By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Reviews

The FTC finalized the nature of its crackdown on fake online reviews, and will put a maximum civil penalty of up to $51,744 per violation on fake reviews. The goal is to pursue the forces that seek to persuade algorithms to favor products regardless of their actual quality by keying into how reliant these algorithms are on reviews they trust implicitly. The FTC thus bans fake consumer reviews by anyone who didn’t have any actual experience with the product, and also goes so far as to ban incentivized positive or negative reviews.

Jon Keegan, Sherwood News

Ports

Retailers and importers are frantically trying to get their wares into ports and unloaded ahead of September 30, when a union contract covering 45,000 dockworkers on the East Coast and Gulf of Mexico will expire. The International Longshoremen’s Association has vowed a strike if a contract is not met, and even the shortest possible strike would have wide-ranging ramifications for the industry. A one-day strike could result in four to six days to clear the backlog, and a two-week strike would mean ports won’t return to normal until at least 2025. As such, the scramble to get containers off boats and on trucks is real, with the off-contract spot market for a 40-foot container shipped from Asia to the East Coast hitting $10,000 in July, up from $2,100 in April. The window is almost closed: If there is a strike, a box that leaves China next week might be sitting on a boat for quite some time.

Reuters

Pac-12

The dissolution of the Pac-12 conference has scattered its constituent teams to the wind, sending Stanford to the ACC, Washington to the Big Ten, and so on. One issue? Some of these college football teams have awful travel schedules. Of every power conference team’s season from 1993 to 2024, five of the top eight highest-mileage seasons will be this year, with UCLA (now in the Big Ten) set to travel 19,618 miles this season, California (in the ACC) traveling 19,226 miles, Stanford traveling 14,021 miles, Southern California 13,951 miles and Washington 13,725 miles. Still, that’s nothing like Hawaii, which is in the MWC, a non-power conference, but nevertheless is set to travel 29,777 miles this year.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Body Care

From July 2023 to July 2024, sales of body care routines — a newer, growing form of skin care where users don’t just put expensive goop on their face, but get to buy other, different expensive goops for other parts of the body — were up 21 percent, with sales hitting $1.5 billion over the period. Sales of fragrant body mists are up 149 percent, body oil sales are up 25 percent, and at Sephora five of the top 10 bestselling products are from Sol de Janeiro, which sells moisturizers, bronzing oils and gels for firmer skin and has seen sales up 158 percent from April 2023 to March 2024.

Chavie Lieber, The Wall Street Journal

Crunchyroll

Sony’s anime streaming service, Crunchyroll, is making a major play in India, which it expects to be a substantial market for the increasingly popular medium. They now offer 800 anime shows in India, adding 25 to 40 per quarter, and have been investing in new, localized dubs to try to make inroads with the Indian audience. So far they’ve dubbed 80 shows in Hindi, Telugu and Tamil, and those dubbed titles contributed 65 percent of total viewership in the country. India’s market for anime is projected to beat $5 billion by 2032.

Ananya Bhattacharya, Rest of World

Age Gap

The average age gap between American husbands and wives is down to 2.2 years apart, down from men being on average 2.4 years older than their spouse in 2000, and down from an average of 4.9 years in 1880. Today, the proportion of straight married couples where the spouses are about the same age is for the first time an outright majority, with 51 percent of couples in 2022 roughly the same age, 40 percent with a husband three or more years older, and 10 percent with a wife three or more years older.

Richard Fry, Pew Research Center

They’ll Make It Anywhere

A new study published in Biological Invasions tracks the ascent of the so-called ManhattAnt, which first appeared in New York City in 2011. The specific species was later identified as Lasius emarginatus, it’s native to Europe, and weirdly they are not even especially dominant in any part of Europe. They have taken over in Manhattan and are expanding their territory at a rate of about a mile per year, which has researchers slightly worried that they could expand across the East Coast, disrupting local ecosystems in the process.

Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR

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