France is on fire. It started with teachers and students protesting packed classrooms, unfilled teaching jobs and crumbling schools, and it turned into more than 2,300 arrests and about a thousand police injured in a single day. Energy prices there are up 21% in a year. Sound familiar?

Here at home, the national debt just passed $40 trillion, and the dollar has lost 23% of its value since 2020. Trump struck a deal with Putin for Russian diesel, Ukraine reportedly ran out of Patriot interceptors, and Finland is buying a million landmines.

Then there's Wall Street. Hedge funds just made their biggest cut to tech in nearly a decade, OpenAI's revenue came in about $20 billion short of what was floating around, and the 10 biggest companies now make up about 43% of the S&P 500. At the peak of the dot-com bubble, that number was 26%.

Eric's back on the news and asking if anyone's paying attention.

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One man has put more than a quarter of a billion dollars into this election since July. Crypto and AI super PACs are sitting on nine-figure war chests aimed at Congress and state houses. And in Festus, Missouri, a town of about 12,000, the city council approved a $6 billion data center without telling the public who would run it. Voters fired every incumbent on the ballot.

Gas went from $2.81 in January to over $4.30. AAA says this is the first October on record with the national average above $4. Fuel oil is up 75% just as heating season kicks in, and AI stocks like CoreWeave dropped more than 20% in a single week.

Also: what oligarchy and technocracy actually mean, Elon Musk's grandfather's arrest for joining Technocracy Inc. in 1940, the four steps a data center takes to land in your town before you ever hear about it, and why St. Charles, Peculiar and Jefferson County residents are pushing back.

Eric's back on the news and following the money.

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Trump told a rally crowd "let them take out Los Angeles, let them take out San Diego." California leaders lost it, and the White House says he was misunderstood. Meanwhile, Sam Altman says the good of AI will outweigh the bad, while businesses keep paying more for AI tools and seeing less in return.

Paramount officially closed its takeover of Warner Bros. HBO, CNN, DC, Harry Potter and around 15,000 films now live under one roof. And Reddit is convinced the new season of American Horror Story was written by ChatGPT.

Also, cocoa dropped from $10,000 a ton to $3,000, but candy prices only fell 8% and Lindt actually raised theirs. New York declared a statewide measles emergency. And one Young and the Restless star has been on the show for 46 years and over 4,400 episodes, so Eric did the salary math.

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