Barbara Corcoran is one of Shark Tanks longest-running sharks, with an estimated net worth of approximately $100 million. But shes also one of 10 kids from a working-class family. By age 23, shed held more than 20 jobs. By 52, she sold her real estate company for $66 million.
Corcoran knows how to build wealth. Her financial strategies are bold and unconventional. They buck traditional financial wisdom andfull disclosurethey can be also risky.
But could they help you build wealth?
1. Dont Bother Saving Money
Ive never saved a dime my whole life, Corcoran told CNBC Make It in 2023.
Rather than letting her money sit idly in a bank account, Corcoran immediately identifies the best way to spend anything she earns, often investing it into something with the potential to grow her wealth.
Of course, investing all your earnings is risky. No one knows when an unexpected expense or income loss is coming and youll need to live on your savings.
But consider the root of Corcorans advice: How much money can you safely risk investing in yourself or a business venture you believe in? How much money could you reasonably put into a stock or other fund with the potential to grow at a higher rate than your savings account?
2. Be The Highest BidderOn Valuable Assets
I am always willing to overspend on any property thats good, Corcoran said in an interview. Overspending on anything might sound counterintuitive, but Corcoran is specifically referencing quality assets with high growth potential.
Corcoran especially believes in using this principle for real estate investments. She says that if youre willing to spend more than anyone else on a property you know is quality and be patient, you will eventually make that extra money back and then some.
3. Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
One piece of advice people hear all the time, and I just dont believe it, is Diversify. Dont put all your eggs in one basket, Corcoran told CNBC Make It. Diversification is investing in different areas so you dont lose everything from a downturn in one area of the economy.
In Spring 2025, you might hesitate to even put all your literal eggs in one basket, but Corcorans advice here is about investing in areas where you have expertise rather than diversifying just for the sake of it. Corcoran has historically focused all her money in real estate, where she can constantly leverage her knowledge and experience to evaluate current and potential investments.
Corcoran isnt alone in this view. Warren Buffett famously called diversification protection against ignorance. His late Berkshire Hathaway cochair Charlie Munger also referred to the practice as diworsification. Both investors made billions by focusing their investments in industries where they were already experts.
Focused investments can lead to outsize returnsbut also outsize losses, so the expertise piece of Corcorans advice is vital.
Dont just toss all your money into one thing you dont understand, she said. Stick to what you know.
A few years ago, if you turned on the heat in an apartment in Helsinki, the energy typically came from coal. But the citys power company shut down one coal plant in 2023, and the remaining one closed this weekfour years earlier than a target set by the national government.
Within two years, we have completely phased out coal, says Olli Sirkka, CEO of Helen, the power company, which is a subsidiary of the city.
The city has one of the worlds biggest district heating systems, with a network of underground pipes filled with hot water that deliver heat to buildings. It takes a huge amount of energy to run. One large chunk of that now comes from wind power, which has more than doubled in Finland since 2020. Helsinki is now building the worlds largest heat pump, which will send heat to 30,000 homes when it starts running in 2026. At the site of one of the closed coal plants, the city is also building a new facility that will capture heat from the Baltic Sea.
Some of the energy also now comes from wood pellets, which Helsinki is using temporarily as it transitions completely away from combustion. (Wood helped replace natural gas from Russia after the invasion of Ukraine, but isnt a good long-term solution. Burning it still produces CO2, it puts pressure on forests, and its more expensive than other alternatives; Finland plans to phase it out completely by 2040.) Helsinki also uses some hydro and nuclear power, and as much waste heat as possible. That includes capturing heat from local data centers and wastewater.
Though the coal plants shut down quickly, the push to close them started more than a decade ago. In 2015, a campaign called Coal Free Helsinki convinced the city council to commit to closing the first coal plant. I think activists played a really big role, says Amanda Pasanen, who previously studied the coal phaseout and is now a city councilmember. It was very much due to public pressure that they decided to quit coal burning.
At that point, it still wasnt clear how it could happen. Then, it was considered a completely impossible goal, says Sirkka. It was only maybe four years ago there was a solid decision that this has to happen. And then it started to roll really, really fast.
[Photo: Helen Ltd]
The steep drop in the cost of wind power, thanks to technological advancements and scaled-up production, was key. Wind power decreased electricity prices so much that its actually a very good business case to replace coal with electricity, he says. On the day we talked, it was windy enough that electricity prices in Finland had dropped to zero. (Finland is a fairly windy place and well suited for the technology; while it also has some solar power, it’s so far north that it isn’t sunny in the winter, and solar can’t really be used to power heating.) The power company continually monitors energy sources, shifting from one source to another to optimize costs.
The city’s layout, with the district heating system, helped make the switch easier than if every single building had to be retrofitted with different technology. “It’s easier to implement these environment-friendly solutions in a centralized system where you have district heating and where you can use your economies of scale,” says Helsinki Mayor Juhana Vartiainen.
Other factors also pushed the company to act quickly. The EUs emissions trading system increased the price of coal as carbon prices rose over time. In 2019, Finland passed a national law to phase out coal by 2029 as part of its climate plan. Changes in national tax policy made coal more expensive and clean power cheaper. In 2021, Helsinki decided to speed up its own plan to become carbon neutral, moving the target date from 2035 to 2030.
“There is broad political consensus on the issue [of climate action],” says Vartiainen, noting that when he took office in 2021, there was nearly unanimous agreement that Helsinki should move faster on its already-ambitious plans to cut emissions. Yet even with that political mandate, it wasn’t guaranteed that the change would happen quite as quickly as it did.
“It’s been quite surprising, Vartiainen says, to see how fast this shift to electricity has taken place.
When President Donald Trump announced his sweeping tariffs against America’s trading partners around the world, Ethan Frisch and Ori Zohar were paying close attention.
As the cofounders of the single origin startup Burlap & Barrel, they do business with dozens of small farmers around the world. They source berbere from Ethiopia, adobo from Puerto Rico, black Urfa chili from Turkey. We bring in spices from countries where they are grown in particular ways, using heirloom varieties, says Zohar. We cannot just buy these spices here in the United States. Many are not grown here at all.
All of the U.S.’s trading partners has been hit by tariffs; the question is just how big the tariff is. Burlap & Barrel is just one example of a small American company whose business will be adversely hit by these tariffs. Yesterday’s news means Zohar and Frisch will now have to pay at least 10% more for the products they import. The business partners are now scrambling to figure out how to manage this crisis. We’re a small business, Frisch says. We don’t have strategic reserves, or relationships with big banks. We’re particularly sensitive to these price fluctuations.
Economists say that businesses will make up for these losses by increasing prices to customers, potentially driving up inflation, or paying their suppliers less, which could profoundly harm workers in poor countries. For now, Burlap & Barrel’s founders have decided to do neitherand absorb these costs internally by halting spending on innovation and special projects.
More broadly and alarmingly, they are reckoning with how they can continue building relationships with farmers around the world, when the United States now seems like an unstable, unreliable trading partner.
An Ancient Profession
Frisch and Zohar launched Burlap & Barrel in New York in 2016, which now has a staff of 20, in an effort to make high-quality spices accessible to more home cooks.
They see themselves as part of the ancient spice trade that goes back thousands of years. Their business relies on going to remote corners of the world where small farmers have been growing particular spices for centuries. For instance, they partner with women in Afghanistan who harvest wild cumin, and Guatemalan farmers who harvest cardamom. Part of their mission as a company is supporting communities in developing countries.
The founders had been closely following Trump’s tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada. But they were surprised by the broad sweep of tariffs the Trump administration announced yesterday. There is now a flat 10% tariff across all of America’s trading partners, and additional tariffs on many other countries, including Vietnam, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Thailand, and Malaysia. Burlap & Barrel sources from many of these countries.
The expanse of the tariffs was much greater in magnitude than any economist expected, says Joshua Stillwagon, associate professor of economics at Babson College. I expected there to be a phasing-in of the tariffs or some kind of implementation, but that didn’t happen.
Last year, the Burlap & Barrel paid $1 million for the cost of goods; this year, they expect this to go up to least $1.4 million. This money needs to come from somewhere. The founders decided from the outset not to pay their suppliers less. We’re a social enterprise, so paying our farmers less is just a nonstarter, says Frisch. We work with small farmers with little access to other income. We have seen firsthand how hard their lives are, and cutting their income could be devastating.
Difficult Decisions
But they’ve also made the decision not to raise prices, at least in the short term. Part of the mission of their business is to make good quality spices affordable to more people; they charge $9.99 per bottle for everything on their site. Zohar also points out that if the United States goes into a recession, more people may choose to eat at home rather than go out for meals. So if they don’t inflate their prices, people may see them as a resource during turbulent economic times. We didn’t want to jump to increasing prices for our consumers, says Zohar.
Burlap & Barrel does not have the option of switching to domestic suppliers because most of their spices are not made in the United States. But even in industries where there are American manufacturers, switching suppliers is not such an easy calculation, says Alex Field, professor of economics at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. Domestic producers often sell their products at higher prices than their foreign counterparts, he says. So either way, it is going to cost more.
Economists expect many companies to pass on cost increases to consumers; unchecked, this will eventually lead to inflation. Stillwagon says the first prices to increase will be on perishable goods, like fruit. But over time, as companies go through their current inventory, it will eventually trickle into many other products. As costs go up, there could be a recession. As companies raise prices on necessities, people are going to be spending more of their budget on those things, he says. As people pull back their spending, they are going to make less profit and hire fewer employees.
While the tariffs are causing businesses a lot of stress, Field says that the sheer instability of the economic situation is even more crippling. The Trump administration has rolled out these tariffs in a chaotic manner and there is uncertainty about whether he will renege on them. So Burlap & Barrel’s decision not to increase cost to consumers in the short term makes sense. Trump is so changeable in his views that you may just want to take a ‘wait and see’ approach, and take a hit on profits to see whether the matter resolves itself before you change your catalog pricing and make your customers unhappy, he says.
Killing Innovation
Frisch and Zohar need to figure out how to make up for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they now have to pay in tariffs. They’ve decided to spend less on innovation. In their case, this refers to things like developing new products, creating interesting partnerships with restaurants and celebrities, and doing special projects. For instance, many people had been asking Burlap & Barrel to create a holiday advent calendar with spices. Frisch says the entire team had been excited about this. But they’ve decided to stop work on it immediately. The packaging for the calendar is now more costly, they were going to source new spices for it, and it was going to take employees’ time.
Burlap & Barrel’s approach of cutting back on extraneous spending is going to happen at businesses across the country. And it will have a profound impact on the American economy as a whole. At a time of instability, companies have to be prudent and pull back on investments, including things like buying equipment and spending in innovation, Field says. But this is a key driver of spending and it is what gave American businesses their edge.
America is No Longer a Reliable Trading Partner
Since launching their business, Frisch and Zohar have been all over the world to build relationships with suppliers. In the past, many of these small farmers were eager to work with American brands, because the country positioned itself as an ideal trading partner. It meant income for them, but it was also a source of pride, says Frisch. They were excited about sending their cinnamon or black pepper to American consumers.
But now that Trump has upended the global trading system, this won’t be true for much longer. Countries around the world now see the United States as hostile and unreliable, which could have long-term consequences, even if Trump quickly reverses these particular tariffs. And eventually, this image of America will trickle down to the rural farmers that Frisch and Zohar have worked closely with. Everything has changed, says Zohar. There’s been a radical shift in how the U.S. engages with the rest of the world, and what the American economy represents.
The nonstop cavalcade of announcements in the AI world has created a kind of reality distortion field. There is so much buzz, and even more money, circulating in the industry that it feels almost sacrilegious to doubt that AI will make good on its promises to change the world. Deep research can do 1% of all knowledge work! Soon the internet will be designed for agents! Infinite Ghibli!
And then you remember AI screws things up. All. The. Time.
Hallucinationswhen a large language model essentially spits out information created out of whole clothhave been an issue for generative AI since its inception. And they are doggedly persistent: Despite advances in model size and sophistication, serious errors still occur, even in so-called advanced reasoning or thinking models. Hallucinations appear to be inherent to generative technology, a by-product of AI’s seemingly magical quality of creating new content out of thin air. They’re both a feature and a bug at the same time.
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In journalism, accuracy isn’t optionaland thats exactly where AI stumbles. Just ask Bloomberg, which has already hit turbulence with its AI-generated summaries. The outlet began publishing AI-generated bullet points for some news stories back in January this year, and it’s already had to correct more than 30 of them, according to The New York Times.
The intern that just doesn’t get it
AI is occasionally described as an incredibly productive intern, since it knows pretty much everything and has superhuman ability to create content. But if you had to issue 30-plus corrections for an intern’s work in three months, you’d probably tell that intern to start looking at a different career path.
Bloomberg is hardly the first publication to run head-first into hallucinations. But the fact that the problem is still happening, more than two years after ChatGPT debuted, pinpoints a primary tension when AI is applied to media: To create novel audience experiences at scale, you need to let the generative technology create content on the fly. But because AI often gets things wrong, you also need to check its output with “humans in the loop.” You can’t do both.
The typical approach thus far is to slap a disclaimer onto the content. The Washington Posts Ask the Post AI is a good example, warning users that the feature is an “experiment” and encouraging users to “Please verify by consulting the provided articles.” Many other publications have similar disclaimers.
It’s a strange world where a media company introduces a new feature with a label that effectively says, “You can’t rely on this.” Providing accurate information isn’t a secondary feature of journalismit’s the whole point. This contradiction is one of the strangest manifestations of the application of AI in media.
Moving to a close enough world
How did this happen? Arguably, media companies were forced into it. When ChatGPT and other large language models first began summarizing content, we were so blown away by their mastery of language that we weren’t as concerned about the fine print: “ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info.” And it turns out that for most users that was good enough. Even though generative AI often gets facts wrong, chatbots have seen explosive user growth. “Close enough” appears to be what the world is settling on.
It’s not a standard anyone sought out, but the media is slowly adopting it as more publications launch generative experiences with similar disclaimers. There’s an “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” aspect to this, certainly: As more people turn to AI search engines and chatbots for information, media companies feel pressure to either sign licensing deals to have their content included, or match those AI experiences with their own chatbots. Accuracy? Theres a disclaimer for that.
One notable holdout, however, is the BBC. So far, the BBC hasn’t signed any deals with AI companies, and it’s been a leader in pointing out the inaccuracies that AI portals create, publishing its own research on the topic earlier this year. It was also the BBC that ultimately convinced Apple to dial back its shoddy notification summaries on the iPhone, which were garbling news to the point of making up entirely false narratives.
In a world where it’s looking increasingly fashionable for media companies to take licensing money, the BBC is architecting a more proactive approach. Somewhere along the waywhether out of financial self-interest or falling into Big Tech’s reality distortion fieldmany media companies began to buy into the idea that hallucinations were either not that big a problem or something that will inevitably be solved. After all, “Today is the worst this technology will ever be.”
Think of pollution and coal plants. Its an ugly side effect, but one that doesnt stop the business from thriving. Thats how hallucinations function in AI: clearly flawed, occasionally harmful, yet toleratedbecause the growth and money keep coming.
But those false outputs are deadly to an industry whose primary product is accurate information. Journalists should not sit back and expect Silicon Valley to simply solve hallucinations on its own, and theBBC is showing there’s a path to being part of the solution without evangelizing or ignoring the problem. After all, “Check important info” is supposed to be the media’s job.
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Andy Merolla is a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jeffrey Hall is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kanas.
Whats the big idea?
Individually, most day-to-day interactions may seem trivial, but they add up to an important personal and societal opportunity. We all engage in our own unique ecosystem of everyday communicationour very own social biome. Meaningful engagement with others is critical to health and wellbeing, but we live in a time when any kind of engagement is dwindling. So, even if we dont get every moment just right, its worth prioritizing human contact and kindness so that we can cultivate happiness within and around us.
Below, coauthors Andy Merolla and Jeffrey Hall share five key insights from their new book, The Social Biome: How Everyday Communication Connects and Shapes Us. Listen to the audio versionread by Merollain the Next Big Idea App.
1. We all inhabit unique communication ecosystems that define us.
We come to know ourselves and others through communication. This includes the full range of daily face-to-face and mediated interactions, from passing hellos and office chit-chat to heated conflicts and heart-to-hearts.
But its hard to conceptualize all this interaction. We coined the term social biome to help people understand how our lives are lived out in everyday communication. A social biome is our ecosystem of day-to-day talk. Its the totality of our moments of communicationin-person and digitalwith loved ones, acquaintances, coworkers, neighbors, customers, clerks, and complete strangers. Our biomes include interactions we choose to engage in, those thrust upon us, and those we just happen to bounce in and out of.
The term biome comes from biology and ecology to describe what life is like in specific regions, including its plants, wildlife, and climate. Every human has their own unique microbiome, composed of the trillions of bacteria, fungi, and viruses living in and on our bodies. These microbes shape our health and well-being in fascinating ways, and although our microbiome is subject to the choices we make, such as the foods we eat, its also shaped by innumerable factors beyond our control. This includes where we happen to be born and the spaces we live and work in.
Our social biomes, too, are products of choices we make and many factors beyond our control. You can choose to be as kind as you can to those around you, but in many situations, you simply dont get to choose whos around you, nor how they communicate with you. When we start viewing our lives as lived out in social biomes, we recognize how consequential our moments of everyday interaction are for shaping our self-concept and worldview. We also understand the limits of what we can do.
Any individual moment of interaction can seem inconsequential, but at scale, our habits of interaction are anything but. Respect, dignity, and trust, as well as hate, indifference, and disdain all play out in small moments of communicationsmall moments that, over time, accumulate, crystallize, and calcify into our view of the world around us as a generally welcoming or inherently intolerant place.
Ultimately, a social biome perspective compels us to scrutinize how we spend our time and why, how we choose to treat others, and what adjustments we can make to social habits to make our livesand the lives of those in our social biomeshealthier and happier. Moves as small as a text to let a friend know you were thinking about them, or pausing an extra beat to acknowledge a coworker you might usually ignore, can initiate new and, hopefully, enduring, routines of connection that can scale up and reverberate across people.
2. There is no such thing as just right when it comes to communication.
Its incredible how much people value good communication skills. In one survey, over 90% of parents said that good communication skills are essential for their kids to thrive. Compare that to the percentage citing math skills (79%) or science skills (just 58%). Its not just parents. Corporations prize communication abilities in hiring. This makes sense, as research indicates that communication problems are at the root of billions in corporate losses each year.
People instinctively know that if they could just communicate better, it would help to address a lot of problems they face. But what exactly is better when it comes to communication? It is a harder question to answer than you might think. Despite decades of research, simple definitions of good communication are hard to find.
First off, consider how messy everyday communication is. Of the thousands of words we typically speak each day, we tend to communicate in six-word chunks that are chock full of vocal fillers like um and ah, hesitations, starts, stops, interruptions, and trail offs. Add to that the constant digital distractions that tax the cognitive processing abilities of even the most Zen among us, and you get a good sense of what everyday communication is like. It bears little resemblance to the polished turns of talk we see in a typical Netflix series.
Further, many of us think about communication in the wrong way. We use the word communication as if its a singular entity. But its not. We all operate from different sets of assumptions about what good communication entails. We even differ in our view of what communication is for. The meaning of communication is always co-constructed between people, and those people might be operating from very different understandings of what demarcates the communicative good from the communicative bad.
Many communication challenges result from our tendency to put too much pressure on ourselves (and others) to get communication just right. But just right is always dependent on the unique standards people apply, and those standards dont always align between communicators. When we fully appreciate that there is no such thing as just right, we can feel freer to connect with others in ways that feel authentic, knowing there are many paths to good communication.
3. Were living in an Age of Interiority.
Time-use data, which tracks how people spend their daily lives, has shown that we spend less and less time socializing. This trend started long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Time spent alone has been increasing for at least three decades. Social changes, such as food delivery apps, online shopping, and self-checkout lines, make it possible to avoid human interaction for tasks that once required it. Its becoming increasingly possible for people, especially highly resourced folks in the Global North, to live in ways that circumvent face-to-face interactions.
Were not just hanging out with friends less often; were able to orchestrate a more disconnected life thats finely tailored to our own needs. If we remember that people within social biomes are interdependent, then we see that each persons shift toward a more interior life limits opportunities for social connections. When it comes to belonging, we are all in it together.
Disconnection, moreover, is self-reinforcing. When we become less comfortable interacting with people, even in mundane moments of everyday life, our social skills can atrophy. Social inertia sets in, making it increasinly energy-intensive to re-engage and build new relationships.
The reason for this interior shift across society is not solely due to personal choices. The social world controls us as much as we control it, and innumerable structural factors are pulling and keeping people apart. Long work hours. Precarious economic conditions. Lacking access to reliable and high-quality child and eldercare. These factors deplete people and lead them to want nothing more than to retreat from the social worldoften toward a screen where they get some semblance of control. On top of it, ongoing segregation and political sorting intensify divisions, so even when we connect with others, its most likely with like-minded others.
There are both personal and societal costs when we live more interior lives.
4. Connection and restorative solitude are linked.
Alone time is important. A well-connected and socially satisfying life requires contented solitude. Research shows that communicating with others, including highly enjoyable conversations, requires a lot of energy. To replenish that energy, we need to recharge, often in solitude. Importantly, though, satisfying interactions make our time alone feel better.
In a study Jeff and I conducted a few years ago, we found that peoples overall satisfaction with their life was associated with their daily survey reports of how content they felt when alonefeeling contented while alone is most likely to occur following positive social interaction experiences.
For many people, though, solitude isnt contented or chosen. Instead, its inescapable. When we find ourselves alone but dont want to be, it reflects the kind of disconnection and loneliness that former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and many others have so admirably called attention to in recent years.
Social connection is highly uneven. Some people are doing greattheir days are full of enjoyable interaction, and their calendars are packed with fun social events. Meanwhile, many others dont have reliable access to the rewarding interactions that facilitate vital feelings of belonging.
This is again where a social biome perspective can be helpful because it reminds us that we can do our best to look out for other people around us, particularly folks who dont have as many opportunities for social interaction and support. This includes acquaintances, neighbors, and people we work with. Our efforts to reach out can rekindle connections for people badly needing them.
5. Hope is an interpersonal phenomenon.
If were in an Age of Interiority, we could just as easily contend that were in an Age of Hopelessness. People have lost faith in institutions and feel less trust in the people around them. People with marginalized identities feel under attack by people in positions of great power. Fears of climate change. The existential dread of AI. Pick your poison.
But what exactly does it mean to feel hopeless or hopeful? In day-to-day conversation, we say things like were holding out hope or trying not to get our hopes up. Such comments suggest that hope is, at best, an intentional suspension of disbelief or, at worst, willful ignorance of the cold, hard reality of life. This view of hopeas a foolish illusion or dangerous obliviousness to the way things really areis one held by some of historys most famous philosophers. Hope was among the evils inside Pandoras box.
Over the past 70 years, however, social psychologists have offered a radically different view of hope tied to the way we think about and pursue goals. The late psychologist C. R. Snyder and his collaborators helped us see that many of our most important goals are linked to other people. These goals can be both big and small. When we see friends giving their full attention to one another or small acts of kindness between strangers, that is hope in action. People are choosing to prioritize their finite attention and energy on others. These are building blocks of connection and, over time, give us a sense of hope to pursue larger, more challenging goals.
When we accept the idea that hope is communal and not just personal, we better appreciate how much is riding on our treatment of one another in everyday moments of talk. Small moments of acknowledgement and compassion arent the antidote to all the worlds ills, but its hard to envision a world of rebuilt trust and a better future for our kids if we dont try to spread kindness and dignity, moment by moment, across our social biomes.
This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Are you prepared for when the power goes out? To prevent massive wildfires in drought-prone, high-wind areas, electrical companies have begun preemptively shutting off electricity. These planned shutdowns are called public safety power shutoffs, abbreviated to PSPS, and theyre increasingly common. So far this year, weve seen them in Texas, New Mexico, and California.
Unlike regular power failures, which on average last only about two hours while a piece of broken equipment is repaired, a PSPS lasts until weather conditions improve, which could be days. And these shutoffs come at a steep price. In 2010 alone, they cost California more than $13 billion. A 2019 analysis of shutoffs in Placer County, California, found that they harmed 70% of local businesses.
I am a business school professor who studies how people pay for things, including during emergencies. As I point out in my new book The Power of Cash: Why Using Paper Money Is Good for You and Society, many people have abandoned paper money and switched to electronic payments such as credit cards and mobile apps. This can become a big problem during an emergency, since these systems need electricity to operate. The switch to electronic payments is making the world less resilient in the face of increasing numbers of major natural disasters.
So if a public safety power shutoff strikes and you dont have any cash, you may be doubly vulnerable. On the other hand, keeping cash can protect youand not just you and your family but also local businesses and your community. After all, keeping the economy moving during shutoffs reduces the financial damage they cause.
Why do they keep turning off the power, anyway?
Its all about risk.
The world has experienced a number of very destructive wildfires recently. In 2025, large parts of Los Angeles burned to the ground, with more than 18,000 buildings destroyed or damaged. In 2023, wildfires in Hawaii killed more than 100 people. Massive wildfires have also occurred recently in South Korea, Portugal, and Australia.
Governments, people whose houses burned, and insurance companies are all looking for someone to blame and pay for the damage. Climate change, which is increasing the worlds average temperatures and drying out trees and grass, is setting the conditions. Since Mother Nature cannot be sued, utilities make handy scapegoats with deep pockets. Electrical utilities are sued because their power lines, transformers, and other equipment often start blazes.
So to prevent lawsuits as well as fires, power companies are increasingly turning off the power when the conditions are ripe for a catastrophic blaze. Theres no uniform set of standards for when to impose a shutdown, but in general power companies do it when there are hot, dry, and windy conditions. For example, a PSPS is triggered in Hawaii if theres a drought, wind gusts are over 45 mph, and relative humidity is under 45%.
Power shutoffs are a relatively new idea. They were proposed in California in 2008 and first allowed in 2012.
Since then, power companies across the entire western U.S. from Texas to Hawaii have adopted these plans. Shutoff plans also stretch from southern border states such as Arizona to northern border states such as Idaho and Montana.
Shutting off the power is a huge problem, since it causes massive disruption to communities. People depend on power to run medical equipment, work, and keep communities safe. Even people with a desperate need for electricity, such as those on medical life support, are not immune to a safety shutoff.
How to prepare for a PSPS
As the world warms, the chance of being caught in a preemptive power shutoff increases. What can you do to minimize the impact?
Having solar panels wont protect you: Utilities shut off customers with solar panels to block those panels from pushing power onto the grid, since the whole goal is to shut off the grid. The only way for you to still have power is to buy a battery storage system and a transfer switch, which allows you to take your system completely off the grid. But this is very expensive.
Getting a portable generator is only a partial solution for a multiday hutoff, since most last only 6 to 18 hours on a single tank of gas. Plus, generators run very hot, which creates its own fire risk.
Another way to minimize the impact of both a power shutoff and a wildfire is to create a small disaster relief kit, or go bag. Creating one is relatively inexpensive. It should contain key items such as water, your medicines, some shelf-stable foodand importantly, some cash. Even some government websites forget to mention this.
Its also important to use paper money before a shutoff happens. I have all too frequently seen gas station attendants, supermarket checkout clerks, and restaurant servers have no idea how to handle cash.
Recently at my local supermarket, for example, I paid with a $20 bill. The cashier had to ask another employee which kinds of coins to use to make change. If people dont know how to handle cash during normal times, it ceases to be useful during emergencies.
As the world warms, public safety power shutoffs will occur more frequently. The shutoffs clearly highlight the trade-off between economic and social disruption versus preventing dangerous wildfires. These shutoffs show there are no easy solutions, only hard choices.
There are a few sensible and easy steps to take to reduce the impact of these shutoffs. One is to understand that during one of the very moments you might really need to spend money, modern payment systems fail. Holding and frequently using old-fashioned cash is a simple and low-cost way to protect yourself and your family.
Jay L. Zagorsky is an associate professor at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Chalk it up to bad timing: Some Home Depot customers are furious after a recent April Fools’ Day prank from a tool review website suggested that the home improvement giant would start charging parking fees due to inflation.
This was no laughing matter, as anxious Americans awaited President Donald Trump’s tariffs news, expecting higher prices on goods and services. So the April 1 date didn’t register with angry viewers right away. Many took to social media, some creating a Reddit thread about the supposed fees, with one duped X user even proposing #BoycottHomeDepot. Desperate for some damage control, Home Depot responded on its official X account, posting, “this is an April Fools’ post from a tool review website. We do not charge for parking.”
So, what exactly happened? On April 1, Pro Tool Reviews, an online product review site, published a fake news article that said Home Depot would start charging for parking to combat inflation and “offset increasing operational costs [to] keep prices competitive,” and that the modest parking fee (“$2 for up to two hours in central Florida, to $5 for a full day of parking in Los Angeles”) would help the company avoid passing those extra costs directly on to customers.
Unfortunately for Home Depot, as the target of the joke, American consumers are now particularly sensitive about retailers passing the cost of tariffs on to them.
Pro Tool Reviews told USA Today that the article’s high viewership was “truly humbling,” indicating the traction this apparent PR nightmare has received, with editor-in-chief Kenny Koehler adding, “we hope our friends over at Home Depot were able to laugh as well.” (We’re not so sure about that, Kenny.)
This isn’t the first time an April Fools’ Day joke has caused trouble. In fact, there is a long list of brands whose pranks have gone awry, from Google to Volkswagen. In 2016, Google announced a new Gmail feature that it claimed would add a GIF of a yellow animated “Minion” character dropping a microphone at the end of an email. Google later apologized. And in 2021, the German carmaker claimed it was changing the name of its American division to “Voltswagen,” causing the stock to rise, as well as a great amount of confusion.
The origin of April Fools’ Day dates back to 16th century France, when Charles IX decreed that the new year would no longer begin on Easter, but instead on January 1. Those who refused the change were named, you guessed it, “April fools.”
President Donald Trump promised tariffs that would raise U.S. import taxes high enough to mirror what others assess as trade penalties on American goods.
What he’s actually imposing is based on far more complicated math.
Here’s a look at how the White House got its numbers:
Why do the new tariff rates often differ by country?
The Trump administration has declared an economic emergency to bypass Congress and impose a 10% tariff on nearly all countries and territories. It has set even higher levies for about 60 nations that it says are the worst” offenders.
The 10% global tariffs take effect at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. The higher tariffs set for specific countries are due to kick in at one minute past midnight on April 9.
Among the so-called worst offenders is China, which Trump argues protect its producers through malicious trade practices in addition to tariffs. Those efforts include actions such as imposing value added taxes on all goods, dumping overproduced products on markets to artificially deflate prices, or manipulating currency.
To determine how much higher those nations’ rates should be, the White House says it calculated the size of each countrys trade imbalance on goods with the United States and divided that by how much America imports from that nation.
It then took half that percentage and made it the new tariff rate.
Why not just charge reciprocal rates?
The White House says its calculations kept new tariffs from going even higher for many countries and demonstrate that Trump is being kind to global trading partners.
The administration maintains that creating a baseline levy with few exemptions is necessary to keep China and others from skirting the new tariffs by manufacturing goods and then shipping them to Vietnam, Cambodia, Mexico or elsewhere to then be sent to the U.S.
Thats why the White House list of tariffed locations includes obscure places like the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are uninhabited. They are 2,550 miles (4,100 kilometers) from the coast of mainland Australia, which claims them as a territory.
Is every country affected?
No. Canada and Mexico are excluded because they already are facing 25% taxes on most imported goods that Trump announced last month, in an attempt to force both to crack down on fentanyl smuggling into the U.S.
The White House originally said all others would be affected by at least the 10% tariff. But administration officials clarified on Thursday that countries already subject to stiff U.S. sanctions for example, Russia due to its invasion of Ukraine, as well as Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Belarus and Venezuela will not face the new, 10% global base tariff.
Official said that is because sanctions and other existing barriers mean the U.S. has so little trade with those places that deficits are minimal.
Why is Trump doing this?
The president has spent months insisting America was at its wealthiest at the end of the Gilded Age in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when it imposed high tariffs as the key means to generating revenue for the federal government.
Trump even suggested Wednesday that the U.S. moving away from higher tariffs and toward a federal income tax in 1913 helped trigger the Great Depression of the 1930s a claim that economists and historians roundly reject.
A more contemporary explanation might be found in Project 2025, a comprehensive blueprint compiled by leading conservatives about how to shrink the federal workforce and push Washington further to the right. It spelled out how Trump might impose high tariffs around the globe, giving his administration more room to negotiate lower levies with trading partners in exchange for U.S. priorities.
White House officials insist the new tariffs are more about closing trade deficits, stimulating U.S. manufacturing and generating government revenue than eventually negotiating new trading deals.
But Trump has shown he is willing to back off on threats of tariffs in exchange for offers of concessions. His administration has said the president is always ready to make deals, a sign the new tariffs may prove to be more bargaining chip than permanent policy.
Why do US trade imbalances matter?
American trade policy created a U.S. trade imbalance worth $1.2 trillion last year, a gap that some experts believe should be addressed in order to ensure the country’s long-term economic strength.
But many economists say the trade imbalances that Trump is looking to correct are based on more than countries just using high tariffs or protectionist trade practices to boost their own exports. Basing the White House’s tariff math solely on trade deficits, for instance, fails to take into account U.S. consumer demand.
Americans relish buying BMWs assembled in Germany, as well as French wine and coffee beans from Guatemala, and their spending can fuel trade imbalances regardless of the tax and tariff policies of the countries producing those goods.
That means any attempt to close U.S. trade gaps by tariffs will likely mean increasing the cost of imported goods that Americans are buying, which in turn could hurt the economy because of increased inflationary pressures.
Will Weissert, Associated Press
Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Zeke Miller contributed to this report.
Google released its new Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental AI model late last month, and its quickly stacked up top marks on a number of coding, math, and reasoning benchmark testsmaking it a contender for the worlds best model right now. becoming apparent that the new reasoning model may be the best model in the world, at least for now.
Gemini 2.5 Pro is a reasoning model, meaning its answers derive from a mix of training data and real-time reasoning performed in response to the user prompt or question. Like other newer models, Gemini 2.5 Pro can consult the web, but it also contains a fairly recent snapshot of the worlds knowledge: Its training data cuts off at the end of January 2025.
Last year, in order to boost model performance, AI researchers began shifting toward teaching models to “reason” when they’re live and responding to user prompts. This approach requires models to process and retain increasingly more data to arrive at accurate answers. (Gemini 2.5 Pro, for example, can handle up to a million tokens.) However, models often struggle with information overload, making it difficult to extract meaningful insights from all that context.
Google appears to have made progress on this front. The YouTube channel AI Explained points out that Gemini 2.5 fared very well on a new benchmark test called Fiction.liveBench thats designed to test a model’s ability to remember and comprehend context information. For instance, Fiction.liveBench might ask the model to read a novelette and answer questions that require a deep understanding of the story and characters. Some of the top models, including those from OpenAI and Anthropic, score well when the amount of stored data (the context window) is relatively small. But as the context window increases to 32K, then 60K, then 120Kabout the size of a noveletteGemini 2.5 Pro stands out for its superior comprehension.
Thats important because some of the most productive use cases to date for generative AI involve comprehending and summarizing large amounts of data. A service representative might depend on an AI tool to swim through voluminous manuals in order to help someone struggling with a technical problem out in the field, or a corporate compliance officer might need a long context window to sift through years of regulations and policies.
Gemini also scored much higher than competing reasoning models on a new benchmark called MathArena, which tests models using hard questions from recent math olympiads and contests. The test also requires that the model clearly show its reasoning as it steps toward an answer. Top models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek failed to break 5% of a perfect score, but Gemini 2.5 Pro model scored an impressive 24.4%.
The new Google model also scored highly on another super-hard benchmark called Humanitys Last Exam, which is meant to show when AI models exceed the knowledge and reasoning of top experts in a given field. The Gemini 2.5 scored an 18.8%, a score topped only by OpenAIs Deep Research model. The model also now sits atop the crowdsourced benchmarking leaderboard, LMArena.
Finally, Gemini 2.5 Pro is among the top models for computer coding. It scored a 70.4% on the LiveCodeBench benchmark, coming in just behind OpenAIs o3-mini model, which scored 74.1%. Gemini 2.5 Pro scored 63.8% on SWE-bench (measures agentic coding), while Anthropics latest Claude 3.7 Sonnet scored 70.3%. Finally, Googles model outscored Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI models on the MMMU visual reading test by roughly six points.
Google initially released its new model to paying subscribers, but has now made it accessible by all users for free.
The Trump administrations 25% tariffs on imported cars and auto parts is expected to disrupt the auto industry and raise car prices by thousands of dollars. Electric vehicles are at particular risk.
Trumps tariffs on vehicle imports went into effect on Thursday, and tariffs on imported auto parts will go into effect by May 3. For the car industry broadly, the lowest-priced American vehicles could see additional costs of $2,500 to $5,000 due to the tariffs, the Anderson Economic Group said in a report this week.
SUVs, in particular, could be hit even harderthough many are assembled in the U.S., they have parts from Canada, Europe, and Mexico, and so could see price hikes of $10,000 to $12,000. EVs, as well, could see price increases that “exceed $15,000,” according to the report.
For some imported models, tariffs could raise prices by up to $20,000. All told, U.S. consumers could see an estimated $30 billion increase in the cost of cars in the first full year of the tariffs.
Though the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) sought to spur domestic EV manufacturing, there are still a handful of EVs that are importedincluding the Polestar 2 (from China), the Mustang Mach-E (from Mexico), the Volkswagen ID.BUZZ (from Germany), and the Hyundai Ioniq 6 (from South Korea), though Hyundai did just open a U.S. plant to build its Ioniq 5 and 9 EVs in Georgia.
EVs manufactured in the U.S. still rely on imported materials, primarily batteries and battery components. The IRA has led to the establishment of domestic production facilities, but the transition is still ongoing, says Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. Even Teslas, which are made in the U.S., have about 20% to 25% of their value in components sourced from Mexico. Elon Musk himself said that the cost impact of these tariffs is not trivial.
And these arent the only tariffs at play for EVs. While both electric vehicles and internal combustion engine vehicles are affected by tariffs, EVs are impacted more by aluminum tariffs and battery materials, which can significantly raise production costs, Valdez Streaty says. EVs use more aluminum than gas-powered cars as a way to reduce weight and make them more efficient (both vehicle types use about the same amount of steel, which is also facing tariffs).
Trump could also impose even higher tariffs on graphite, a key component in anodes and batteries overall; the U.S. International Trade Commission says China has been exporting artificially cheap graphite, which has suppressed the U.S.’s own graphite industry. Petitions from U.S. producers of anode materials have requested tariffs on Chinese graphite be raised to as high as 920%. (The U.S. produces no graphite itself, and so relies on imports.)
That could raise the cost of synthetic graphite anode material from $4,200 per metric ton to approximately $42,672 per metric ton, Valdez Streaty says, which could raise the entire cost of NMC 811 cells, a type of lithium-ion-battery, by 51%. Tesla, Volkswagen, and Ford have used such battery cells.
Tariffs, EV tax credit removal would hurt EV demand
The U.S. already lacks affordable EVsespecially compared to China, which has made EV models for as cheap as $10,000. Tariffs, combined with the potential rollback of the EV tax credit, could sink domestic EV demand, even those made by American workers.
The EV tax credit, part of the IRA, was meant to spur domestic EV production; getting rid of it could then eliminate the need for future EV or EV battery factories here, according to a Princeton University study from March.
That study found that if that EV tax credit goes away (and also if tailpipe emissions regulations are reversed), then as much as 100% of planned EV factories could be at risk of being canceled or closed. Between 29% and 72% of U.S. battery factories operating by the end of 2025 would also be unnecessary to meet automotive demand and could be at risk of closure, the study noted.
Thats because removing the tax credit could cause EV sales to drop about 30% in 2027 and 40% in 2030, compared to a scenario in which those policies continued. The study found that cumulatively, there could be 8.3 million less EVs and plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads in 2030.
