Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial.No, no, no, no, no, no.Don't, don't, don't.No.I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do, like, four of these.
I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month.How are there still people paying two or three times that much?I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim-blaming here.Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready.
$45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month.New customers on first three month plan only.Taxes and fees extra.Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes.See details.
Good morning, Brew Daily Show.I'm Neil Freiman.And I'm Toby Howell.Today, what happens when a corporate landlord comes into your neighborhood?
Then how Strava is proving to be a major international security risk.It's Thursday, October 31st.And let's ride.
Good morning and happy Halloween, the one day of the year it's acceptable for adults to look like a fool at the office.And that is exactly what we've done.Toby, want to describe to our listeners what we are dressed as.
All right, Neil, I got to give you credit because you clearly won the costume challenge between the two of us this year.Neil is dressed head to toe in a silver reflective astronaut suit.Is this the one designed by Prada for their mission to the moon?
It is the Prado one, yes.You look fantastic.And myself, I am dressed as Uncle Sam, who benevolently funds Neil's missions to space.So we got a little couple's costume going right here.
Yeah.And if you want to check out what we look like and go to our YouTube, we'll also post on Instagram later.
You know, one other group of people pumped about this year's Halloween in particular is kids in Des Moines, Iowa, because for the first time in nearly 90 years, they're allowed to go trick-or-treating on Halloween night.
This is some deep Midwest lore right here.Iowa's capital hasn't allowed trick-or-treating on Halloween since 1938, when it banned the practice to crack down on vandalism.
Instead, the kids in Des Moines have gone door-to-door in their costumes on the night before Halloween known as Beggar's Night.
This year, though, bad weather was forecast for Beggar's Night, so officials decided to forgo tradition and allow the youth of Des Moines to trick-or-treat with the rest of the country tonight.
I guess beggars can be choosers, right?You can choose to trick-or-treat on Halloween now, so shout-out Des Moines!Congratulations for your first Halloween trick-or-treating night. Now, a word from our sponsor, Bonobos.
Neil, it is Halloween, and I will say you are rocking the heck out of that astronaut costume.
Thank you.It's from Bonobos.Wait, really?No, but Bonobos does have out-of-this-world range.It might not be able to outfit humanity's first mission to Mars, but it's got you covered for pretty much every other occasion.Golf course?Yep.Great golf line.
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There is one subgroup of the housing market that is more hated than the person who brings zucchini casserole to the neighborhood potluck, corporate landlords.
Ever since the PE giant Blackstone popularized the practice of snapping up family homes in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, institutional investors have flooded into the asset class.
That flood has created all sorts of headaches for the new homeowners trying to break into the market, existing homeowners as they ride the rises and falls in property values, and caught the eye of presidential candidates who want to crack down on their infiltration.
Kamala Harris has said that if elected, she will urge Congress to pass the Stop Predatory Investing Act that would cut down on the tax benefits corporate landlords are afforded for buying single-family homes.
Despite the public hostility toward Wall Street landlords, they don't have a big presence in the national housing market yet.
Nationally, landlords that have more than 1,000 units in their portfolios own just 1% of all of America's family homes and 4% of all the houses that are rented out.
They are hungry for more, and if these landlords keep buying houses at their current pace, their share of the single-family rental market could jump tenfold by the end of the decade, according to MetLife Investment Management.
Toby, a lot of communities feel taken advantage of by these types of landlords, but how much of an impact are these big investors actually having?
They are having a big impact, but in a concentrated subset of the housing market.There are a handful of neighborhoods that definitely pop up on these institutional investors' radar and say, hey, this is where good deals are to be found.
They're mostly clustered in places like Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, those Sunbelt states that have these ripping housing markets.They have bought more than 1,000 homes, specifically in 53 zip codes where their ownership
hovers in that 5% to 12% range, and that is where you are really seeing their impacts being felt, is in these neighborhoods where they say, ding, ding, ding, this is where the deals are to be found, this is where we think we can charge above-median rents for these neighborhoods, we can fix up the place, and that is where we think we can find the most profit.
Right.So actually, the Wall Street Journal published this article this week that dug into the home prices and rent and rent prices in those 53 neighborhoods, because this is a question that affects a lot of people.
How are institutional investors impacting the local housing market?We're trying to figure it out, whether it's a big impact or not, especially during this housing crisis.
So it does look like home pros whom home prices have risen more quickly than the average in those particular neighborhoods values in those 53 zip codes have increased 64% on average over the past five years compared with a national rise of 48% and then rents have also risen more than average in those neighborhoods median rents in those zip codes have risen 30% in the past five years compared with 23% gains for the US overall
all, the question is correlation or causation.
As you mentioned, these corporate landlords, these Wall Street institutional investors have very sophisticated algorithms where they identify up and coming housing markets that might grow organically faster than the national average.So, but
We do these analysis, we're trying to find out what the impact is.
We still don't yet know whether this is because of the landlords or just messing with the housing market because they pay in cash and they can do all kinds of things that make values go up, or it's just a natural outgrowth of an area that is experiencing a boom.
And there is one, uh, some studies that show that maybe these influx of corporate landlords could be good for the neighborhood.
One university of Texas study found that although they are extracting higher rents from people, they do invest in better street lining and security measures, which on the whole leads to lower crime rates and neighborhoods.
Again, that might be a pretty generous interpretation of their presence in these neighborhoods.
The flip side is, though, that if maybe their algorithm changes and they see that the neighborhood is not producing the returns that they want it to, they can flee in a mass, which does cause this huge spike in for sale listings, which can depress housing prices.
So sometimes when they're coming in, A rising tide lifts all boats.Maybe all property values are rising.It makes your house more valuable.It also increases investment in the area.
But on the flip side, when they leave, it can cause those prices to crater.
Prompt automatic refunds.
It's not a phrase you'd typically associate with the airline industry when your flight plans go awry, but prompt and automatic refunds is what you should expect after a new Transportation Department rule went into effect on Monday.
The rule, which was introduced back in April, Attempts to establish clear and consistent standards for when you, a passenger, are owed a refund because your flight was subject to a significant delay or another disruption that left you seething.
Because in the before times, it was the Wild West.Airlines could set their own definition for what constitutes a significant delay that triggers a refund.
Each carrier had their own refund policy, and trying to get your refund required you to take the initiative, which often involved spending hours on the phone. Now though, there's a rule of the road.
An airline is required to automatically process your refund without you even asking for it if your flight is cancelled or significantly changed.Those refunds are due within seven days for credit card purchases and within 20 days for other payments.
So there's a lot more on these rules that help out airline passengers.I only just scratched the surface.
I know, but the surface was great to scratch.
Oh my gosh, we've all been in airline purgatory before, where you're just on this endless cycle of trying to talk to a representative to try to get a refund.
And then usually what you end up getting is an airline credit, which is fine, but it's not as good as just getting a full-on refund.Cash is king in this instance.
But you're right, there is some more things within this ruling that you are going to be entitled for a refund now. One is if you're downgraded to a lower service class, you get a refund for the difference.
If your departure or arrival from the airport is different from the one you booked, refund.If you go through a connection at a different airport, refund.If the Wi-Fi isn't working on the plane and you paid for it, that's a refund as well.
And the big part is is that now you just don't have to fight for them.They do automatically get reimbursed on your credit card.You don't have to go to bat for it.This feels like a very common sense thing.Airlines are obviously not all,
too happy about it, but it is a big win for consumers.
So in a statement, let's talk about the, uh, the, what the airline lobby is saying, uh, airlines for America, they fought this rule, but eventually when it went into effect this Monday, they said, we support the automatic refund rule and are happy to accommodate customers with a refund when they choose not to be rebooked.
So maybe not the most enthusiastic statement, but they're saying, okay, we'll do it.They were quick to point out that they did pay customer refunds
$43 billion between January 2020 and December 2023, but who knows how long it took the customers to get those refunds.Let's just talk about whether this is gonna impact your flight.
Overall, you know, America, it might not feel like it, but there aren't that many significant delays, and by significant delays, for the first time, they set this standard, three hours for domestic flights, six hours for international flights.
That doesn't happen too often, luckily. The average delay for a flight in the United States last year was 14 minutes, and then the average cancellation rate was 2.1%.
So it's not like, you know, you're waiting in the area for 20 more minutes, you're going to get a refund for your flight.But this will go to those edge cases where it's just an absolute disaster and you're like, I just want my money back.
So PBS was talking to the points guy who is this credit cards kind of guru about this new rule change and his theory about why there's been maybe a suspicious lack of pushback from the airlines here is that they do think that a change in administration could potentially water down or just get rid of these regulations.
So they're sort of in a wait and see mode because There has been, if this rule was in place last year, this publication upgraded points, estimated it could have cost United, American, and Delta more than $1 billion each in refunds.
So they are kind of playing their cards close to the vest right now, but I do think we might see a little bit more pushback if these rules stay in place or if there's a change in administration.We could see these rules watered down or nixed entirely.
There is an inside joke amongst athletes that if you didn't post a workout on Strava, did it even really count?
And that sort of thinking is getting security and bodyguards in trouble for revealing the location of the targets they are supposed to be protecting.
The French newspaper Le Monde found that you could easily approximate the supposedly confidential movements of high-profile political figures like President Joe Biden, Donald Trump, or Kamala Harris by snooping on the fitness habits of their bodyguards.
Secret Service agents have been posting their workouts to Strava, location data and all, just like you or me do.And it's not just in the US.
Le Mans investigations also found that they could track the movements of French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In one case, they ID'd a weekend trip to Normandy taken by Macron that was meant to be private but wasn't due to a bodyguard's Strava post.
Neil, anything for a kudos, I guess? I mean, you know, I was scrolling on Strava the other day and I was about to give some kudos for Putin's bodyguard.He was doing a really long run, you know, doing it really fast, incredible pace.
And then I realized, hey, wait a second, maybe I shouldn't be knowing this.So this has been a problem with Strava for a while because by default, your map data gets published publicly. And you have to go in and make the settings on private.
We've been here before with Strava when it comes to U.S.military bases back in 2018.They made this big deal of publishing this heat map of where everyone has run or done an exercise.And they were like, oh, this is amazing.
We have 3 trillion data points.Look at how cool this map is.And then researchers went in and said,
Actually, we can find military installations that we're not really supposed to know about because soldiers are doing these runs on Strava and posting, you know, the exact coordinates of the military bases in places like Afghanistan that the public shouldn't really know about.
So this is just another instance of Strava mapping data coming to the fore and raising privacy concerns.
And it's not a small issue either.The newspaper's journalist did identify 26 US agents, 12 members of the French Protection Agency, and then six members of the Russian FSO, which is their version of the Secret Service.
That is a pretty significant amount of bodyguards and security personnel that are kind of giving hints as to where their protectee is supposed to be. And then it's not just location data that comes from Strava that have led to problems before, too.
I mean, earlier this year we spoke about the Olympics.
Grindr, which is a gay dating app, was previously under scrutiny for allowing journalists to change their location and swipe on athletes in the Olympic Village, which in the 2016 Rio Olympics caused this big uproar because a Daily Beast article outed some athletes.
This year, Grindr cracked down and said no more snooping on location data, no more changing your location to kind of match with athletes in the Olympic Village.So this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to location-based security breaches.
Strava, obviously, is one that maps are very important, and you do want to show where you ran, and you do want to get your kudos, but not when it puts the safety of your protectee in jeopardy.Up next, it is Halloween, but it is also Neil's numbers.
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Welcome to Neil's Numbers, the segment where I share three stats from the week's news that will turn you into a walking, talking Wikipedia page.My first number might leave you frustrated because you know how long the United States elections are?
How you're bombarded with ads when you're just trying to watch football?How big money has seemingly taken over the political process? Well, in that, fellow Americans, we are exceptional, and not in a good way.
And I'll lay it out for you with some numbers from the Wall Street Journal.This U.S.election is said to be the most expensive ever, with spending reaching $15.9 billion on all federal races.
That's nearly double what the 2016 race cost, and nearly triple the cost from elections in the early 2000s.By contrast,
When our neighbor Canada held its election in 2021, the total campaign bill was $69 million, about 1 27th the price tag per voter compared to the United States.And that's not even that bad.
US elections cost about 40 times more per person than the UK or Germany.And in 2020, President Biden spent 70 times more than Francis Emmanuel Macron on their way to victory.And then there's the bloated timeline.
The UK election this summer lasted just six weeks.In the United States, they go on nearly two years.Toby, how did we get here?
I mean, part of the answer is just size.The US is a big country, but also we have a lot of expensive media markets.It costs a lot of money to reach voters in New York and California. We also elect a lot of people.
Lower-ranking positions that are just filled in other democracies are actually voted on in elected positions in the United States, which you need to put campaign money towards.Another reason is primaries.
In most European countries, political parties just pick their candidates rather than voters.The same was true in the U.S.until the 70s.
But then that was seen as a little undemocratic so primaries became the main path to nomination which causes an entire campaign cycle to be even elected as your your candidate, so it all just costs a lot of money plus
You mix in a couple of less regulations in the United States.Mostly, whenever these campaign spending issues reach a court system, they say that they need to protect freedom of speech, which means freedom to spend in this case.
So, a lot of different factors kind of are coming together to make U.S.elections just such a big black hole of money.
Yeah, I mean, we just have unrestrained spending by anyone who wants to spend on a political election and leads to some truly outrageous sums.I mean, Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Georgia, he spent $180 million in 2020
his campaign, that's just about the same amount of spending as the UK, Germany, and Canada's last elections combined.So just truly astronomical sums.
And if people are wondering why there's money in politics, well, here is your numbers to prove that out.
My second number is a Google fine so big, there's no way the company could possibly pay it, because it's 24 million times all the money that exists on Earth.
According to a state-run Russian news outlet, a Russian court has fined Google $20.6 decillion, that's 206046, followed by 29 zeros.
To put that in context, researcher Nigel Gold Davies said that even if Google gave Russia everything the world produced this year, Every day since the universe began, it would only have paid about 3% of this fine.
Okay, so what is this fine for and how did it get so astronomical?The legal battle goes back years when a Russian court fined Google after YouTube suspended several Russian news accounts to comply with US sanctions.
The original fine was just over $1,000, but that number doubled every week Google kept those channels offline.
And due to the law of exponential returns, the fine has ballooned to, as a judge on Monday called it, a case in which there are many, many zeros.
i think that this goes down in history as the largest neil's number we've ever had like so far it is two point out times ten to the twenty first power anytime you're bringing in powers that means it is a big number the moscow times wrote that google is quote unlikely to ever pay that incredibly high fine which is an understatement of this century
Google's parent company Alphabet brought in 307 billion dollars last year But that is not enough to crack into the amount of zeros that are attached to this fine and Google has basically Extracted himself from the Russian market so Russia is suing it all over the world trying to get it to pay this fine But it doesn't appear like it will or it can
My final number is that scientists have observed the largest predation event ever recorded.Cod devouring 10 million smaller fish in the span of four hours.
In a new paper, oceanographers in Norway and MIT explained how they saw a massive group of cod wipe out about half of the capelin gathered off the Norwegian coast in a single morning.
The episode happened in 2014, but the scientists were able to confirm it for the first time using a new technique known as Ocean Acoustic Wave Guide Remote Sensing, in which you send sound waves out into the ocean, and they bounce off the fish that get in their way.
So how'd this go down? Each February, billions of capelin, a small arctic fish the size of an anchovy, migrate from the edge of the arctic ice sheet to Norway in order to lay their eggs.
That area of the coastline also happens to be on the same route that cod travel to spawn, so the two groups of fish bumped into each other and the cod enjoyed the biggest breakfast ever known.Red Lobster wishes they could put up those numbers.
They certainly do.This was shoal versus shoal, and the cod shoal absolutely dominated the capelin shoal.It's not just that that technique used this new acoustic imaging to kind of pinpoint the two shoals.
It's that they can now differentiate between what the species were, and the way that they were able to do that was actually analyzing the ways that the different acoustic resonance of swim bladders came back.
So they were literally bouncing sound waves off bladders, and then they were able to say, okay, this is capelin, this is cod, Well, don't.
And that's what I was about to say.Don't feel bad.They're not going extinct.There are so many of these things out there.
The amount that were in the entire shoal, not the ones that were eaten, represents 0.1% of all of the capelin that spawn in that region.So their numbers are still plenty intact.
The researchers were like, well, this is probably just happening all the time.We just haven't seen it.So that's the pretty interesting part.
Now, let's sprint to the finish with some headlines you may have missed.Up first, the U.S.economy stayed hot, with GDP expanding at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 2.8% for the third quarter of the year.
That was a slight slowdown from the 3% growth posted last quarter, and did come in under economists' expectations of 3.1% growth.I'd say, though, it was like pulling a spare after a couple of quarters where the economy was rolling strikes.
But still on pace for a good score this year.
Absolutely.It is a great GDP report.And then this morning, remember we talked yesterday about we have those back-to-back-to-back economic reports.Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, this morning we'll get the inflation report.
And with the strong economy and if inflation comes down to its lowest level since 2021, which we're expecting, that would absolutely signal a soft landing. Starbucks is making more big changes to its menu under new CEO Brian Nickell.
As part of its turnaround efforts, the chain said it would no longer charge you extra for dairy substitutes like oat milk, which could save some U.S.customers 10% off of your latte.
Nickell said that substituting non-dairy milk is the second most requested customization by customers, trailing only adding a shot of espresso.Toby, the surcharge has been a source of contention for a while.Remember, two years ago, a succession actor
glued himself to the counter of a New York City location to protest the fees for non-dairy substitutes.
The way they are trying to pinch pennies here is by getting rid of some of those discounts you may see in the Starbucks app.So he's trying to raise the bottom line without tarnishing the image, without raising prices.
So tough job for the guy, but I think this is a step in the right direction.
Austin Capobianco tried his best, but his viral intervention in Game 4 of the World Series, where he reached over the right field wall to wrestle the ball out of Dodgers outfielder Mookie Betts' glove, was not enough to power a historic Yankees comeback.
The Yankees did win Game 4, but last night, Sanz Capobianco, who was banned from attending the game, the Yankees lost to the Dodgers, giving LA its eighth World Series title.
Neil, if this guy had inspired a Yankees rally, he'd go down in history, maybe even get a statue, but he didn't, and now he's just a meme.
He didn't, he's a meme now.And of course, who is his friend?Rob Gronkowski.Apparently Gronk knows him, is a friend, vouched for his character.But in the end, the Yankees lost, which I'm happy about.
And also, the Yankees gave those two tickets of the guys who were banned to a pediatric cancer patient and his family.Unfortunately, they didn't see a Yankees victory, but also congrats to the Dodgers and Freddie Freeman, who was the MVP.
If you're looking for some fresh pow on the slopes of Mount Fuji, you aren't going to find any.
One day before November, Japan's tallest mountain is still without its iconic snow-capped peak, making it the latest time in the year that Fuji has been without snowfall since records began 130 years ago.
This is very abnormal and is a result of hotter temperatures.Last year, snow was first seen on the summit on October 5th, and the snowcap begins forming on October 2nd on average.This summer, Japan had its joint hottest summer on record.
Interestingly enough, fewer climbers actually hiked Mount Fuji this year.I would have thought it would have been more because it usually becomes a little impassable later in the year.But Japan authorities have been cracking down on tourism there.
They charged an entry fee, they put a cap on daily numbers, which goes with this theme of over-tourism that we've talked about.
So even though there's no snow up there, it is still not as easily accessible because of these decisions Japanese authorities have made.
Finally, stare at an old map and you don't know what you might find.For one PhD student at Tulane University, it was a lost Maya city.
Luke Ald Thomas, the student, said he was on something like page 16 of Google search when he found a laser survey map of the Yucatan Peninsula originally done for environmental monitoring.
He started crunching the data for archaeological purposes, and he made the remarkable discovery of a huge Mayan city that had been reclaimed by the jungle hundreds of years ago.
At its peak from 750 to 850 AD, this ancient city may have been home to 30,000 to 50,000 people.
Can you imagine just going through Google and going, wait a second, I swear that looks like an ancient Mayan city.
And then it actually ended up being, I know obviously they had to use LIDAR, a lasering technique to get, to map the structures underneath it, but that is just the greatest story of all time. on page 16 of Google.
That is why you keep searching through Google again.Usually I make it through the first three pages and say, all right, I'm done.But page 16, it's hiding ancient wonders.
Let's wrap it up there.Thanks so much for starting your Halloween morning with us.Have a great day.And for all the kids listening, we hope you get your hands on more candy than your stomach can possibly handle.
For any questions, comments, or feedback, send an email to morningbrewdaily at morningbrew.com.And if you are enjoying this podcast, don't keep it a secret.
Share Morning Brew Daily with your friends, family, and co-workers to make their mornings brighter.For those of you drawing a blank on who to share it with, Toby is here to inspire you.
I want you to share today's Halloween pod with someone you do want to go trick-or-treating with.I think you're never too old for a little begging for candy, so maybe toss on a mask, go ring some doorbells, and get those king-sized candy bars.
Let's roll the credits.Emily Milliron is our executive producer.Raymond Liu is our producer.Olivia Graham is our associate producer.Uchenowa Ogu is our technical director.Billy Menino is on audio.
Hair and Makeup lives in that one house that gives you granola bars on Halloween.Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew.
Great show, Daniel.Let's run it back tomorrow.
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