | ⚾ MLB: The Mets and Dodgers are tied 1-1 in the NLCS, while the Yankees lead the Guardians 1-0 in the ALCS; see the full playoff picture. | 🏈 NFL: See a full Week 6 recap. | 🏀 WNBA Finals: The Minnesota Lynx and New York Liberty are tied 1-1, with Game 3 scheduled for tomorrow night. | 🇰🇪🏃‍♀️ Kenya’s Ruth Chepngetich set a new women’s marathon world record in Chicago on Sunday (2:09:56).
• 🍿🤡 Joker: Folie à Deux earned $7 million in its second weekend at the domestic box office, down 81% from opening weekend; it marks the largest such decline in history for a comic book movie, and one of the biggest among all films.
• ⚖️ Kanye “Ye” West is facing accusations of drugging and sexually assaulting his former assistant, according to an amended wrongful termination lawsuit from the employee. | ⚖️ Sean “Diddy” Combs is facing six more lawsuits filed in federal court accusing the music mogul of sexual assault and rape, including an alleged incident involving a minor.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Manscaped

• 🤖📹 Adobe unveiled new AI tools that allow users to create and modify videos across its suite of software, including Photoshop and Illustrator; Adobe is the first large software company to make AI video generation widely available for customers.
• 👃 Humans’ sense of smell reacts to changes in odor far faster than previously thought, working at a level of sensitivity on par with how our brains perceive color, per a new study.
• 🤫💻 Photos and videos allegedly showing an unannounced 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M4 chip have appeared on social media; analysts say it could mark Apple’s worst product leak since an employee accidentally left an iPhone 4 prototype at a bar in California in 2010.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🚨 A 49-year-old Nevada man with a shotgun, loaded handgun, ammunition, and several fake passports in his vehicle was arrested at a security checkpoint outside former President Trump’s rally in Coachella, California, on Saturday night; the man was released the same day on $5,000 bail; in a statement, US officials said Secret Service assessed that “former President Trump was not in any danger,” though an investigation is ongoing. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)
• 🇨🇦🇮🇳 Canada and India each expelled six diplomats from their respective countries yesterday, escalating a dispute over the killing of a Sikh activist on Canadian soil last year. | 🇨🇦🏥 Canada's government passed a bill to cover the costs of diabetes medications and contraception for all citizens (with or without insurance).
• 🇺🇸🇮🇱 The US is sending a major new air defense system to Israel, along with 100 US troops trained to operate it, the Pentagon announced. | 🚁 Mystery drones swarmed a US military base for 17 days – and the Pentagon is stumped.

CLICKBAIT

• 🗳️📈 The Dow has predicted 22 of the past 24 US presidential elections. Here’s what it says about Trump and Harris’ odds of winning.

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🧠📲 Stat of the Day: A half-hour of free time could buy you a short run, quick meal – or crippling social media addiction. Users can become addicted to TikTok in less than 35 minutes, according to the company’s own internal research that was recently made public. In a trove of secret documents reviewed by NPR and Kentucky Public Radio, TikTok’s researchers detailed how it takes exactly 260 short-form videos for users to develop addictive behaviors. The information was revealed as part of a two-plus-year investigation into TikTok by 14 state attorneys general, which resulted in a joint lawsuit filed against the company last week.

🤔 Did You Know? An estimated 1 in 8 Americans have worked at McDonald’s at some point in their lifetime, per a survey conducted by the restaurant chain.

📰 Worth a Read: Even a Single Bacterial Cell Can Sense the Seasons Changing → (Quanta Magazine)

Here are five stats from this past week that made our team go “whoa.” Hopefully you will, too.

• 💎 54% of all diamonds sold in US jewelry stores last month were real, while 46% were lab-grown; at the start of 2020, those figures stood at roughly 92% real and 8% lab-grown.
• 🌎⚡ Renewable energy sources will generate more power than coal in 2025, and provide nearly half of the world’s power by 2030, per a new International Energy Agency forecast.
• 🏈 Peyton Houston, a high-school sophomore QB in Louisiana, threw for 817 yards in an OT loss last Friday – just 20 yards shy of the all-time HS record set in 2012.
• 💰Elon Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2027, per a recent report; at the start of 2020, Musk was worth ~$28.5 billion.
• 🇪🇸👥 Spain logged a record 21.8 million international visitors this summer – and the three most popular destinations were spots where locals staged anti-tourism protests this year.

On Friday, we covered how, after two major hurricanes battered the Southeast US, many are turning their attention to FEMA, whose mission is to help Americans before, during, and after natural disasters.

❓ Our question to you: In general, how would you best describe your opinion of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)?

• 👍 Favorable: 42%
• ↔️ Neutral: 27%
• 👎 Unfavorable: 31%

Click here to read some of the most thoughtful longform responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 3,548 votes and 357 longform responses.

... is another's once-in-a-lifetime art find. Six decades ago, Luigi Lo Rosso found an old painting in an abandoned house in Capri, Italy, to sell in his junk shop. Instead, he decided to gift the painting to his wife, with the painting hanging in their house for nearly 50 years.

⏭️ Fast forward to today: And the painting was recently confirmed to be a Pablo Picasso original, valued at ~$6.6 million. If additionally verified by the Picasso Foundation, Luigi's children plan to auction it off in honor of their father.

🤖 Read: The story of why OpenAI is waging a war against a guy named Guy.

🏈 SportsTok Sports talk: Press Sports writes a free email newsletter 1x/week, chock-full of tidbits, trends, and information that takes you beyond the headlines of the sports world.

🧙‍♂️ Watch: One of the most…magical performances on Penn & Teller’s Fool Us, brought to you by Spanish magic legend Dani DaOrtiz.

🍀 Pretty cool: A statistician explores the three types of luck.

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*A message from our partners.

Guess the definitions of the following Greek/Latin root words:

1. Audi
2. Bibl
3. Ciner
4. Deca
5. Fum

1. Audi = Hearing (e.g., audio, audible)
2. Bibl = Book (bibliography)
3. Ciner = Ash (incinerate)
4. Deca = Ten (decathlon)
5. Fum = Smoke (fume)