
Hi! People always tend to bicker about lifestyle choices, like water on a toothbrush before or after applying toothpaste; cereal or milk first in the bowl, shower or no shower after a haircut. One such quarrel is socks or no socks:
Albert Einstein despised wearing socks, claiming it was pointless to wear both shoe and a sock together. He also mentioned the reason for his annoyance also stemmed from the fact that his socks would form holes because of his big toes.
The current Guinness World record of wearing the most number of socks is 252. And if the number wasn't outrageous, it will be the fact that they were all worn on a single foot!
Well, we can call it a stalemate between the big foot scientist and the sock connoisseur for now, on the occasion of No Sock Day. So, don't risk wearing no socks on your interview and make sure to remove them before heading to sleep. Now, let's get started with our regular!
Today’s special:
A Home Sickness: Young adults in America are living with their parents against their wishes.
The Tech-Tical Anomaly: Tech layoffs seems to have become the latest TikTok trend in the U.S.
All Chips No Air: GE Vernova is powering itself for success thanks to the AI Boom!
Roommates Since Birth
For decades, it’s been an unspoken belief that moving out is a rite of passage, well now it’s starting to look like a privilege. In the US, the number of young adults aged 18–34 who lived with their parents has climbed to 33%, hovering near pandemic-era highs, as per FinanceBuzz. That number has jumped since 2010 when it was only 30% marking a steady but decades-long increase with little sign of reversing.
And the trend isn’t subtle at all, and geography only sharpens the divide. For instance, in high-cost regions like New Jersey, the share crosses 44%, while at the same time in Puerto Rico the percentage is at 58%, a stark reflection of how housing costs dictate independence.
A glance across the Atlantic and it's not any different, even there the pattern holds. In the UK, the number of 25–34-year-olds who are living with parents has increased from 13% in 2006 to 18% recently. That’s an addition of roughly 450,000 more young adults to the family home, per BBC reporting on Institute for Fiscal Studies data. Even the drivers and symptoms are uncanny: rising rents along with the situation of house prices outpacing incomes are the reasons.

A Pricey Adulthood
The issue isn’t just about delay in adulthood or how the norm of moving out after eighteen is being completely debunked, it’s more structural in nature, and the numbers are beckoning to a financial squeeze.
Over the past decade, 1.5 million people under 35 are living with their parents, setting a 6.3% increase and growing faster than the young adult population itself, according to The Conversation. The math behind reveals the reason for this phenomenon: rents have risen roughly 4% annually, while wages have been trailing, managing to crawl up just 0.6% a year. Even further out of reach is the attainment of homeownership. Median house prices have surged 90% in 10 years, and this has pushed the typical first-time buyer’s age up to 38.
Now faced with this predicament, moving back home becomes less of a choice and more of a financial strategy. Almost half of parents report having a “boomerang child” aged 18–35 return home, per a survey cited by the New York Post. But that strategy of moving home comes with trade-offs and downsides. Only 46% of those who moved back home showed top budgeting skills, compared to 63% who never returned home, hinting at stalled financial independence. In other words, young adults aren’t staying home because they want to; they’re staying because the alternative keeps getting further away.
Laid Off Like Weed
From “a day in my life” vlogs to “I just got laid off” confessionals, tech layoffs have quietly become a genre of their own online, except the numbers behind the trend are anything but the stuff for virality.
In the entirety of 2025 alone, at least 127,000 US tech workers were laid off, following 95,667 cuts in 2024 and more than 191,000 in 2023. Even big tech firms conventionally known to be stable are left with no immunity. From 2025 until now companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Intel are all about reducing the workforce and accordingly have laid off 15,347, 30,284, 27,058 respectively.
And 2026? It is not exactly turning out to be a comeback arc, with over 52,000 jobs having already been cut in the first three months, with March alone bearing witness to 18,720 layoffs, marking a 40% jump year-over-year. Some cuts have been incremental; others have been sweeping through: Block trimmed down a staggering 40% of its workforce, while Oracle reportedly laid off tens of thousands globally.

The AI Restack
If layoffs once signaled downturns, today they are starting to look more like redesigns. By January 2026, the highest record for tech job cuts since 2009 was already set in stone through the realization of 22,291 layoffs as companies doubled down on automation.
AI isn’t just a catchphrase in this context, here it’s more of a headcount strategy. In 2025, AI adoption was directly responsible for around 55,000 layoffs and to make things worse about 32% of companies are anticipating to follow suit and shrink their workforce because of it. Beyond layoffs, the onset of the AI boom is even changing the structure of companies within. Instead of sprawling teams, AI-first startups are scaling with just 10 to 50 employees, and completely relying on automation to do the heavy lifting.
Meanwhile, the labor market is being affected by this shift and is feeling the repercussion in real time even as the broader economy added a lay up of 178,000. And for those caught in the cuts, the aftermath isn’t kind either in fact the fallout lingers beyond the layoff post. Goldman Sachs estimates displaced tech employees take about one month longer to find new roles, and when they do it's often by settling for jobs that pay over 3% less.
GE Going Sup-Vernova
Beyond the hype of tech chips, the AI revolution is about the massive electricity demand it creates. And few companies are closer to that power switch than GE Vernova.
The numbers they’ve put up is testament to a business that’s scaling fast with gross profit doubling from $3.458 billion in 2022 to $7.535 billion in 2025. Even on a quarterly basis, momentum is clear with the company bagging $1.782 billion in Q1 2026, up 21.22% year-over-year.
That type of consistency is indicative of something more structural than cyclical growth, and the markets seem to concur with Vernova’s stock surging roughly 70% year-to-date. As of May 6, 2026, the stock closed at $1,118.96, capping off a strong rally backed by investor optimism around the demand of AI-linked energy infrastructure.

Feeding Hungry Mouths
At the crux of this surge is a simple constraint: AI needs electricity, quite a lot of it, and the grid isn’t prepared for it. Owing to which GE Vernova’s electrification business has become ground zero for that demand. Vervona builds transformers, grid systems, and high-voltage equipment, and this has become the company’s growth engine. Revenue jumped 61%, while its backlog ballooned to $42 billion, up from just $9 billion at the end of 2022. In a single quarter, data center-related orders alone hit $2.4 billion, already exceeding all of last year.
It’s not just wires and transformers the company is scaling the supply side to keep up. Gas turbine demand, which is imperative for 24/7 data center power, is booming, with orders rising 77% organically in late 2025.
To remove grid bottlenecks GE Vernova is also betting big on supply chains. Its $5.3 billion acquisition of Prolec GE, targeting transformer shortages and sure enough it’s paying off. Looking ahead, the company has raised its 2026 revenue outlook to $44.5–$45.5 billion. Even with a struggling wind segment where revenue fell 23% the larger context is undeniable. AI is turning GE Vernova into a core player because in the AI economy, tech chips may be king but electricity is key to the kingdom.
Extra Data Bites
Guess The Bite
AI might be increasing productivity and may be the reason behind many layoffs, but surprisingly it is not mostly used for work-related tasks — can you guess where it is being used the most?
[Answer Below]

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