By Walt Hickey

Akiya

Urbanization, declining birth rates and the depopulation of the countryside in Japan have led to the phenomenon of akiya, or long-abandoned homes. A new report from an agency trying to rein in the problem found that the number of abandoned homes not for sale or rent increased by 360,000 from 2018 to 2023, and today stands at 3.85 million units, of which 70 percent are detached, single-family homes. The homes can drag down property values of surrounding homeowners, which compounds the problem; overall, those homes that have become abandoned over the past five years caused the value of neighboring homes to decline by 3.9 trillion yen ($24.7 billion) in the aggregate.

Daisuke Hori, Nikkei Asia

Ivory

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has indicted the owners of a Great Neck-based online auction business, saying that they sold an undercover cop almost $40,000 in illegal ivory products. According to the indictments, an undercover lieutenant from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation bought three items — a $4,800 ivory rosary bead, three ivory figurines for $2,640, and a carved elephant tusk for $31,950 — across three different transactions. “Ivory” was not explicitly mentioned in the listing of the first buy, according to prosecutors, but once the first payment cleared the items were then referred to as ivory. Listen, it’s a freaking tusk; it’s kind of hard to play dumb on that one at that point.

Torey Akers, The Art Newspaper

Experience

A new analysis from Forrester looked at consumer perception of 223 brands and found that valuations of customer experience have across the board tanked since a peak in 2021. The average score was 69.3 out of 100, which is the lowest since the current methodology was adopted in 2016 and a sharp decline from the value of 72 in 2021. Hey, it turns out when you try to make everyone talk to an inept chatbot and listen to a 50-option phone tree before sorting them to an agent, maybe the perception of customer service is going to decline a smidge.

Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal

Wave Pool

The hottest new trend is constructing large wave pools in the middle of deserts, with developers spending tens of millions to build the large pools in places like Arizona and California. Of 162 surf pools built or announced, 54 are in areas with high or extreme water stress. The water stress is a real thing — one 14-acre wave pool in Lemoore, California, can lose up to 250,000 gallons of water per day to evaporation alone — and a proposed surf park that could hold 7 million gallons would still use 24 million gallons per year due to water loss. A 20-acre recreational lake, 3.8 acres of which are a surf pool, would use 51 million gallons per year according to Riverside County. In the Coachella Valley, those in favor argue that building a wave pool in the desert is still somehow less water intensive than a golf course, the average one using 285 million gallons per year per course.

Eileen Guo, MIT Technology Review

Pass Through

The U.S. Treasury has announced plans to rein in partnership basis shifting, a tax strategy where a business or person can move assets around related parties to avoid taxes. As it stands, filings for the large pass-through businesses that are common for the strategy increased from 174,100 in 2010 to 297,400 in 2019. Over that period, the audit rate has collapsed, from 3.8 percent to 0.1 percent. That leaves lots of room for chicanery, and the IRS estimates that by investigating those businesses more thoroughly, they’ll be better able to find bad actors and incentivize people to more accurately report their income. The IRS plans to audit companies with over $250 million in assets at a rate of 22.6 percent in 2026, up from 8.8 percent in tax year 2019.

Josh Boak and Fatima Hussein, The Associated Press

Witness Me

Furiosa, the Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth movie directed by George Miller that serves as a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, received a massive portion of its budget from the Australian government. Screen NSW, which supports film production in New South Wales, at minimum kicked in AU$50 million of the AU$333.2 million production budget, and the Australian government’s producer offset program also likely provided AU$133 million. I mean, think about it, Australia’s got to compete; Miller could have just as easily shot it in Wales, which as we all know may be older and more northern than New South Wales, but they’ve got a great tax credit program. Furiosa was a bit of a miss at the box office, which makes sense given that it is a sober-minded documentary film about Australian politics, I assume.

Amanda Lotz, Nikkei Asia

Shiny and Chrome

Stellantis, the company behind Dodge, Jeep and Ram, will be doing away with chrome on all new models of its vehicles, an end to a longstanding American vehicle aesthetic. The issue is that hexavalent chromium, the stuff that makes chrome plating, is an aggressive carcinogen, 500 times as toxic as diesel exhaust, and a major danger to the workers who work with it during the electro-plating process and the environments and facilities that work happens in. While the industry has substantially reduced air emissions of hexavalent chromium, it’s still gnarly stuff, and Stellantis is getting out of it.

Peter Valdes-Dapena, CNN

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