1. Portugal made it illegal for your boss to text you outside of work hours if you do your job remotely.
Boss: hey you left your keys at the off- Me:
In Portugal, employers can now be fined for contacting workers outside of their usual working hours. Additionally, companies with remote workers are now required to pay for WFH expenses like electricity and internet. According to Business Insider, these new regulations are part of a plan to attract more remote workers to the country.
BRB, downloading Duolingo so I can try to learn Portuguese for a couple of days until I forget.
2. Consumer prices in October were up 6.2% over last year, the biggest jump we've seen since 1990.
Food prices continue their march upward. Latest data from @BLS_gov for October was just released, showing food at home prices up 5.4% compared to last year; up 1% compared to previous month. Overall food prices up 9.3% since start of pandemic
Prices are up for pretty much everything, including energy, groceries, and cars, and unfortunately they are expected to continue to rise. While there are some things you can do to cut your spending, AP reports that these price increases are affecting lower-income people the most and that food banks are having a tough time serving everyone who needs to use them.
If you have the means, consider checking in with your local food bank this weekend to see what they need, and give what you can.
3. Grimes' ex sold about $5 billion in Tesla stock, seemingly because a Twitter poll told him to.
Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?
According to reporting by CNBC, Elon Musk had already planned to sell a portion of these shares anyway before the Twitter poll, to satisfy tax obligations. He still has 166 million shares in the electric car company, but after the sale, stock prices went down by 15%. This lowered Musk's net worth by about $50 billion, but according to Futurism, he's still the richest man in the world. Cool, totally normal and cool.
No word yet on whether the billionaire plans to use the proceeds of this sale to end world hunger, which the director of the UN's food scarcity organization recently suggested he could do with just 2% of his wealth (~$6 billion).
4. It's open enrollment season, so we have some pro tips for choosing a health plan.
Open enrollment = me calling my parents to figure out what insurance plan I need😂
If you're planning to get health insurance for 2022 on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) exchange at Healthcare.gov, open enrollment is up and running from Nov. 1, 2021 to Jan. 15, 2022. If you don't get coverage during this time, you won't be able to select or change plans again until next year (unless you have a qualifying life event).
Honestly, health insurance is so confusing, and personally, I can't believe that America is still the only developed country without universal healthcare. But if you ever get sick or injured, it's still so much better to have health insurance than not. So, if you could use a little refresher on what the heck a "deductible" is, we got you.
6. Sales of pregnancy tests are up, which could signal a "millennial baby boom" in the near future.
7. And there was controversy around a billionaire's plans for a 4,000-person windowless dorm.
possible floor plan for UCSB’s new proposed walled city- I mean dorm 8 to a room, almost no windows, 4500 students, 2 building exits. forget a fire code, this has to break the Geneva conventions or something https://t.co/deu5pBQu7R
The building was designed for UC Santa Barbara by Charlie Munger, a 97-year-old billionaire and friend of Warren Buffet. Like George Costanza, he is not a trained architect — but he did gift UCSB $200 million for the dorm under the condition that he gets total control over the design. About 94% of the bedrooms will have no windows, and there will be one (1!) toilet for every eight students. Additionally, the building will only have two exits.
An actual architect on the school's review board has resigned over the plans, calling them "unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent, and a human being."
8. Finally, office buildings around the United States are transforming into apartment buildings.
Hey, look at us. We made it through another week. Who would've thought?
