1) The Wall Street Journal detailed the work experiences of some former US TikTok employees who claim to have averaged 85 hours of meetings per week. The Chinese company has 1.5k US employees and plans to hire ~8.5k more.
2) A new study tracking 305,422 trademarks from 1976-2014 found companies that filed with a higher “trademark intensity” — the trademark count as a percentage of total assets — performed 5.2% better on the stock market than those with low scores.
3) The US unemployment rate for 16- to 19-year-old workers was 10.2% in April. That’s way down from the sky-high 31.9% rate in April 2020, and not far off from the 68-year low of 9.6% in May 2021.
4) Q1 2022 saw more money spent on lobbying than ever — $1B+, up from <$929m last year. Meta and Amazon were the 7th and 8th highest spenders at $5.4m and $5.3m+, respectively.
5) Googoogaga. In the week ending April 24, a study across 11k+ US stores found 40% of baby formula products were out of stock, up from 31% on April 3 and way up from 11% in November.
