TeeJay Tech Bro

  Truffles seem to be reshaping menus faster than QR codes did in 2020. The luxury item has gone mainstream, popping up on French fries, pizza, and in hot sauces. Truffles are even the basis for a Nicolas Cage movie , Pig . And it doesn’t get more ubiquitous than Nic Cage. Underground activity: Truffles don’t grow on trees—they grow underground near their roots. They’re rare, hard to find and grow, and have a short shelf life, hence their exorbitant price. White truffles can sell for more than $4,000 per pound. Truffle shuffle: Thanks to a particularly good Italian white truffle harvest in 2015, prices dropped temporarily, opening the door for more restaurants to utilize the aromatic fungus, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. Once customers got a taste, they wanted more, even when prices went up (kind of like how streaming services work). So, if truffles are so expensive, how are they everywhere? Technically, they may not be, since many restaurants don’t actually use fresh tr...

  Accounting for July sales recorded in the first half of August, Zillow's national existing home sales nowcast for July was revised down 1.9% from its projection earlier this month. Zillow now estimates 346.9k existing home sales in July. The previous nowcast for July was 353.4k sales.  Zillow’s nowcast, explained A nowcast is a projection of the very recent past or present. Most of Zillow’s monthly housing metrics — publicly available at zillow.com/data — have reflected known data at the close of the prior month. However, because a home sale typically takes weeks from when a seller accepts a buyer’s offer to when the sale officially closes and is recorded in the public record, home sales counts from Zillow and elsewhere traditionally report on a lag.  Zillow’s existing home sales nowcast aims to eliminate this lag by using a statistical model incorporating past latency and average revision rates locally so that existing home sales are reported on the same cadence as mo...