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President Donald Trumps handpicked board voted Thursday to rename Washingtons leading performing arts center as the Trump-Kennedy Center, the White House said. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the vote on social media, saying it was because of the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year in saving the building. Not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction, but also financially, and its reputation. Trump, a Republican who’s chairman of the board, often refers to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which is named for a Democratic predecessor, as the Trump Kennedy Center. Asked on Dec. 7 as he walked the red carpet for the Kennedy Center Honors program whether he would rename the venue after himself, Trump said such a decision would be up to the board. Earlier this month, Trump talked about a big event on Friday at the Trump Kennedy Center before saying, excuse me, at the Kennedy Center, as his audience laughed. He was referring to the FIFA World Cup soccer draw for 2026, in which he participated. A name change wont sit well with some Kennedy family members. Maria Shriver, a niece of John F. Kennedy, referred to the legislation introduced in Congress to rebrand the Kennedy Center as the Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts as insane in a social media post in July. It makes my blood boil. Its so ridiculous, so petty, so small minded, she wrote. Truly, what is this about? Its always about something. Lets get rid of the Rose Garden. Lets rename the Kennedy Center. Whats next? Trump earlier this year turned the Kennedy-era Rose Garden at the White House into a patio by removing the lawn and laying down paving stones. Another Kennedy family member, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., serves in Trumps Cabinet as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Darlene Superville, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
The average rate on a 30-year U.S. mortgage edged higher this week, though it remains relatively near its low point so far this year. The uptick brings the average long-term mortgage rate to 6.22% from 6.19% last week, mortgage buyer Freddie Mac said Thursday. A year ago, the rate averaged 6.6%. Borrowing costs on 15-year fixed-rate mortgages, popular with homeowners refinancing their home loans, also rose this week. The rate averaged 5.54%, up from 5.44% last week. A year ago, it averaged 5.84%, Freddie Mac said. Mortgage rates are influenced by several factors, from the Federal Reserves interest rate policy decisions to bond market investors expectations for the economy and inflation. They generally follow the trajectory of the 10-year Treasury yield, which lenders use as a guide to pricing home loans. The 10-year yield was at 4.12% at midday Thursday, slightly higher than it was a week ago. The rise in mortgage rates comes a week after the Federal Reserve cut its main interest rate for the third time this year and indicated another cut may be ahead in 2026. The Fed doesnt set mortgage rates, so even when it cuts its short-term rates that doesnt necessarily mean rates on home loans will necessarily decline. That’s what happened last fall after the central bank cut its main rate for the first time in more than four years. Instead of falling, mortgage rates marched higher, eventually cresting above 7% in January this year. At that time, the 10-year Treasury yield was climbing toward 5%. Mortgage rates began declining this summer ahead of the central banks September rate cut, its first in a year. The average rate on a 30-year mortgage got as low as 6.17%, the lowest level in more than a year, on Oct. 30. That pullback in rates helped lift sales of previously occupied U.S. homes in October on an annual basis for the fourth straight month. Still, affordability remains a challenge for many aspiring homeowners, especially first-time buyers who dont have equity from an existing home to put toward a new home purchase. Uncertainty over the economy and job market are also keeping many would-be buyers on the sidelines. The overall decline in mortgage rates this fall has been a boon for homeowners eager to refinance their home loan to a lower rate. Applications for mortgage refinancing loans jumped 14% last week from the previous week, and accounted for about 58% of all home loan applications, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. Applications for loans to buy a home climbed nearly 5%. Economists generally forecast that the average rate on a 30-year mortgage will remain slightly above 6% next year. While this is unlikely to deliver the sharp relief some buyers are hoping for, rates are expected to be low enough to help counterbalance continued, but modest, home price growth, said Anthony Smith, senior economist at Realtor.com. Alex Veiga, AP business writer
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E-Commerce
British oil giant BP just announced a new CEO, marking its fourth chief executive shake-up in the last six years alone. The company named Meg ONeill, who previously led Australias top oil and gas company Woodside Energy, to the role. ONeill will become the first woman to hold the top executive spot at one of the worlds biggest oil companies. She said that she looks forward to working to accelerate performance at BP and plans to prioritize shareholder growth and reestablish BPnow a possible takeover targetas a market leader in the oil and gas industry. ONeill will take over from Murray Auchincloss, a longtime BP employee who was appointed as interim CEO in 2023 before being named to the role permanently in January 2024. While Auchincloss will leave the oil giant immediately, ONeill wont take the helm until April of next year. After more than three decades with BP, now is the right time to hand the reins to a new leader, Auchincloss said in the announcement, adding that he told BPs chairman that he would be open to stepping down if a different leader could hasten the companys growth trajectory. I am confident that BP is now well positioned for significant growth, and I look forward to watching the companys future progress and success under Megs leadership, he said. BP named Albert Manifold as the new chairman of its board over the summer, tapping the oil and gas outsider who spent the previous 10 years as CEO of the building materials company CRH. That shake-up to the board was one of many recent moves designed to put the company back on track and make BP competitive again with its rivals in the oil and gas industry. Earlier this year, Elliott Investment Management, an activist investor known for dramatically remaking companies in its image, disclosed that it owns a 5% stake in the troubled British energy company. BPs checkered past While oil and gas peers like Shell and ExxonMobil continue to notch market wins, BPs share price has floundered. BP remains haunted by its past and still pays around a billion dollars a year in damages for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which killed 11 people and triggered a long-term environmental and health catastrophe at the company’s semi-submersible offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. BP has changed directions a few times in recent years, but the companys leadership and timing have yet to impress investors. The company took a significant near 20% stake of Russian oil company Rosneft in 2013, but paid a political price and eventually ate a $25 billion loss when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Under previous CEO Bernard Looney, who stepped into the role in 2020, BP pivoted toward an aggressive plan to reduce emissions and reorient the company toward renewable energy. Less than four years later, Looney was ousted from BP after failing to disclose intimate relationships with employees, and an internal investigation determined that he provided “inaccurate and incomplete assurances about his conduct. This year, BP slashed its green energy promises and announced a move back toward fossil fuels like gasoline, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and petroleum to please its unhappy shareholders. Then-CEO Auchincloss said that the company went too far, too fast” in its pivot toward clean energya claim that climate experts alarmed about the closing window for a planet-wide emissions intervention would certainly take issue with.
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E-Commerce
Experts have compressed their predictions for when artificial general intelligence (AGI)the type of AI that can equal or exceed human intelligencewill arrive. When predictions were first made in 2023, AGI was expected to arrive in 50 years. Newer estimates say five years. When GPT-5 came out this summer, it demonstrated surprising leaps in reasoning and memory, further accelerating those timelines. Progress is moving faster than anyone anticipated, and what once felt speculative now feels inevitable. Meanwhile, small teams are shipping products that would have required 100-person companies two years ago. The gap between the AGI debaters and the builders (those who are developing AGI systems) isn’t philosophicalit’s economic. While everyone waits for perfect AI, builders are dominating markets with today’s “broken” tools, those that are functioning, albeit with some quirks, that will be worked out as the technology evolves. They arent betting on future breakthroughs, theyre betting on momentum. WHAT’S ACTUALLY HAPPENING This wave of adoption isnt happening in research labs. Its happening inside companies solving boring, repetitive problems. The shift isnt about science fiction-level AI. Its about shipping fast and iterating now. As has been covered in Fast Company: Cursor went from launch to 40,000 customers by letting developers code faster with AI. Glean hit $100 million in annual revenue helping companies search their own documents. These aren’t hypothetical AGI use cases. They’re real businesses built on today’s imperfect AI. And theyre growing because theyre solving problems that already existnot waiting on capabilities that might. At Fireflies, we process billions of conversations across sales, recruiting, and customer success. Our AI doesn’t just transcribe. It identifies deal risks, surfaces customer objections, and tracks competitive mentions across entire organizations. Its not flawless, but there isnt an AI yet that is, but an AI tool that can provide actionable insights today beats a perfect AI that never ships. Were seeing the same pattern across the board: AI thats just good enough is already creating leverage. Take “vibe coding” platformsthey let non-programmers create apps simply by describing what they want in natural language without a single line of code. Are these apps perfect? No. Do they work well enough to solve real problems? Absolutely. That means were entering a phase where anyone with a problem and a prompt can build a product. THE COMPOUND EFFECT The hardest part of adopting AI? Knowing where to start. Begin with the boring stuff. Find the repetitive task in your workflow that nobody wants to do. Apply todays AI, and ship when the product or service is 80% good. Then, fix as you go. Most companies think they need a moonshot AI strategy. What they need is a simple use case. The advantage isnt having the smartest model, its in learning the fastest. AI rewards iteration, so the teams that adopt early build intuition, infrastructure, and momentum that compound. Early adoption gives you more than toolsit gives you an internal muscle for how to think with AI. This is what builders do while large companies form AI committees. And every day the builders ship, they get stronger. Every interaction improves their product. Every customer teaches them something new. Every iteration makes switching to their solution more inevitable. By the time AGI arrives (whether that’s 2027 or 2047), these builders will own entire markets. Not because they had better AI, but because they started using what was available. BUILD OR LOSE The world will keep running, but ownership of entire industries will have already changed hands. From companies waiting for perfect AI to builders who shipped with what they had. OpenAI itself proved this path works: They’ve improved their models not through some breakthrough to AGI, but by shipping o1 models that spend more computing power on reasoning at inference time, the moment a model is generating answers in response to a prompt. Messy iteration beats elegant planning. Stop waiting for the perfect model. Stop debating timelines. The builders aren’t waiting for history. They’re making it. Krish Ramineni is CEO and cofounder of Fireflies.ai.
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E-Commerce
Americas small businesses are the backbone of our economy. They create two-thirds of new jobs, power innovation, and anchor communities across the country. But that backbone is under real strain. Rising healthcare costs dominate the headlines, but whats missing from the conversation is how deeply they impact the small businesses that keep our economy running. At Gusto, we see this strain firsthand. Our latest Small Business Jobs Report showed hiring slowed in November as owners continue to navigate higher costs and uncertainty. Rising healthcare premiums arent the only challenge, but theyre making it that much harder to grow and hire with confidence. Since 2022, small business health insurance costs have climbed 23% since 2022far faster than inflation or wage growth. For the smallest employers, those with just two to five employees, the increase is even steeper: up 18%, reaching nearly $8,500 per worker. Looking ahead to 2026, premiums are projected to rise another 9.5%, the sharpest jump in 15 years. Those numbers have real consequences. They show up in delayed hires, scaled-back hours, or founders skipping their own coverage to keep their team insured. SMALL BUSINESSES ARE HOLDING THE LINE Despite the pressure, small businesses are doing everything they can to support their people. More than one in five small employers still offer health insurance. This is a clear reflection of how much they value their teams. That investment pays off. Gustos data shows that employees with health coverage are 25% less likely to quit in their first year, and businesses that offer it are 13% more likely to report no difficulty hiring. Healthcare isnt just a benefitits a competitive advantage and retention tool for these small businesses. That said, its also becoming unsustainable. Every year, more small business owners are forced into impossible choices. They can keep offering coverage and absorb higher costs, drop it and risk losing the people who make their business work, or pass more of the expense on to employees, who may already be feeling stretched. A HIDDEN HEADWIND FOR ENTREPRENEURS Entrepreneurship in America is thriving. More people are starting businesses now than at any point in recent history. But rising healthcare costs are creating a new kind of barrier: They make it harder to start, grow, or hire. For many would-be founders, leaving a traditional job means losing access to affordable coverage. That doesnt always stop them, but it adds risk and limits what they can do once they start. Some stay solo longer than they want to. Others delay hiring. Some take on extra work to cover premiums. In other words, healthcare isnt necessarily halting entrepreneurship, but its most certainly holding it back. Its keeping too many small business owners from growing to their full potential. HOW SMALL BUSINESSES ARE ADAPTING The good news is that small business owners are incredibly resourceful. Theyre rethinking what benefits look like and finding creative ways to offer support. Many are experimenting with level-funded plans, high-deductible options paired with Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), and Health Reimbursement Arrangements that let employees choose coverage that fits their needs. Others are expanding voluntary benefits like dental, vision, or mental health programs that provide real value without breaking the bank. At Gusto, we help small employers find the right mixbecause the best benefits strategy isnt one-size-fits-all. Flexibility and innovation are key. THE SOLUTION: FLEXIBILITY, POLICY, AND INNOVATION Small businesses cant solve this challenge on their own. The U.S. healthcare system was built around large employers, not the millions of small business owners and self-employed workers who drive todays economy. Its time to modernize that system so healthcare is portable, affordable, and built to support entrepreneurship. Congress already has practical solutions within reach. Lawmakers can codify and strengthen Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements, which give employers flexibility to help workers buy their own coverage. A temporary tax credit for small businesses offering these plans for the first time would make coverage more affordable and expand access quickly. Congress can also expand HSA eligibility to include Affordable Care Act Bronze and catastrophic plans, giving small employers and their teams the same tax advantages that large companies enjoy. If we want small businesses to keep creating jobs, serving their communities, and fueling our economy, we need to make healthcare affordable for the people behind them. Tomer London is cofounder and chief product officer of Gusto.
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E-Commerce
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