Gen Z, millennials are ‘house hacking’ to become homeowners in a tough market. How the strategy can help | The Simple, Ancient Idea That Can Replace Concrete Walls | Spending on infrastructure has fallen in real terms in America | Opinion | Big Tech’s Bitter Battle With the Free Press

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� � � � � � Gen Z, millennials are ‘house hacking’ to become homeowners in a tough market. How the strategy can help - CNBC    Gen Z and millennials are "hacking" the housing market as high prices and interest rates make affordability difficult. The term "house hacking" refers to the practice of renting out a portion of your home or an entire property for an additional stream of income. Almost 4 in 10, 39%, of recent homebuyers say the practice represents a "very" or "extremely" important opportunity, according to a new report by housing market site Zillow. That share is up eight percentage points in the past two years. Continued here � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium The Simple, Ancient Idea That Can Replace Concrete Walls - The Atlantic    The energy intensity of concrete is an intractable climate problem. What about using stone instead? A dry stone wall is a purposeful pile of rocks, held in place by friction and gravity rather than mortar. It’s one of the oldest building methods known to mankind, used over millennia to construct buildings, wind breaks, and dykes, to mark borders and create monuments, and to keep livestock penned in and nuisance animals hemmed out. In rural Japan, where I live, stone retaining walls shape a country that’s 80 percent mountainous into livable and farmable land. To get into town from my home, I walk past century-old stone walls. The rocks are shaded velvety green by moss, and plumes of ferns spring from crevices with starry pink flowers hovering above. These walls carve out spaces for roads and houses, and define irregular terraced rice paddies farther up in the mountains. Continued here � � � � � � Spending on infrastructure has fallen in real terms in America - The Economist    It is easy to take internet connectivity for granted these days. But when stringing up fibre-optic cable in the woods of Vermont, not much comes easily. Some homes are a mile back from the road, requiring thousands of dollars and much tree-pruning to link them to the network. In remote areas new poles are needed to replace ones that date back to the introduction of electricity. The wait for these can run to two years. The local broadband group responsible for Vermont’s north-east corner brought high-speed internet access to about 2,500 homes in 2023. If not for the delays, it could have reached 7,000. Bringing broadband to under-served parts of rural America is one element of a giant infrastructure programme that began two years ago when President Joe Biden signed it into law. It was hailed as a historic opportunity to repair America’s bridges, rebuild its roads for electric vehicles and update its power grid and communications technology. With headlines proclaiming its $1.2trn in investments, worth about 5% of GDP, it was easy to get caught up in the excitement. That makes the current state of the big dig all the more disappointing. Instead of the anticipated surge, total infrastructure spending has fallen by more than 10% in real terms since the passage of the law (see chart). The most charitable explanation is that it takes time for big projects to get going. There are lags as money goes from being authorised by Congress to being doled out by the federal officials to actually being spent by state and local officials. Moreover, as anyone who has ever renovated a home knows, construction is always behind schedule. Many of the biggest expenditures will come near the end of the infrastructure law’s five-year term. John Porcari, a transport official in both the Biden and Obama administrations, draws a distinction with stimulus spending in 2009 during the global financial crisis. “The primary criterion then was getting people back to work. But with the infrastructure law, the primary criterion is the projects. We’re replacing what our parents and grandparents built and paid for,” he says. Continued here � � � � � � Opinion | Big Tech's Bitter Battle With the Free Press -     Ms. Angwin is a contributing Opinion writer and an investigative journalist. A bitter battle is taking place between Big Tech and the free press over how to share in the income that news content generates for technology giants. The future of our news ecosystem, a linchpin of democracy, depends on the outcome. Last week, after months of hardball negotiations, Google and the Canadian government agreed on a deal that would require the company to pay Canadian news outlets about $73.5 million a year. Canadians are no longer facing the threat that Google would remove all news content from its search results. Continued here

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