Author: Money Mechanics

Home prices during the AI boom have surged far faster in the Bay Area’s luxury zip codes than its non luxury zip codes—a split not seen before the launch of GPT-3.5 or in other major U.S. metros. Luxury zip codes in the San Francisco Bay Area saw a 13.4% average jump in home prices in the two years following the launch of ChatGPT. That’s a significantly larger jump than any other price segment in the Bay Area and is more than double the 6.3% average increase in the segment immediately below luxury. The most affordable Bay Area zip codes saw…

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET’s key takeaways Google appears to be ditching its Pixel thermometer feature.Leaks show a “Pixel Glow” feature taking its place.The Pixel was the only flagship phone with a thermometer.I’ve been a loyal Pixel user since the beginning, but I might be tempted to switch because Google is removing one of my single favorite features from the Pixel.Google introduced a temperature sensor and built-in thermometer app into the Pixel 8 Pro in 2023. It was a fairly unique feature, and the Pixel was the only flagship phone to have it.…

(Image credit: Alex Wong / Staff)Your short-haul flights with Delta Air Lines are about to change. The airline recently announced it would discontinue complimentary drinks and snacks on 450 short-haul flights, starting May 19.What constitutes a short-haul flight? According to Delta, it’s any route less than 349 miles. This affects some of the country’s busiest routes, such as New York to Boston, Charlotte to Atlanta and Los Angeles to San Francisco. The change applies to all Delta Main and Delta Comfort+ passengers. First-class passengers won’t be affected.This comes at a time when air travel is facing challenges due to rising…

Arizona, California, and Nevada have proposed a high-stakes plan to conserve 3.2 million acre-feet of Colorado River water through 2026. While the goal is to stabilize the West’s most vital waterway, the deal signals a permanent shift for the region’s real estate: The era of water-unlimited growth is officially over.”We’ve been used to a world in which there’s unlimited supply, and now we’re not in that world anymore,” says Laurie Schoeman, founder at Housing for a Changing Climate and a former senior housing adviser to the White House under the Biden administration.Her warning comes at a time when few are…

(Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)Stocks bounced back Tuesday as market participants brushed off geopolitical worries and cheered falling oil prices. A round of well-received earnings reports and a rally in tech stocks also lifted sentiment, with two of the three main equity indexes ending the day with new record highs.The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite rose 1% to 25,326 and the broader S&P 500 gained 0.8% to 7,259 — their highest closes on record — while the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.7% to 49,298.Oil prices, on the other hand, retreated after the U.S. said the ceasefire with Iran remains in…

The author and her mother in Montserrat, Spain.(Image credit: Alexandra Svokos)Like many moms, my mother has always been our family’s CFO. I grew up watching her fill in Quicken workbooks, write and document checks and keep us all accountable for our own spending.As an adult, I recognize now how valuable it was for my sisters and me to watch our mother manage money. It’s only in more recent history that it’s become socially acceptable for women to manage finances, even within the family, and many women have become financially disadvantaged because a husband mismanaged funds and kept them in the…

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis announced today that the goods and services deficit was $60.3 billion in March, up $2.5 billion from $57.8 billion in February, revised.U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services DeficitDeficit:$60.3 Billion+4.4%°Exports:$320.9 Billion+2.0%°Imports:$381.2 Billion+2.3%°Next release: Tuesday, June 9, 2026(°) Statistical significance is not applicable or not measurable. Data adjusted for seasonality but not price changesSource: U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis; U.S. International Trade in Goods and Services, May 5, 2026Exports, Imports, and Balance (exhibit 1)March exports were $320.9 billion, $6.2 billion more than February exports. March imports were…

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) opened at $78,543.43 on Tuesday, even with Monday’s opening price. The value of bitcoin at 7:16 a.m. ET rose significantly to $80,921.09. Bitcoin has risen 5.2% over the last five days. Ethereum (ETH-USD) opened at $2,322.49 on Tuesday, even with Monday’s opening price. The value of ethereum moved up to $2,374.66 as of 7:16 a.m. ET. Over the last five days, ethereum is up 4.66%. While gold has trended lower over the last five days amid rising interest rate expectations, the value of the two most popular cryptocurrencies is gaining strength. Bitcoin is back over $80,000 this morning. In…

A version of this article first appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and evolving opportunities for the real estate investor, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. Sign up to receive future editions, straight to your inbox. Even as more local communities rise up against the proliferation of massive, energy- and water-sucking data centers, some big players in housing are betting consumers would be willing to put mini data centers right on the walls of their homes. Span is a California-based startup that…

On Monday, OpenAI released a new foundation model called GPT-5.5 Instant, which will replace GPT-5.3 Instant as the default ChatGPT model. The company said the model reduces hallucination in sensitive areas such as law, medicine, and finance, while maintaining the low latency of its predecessor. OpenAI released the latest GPT-5.5 model last month with the company claiming improvements in areas like coding and knowledge work. The new model also achieved a score of 81.2 in the AIME 2025 math test, compared to 65.4 for the older model. It also outperformed its predecessor on the MMMU-Pro multimodal reasoning benchmark, with a…