• Apple is developing software for users to create custom emojis using generative AI.
• Siri will get a generative AI upgrade to improve natural speech and new task capabilities.
• New AI features for iOS 18 and macOS 15 include transcribing voice memos and retouching photos.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But that was before we had emojis. And before emojis had AI.

Apple is developing software for users to create customized emojis on the go as part of a new spate of generative AI features, according to Bloomberg. These features go beyond the catalog of emojis Apple offers by creating a special emoji for each situation.

Siri is also getting a generative AI makeover. With the help of Apple's own large language models, its virtual assistant will should sound more natural, and the Apple Watch will get a more advanced version of Siri to assist with tasks on the go, Bloombeg reported. Apple hopes the technology will also help Siri improve upon the tasks it already does, like responding to questions, and take on new tasks like summarizing text messages.

Apple also aims to release new AI features for iOS 18 and macOS 15 to transcribe voice memos, retouch photos, and speed up and improve search results.

Next month, Apple will likely discuss some of these features at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. The company has been pretty quiet about its generative AI strategy — especially compared to other tech giants like Google and Microsoft — but that doesn't mean you should count it out of the AI arms race. CEO Tim Cook promised in February that "AI "will affect every product and service we have."

It's par for the course for Apple to be a little late to the announcement game.

"Apple is very rarely first to market," Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, a tech consulting firm, previously told Business Insider. "They prefer to come in and disrupt the market — take anything from wearables to smartphones to tablets. They've never been first."

• Hillary Clinton said that Democrats didn't do enough to stop the demise of Roe.
• "We didn't take it seriously, and we didn't understand the threat," she told The New York Times.
• Ahead of November, abortion and reproductive rights are top of mind for many voters.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an interview for a forthcoming book, made some of her strongest remarks to date about the fall of Roe v. Wade, arguing that the Democratic Party underestimated the anti-abortion movement.

In advance of the June release of the book, "The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America," Clinton told The New York Times that Democrats believed that the court system and legal precedents would protect abortion rights — until the US Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that those rights were not protected by the Constitution.

"We didn't take it seriously, and we didn't understand the threat," Clinton, the party's 2016 presidential nominee, told the Times. "Most Democrats, most Americans, did not realize we are in an existential struggle for the future of this country."

"We could have done more to fight," she added.

The book, written by Times journalists Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, explores the decadeslong push to dismantle Roe v. Wade and the ramifications of its demise.

During the interview, Clinton lamented that Democrats were "taken by surprise" by the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. She argued that she never became complacent over the potential for a conservative-led Supreme Court to reverse Roe.

"One thing I give the right credit for is they never give up," she told the Times. "They are relentless. You know, they take a loss. They get back up. They regroup. They raise more money."

"It's tremendously impressive the way that they operate," she continued. "And we have nothing like it on our side."

Since the fall of Roe, Democrats have benefited in elections across the country, with many independents and even some Republicans backing ballot measures protecting abortion rights. And Democratic candidates fared much better than predicted in the 2022 midterms in part because they supported abortion rights, a position largely in line with suburban voters who have dramatically moved away from a GOP now controlled by former President Donald Trump.

Democrats plan to use the issue against Trump this year, telling voters that it was his Supreme Court appointments that have now caused a patchwork of abortion laws across the country — with some states enacting near-total abortion bans and others expanding access.

Trump has sought to moderate his views on the issue. He criticized a near-total abortion ban in Arizona that has since been repealed by the legislature.

But Clinton is warning that the conservative push to restrict abortion further will not abate.

"More people have got to wake up because this is the beginning," she told the Times. "They really want us to just shut up and go home. That's their goal."

• Bette Nash, the world's longest-serving flight attendant, has died from cancer at age 88.
• Nash started her career in 1957 with Eastern Airlines. 
• She witnessed major changes in air travel, from the jet age to post-9/11 security measures.

The world's longest-serving flight attendant has died from cancer at the age of 88.

In a statement on X, formerly Twitter, American Airlines said: "We mourn the passing of Bette Nash, who spent nearly seven decades warmly caring for our customers in the air."

"She started in 1957 and held the Guinness World Record for longest-serving flight attendant. Bette inspired generations of flight attendants. Fly high, Bette," the post continues.

Nash never officially retired from her role with American Airlines. She died in hospice after a recent breast cancer diagnosis.

Nash got her first job as a flight attendant with Eastern Airlines — which later became American Airlines — in 1957, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was in the White House.

"You had to be a certain height, you had to be a certain weight. It used to be horrible. You put on a few pounds and you had to keep weighing yourself, and then if you stayed that way, they would take you off the payroll," Nash previously told ABC affiliate WJLA about the early days of her career.

She told ABC News in 2022 that a ticket for a flight between New York and Washington, DC, cost just $12 at the time, adding that passengers could even purchase life insurance from a vending machine before boarding their plane.

Over the course of her career, Nash saw huge changes to the aviation industry, including the effects of deregulation, the computer revolution, and the heightened security measures that came into effect following the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

She also saw flying become increasingly accessible following a boom in commercial air travel in the 1950s.

By 1955, more people in the US traveled by air than by train, and by 1957, airplanes had also replaced ocean liners as the preferred means of crossing the Atlantic, according to the National Air and Space Museum.

Just as Nash was starting out, jet passenger service also began in the US with the arrival of the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 airliners.

"The jet engine revolutionized air travel. Powerful and durable, jets enabled aircraft manufacturers to build bigger, faster, and more productive airliners," the National Air and Space Museum says on its website, adding that almost half of all Americans had flown by 1972.

In an X statement, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants said Nash "touched many with her warmth, dedication, and service."

"RIP, Bette. You won't be forgotten," it added.

• The baby-boomer "time bomb" is finally upon us, economists say.
• All boomers will be at least 65 soon, the generation's point of "peak burden" on the economy.
• Future generations can take solace in the fact that no boomer-size generations are in the making.

A time bomb has been ticking in the US.

It's the baby boomers, who as they age are approaching their "peak burden" years in regard to their drag on the economy and the resources of younger generations.

Boomers have already gotten tons of flak from younger people over the economy they've left Gen Zers, millennials, and Generation X to inherit. By the end of this year, all boomers — defined by the US Census Bureau as being born from 1946 to 1964 — will be 60 or older.

This means the youngest boomers are rapidly approaching retirement, and a bigger retirement population means more of a drag on the US economy, a burden that Barclays senior economist Jonathan Millar expects to stretch on for the next 20 years. 

"The peak burden," Millar told Business Insider, is when essentially all living baby boomers have hit retirement. "And we're getting there."

The date could fall sometime around 2029, when the youngest boomers will be 65, according to a Census Bureau report.

A population time bomb

It isn't the boomers' fault they were born. They didn't choose to be a mammoth-size generation that's left the US with a big and probably expensive retirement-age population.

And it isn't the case that baby boomers will derail economic growth nearly as much as, say, a full-blown recession, according to Dean Baker, an economist who described the baby boomers as a "time bomb" in a 1998 paper.

"Yes, it does create strains, but the idea was just some horrible catastrophe that loomed on the horizon," he said of the public dialogue on aging boomers. "It was really just craziness."

Still, the consequences of an aging population are real — and it's expected to weigh on the US over the coming decades. Older people are just one of the many factors weighing on Japan's economy, for instance, with people over 65 making up more than 25% of the overall population.

Baby boomers have already weighed on the US economy, and the cohort risks being a bigger drag in the coming years, Millar said.

Boomers are taking up the housing supply

Boomers are taking up a disproportionately large share of the housing supply compared with previous generations. That has been a pain for other homebuyers, as lower housing inventory has helped push up home prices.

The housing market saw its worst year of sales since 1995 in 2023, according to the National Association of Realtors. Existing homeowners have had little incentive to downsize their homes, many of which are fully paid off or financed at ultralow rates.

"It probably means we're headed for five or six years where baby boomers contribute to very strong housing demand, and we're going to have high house prices as a result," Millar warned.

Boomers also appear to be hogging the larger homes that millennials would otherwise be flocking to as they start families. In 2022, empty-nester baby boomers owned 28% of large homes in the US, a Redfin analysis found, double the share of millennial families.

Boomers are contributing to the labor shortage

The US has more open jobs than available workers. That gap is likely to widen as more boomers leave the workforce.

As of January, the Chamber of Commerce estimated that the economy was still down about 1.7 million workers compared with before the coronavirus pandemic. The labor market, meanwhile, is staring at 9.5 million job openings.

The labor shortage could eventually spell trouble for the economy, as a low supply of workers pushes up wages, which can stoke inflation.

Boomer retirees are also still demanding goods and services in the economy. If they aren't contributing anything in labor, that demand is also inherently inflationary, Millar added.

Boomers are a risk to the stock market

Retirees, who are less tolerant of stock-market volatility, also pose a downside risk to stocks. Boomers are more likely to sell if the US economy tips into a recession. That's a problem, considering that analysis by Rosenberg Research found people 55 and older account for 80% of stock-market ownership in the US.

"Retirees don't have the luxury to buy and hold through a market downturn," the economist David Rosenberg said in a recent note. "If a downturn does materialize, demographically induced selling is a force that could exacerbate the spiral powerfully, with the effects ricocheting into consumer spending."

Boomers will drain Social Security

Finally, boomers are set to collect a large amount in Social Security payments. The Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund is expected to be depleted in 2033, a year earlier than previously expected, the Social Security Administration said in a new report.

Politicians are averse to raising taxes or slashing spending on social programs, Millar noted, and are unlikely to let payments lapse. Instead, they'll most likely pay for the program by taking on more debt to keep funding retirees through old age.

"Any way you slice it, this is a burden on current and future generations of taxpayers," Millar added.

The silver lining is that there doesn't appear to be a baby-boomer redux in the making, Baker said. Millennials are a large generation, but after that, Gen Z and Alpha look to be much smaller, meaning there won't be a similar time bomb ticking for the economy.

"I think it's very unlikely that we're going to see another population boom like we had in the post-World War II years," Baker said. "If there's some set of events that lead to that, it's nothing I can see on the horizon."

Correction: February 5, 2024 — An earlier version of this story incorrectly described data from the National Association of Realtors. It found the housing market to have had its worst sales in 2023 since 1995, not ever.

This story was originally published in February 2024.

• Trump vowed to commute Ross Ulbricht's sentence at the Libertarian National Convention.
• Libertarians view Ulbricht's life sentence as a symbol of government overreach.
• Trump also promised to include a Libertarian in his cabinet if elected.

Donald Trump made an address at the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday, promising to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the jailed founder of the infamous online drug marketplace Silk Road.

"If you vote for me, on Day One, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht," Trump declared to enthusiastic applause from the crowd in Washington, DC. 

The move to highlight Ulbricht was strategically catered to Libertarian voters.

Ulbricht, now 40, who was imprisoned for life in 2015, is an unjustly imprisoned hero of the US libertarian movement.

The Libertarian Party, with its long-standing advocacy for drug legalization and criminal justice reform, has consistently lobbied for Ulbricht's release, viewing his life sentence as a symbol of government overreach.

Ulbricht became interested in libertarian values at university, according to a Wired report, where he discovered the ideas of Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, an advocate of the moral purpose of free-market capitalism and staunch opponent of interventionism. Ulbricht embraced these ideas of uncompromised freedom, per Wired.

"When I created Silk Road, I wasn't seeking financial gain," Ulbricht's wrote in a heartfelt letter to his trial judge in 2015.

"I created Silk Road because I believed at the time that people should have the right to buy and sell whatever they wanted so long as they weren't hurting anyone else," he wrote.

In 2015, he was given life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was also fined $183,961,921.

Ulbricht is being held at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson.

The majority of goods sold on Silk Road were illegal hardcore drugs, said the United States Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York at his trial.

"Silk Road was supposed to be about giving people the freedom to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness," wrote Ulbricht. "While I still don't think people should be denied this right, I never sought to create a site that would provide another avenue for people to feed their addictions."

Trump, who was loudly booed and heckled during much of his speech at the Libertarian National Convention, did manage to partially win the audience around by committing to free Ulbricht.

Katherine Yeniscavich, a Libertarian Party national committee member, told Politico, "It's one of the things we wanted from his first term."

In addition to the Ulbricht pledge, Trump made further pledges, promising to include a Libertarian in his cabinet and others in senior administrative positions if elected.

• The Federal Reserve published its Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking this week.
• The percentage of parents with children under 18 who felt "financially okay" declined.
• It's the lowest percentage since 2015. Skyrocketing childcare costs are likely to blame.

The financial well-being of American parents with young children is plummeting, highlighting how unaffordable childcare costs have become.

The Federal Reserve published its annual Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking on May 21. The survey, which collected answers from 11,000 people in October 2023, examines the economic well-being of US households and potential financial risks.

While the report said people's overall financial well-being was "nearly unchanged" between 2022 and 2023, some groups "continued to experience financial stress at higher rates than others."

That included parents with children under 18.

The percentage of parents with children under 18 who felt "okay financially" dropped from 69% in 2022 to 64% in 2023.

The 2023 data point is a stark decline from 2021 when 75% of parents said they felt comfortable financially. Data from the Federal Reserve shows that parents haven't felt this financially insecure since 2015, when it recorded 65%.

Comparatively, the percentage of adults who don't have children under 18 and feel "okay financially" hasn't dipped below 70% in the last eight years.

The report doesn't give specific reasons for the growing financial concern, but the rising cost of childcare has been a national concern for years.

The cost of childcare has skyrocketed in the United States, making it difficult for families to maneuver the current economy.

"Childcare costs can be significant for parents," the Federal Reserve report says. "The median monthly amount that parents using paid care paid for childcare was $800. For those who paid for 20 or more hours of childcare each week, the median cost was $1,100."

Business Insider estimated that it could cost parents nearly $26,000 a year to care for one child in 2024 — a 41.5% increase from 2016. A 2024 Bank of America analysis also found that the United States has the second most expensive childcare system among developed countries.

That analysis, which ranked New Zealand No. 1, found that the average couple with two children spent more than 30% of their combined wages on childcare.