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One of the many mysteries surrounding today’s housing market in the United States is why existing homes are now more expensive than new ones. Traditionally, it’s the other way around. A look at the June housing numbers showed that the medium sale price for an existing home was $441,500, while new ones sold for $401,800, according to Forbes. Do that math and that means brand-new homes were 9% cheaper, than old, or “existing” onesa new record. According to U.S. Census Bureau data, the medium price for a new home sold in July 2025 was 0.8% below June 2025 prices, and 5.9 percent from July 2024. So, not only are new builds less expensive, they are now selling at a sharp discount. That’s especially true in some of the weakest markets, where new construction prices are falling the fastest. (For example, in Little Rock, Arkansas, the $321,520 median listing price was down 15.6% from a year ago; in Austin, Texas, it’s down 8.5%); Wichita, Kansas, it’s down 7.9%; and in Jacksonville and Cape Coral, Florida prices are down 7.8% and 7.4% respectfully.) Why are new homes cheaper than old homes? There are a few other reasons for the trend. “The affordability difference goes beyond sticker price, too, as many builders are offering incentives like cash at closing or reduced mortgage rates that make a major difference in upfront costs and monthly payments,” Realtor.com senior economist Joel Berner explained. New homes are also relatively cheaper now because, in an effort to keep costs down, builders are creating new homes with smaller floor plans. And geography plays a role, too, with new home builds more often located in lower-priced markets. And that brings us to the sellers, themselves, who have low or no mortgages thanks, in part, to rate drops during COVID-19. With little to no incentive to move, home owners are more likely to stay put, and reject an offer to sell, rather than cut prices. Data shows nearly 40% of U.S. owner-occupied housing units in 2023 were mortgage-free, marking a new high. Factor in with that a huge inventory of unsold new-builds, especially in softer markets like the Sun Belt, and a clearer picture begins to emerge.
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Three years ago, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had a scientific breakthrough: as they fired lasers at a tiny pellet of fuel, they achieved fusion ignition for the first time, a key step in making fusionclean, safe, abundant nuclear powerpossible. Now, a new startup called Inertia is spinning off to commercialize the lab’s approach and aim for the end goalaffordable clean energy that could be available 24/7. Andrea Kritcher, the fusion energy pioneer behind the work at Livermore Labs, is founding the company along with Mike Dunne, a Stanford professor focused on fusion power plant design, and tech entrepreneur Jeff Lawson. Lawson previously cofounded Twilio, a cloud communications platform, and grew it to a company with $4 billion a year in revenue, but left last year after pressure from activist investors. As he considered starting something new, he knew that he no longer wanted to work on software. (In a very different side project, he also bought The Onion and brought back its print edition.) Then he happened to meet Kritcher, and saw the opportunity to work on something transformative. “There are a lot of startups out there pursuing fusion with a number of different methods,” Lawson says. “But none of them were really basing their work on Livermore and just taking the most direct possible path, from what has now been working at Livermore to a working power plant design.” The exterior of the target chamber of LLNLs National Ignition Facility. [Photo: LNLL] The lab’s initial breakthrough in 2022 was an early but historic step. In the experiment, researchers pointed 192 powerful lasers at a can roughly the size of a pencil eraser that contained a tiny capsule made of fusion fuel. The laser beams entered the end of the can and created a 3 million-degree oven, heating up the pellet and exploding it. “You get to these extreme starlight conditionsminiature stars inside of the can for a brief second in time,” Kritcher says. The energy output from fusion reactions was larger than the energy input from the lasers. That’s the definition of ignitionand the point of the experiment and others that followed it at the lab. But the lasers still used an enormous amount of grid power. The next step is showing that it’s possible for the system to produce more energy. The interior of a LNLL target chamber during maintenance. [Photo: LNLL] That should be feasible. “The lasers are inefficientbased on very old technology,” says Kritcher. The lasers were also much smaller than they would need to be in a power plant. The experiment “was never meant to generate more energy than we pull from the wall,” she says. Now, the team will adapt modern, much more powerful laser tech. “Number one, we have to build the world’s most energetic lasera giant laser that is far more energetic and far more powerful than what they have at [the national lab], but also is actually physically much smaller,” Lawson says. The technical risk is low, he argues, and the challenge is more about ramping up manufacturing of parts that are already possible to make. A target housing similar to the type used in the 2022 test. [Photo: LNLL] The tiny fuel “targets” in the system also need to be manufactured. The prototypes have been proven, Lawson says, and will now need to be mass produced in factories. The final step will be building a power plant. The startup aims to have early design proofs for the target and lasers in 18 months. In three to four years, it expects to have scaled-down versions of the assembly line for both key parts. They believe that a working plant could be possible in around 10 years, and a fully scaled-up plantproducing 1.5 gigawatts of power, enough for a medium-sized citycould be possible in 12 years. Other companies are taking different approaches. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, for example, which recently signed a deal with Google to provide future power to data centers and has raised nearly $3 billion to date, uses powerful magnets. But Inertia has the advantage of proof of ignition in the lab. “Every approach to fusion has two things they primarily have to do,” Lawson says. “Number one, they have to build some really big, powerful driver to impart all this energy on the fuel. For CFS, it’s a magnet. For us, it’s a laser. The second thing they have to do is get the plasma physics of ignition to work, meaning the plasma actually does what you want it to do, remains confined. And when you reach these temperatures and pressures that are so extreme that you get fusion, you’re able to control it. Those are two very hard problems. The benefit of working from what Livermore has accomplished is the second one is now proven. That’s really, really valuable. That’s theunbounded basic science problem, and that’s the one that the US government has spent billions of dollars and 60 years to prove.” In a new agreement, Kritcher will continue working for the national lab while the startup grows in a nearby facility. The company has licensed nearly 200 patents from the lab related to reaching fusion ignition. A colorized image of a target shot. [Photo: LNLL] “This is the first of a kind of agreement to allow a national lab employee to also be an entrepreneur in their area of expertise,” says Lawson. “The labs have been around since basically post-war, and there’s been probably hundreds of thousands of employees, and this is the first time it’s ever happened.” It’s possible because of the CHIPS Act, which encourages national labs to let employees pursue this type of public-private partnership. Though the lab continues to do related scientific research, its purpose was never to build a commercial power plant. The startup could make that possible. It will also speed up research that was already underway; in the national lab, for example, it was only possible to run experiments a few times a year to optimize the energy output. Being able to quickly iterate through design changes “will be a game changer,” Kritcher says. The startup also plans to use AI to help dramatically speed up the design process. The timeline is obviously very different from a software company. “For the next decade, the company is not going to be one where the story is told of revenue,” Lawson says. “It’s going to be told in terms of engineering, progress, and retirement of risks that stand between us and energy going on the grid. So you have a different set of milestones and a different way of measuring your progress.” The stakes are also higher. “This is the holy grail of energy,” he says. “We’ve known that for 75 years. The only question has always been, is it possible? The question’s never been, is this a good form of energy? Everyone knows it is. The only question has been: Are we able to build the technology? And I think that we are very close.”
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E-Commerce
Google has spent the last decade and a half redefining its engineering culture as a design-focused company. But a recent scene that played out in court offered a sad rebuke of the narrativeouting Google as either entirely incompetent at design or manipulating in its practice. The company has been facing a federal jury this week in California, around a class action suit that claims between 2016 and 2024, Google saved and used “pseudonymous” information about its users without consent. Despite customers opting out of data collection on Google services, the suit alleges that Google still accessed their data collected via third party apps. How? Google tapped the data tracked by its own analytics software incorporated inside of these apps. (Google did not respond to a request for comment by time of publication.) Explained like that, it seems almost obvious that Google could be privy to data. But of course, most users have no idea what analytics software their apps are using, and furthermore, plaintiffs argue that 98 million people opted out of Google having their third party data collected. They believed they were covered, even if there were some other hidden terms and conditions offered by individual apps. Defending bad behavior As part of its defense, Google brought in an expert witnessGeorge Washington University professor Donna Hoffmanto argue their case. According to Law360, Google used a technique of progressive disclosure so that the most important disclosures were aired to users first. She also stated that Google employed good UI design to avoid cognitive overload. Progressive disclosure isn’t an inherently deceptive UX practicedone right, and the technique can reveal more of a service or app’s capabilities in respect to someone’s attention span. You learn more about it, bit by bit, over time. Video games are designed around the very principle. You learn how Mario jumps before you learn how he flies. Hoffman said that it was a technique Google used to satisfy its very different styles users, who interact with legalese in different ways, who Google dubs “skippers, skimmers and readers.” But Google leveraging progressive disclosure in this instance is bogusand I offer that analysis as a design expert myself (who is not being financially compensated as an expert witness). There is nothing in terms of design challenges stopping Google from offering a single switch right on their homepage for a user to opt out of every type of potential tracking from Google forever. That would not overload anyones cognition, especially compared to the strange maze of settings and explainer pages that Google uses to index matters of privacy. Plaintiffs even presented evidence that employees inside Google were skeptical that theyd provided proper privacy disclosures to users. [Screenshot: Apple] Google is hardly the only bad actor in this space. Apple created the privacy dystopia we live in as much as any other peer. To this day, it offers a terrible UX option to iPhone users, who must allow or ask app not to track them in a popuprather than just denying the request on their customers behalf. Every time, I worry my thumb will slip and hit the wrong choice, when the anti-consumer option shouldn’t even be presented to me in the first placelet alone from a company that claims to be privacy-first. If Google loses this case, the payout to consumers could be quite large. Plaintiffs are placing the value of the data at $3 per month. And with 173 million affected customers, that would reach up to $29 billion in compensatory damages. As companies go even deeper into our lives, offering AI software a direct firehose of our personal data, disclosures around privacy are only going to grow murkier and more complex. Even if plaintiffs win this trial, our privacy feels like a losing battle.
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