By Walt Hickey

All Smiles

Horror flick Smile 2 brought in $23 million domestically and the same amount overseas to open to No. 1 at the cinema this weekend, beating out rival horror movie Terrifier 3, which made $9 million in its second weekend. That’s still a great result for Terrifier, which has made $36 million domestically on a paltry $2 million budget. There is also a funny rumor going around that one reason for the sustained box office performance of Dreamwork’s Wild Robot animated movie — which is already out on streaming on demand — is that teenagers are buying tickets to the movie and then sneaking into Terrifier, which is unrated.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Hurricane

In a surprise to meteorologists, a little hurricane developed on Saturday off the coast of Turks and Caicos, and has proceeded to hit Cuba. It’s only barely a hurricane — hurricane-force winds extend just 5 miles from the storm’s center — and while it isn’t the smallest-ever tropical cyclone, it’s still very close. Its winds were not even detectable by satellite, and it only got bumped up to hurricane status thanks to a last-minute Air Force Hurricane Hunter flight, which found sustained winds of 85 miles per hour in a small area, just above the threshold for a hurricane.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica

Long Beach

The Port of Long Beach in California just logged its busiest-ever September, moving 829,499 20-foot equivalent units, narrowly beating out the previous record by a mere 70 cans. Imports were up 2 percent, while exports were down 12.8 percent. August was a huge month for Long Beach, the busiest in its 113-year history, with 913,873 TEUs moving through the port. Lots of that was the result of retailers rushing their goods through in an attempt to avoid an East Coast ports strike and ahead of potentially catastrophic tariff hikes next year.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Laos

The area of forests are down 14 percent in Laos from 2002 to 2023, driven by illegal logging and large-scale agriculture. In 2023 alone, 137,000 hectares of forests in Laos were cut down. Part of this is driven by cassava, a hugely profitable agricultural product, but lots of it is due to a huge increase in durian farms rising to satisfy demand from China for the fruit. China’s responsible for buying up 95 percent of all global durian exports, and bought $6.7 billion worth of the fruit last year. That in and of itself is a side effect of rampant demand for the fruit, as those imports are 12 times what they were in 2017.

Zhaoyin Feng and Beimeng Fu, Nikkei Asia

Insurance

Auto insurance prices were up 16.3 percent in September compared to the same month last year, which is down from the 22.6 percent higher seen in April but still very high. About to make that worse is a series of bad storms, Helene and Milton, which will cost $3 billion to $5 billion in auto losses, or about 10 percent of all the insured damage. Auto insurance usually does cover floods — which home insurance tends to treats as a separate policy — so the flooding is bad news for the overall auto insurance business. In Florida alone, 80,000 auto insurance claims have been filed since the storms.

Jean Eaglesham, The Wall Street Journal

Operations Research

It’s a boom time for operations research and logistics degrees, as the pandemic supply chain disruptions highlighted the crucial need for — and solid career stability of — people who specialize in supply chains. They’re needed everywhere from FedEx and Amazon to all sorts of unexpected places. Heck, there are people who look at the U.S. Navy and see not a bunch of boats but simply a 470-vector optimization matrix, and essentially the consensus is that we need more of those people. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts 23 percent growth in operations research analysts from 2021 to 2031, and already the number of supply chain management degrees grew 75 percent from 2012 to 2020. The estimated market size of the logistics business is expected to hit $21.91 trillion by 2033, triple the level of last year.

Alexandra Frost, Sherwood News

Goggles

The United States Army has indicated to Microsoft that they’re gonna need to knock down the price for its futuristic goggles south of the current projected price of $80,000 if they want them to be bought in any reasonable amount. The Army is planning to buy as many as 121,000 devices, called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), and they’re running them through a gauntlet of tests leading up to an exercise next April to June, when they’ll make the final call. That is, unless the high cost of the goggles scuttles the plan altogether; still, Microsoft is looking at making up to $21.9 billion over the next decade.

Anthony Capaccio, Bloomberg

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