Business
How Costco’s Clothing Business Became Bigger Than Abercrombie And Gap. Costco has traffic and scale. It has bargaining power over suppliers. The more consumers are familiar with and accepting towards private labels, the stronger the tailwind is for retailers like Costco. If consumers are already members and don’t find any issuers wearing jeans or shirts from Costco, what’s the reason for going to other clothing national brands like Gap? That’s what they have to deal with here. Other brands have to find a way to convince shoppers that their clothes are worth another trip or paying a little more.
Visa’s revised card fee system may jolt merchants. As someone who deals with card data, I am intrigued by this change. In my experience, it’s more straightforward to deal with Visa data than Mastercard data because the latter has more consistency and standards. If this change increases the quality of Visa data, it will be good news for me as an analyst. It’ll be fascinating to see what additional data will be available to banks. SKU data will be interesting, because banks can run predictive models to further their business interests. For merchants, especially small ones, they now have additional burdens to provide more data in exchange for more discounts. Will the rewards outweigh the efforts?
Apple is the exclusive new broadcast partner for Formula 1® in the U.S. A great partnership! Apple was looking for a sport partner that they could do something different with, not just paying a huge sum of money to broadcast. Formula 1, on other hand, needs a partner to help maximize the lucrative market in the US, having already three races here: Las Vegas, Miami and Austin. Who is better than the company that Formula 1 spent the last three years developing the F1 movie with? I am excited to see what plans Apple has to promote this partnership. Apple TV and, by extension, Apple One subscription will be a big deal for Apple moving forward.
Inside Ralph Lauren’s Big Comeback — And How it Won Over Gen Z. The current CEO broke down how he changed the company in the last few years. It may sound easy: just understand Gen Z and go after what they want. As Patric Louvet articulated, it is more complicated than that. It also involves making the right investments in the right markets, upgrading the stores and processes to reflect the new direction, overhauling supply chain, taking bets in marketing and maintaining the discipline to not stretch too thin. I like that at the end of the clip, he talked about the vision for the company: we are in a dream business, not in an apparel business or fashion business.
Other Things I Find Interesting
Federal Judges, Warning of ‘Judicial Crisis,’ Fault Supreme Court’s Emergency Orders. It’s alarming that a handful of judges have the power to shape the laws in the country often without rigorous review, due course or challenges. It’s even worse when the process to appoint these judges is far from perfect and recently very partisan. We are already in a judicial crisis.
We took a tour of Apple Music’s futuristic L.A. studio–check out these gorgeous photos. I love stories that shed light on underappreciated and overlooked parts of a business like this one here.
Andrej Karpathy — AGI is still a decade away. “I do think that humans have a lot more of an element, compared to LLMs, of seeing the forest for the trees. We’re not actually that good at memorization, which is actually a feature. Because we’re not that good at memorization, we’re forced to find patterns in a more general sense. LLMs in comparison are extremely good at memorization. They will recite passages from all these training sources. You can give them completely nonsensical data. You can hash some amount of text or something like that, you get a completely random sequence. If you train on it, even just for a single iteration or two, it can suddenly regurgitate the entire thing. It will memorize it. There’s no way a person can read a single sequence of random numbers and recite it to you. That’s a feature, not a bug, because it forces you to only learn the generalizable components. Whereas LLMs are distracted by all the memory that they have of the pre-training documents, and it’s probably very distracting to them in a certain sense.”
California’s Wine Industry Is in Crisis. “Meanwhile, the unusually good weather is adding to the glut. The temperature was cool most of the year, without frost or heat, an environment that allows grapes to grow in abundance—and slowly develop the concentrated flavors that wine drinkers covet. An August poll from Gallup found that the percentage of U.S. adults who say they drink alcohol had fallen to 54%, the lowest tally in the almost 90 years the organization has been tracking drinking behavior. Last year, the number of wine cases shipped from California had dropped to 203.5 million—leaving some producers sitting on excess inventory that they so far haven’t been able to sell. Over the winter, different alarm bells sounded. At the start of the year, President Trump threatened Canada with a slew of tariffs. In response, Canadians pulled California wines off store shelves, along with other American-made alcohol. U.S. wine exports to Canada dropped 96% in the second quarter—from nearly $111 million last year to under $4 million this year—and the U.S. wine trade surplus with Canada has flipped to a deficit for the first time ever.“
Stats
In 2024, epidural was used in only 14% of births in Japan, compared to more than 75% in the US
Extreme weather cost approximately $100 billion in the first half of 2025
Minh Quang Duong 
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