Most brands come to YOCTO asking us to fix retention, with the diagnosis already written: onboarding is not landing, the storytelling has gone flat, or the cancellation flow needs rebuilding.

The diagnosis is sincere, and usually wrong. When we open the account, the broken thing is rarely a flow. It is a number: how long it takes to earn back the cost of a customer, what a subscriber is worth once discounts are counted, how the offer is structured at the point of sale.

The most expensive version of the mistake is borrowed maths. A founder watches a famous brand run at a loss for the best part of a year before the money comes back, and concludes this is simply how ecommerce works now. Invisible from the outside is everything underneath that tolerance: a decade of paid-media experience, in-house teams, systems tuned over years, and enough capital to be wrong for a while. Adopt the tolerance without the advantages and nothing dramatic happens at first. The dashboards stay green while the road quietly runs out.

Why changing agencies changes nothing

It is why brands churn through agency after agency and conclude nobody can help. Each new partner is hired to produce deliverables, because that is what the brief asked for. The welcome series is rebuilt, the cancellation page redesigned, and the number that was actually broken sits untouched, because nobody was ever hired to find it. Cycling is rarely evidence that agencies do not work; more often it means the brief bought deliverables when the business needed a diagnosis.

Buy the diagnosis before the deliverables

Invert the purchase. Before anything is redesigned, establish which numbers are out of range: how many new customers start as subscribers, how many leave in the first month, what is lost to failed payments, what a recurring order is worth. At YOCTO we track nine such numbers, and no work ships unless we can say which one it should move. Skio’s published account of our work with Gratsi runs in that order, departing subscribers surveyed before any rebuild: cancellations down 48 per cent, the reactivation rate more than doubled. Loop Subscriptions recorded Evereden’s subscriber acquisition growing eightfold in three months. Neither figure is ours; the platforms wrote the case studies.

None of this argues against help; it is an argument about what you buy first. When you next brief a customer retention agency, ask it to name the number it intends to fix before it shows you a single design. If the answer comes slowly, keep looking. If the diagnosis shows your maths already works, you have learned the problem really is the creative, for less than a year of rebuilt flows. Either way, you stop guessing. For a subscription business, that is the cheapest thing you will buy all year.

George Kapernaros is the founder of YOCTO, the Klaviyo Elite retention agency for fast-growing DTC and subscription brands.

Lowe’s announced a new partnership on Tuesday with dozens of companies that aims to address America’s shortage of skilled workers by helping to train and develop 1 million tradespeople over the next decade.

The Lowe’s Foundation is partnering with Nvidia, General Motors, AT&T, Bank of America and more through the Building Futures Skilled Trades Coalition, which aims to train and certify 1 million skilled tradespeople by 2035. The cross-sector coalition – billed as the nation’s largest – includes more than 75 businesses, educators, workforce organizations and industry leaders.

Janice Dupré, executive vice president of human resources and chair of the Lowe’s Foundation, told FOX Business that Lowe’s first launched an initiative four years ago that aimed to train 250,000 workers for roles in skilled trades that it was clear that the “problem is so much bigger.”

She noted that the U.S. economy is facing a shortage of 2 million workers in the skilled trades, which is having an estimated impact of $1 trillion per year.

“No one entity can solve this. The Lowe’s Foundation is uniquely positioned because of our success and experience that we’ve had over the nearly four years,” Dupré said. “I believe collectively, with all these wonderful partners coming together, we’re going to solve this for the country.”

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Lowe’s announced a coalition with over 75 companies and other partners aiming to train 1 million skilled tradespeople by 2035. (Chet Strange/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Dupré said that the flow of new workers into the industry has lagged as younger, working-age adults increasingly opted to pursue college degrees rather than enter skilled trades in recent decades. As a result, “There’s no workforce waiting in the wings for us to fill these jobs that we so desperately need in this country.”

“The skilled trades are continuing to be depleted because for every five people that retire in the skilled trades, only two people are getting introduced into the profession,” Dupré said. “It’s just eroded over time where students have been encouraged to go get their college degree, and no one’s taking over the family business.”

“These are the people that build the homes that we all live in. They restore communities when a disaster has happened, and then they support the infrastructure that our economy and our country so desperately needs right now,” she added.

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Workers can learn to become electricians and other skilled trades through the partnership. (Welcomia/iStock Getty Images Plus)

Dupré noted that partnerships training skilled tradespeople can offer a pathway to in-demand, higher-paying work that can be completed in less time and with less debt than careers that require a college degree.

“When you look at a lot of these skilled trades programs, some of them can take 90 days of training and certification. Some of them that are more in-depth could take up to six months. Very low-cost models are what we have seen in our partnerships that we have that we’re funding,” she explained.

“These are careers you can get into with very low debt. But when you look at master plumbers and electricians, these folks are making six-figures,” Dupré added. “These are not low-paying jobs, these are high-demand jobs.”

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The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn new attention to the skilled trades as hands-on roles can be less sensitive to automation. Dupré noted that while “AI is going to transform work no matter what it touches – skilled trades, corporate jobs, and it’s going to have an impact, so we’re all going to have to figure out a brand new way of working.”

“But what’s uniquely beneficial in the skilled trades is that it remains hands-on,” she said, noting that plumbers, electricians and construction workers have to physically perform that work.

Lowe’s launched an initiative nearly four years ago aimed at training 250,000 skilled tradespeople, which helped the company realize the scale of demand for those workers. (Angus Mordant/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Dupré added that AI buildout itself is spurring demand for skilled trades workers amid the need for data centers and other infrastructure to power it. Furthermore, AI tools can serve skilled trades workers by helping them research issues they may encounter in the course of their work.

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“We don’t think of AI as necessarily replacing, we think AI can actually enhance the skilled trades because it’ll make it easier for people to get hands-on experience, but also being able to leverage AI to give them quicker solutions,” she said, calling the skilled trades a “people business.”

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It is now official. Thailand is ending its 60-day visa exemption scheme and reverting to a 30-day stay for nationals of 60 countries and territories, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and most of the European Union. The four Ministry of Interior regulations behind the change were published in the Royal Gazette on August 31, setting the effective date at September 15, 2026.

What is changing

Since July 2024, travelers from eligible countries have been able to enter Thailand visa-free for up to 60 days, a scheme introduced to help revive tourism after the pandemic. From September 15 onward, that period is cut to 30 days for tourism purposes. The change affects only the length of stay, not the process itself: eligible nationalities still enter without applying for a visa in advance.

Travelers arriving on or before September 14 remain under the current 60-day rule for that entry, even if their stay extends past the cutoff date. The new 30-day limit applies only to entries made from September 15 onward.

Who is affected

The reform sorts nationalities into several tiers. Sixty countries and territories, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany and most other EU members, receive a 30-day tourist exemption. Two nationalities, reportedly Mauritius and the Seychelles, move to a 15-day exemption, while three others remain on the Visa on Arrival track.

This finalizes a process that had been under discussion since March 2025, when Thailand’s Tourism and Sports Ministry first floated the idea of scaling back the 60-day scheme over concerns it was being used for unauthorized work, informal business activity, and overstays. The Cabinet approved the principle of the rollback on May 19, before the exact terms were settled and published.

The 30-day extension option

The shorter exemption does not fully close the door on longer stays. As was the case before 2024, travelers can apply for a 30-day extension at a Thai immigration office, generally for a fee of around 1,900 baht and a TM.7 application form. That brings the maximum visa-free stay to 60 days in total, down from the 90 days previously available under the 2024 scheme, but only if the traveler completes the extension in person.

Why Thailand is scaling back

Thai authorities have framed the rollback as a response to abuse of the extended exemption, including unauthorized remote work, informal businesses run without a work permit, and cases where the extra time was used to facilitate illegal activity. Industry groups had also raised concerns that the looser 60-day rule made it easier to bypass proper visa channels altogether. The reform comes as Thailand’s tourist arrivals continue to run behind the government’s targets for the year, a backdrop that shaped months of internal debate before the final texts were signed.

What this means for travelers

For a standard two- to three-week holiday, the change makes no practical difference: a passport valid for at least six months, a completed Thailand Digital Arrival Card filed within 72 hours of arrival, and proof of onward travel remain the only requirements. The impact falls mainly on travelers who had grown used to two full months without paperwork. Anyone planning to stay longer than 30 days from September 15 onward will need to either apply for the extension locally or arrange an appropriate visa before departure.

Elon Musk said this weekend that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software will soon be able to automatically steer around potholes, reviving a promise the Tesla and SpaceX CEO first made roughly seven years ago that has yet to materialize.

Musk offered the latest update Sunday night, responding on the social platform X to a user who asked whether FSD would eventually be able to avoid potholes. True to his typically terse style, Musk replied with just two words: “coming soon.” The exchange quickly drew attention from Tesla-focused outlets given how long the specific promise has been outstanding.

Potholes remain one of the most persistent and costly road hazards in the United States, capable of damaging tires, wheels and suspension components, and in more severe cases, causing injury to vehicle occupants. Reliable, automated pothole detection and avoidance has proven to be a genuinely difficult engineering problem, requiring a vehicle’s software to identify a pothole under varying lighting and road conditions, estimate its depth, location and overall risk level, and then decide in real time whether to slow down, steer around it, or simply drive through it if avoidance isn’t feasible.

Musk’s pledge traces back years earlier than most casual observers might expect. In 2019, he agreed with a Tesla owner that pothole avoidance would “definitely” improve the driving experience under Autopilot, the company’s less capable predecessor to Full Self-Driving. The following year, in February 2020, Musk responded “Yes” when asked whether Tesla vehicles could eventually create and share “micro-maps” containing data on road features such as potholes and stop signs, allowing the broader vehicle fleet to benefit from data collected by individual cars. Neither capability has become a standard, broadly available feature in the six years since.

Despite that long gap, there are indications the feature may genuinely be closer to release this time. Pothole avoidance has been explicitly listed as an “Upcoming Improvement” in Tesla’s FSD release notes since the company deployed FSD version 14.3 in April, distributed through software update 2026.2.9.6. That version also included a significant upgrade to Tesla’s neural network vision encoder, improving the system’s understanding of three-dimensional geometry and difficult road environments, alongside a complete rewrite of the company’s underlying AI compiler and runtime software, which Tesla said resulted in a 20% improvement in the system’s reaction time. More recent builds, including versions 14.3.4 and 14.3.8 rolling out as part of Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, have continued to list the feature as pending rather than active.

Some drivers have already reported seeing early, inconsistent signs of the capability in action. Tesla vehicles running current FSD versions have occasionally been observed steering slightly to avoid large potholes, including one documented case in which FSD version 14.2.2.5 positioned a vehicle so that a damaged section of road passed cleanly between its tires. It remains unclear whether the software specifically recognized the feature as a pothole or simply treated it as a generic road obstacle, though the behavior suggests the underlying capability may already be partially functional even without a formal rollout.

Unlike some previous Tesla hardware initiatives, pothole avoidance is expected to be delivered as a pure software update rather than requiring new sensors or components, meaning it should eventually become available across Tesla’s existing FSD-capable vehicle fleet, including older cars running Hardware 3, once the feature is formally activated.

Musk’s latest promise arrives at a notable moment for Tesla’s broader autonomous vehicle ambitions. The company recently expanded the operational area for its driverless robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, marking its first such expansion in some time, as Tesla continues working to establish its Cybercab service amid intensifying competition from rival autonomous vehicle operator Waymo. Musk has a long history of publicly discussed self-driving predictions that have taken considerably longer to materialize than initially promised, a pattern extensive enough that it has been documented at length by outside trackers. Even so, Tesla has continued to make incremental technical progress toward full autonomy in the years since Musk’s original 2019 pothole comments, even if the specific feature he first teased has, until now, remained conspicuously absent from the company’s production software.

Long-term government borrowing costs have risen to a 28-year high, putting further pressure on Prime Minister Andy Burnham ahead of his first Budget next month.

The yield on a 30-year gilt — a loan to the British government — rose to 5.89%, the highest since 1998.

The effective cost of borrowing for governments across the globe has continued to rise this morning with new multi-decade highs in market interest rates.

The moves reflect concerns about inflation arising from the ongoing Iran war, competition from major tech firms for long-term borrowing, and concerns about state borrowing levels.

All of those factors will make the Budget process trickier for Burnham, who will face MPs on Tuesday for the first time as prime minister, and his Chancellor John Healey.

Higher borrowing costs will reduce the amount of headroom the government has against its self-imposed fiscal rules, limiting the amount Healey can spend on consumer-friendly measures to ease the cost of living.

Downing Street said fiscal discipline is the “bedrock” of Britain’s economic stability and national security.

But a spokesperson for the prime minister refused to comment directly on the rise in borrowing costs.

“The chancellor and the prime minister are in lockstep that the government will meet the fiscal rules with a buffer against uncertainty and we’re cutting the deficit faster than any other G7 economy to the lowest level in six years,” the spokesperson said.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year gilt rose to its highest rate since June 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis.

Gilt yields move counter to the value of the bonds, meaning their prices fall when yields rise.

Borrowing costs in the US, Japan and Europe have hit similar highs in recent days.

Global markets reacted in particular after suggestions in the US that its central bank could raise rates. The UK market was closed for the bank holiday yesterday. Japan is also facing pressure to raise rates.

The Chancellor is in the USA attending a meeting of global finance ministers and central bankers. He told the G20 that the UK had the fastest growth in the G7 in 2026 so far, that productivity was improving and that the UK was cutting its borrowing at the fastest rate of the major economies.

Kathleen Brooks, research director at investment company XTB, told the BBC News Channel: “Of course, this is red lights flashing.”

“We are used to pockets of volatility, it has been volatile few months,” she says.

But record levels of government debt and a record tax take mean “these are not comfortable times for the new government and the new chancellor,” she says.

Every time bond yields rise, the UK has to pay more on the debt interest, she says.