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Unwell Hydration’s collapse shows the limits of celebrity-backed CPG—and why a massive audience doesn’t necessarily translate into shelf velocity, experts say.
Thirty senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on August 11, 2026, demanding the State Department restore priority to F, M, and J visa interviews before the fall term begins.
Led by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA), the group wrote in the letter (PDF File) that “no timely visa appointments are available for students at some embassies and consulates” during peak application season. They gave the department 30 days to answer 10 questions covering staffing, interview slot allocation, and the guidance sent to consular posts since August 2025.
The push lands as international enrollment already drives job cuts and program closures at U.S. universities.
International students made up about 6% of U.S. higher education enrollment but contributed nearly $43 billion to the economy in 2024-2025 and supported more than 355,000 American jobs, according to the letter.
Most pay full out-of-state or international rates, subsidizing the price domestic families pay, as we reported in how colleges build and inflate their sticker prices. Research the senators cite found that for every additional international undergraduate at a public university, two more in-state freshmen can enroll.
When that revenue disappears, the gap gets closed with tuition hikes and cuts, and the average cost of college keeps climbing.
The squeeze started with the 2025 policy shift (a May 27 to June 18, 2025 pause on student visa interviews followed by social media vetting for all applicants) which cut new student visas 35.6% last summer.
The effects show up in university budgets now: UT Arlington projected a $13 million to $15.6 million tuition revenue loss for fiscal 2026, and DePaul laid off 114 staff. Schools facing similar shortfalls appear in our tracker of colleges closing and merging in 2026 and in Syracuse’s first budget deficit in years.
The 30-day clock puts a written response due around September 10, 2026 — after most fall terms begin. NAFSA modeling reported by Inside Higher Ed projects visa delays could cut international enrollment 15% next year and erase roughly $7 billion in spending.
Watch whether the Department of State resumes monthly reporting, and whether interview waivers get extended before spring applications open. Students already enrolled who need funding should compare international student loan options, since most require a U.S. cosigner.
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The post 30 Senators Press State Department To Clear Student Visa Backlog Before Classes Start appeared first on The College Investor.
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They’re doing Pokemon-themed donuts the whole week in honor of the Pokemon 30th anniversary, and on Saturday 8/22/26 they are offering the freebie for those in dress.
“These aren’t dumb people,” he said. “But there’s definitely a difference versus how you would assess risk in a typical conventional loan. Inherently, they haven’t dealt with concentration risk and some of those things that we have since the beginning of residential investor lending becoming institutionalized.”
He said the underwriting considerations that come with investor lending, including concentration risk, market-specific conditions, and the distinction between performing and non-performing local inventory, require accumulated experience that does not transfer automatically from conventional lending.
“They’re still kind of coming at it with a broad brush,” he said. “At the end of the day, those guys know mortgages. It’s just a function of — are the nuances at some point at scale going to be problematic or not? We’ll see.”
Fertig said the question will be whether these larger lenders are accounting for the risks that private lenders have been identifying. Accounting for some of those risks is one of the reasons why the National Private Lenders Association came up with its watch list to try to identify potential fraudsters.
“We’re biased, and we think we’ve taken all of these remarkable steps to deal with what we’ve seen as the real risks and what have caused losses and where severities are coming from,” he said. “And then you’re seeing these big guys come in and just don’t even acknowledge any of it. And we’re sitting there going like, ‘You just have to wait until it happens.’”
There’s an ongoing arms race to protect identities and privacy in the age of facial recognition, biometric scanning and data collection. Now, some of those concerns are coming from the influx of wearables, namely, smart glasses, and how to go about protecting oneself from being filmed in public. Some joke about singing Disney songs, others use software, and some have even resorted to physical tricks.
And the concern is warranted: Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, for example, have been coined “pervert glasses” for recording people undressing, and the company is even being sued after a study revealed Meta’s subcontractors are viewing your most intimate moments. This is all culminating into a real privacy concern as not only is your right to privacy (or lack thereof) in the public realm coming into question, but so is how to stop what you do in public from getting stored on a company’s servers.
“We are living in weird times,” Jim Waldo, a professor of computer science who teaches several technological privacy courses at Harvard, told Fortune. “The technology is changing. It’s the combination of the Meta Glasses with facial recognition, AI, and a number of other sorts of technologies that are all coming together and putting us in an environment that we just aren’t prepared to deal with yet.”
The privacy concerns are real—from the suit to data collection, and even the social media content made with the tech has left people chalking up Meta Glasses as a form of surveillance. Even Meta’s Instagram has had to act: the platform disabled several accounts thanks to violations of content usage after those accounts amassed millions of followers by streaming live feeds from Meta glasses.
“We don’t want harassing content on our platforms and take it down when we find it,” a spokesperson for Instagram told Fortune.
Gone are the days of “dumb” smart wear. No longer are wearables contained to just your fitness trackers or your sleep monitors, they now have cameras with AI built in them. Most prominently in this space are Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, which have cameras built directly into the frames, allowing users to take photos and videos without pulling out a phone. The glasses also have microphones that capture audio, and Meta has enabled livestreaming directly from the glasses to Facebook and Instagram.
There’s a way to tell if you’re being recorded: the glasses use a white capture LED on the front of the frames that blinks when content is being captured. Meta says the LED cannot be switched off and that the camera is disabled if the LED is covered or blocked.
“We will keep strengthening our protections as our glasses become even more capable,” Meta spokesperson Dina El-Kassaby told Fortune.
But experts are still concerned about the privacy implications of wearable technology. “They’re making it safe for the consumer,” Waldo said. “They’re not making it safe for the people around the consumer.”
There are also legal implications for the use of these smart glasses in public. Gene Kang, partner at law firm Rivkin Radler LLP, told Fortune the technology itself is not necessarily the problem, but that people don’t know they could be filmed.
“If you’re holding up your phone to somebody’s face, they’re going to know,” Kang said. In that situation, he explained, there could potentially be an argument for implied consent if the person knows they’re being recorded and does nothing to object. With the inconspicuous glasses, however, that assumption becomes much harder to make—meaning privacy and consent laws can potentially be invoked.
“If they’re not aware that they’re being recorded, then I think that presents a different issue,” he added. “I think they would potentially have a claim there.”
According to a study done by University of Sydney researchers, “pick-up artistry” content has picked up in recent years. This type of content, spread around social media and mainly perpetrated by individuals in the “pick-up artist” community, attracts viewers who wish to watch point-of-view reels of women being approached in public.
The study found 60% of over 350 videos analyzed involved behavior classified as potentially harassing. In 43% of the videos, women were subjected to derogatory commentary, and other subjects were identified or doxxed. The study focuses on what the researchers defined as “ambient capture”—recording people in their everyday surroundings without them realizing that a camera was pointed at them.
The researchers found a relationship between the apparent covertness of the recording devices and the severity of the harassment. “We should all be very concerned,” Dr. Milica Stilinovic, one of the study’s authors, told Fortune.
The harmful content perpetrated online echoed concerns among consumers, leading them to find avenues to protect themselves. People have started to use face markings to confuse the facial recognition system within the glasses, and a theory has circulated online to sing copyrighted songs when under suspicion of being recorded.
Some individuals have even developed software to help notify users for potential smart glass intrusion. Professor. Dr. Yves Jeanrenaud built an open-source, free software app Nearby Glasses, allowing users—as the name suggests—to be notified when Meta Glasses are nearby. According to its open-source repository, Jeanrenaud developed the app in response to “an intolerable intrusion, consent neglecting, horrible piece of tech that is already used for making various and tons of equally truely disgusting ‘content’.”
According to the Google Play store, the app has amassed over 100,000 downloads to date.
And while the app was made to help users stay aware of potential discreet filming, Professor Jeanrenaud included a disclaimer on the use of his technology.
“It’s still an imperfect approach and probably always will be,” he wrote. “It’s not all good only because this app exists now. We need better solutions to curb surveillance tech and privacy intrusion.”
Not all of the methods are feasible, however. A recent social media theory has circulated citing Disney songs can protect you from being filmed. The idea is that Disney’s notorious copyright strikes would be enough to get any unsolicited videos taken down across social media. But according to Kang, hiding behind copyright isn’t an effective way to protect yourself from discreet filming.
“If you’re the person being recorded, you don’t own any copyright to the composition,” he explained. However, while he did add that copyright may not be an effective claim, he also said individuals who want to protect themselves should look into privacy claims instead.
“It’s really a privacy issue,” he said. “Which still could be applicable here.”
In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, Sara Nay sits in for John Jantsch and talks with Heidi Ellsworth, president of Roofers Coffee Shop, about how small businesses build trust with customers. Ellsworth has spent more than 30 years in roofing, much of it helping tradespeople and small business owners tell their stories online. She and Nay talk about why online communities, directories, networking, and content still work together, and how that combination matters more now that AI shapes how people find and judge a business.
Ellsworth breaks down how she builds content: record your conversations, turn them into transcripts, then let AI help with the first draft. She and Nay also talk about what happens after the sale, where staying in touch with customers pays off, and why the best referral programs start with genuinely strong service.
This episode is for small business owners, marketing agencies, and consultants who want a grounded take on combining offline relationship-building with online content and AI tools without losing the trust that got them there.
Heidi Ellsworth is president of Roofers Coffee Shop, an award-winning media and community platform serving the roofing, coatings, metal, and outdoor living industries. Ellsworth is a nationally recognized leader in the roofing industry and has helped shape how the industry connects and communicates online, she helped launch Roofers Coffee Shop with business partner Vicky Sharples in 2002, joining the company full-time in 2015. She also leads Ask A Roofer, connecting homeowners and business owners with roofing contractors.
AI and marketing, Content Marketing, customer journey, customer trust, Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, Heidi Ellsworth, Networking, online directories, Referral Marketing, Roofers Coffee Shop, roofing industry, Small Business Marketing
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The investment industry faces a situation whereby the same systems that enable analytical efficiency also facilitate the outsourcing of cognition. In practical terms, this leads to a growing tendency among investment professionals to rely on AI-generated outputs prior to developing their own sufficiently robust internal understanding of the underlying analytical processes. Recent research clearly shows that such behavior can introduce significant fragility into the investment process (Gerlich, 2025; Jose et al, 2025; Lenhardo, 2026; Strömberg et al, 2026). While investment theses may appear technically coherent, investors risk losing the ability to properly question, defend, and adapt them when necessary.
Investment management has always required sound judgment in the face of uncertainty and incomplete information. Historically, this judgment has been developed through experiences with complex environments and the evaluation of evidence under stressful conditions. Although inherently inefficient, these processes remain the primary means by which investors build tacit knowledge and expertise. In contrast, current AI systems are specifically designed to eliminate such friction. In doing so, they compress, and potentially bypass, the pathway through which investment expertise has traditionally been acquired.
This may have significant implications for talent development within investment organizations. Entry-level professionals, who have traditionally built their expertise through a series of increasingly demanding analytical tasks, can now produce sophisticated outputs, such as financial models, investment theses, and risk assessments, without fully internalizing the underlying conceptual frameworks. Over time, this may create a generation of analysts whose investment theses mask gaps in their foundational understanding. This imbalance becomes particularly evident in live discussions and decision-making settings, where the ability to defend assumptions, address counterarguments, and revise conclusions in real time remains critical.
Importantly, this phenomenon is not limited to junior professionals. Once cognitive delegation becomes normalized, it also affects experienced investment professionals. As reliance on AI-assisted outputs grows, the maintenance of internal mental models (i.e., the simplified yet essential frameworks investors use to interpret complex realities) may gradually erode. This erosion introduces a significant risk into the investment process, particularly when investors face high-stakes situations where time pressure often limits thorough verification and where independent reasoning is most critical.
Figure Technology Solutions (Nasdaq: FIGR; OPEN: FGRS), a capital markets blockchain firm founded by Mike Cagney, reported Q2 earnings, delivering net revenue of $226 million, up 113% from the same period the prior year.
The consumer loan marketplace booked $4.3 billion in volume during the quarter, a 132% increase year over year.
Net income increased 192% to $192 million from $87 million last year. Net income margin reached 38.8%, up 11 percentage points year over year.
Cash and cash equivalents, excluding restricted cash, totaled $1.4 billion, an increase of $239.4 million, or 20.0% compared to December 31, 2025.
Loans held for sale totaled $597 million, up $193.1 million, or 47.7%, from the end of last year.
Michael Tannenbaum, CEO of Figure, said it was the company’s strongest quarter ever as they added more than 100 origination partners.
“With weekly applications now surpassing $1 billion as of July and the pending completion of our Kiavi acquisition, which we expect will significantly grow our platform into adjacent asset classes, we are accelerating our growth flywheel and our first-mover advantage in bringing the capital markets on-chain.”
Figure provided Q3 guidance, anticipating consumer loan marketplace volume of between $4.8 billion and $5.2 billion.
Analysts are pretty positive on Figure. Needham has a buy rating and a $55 price target. Piper Sandler has an overweight/buy with a $65-$70 price expectation. Bernstein is more bullish, expecting a rise to $70 a share.
Figure connects money to loans like HELOCs or personal loans, while expanding into other debt verticals. It recently acquired Kiavi, a real estate lender. By leveraging blockchain technology, Figure reduces the friction in the process. For institutions, this matters because of scale. Figure also offers YLDS – legally a security- a digital asset that generates yield but aims to maintain a stable $1 peg, which can be transferred onchain. In a way, it is similar to a stablecoin.
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