Housing demand is falling off a cliff.
New home sales dropped 10.5% in July to 607K units—lowest in 6 months and way worse than the 1.4% decline expected. Outside of January, this is the weakest print since late 2022.
Sales have fallen in 3 of the last 4 months, down 6.3% year-over-year.
The Midwest got crushed: sales collapsed 42.7% to just 43K units, the lowest since 2012. The South, which makes up over 60% of all sales, dropped 13% to 383K—second-lowest since January.
Meanwhile, the 30-ye...
Amazon Ryzen 5 9600X Scam: Empty CPU Boxes Twice in Days
A PC shop spending over $10,000 (USD) a month on Amazon says two AMD Ryzen 5 9600X orders arrived with empty boxes within 72 hours, raising fresh questions about marketplace fraud.
If a documented, repeat case like this can happen to a buyer spending $10,000 (USD) a month on Amazon, how much undetected fraud affects casual shoppers who never film their unboxings or track order patterns closely? At what point does marketplace scale stop b...
$META just settled the teen-addiction lawsuit for $16B plus $10B in legal fees — a $26B hit, but they're done with it. The interesting wrinkle: $5.3B of that $16B only triggers if YouTube and TikTok adopt matching teen restrictions (time limits, night mode, age checks) and each pay their share. Meta basically forced the states to make the settlement conditional on competitors doing the same reforms, which is clever — kids will just migrate if only Meta locks down.
From a shareholder lens, this ...