Still reeling from Helene, Florida is scrambling to clear debris and get residents to safety before it’s again plunged into flooding and harsh winds.

Hurricane Milton is coming. The second natural disaster to hit the Southeast in two weeks is expected to make landfall as a Category 3 as early as tomorrow night. It will likely deal its worst destruction to coastal communities, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he can’t see “any scenario where we don’t have major impacts.” The greater Tampa Bay area—where most of the 20 deaths caused by Helene in the state occurred—is in Milton’s path and could get up to 12-foot storm surges.

To prepare, Florida is attempting its largest evacuation in years. The National Guard will have 8,000 troops on the ground, per DeSantis. President Joe Biden declared a state of emergency in Florida yesterday, which primed FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security to send federal disaster relief. Meanwhile, Floridians and soldiers are racing to clean up detritus from Helene before it can get swept up and cause more harm.

The housing market is hurting

Milton and Helene are compounding another problem: People aren’t migrating to Florida like they used to. With Tampa’s housing supply up 58% and demand down 10% in August, half of the area’s for-sale listings had gotten price cuts as of a month ago, according to the analytics firm Parcl Labs.

Zoom in: One homeowner told the Wall Street Journal he’s been trying to sell his ~$580,000 suburban Tampa house for eight months, but he hasn’t even received open house visitors.

Zoom out: Prospective buyers are getting priced out. Home and flood insurance rates in Florida have skyrocketed as much as 400% over the past five years, and those premiums will likely only get worse after this year’s hurricane season. Disaster models are projecting an average of $35 billion in damages from Hurricane Milton, according to Enki Research.—ML

Google must let Android users download apps outside its store, judge rules. In an injunction handed down yesterday that stems from Fortnite-maker Epic Games’s victory in its antitrust lawsuit against Google, a California federal judge said the search giant must make it easier for third-party developers to have their own app stores on Android devices. Google will have to allow alternatives to its Google Play store onto the devices and won’t be allowed to pay other companies not to compete with its store or to launch apps on its store first. The legal setback comes as Google faces a second suit from Epic and antitrust scrutiny from the DOJ.

Activist investor takes $1 billion stake in Pfizer. The firm Starboard Value has amassed a stake in the pharma giant, which has struggled after reaching new heights during the pandemic, in hopes of turning the company around. It’s reportedly reached out to former Pfizer CEO Ian Read and former finance chief Frank D’Amelio to help right the Big Pharma ship. Starboard thinks the current CEO has lost the company’s former focus on keeping costs down and investing in new drugs. Pfizer’s shares cost roughly half what they did at their 2021 high.

Trump would add more to the national debt than Harris, study finds. Crunching the numbers for both candidates’ policy proposals, the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget found that they’d increase the national debt—but that Donald Trump’s plans would balloon the deficit twice as much as Kamala Harris’s. If Trump is able to put his policies into action, it would add $7.5 trillion to the nation’s debt, while Harris’s would only raise it by ~$3.5 trillion, the group’s analysis determined. But it’s worth noting that not all proposals are likely to become reality, and the group itself acknowledged that its estimates come with “a high degree of uncertainty” because campaigns aren’t always specific.—AR

The latest SCOTUS term kicked off yesterday, and today, the court will hear a challenge to rules on so-called ghost guns, or untraceable firearms. The case could have major consequences for public safety.

Between 2018 and 2022, the number of ghost guns—made from 3D printers or at-home kits—recovered at crime scenes jumped from 3,960 to 25,785.

• In reaction to the spike, the Bureau of Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives began requiring vendors that sell ghost gun kits to treat them like full firearms with serial numbers and background checks.
• After the rules took effect, the number of ghost guns recovered at crime scenes went down in several cities, including Baltimore and Chicago. Many local officials credit the stricter regulations.

But…the NRA says that ghost guns don’t meet the definition of a “firearm” set out in the Gun Control Act of 1968 and that the Biden administration overstepped. It’s a similar argument to the one the gun rights group made that convinced SCOTUS to strike down a federal ban on bump stocks in a June ruling.

Big picture: Gun control advocates and local governments worry that reversing the restrictions could undo the progress made in reducing ghost gun crime, spurring new companies to join the industry. Polymer80, which was the US’ largest manufacturer and online seller of ghost gun components, went out of business in the wake of the 2022 regulations.—CC

Kamala Harris’s weeklong media tour began when Call Her Daddy, the Alex Cooper-hosted podcast with more than 5 million downloads per week, dropped a 40-minute conversation with the Democratic presidential candidate on Sunday that covered reproductive rights, sexual abuse, and debt.

Both Harris and Republican rival Donald Trump apparently see podcasts as a battleground for undecided voters in a tight race. While Harris visited the most popular podcast among women ages 18 to 24, Trump is trying to bro his base:

• The former president has focused on shows with younger, male-dominated audiences.
• Trump has sat down with comedian Theo Von, influencer/wrestler Logan Paul, and computer scientist Lex Fridman, who are all part of the “manosphere” of podcasts. He also participated in a glitch-filled interview with Elon Musk using X’s audio-streaming feature, Spaces, in August.

Democratizing media? Some CHD listeners were upset with the politics-focused episode or wanted Cooper to cover other topics with Harris, while some in traditional news circles aren’t thrilled about candidates favoring the media that can be consumed while at the gym or running errands. But Saifuddin Ahmed, a communications professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, told Business Insider that podcasts are a fruitful way to reach “politically disinterested audiences.”—DL

A few years ago, predicting a recession felt a lot like guessing whether it was going to rain in the rainforest: In October 2022, Bloomberg economists predicted a 100% chance of a recession coming in the following 12 months. But it didn’t. And yesterday, Goldman Sachs lowered its estimation of the odds of the economy tipping into a recession in the next year to 15%. The bank’s chief economist described that number as the “unconditional long-term average”—which in nonbanker-speak means there’s no more chance of the economy tanking now than in any other normal conditions.

Goldman’s prognosticators had already lowered their prediction several times recently, but September’s blockbuster jobs report finally convinced them that we’re not living in interesting times.—AR