⚽ The half empty World Cup

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👋 Good morning. The biggest divide in baseball might not be on the field during a Red Sox vs. Yankees game — it’s on the payroll. MLB is the only major US league without a salary cap, and a record 11 teams opened this season with $200m+ payrolls, while the 10 lowest-spending teams have increased payrolls by an average of just 1.7% annually since 2019. The league’s labor deal expires at the end of this season, so a debate on whether to level the playing field is coming. Before you start feeling bad for the little guys — know that the average MLB salary hit $5.34m this year.

NEWS FLASH

💧 Cooling things down: Climate tech startup Enaxiom is tackling one of the biggest environmental concerns about AI data centers: water use. The Sydney-based startup’s patented system uses non-drinkable water — including wastewater — to cool data center servers and recovers and reuses the water. The company is betting that water will be the ultimate constraint for AI’s expansion, and has raised $2.7m so far to deploy its Hydrocool system commercially.

📏 End of an era: In 1950, New Britain, Connecticut, was home to Stanley Black & Decker’s sprawling manufacturing complex, employing ~5k people. Now, the company will close its last remaining plant in the area on May 18. It made single-sided tape measures, which B&D claims have fallen out of favor, despite some contractors' statements to the contrary, per The Wall Street Journal, and employee suspicions that it just wants to cut costs by offshoring manufacturing to another country. It makes its double-sided measures in Thailand.

🍻 No hangovers: George Clooney, Rande Gerber, and Mike Meldman sold their tequila brand, Casamigos, in a $1B deal to Diageo. Now, the nonalcoholic beer brand they launched in March, Crazy Mountain, has raised $15m. As consumers drink less alcohol, NA brews have seemingly become popular among celeb founders: Tom Holland founded Bero, Charlie Sheen founded Wild AF Brewing, and John Mulaney partnered with Years.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

Oof: Pennsylvania is suing Character.AI, claiming a bot named Emilie told a state investigator it was a licensed psychiatrist, even fabricating a medical license number. Character.AI declined to comment.
Call me, maybe: Tin Can Untechnologies Inc., maker of the $100 landline phone for kids, announced Communities, a bulk order program for schools, sports teams, and neighborhoods, as parents and organizations increasingly look for low-tech options.
Open sesame: Aliro, a smart lock standard that lets any smartphone (iPhone, Android, etc.) work with any lock, has launched three years after it was announced. Over 220 companies, including Apple and Google, worked on the project.
Kids these days: Children are finding interesting workarounds for online age verification checks, used in half of all US states and the UK, including drawing mustaches onto their faces, according to a survey from Internet Matters.

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

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The main takeaway: AI is helping people spend more time on high-value work.

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THE BIG IDEA

A soccer player in a green uniform intercepts a flaming soccer ball.

Will the World Cup be an economic bust?

When cities host major sporting events, the economic projections are typically as rosy as they are dubious. North America’s World Cup, which runs from June 11 to July 19, is no exception.

Altogether, FIFA has estimated $30.5B in US economic output. Host cities like Los Angeles are counting on World Cup visitors to spend $594m, more than it claimed as a recent Super Bowl host. Kansas City, Missouri, has predicted 650k tourists — or ~135k more than the city’s population.

This week, the rose-colored glasses came off, courtesy of a depressing hotel survey from the American Hotel & Lodging Association.

The big takeaway?

Around 80% of hotelier respondents across the US’s 11 host cities said their occupancy rates for June and July are lower than anticipated.

It gets even worse in Boston, Seattle, Kansas City, San Francisco, and Philly: Their hotel rates are tracking lower than a normal June or July without a supposed World Cup tourist boom.

The report follows other concerning signs about sluggish demand:

Most host cities were showing Airbnb occupancy rates below 50% as of May 1.
Flight data indicates average, or worse, summer bookings compared to years past in several host cities.

The hotel owners are blaming a few main culprits

The first is FIFA. The organization pre-booked and then canceled thousands of hotel rooms in the US, screwing up supply. Another is the White House, which is requiring some foreign visitors to put up a $15k bond to be a World Cup tourist.

And then there’s the cost of literally everything. Face-value nosebleeds for opening round games start at ~$140 and rise to above $1k depending on the match. In 1994, opening round nosebleeds were $25 (~$56 today), and the average ticket cost was $58 (~$131 today).

New Jersey Transit is charging $150 just to take the train from Penn Station to MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands.

An overhyped World Cup might not be a huge deal…

… if North American host cities weren’t estimated to have spent ~$1.8B on preparations.

Small businesses have invested, too, expecting more shoppers, more people buying coffees and sandwiches and pizzas. Instead they might find out what economists have warned about big events for years: that you shouldn’t count on a massive tourist windfall just because a giant sports organization says so.

🔗

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Making lemonade: Here’s how a HubSpot YouTube team turned a traffic crash into 22% more views.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

How many fewer words, on average, people are speaking aloud per day each year, according to a recent study that analyzed 2k recordings of people talking between 2005 and 2019. While the study doesn’t identify a cause for the decline, researchers noted the timeframe coincides with the rise of digital communications, like email, social media, and texting, and suggest it could signal the loss of IRL connection and community.

And although your motor mouth might drive others crazy, scientists have found that talking someone’s ear off can actually be good for your mental health (if no one else’s).

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven debuted his ninth and final symphony in Vienna.

🍴 That’s interesting: How eating may boost your immune system.

🗞️ Newsletter: The Psychology of Marketing bridges the gap between Nobel Prize-winning psychology and effective marketing.

🦘 Game: A spiraling platformer. Start by using the space bar and arrow keys.

🐈 Aww: Get a cat for your cat.

SHOWER THOUGHT

I wish I could just eat all of the food in my fridge at once, then not eat for two months like a snake. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Mark Dent, and Singdhi Sokpo.

Editing by: Sara "Cup runneth over" Friedman.

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⚽ A FIFA flop?