Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 💥 The Russia-Ukraine war, three-years later
• 📈 Tourism + The White Lotus
• 🤔 Nevada’s most expensive home sale?

… and more.

Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~4.56-minute read (1,213 words).

Did someone forward you this email? Subscribe here for free.

“Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”

–Sun Tzu (544 B.C. – 496 B.C.)

Monday marked exactly three years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, kicking off an ongoing war with major global implications.

An update: Current estimates show Ukraine has lost ~11% of its territory to the Russian invasion since 2022. While isolated instances of fighting are scattered across Ukraine, fighting is currently most concentrated in the Donetsk region, where Russian forces are currently advancing.

• 46,000+ Ukrainian soldiers had been killed and 390,000+ wounded over the past three years, Ukrainian president Zelensky recently said. Other independent estimates of the country's total casualties are considerably higher.
• On the Russian side, Moscow hasn’t released casualty numbers for its troops since 2022. Independent estimates vary widely, but most put Russia's losses higher than Ukraine's, with troop deaths estimated between 95,000-165,000.

America’s role may be changing

The US has provided $65.9 billion in military assistance to Ukraine since the start of the war. But America’s current role has come into question following a series of recent Trump administration statements and actions, including criticism of Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as opening US-Russia peace talks in Saudi Arabia without Ukraine present.

• This week, the US was one of 18 countries – alongside Russia, North Korea, and Belarus – to vote against a UN resolution meant to condemn Moscow's invasion and reiterate support for Ukraine on the war’s three-year anniversary.

The US is also limiting free aid to Ukraine. The recent tensions between the two countries come amid weeks of ongoing negotiations over a deal for the US to access billions of dollars worth of mineral rights in Ukraine in exchange for further American military assistance.

Yesterday, President Trump announced Ukraine agreed to a mineral rights deal that’ll be finalized in a White House signing ceremony with Zelensky on Friday – though exact details weren’t immediately made public.

Looking ahead…The US and Russia have both committed to more high-level peace talks in the coming weeks and months. Ukrainian officials say Kyiv currently won’t accept any territorial concessions, or a “bad peace deal” with Russia.

📊 Flash poll: In general, how do you feel about the way America’s role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict has changed since President Trump took office?

• Support
• Oppose
• Unsure/other

Spencer Rascoff co-founded Zillow, scaling it into a $16B real estate giant. But everyday investors couldn’t invest until after the IPO, missing early gains.

• "I wish we had done a round accessible to retail investors prior to Zillow's IPO," Spencer later said.
• Now he’s doing just that. Spencer has teamed up with another Zillow exec to launch Pacaso, a co-ownership marketplace that's disrupting the $1.3T vacation home market. And unlike Zillow, you can invest in Pacaso as a private company.

With $100M+ in gross profits and rapid international expansion, Pacaso is scaling fast. Investors like Softbank, Maveron, and others are already on board. Even better, the company’s now turning its focus to international markets, giving this disruptive model even more upside than before.

Join them as a Pacaso shareholder and lock in the $2.70 share price by tomorrow.**

**Disclaimer: This is a paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com.

Mark the cal: The AI coding tools war has begun.

A free version of Gemini Code Assist, Google’s enterprise-focused AI coding tool, is now available for solo developers, the tech giant announced yesterday, as it ramps up efforts to compete with Microsoft in the developer tools space.

Gemini Code Assist can generate entire code blocks, complete code as you write, and provide general coding assistance via a chatbot interface.

• The tool’s free tier also comes with generous usage limits, including 180,000 snippets of AI-generated code per month – or 90x what competitors offer.
• Google, which was slower than competitors to release an AI coding tool, is hoping this high ceiling will make its coding assistant more popular with students, hobbyists, freelancers, and startups. Subscription plans with additional features start at $19/month/user.

Demand side: 62% professional developers used AI coding tools last year, compared to 44% in 2023, according to data from Stack Overflow.

📧 Zoom out: With its approach, Google is hearkening back to its early Gmail days. In 2004, when the company was working to draw new users to the free service, it started offering 1GB of free storage per account – or 250x–500x more than the then-leading email services run by Yahoo and Microsoft.

This growth strategy ended up working better than a meticulously cared-for Toyota after a tuneup, catapulting the tech giant to its current position as the undisputed king of email with 1.8 billion users.

Resorts featured in The White Lotus can count on waving hello to more new visitors.

The widespread popularity of HBO’s hit TV show – set at a different high-class resort each season – is spurring a huge surge in tourism to those locations, in a phenomenon travel agents have dubbed the “White Lotus Effect.”

• Hawaii’s Four Seasons Maui at Wailea, where Season 1 was shot, experienced a 425% annual increase in website visits and a 386% bump in availability checks after the show first aired in 2021.
• Season 2’s setting, San Domenico Palace in Taormina, Italy, sold out for several months after the show debuted in October 2022. Additionally, searches for hotels and flights to Sicily from the US increased 50+% while Season 2 was airing.

The latest season is no different. Though Season 3 still has six episodes left, bookings at Thailand’s Four Seasons Resort Koh Samui have already jumped 40% since it started airing. Overall, Thailand’s director of tourism predicts a 20% rise in visitors this year as a result of the country being featured on The White Lotus.

✈️ Zoom out: The trend of “set-jetting,” or traveling to destinations where TV shows and movies were filmed, has grown increasingly commonplace. It earned a designation from Expedia as one of its top travel trends of 2024, with popular destinations including the London suburb where Ted Lasso was filmed and areas of Norway featured in Succession.

Too many tabs? Losing great Bluesky posts? Niphtio solves both with one elegant tool – and their new Bluesky integration lets you save and organize your entire digital world.

• 🔍 Find anything with content-based search (not just titles)
• 📚 Organize into collections with notes and highlights
• 📱 Access everything across all your devices

From research projects to social curation, Niphtio puts your digital mess on autopilot.

Try the Bluesky integration and get Niphtio free here.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 📊 US markets closed mixed (S&P: -0.5%; Dow: +0.4%; Nasdaq: -1.4%). | 💪 US consumer confidence fell 7% in February, the largest monthly drop since August 2021.
• 📝 Super Micro filed its past financials just ahead of the Nasdaq’s deadline, says it’s “regained compliance” and won’t be delisted. | 🏘️ Home Depot reported positive same-store sales last quarter (+0.8%), ending eight consecutive quarters of declines.
• 📉 Tesla sales fell 45% last month in Europe; EV sales in the region rose 37% over the same period. | 📉 Tesla shares fell 8% yesterday, pushing the company's market cap below $1 trillion.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

in partnership with Autio

• 🎿 Skier Mikaela Shiffrin claimed her 100th World Cup victory; she’s the first and only member of skiing’s century club; no other skier in history – male or female – has achieved more than 86 career wins.
• 🎙️ Al Trautwig, a legendary New York sports broadcaster on MSG Network, passed away at 68 from cancer complications. | ⚾️ Larry Dolan, owner of MLB's Cleveland Guardians, died at 94.
• 💿 1,000+ musicians, including Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, and Kate Bush, released a silent album in protest of the UK government's planned changes to copyright law, which they say further enables AI companies to train models using copyrighted work without a license.

*From our partners: 🛣️ Your journey like never before… Autio delivers captivating location-based stories for drives, hikes, or bike rides—hands-free. With over 20,000 professionally narrated stories from famous voices like Kevin Costner, you’ll find something for every journey. Download Autio here – first 5 stories are free.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🥜🍇 An antioxidant widely found in nuts, fruits, and vegetables may help combat the negative effects of microplastics on the human body, per a new study.
• 🛰️🌐 The FAA has reportedly agreed to use SpaceX’s Starlink to help accelerate its upgrade of IT networks. | 📲 Apple says it will fix a “bug” on some iPhones’ text-to-speech transcription that replaces certain words starting with “r” – including racist, rampant, and rampage – with “Trump.”
• 💉 Eli Lilly is expanding its offerings of weight-loss drug Zepbound and reducing prices for certain dosages; the moves are aimed at consumers who want to pay cash instead of using their health plans.

MISCELLANEOUS

in partnership with The Knowledge

• 🧑‍⚖️ The Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge to abortion clinic buffer zones, or laws that prevent anti-abortion demonstrations near clinics. | 🧑‍⚖️ The Supreme Court ruled that an Oklahoma court can’t order the execution of an inmate over the objections of the state’s attorney general, who determined the inmate’s initial conviction had flaws.
• 📧 More than 1 million federal workers – less than half of the workforce – responded to Elon Musk’s recent email asking them to document what they did last week, per the White House; it’s currently unclear if failure to respond will carry consequences, as Musk promises.
• 🏛️ The Trump administration faced a trio of legal setbacks yesterday in separate court cases involving federal spending, refugees, and foreign aid. | 🏛️ DOGE’s acting administrator is Amy Gleason, according to CNBC.

*From our partners: 📰 Witty world news delivered daily… Based in the UK, The Knowledge delivers a daily dose of current events with quips and insights you’ll love. 5-minute articles with sharp commentary to give you the information you need. Join 140k+ subscribers free at The Knowledge.

A controversial April 2023 Texas lottery draw has state lawmakers pushing for change, after a single buyer from an unknown location won a guaranteed $95 million jackpot by purchasing all possible ticket combinations online – and was helped by the state’s lottery agency in doing so.

• For an initial investment of ~$25 million, the buyer – known only as a company called Rook TX – ended up claiming a one-time prize of $57.7 million.
• A Houston Chronicle investigation found the Texas Lottery Commission materially helped Rook TX’s operation and ignored apparent rule violations stemming from the plan.

Pushback has been mounting. On Monday, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Rangers (the law enforcement agency, not the baseball team) to investigate two recent jackpots for potential wrongdoing, including the April 2023 drawing.

☝️ A waterfront Lake Tahoe home with its own small golf course recently hit the market with an asking price of $65 million; if achieved, it would set a new Nevada state record for most expensive home sale.

🤔 Did You Know? Axolotls, a species of salamander native to Mexico, can regenerate lost or damaged limbs, hearts, spinal cords, and even parts of their brains.

📰 Worth a Read: The Missing $25 Gift Card That’s Rocking the Hamptons

🖱 Clickbait: What is ‘feels-like’ temperature? A meteorologist explains

🌀🏠🌀 An upside-down house has opened in Bristol, UK, allowing visitors to walk on the ceiling as tables, chairs, beds, and more hang above them. Check out the wacky pictures here.

🧀 French cheese company Juraflore set a new world record for the largest cheese fondue, using a massive cauldron to melt 40 wheels of comté cheese simultaneously. The resulting fondue pot weighed 4,800 lbs.

💐 The Colorado Garden Foundation is awarding $800,000+ in grants this year to 150+ nonprofits across the state, including the Mackintosh Academy’s greenhouse program for K-8 students.

🧱 Relax: By sculpting some digital pottery.

🚗 Explore: Consumer Reports’ newly released list highlighting the top ten cars of 2025.

⚾ That’s cool: The newly signed and very rich Juan Soto hit a home run in his first at-bat in a NY Mets uniform.

🚨Free giveaway alert: Win up to $1,100 in prizes – for the whopping price of $0. Giveaway items include cold, hard cash, a Dyce Games prize pack, and even a NoNetz gift card. Enter free today.

🏃‍♀️ Subscribe: The Rundown is your free, go-to source for all things running. Receive the latest news, valuable tips, and race updates to gain a mental edge and motivate you to hit the pavement.*

*A message from our partners.

Three different films hold the title for most Oscars won, with 11 apiece. Can you name them?

Your favorite beanies, sweatshirts, and tumblers are saying their goodbyes – so why not grab one (or a few) before they’re gone forever? Get up to 50% off for a limited time (while supplies last).

1. Ben Hur (1959)
2. Titanic (1997)
3. The Lord of The Rings: Return of the King (2003)

Source

**This is a paid advertisement for Pacaso’s Regulation A offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.pacaso.com.