--- title: From California Fires to Colleges: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week | TIME description: Devastating fires ravaging California, which states will be ready for legal sports betting in time for the NFL season, Loreal’s investment in AR, and the public versus private university divide. canonical: https://time.com/video/NnDVrL8M/ og:title: From California Fires to Colleges: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week og:description: Devastating fires ravaging California, which states will be ready for legal sports betting in time for the NFL season, Loreal’s investment in AR, and the public versus private university divide. og:url: https://time.com/video/NnDVrL8M/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/NnDVrL8M/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: From California Fires to Colleges: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week twitter:description: Devastating fires ravaging California, which states will be ready for legal sports betting in time for the NFL season, Loreal’s investment in AR, and the public versus private university divide. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/NnDVrL8M/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # From California Fires to Colleges: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: From California Fires to Colleges: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week [Watch (HLS stream): From California Fires to Colleges: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/NnDVrL8M.m3u8) (12:39)  _Published 2018-08-15. Devastating fires ravaging California, which states will be ready for legal sports betting in time for the NFL season, Loreal’s investment in AR, and the public versus private university divide._ --- Jul 28, 2023 12:24 AM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [From College Bowls to Coding Bootcamps: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week](/video/nlUZPjzW/) ### From College Bowls to Coding Bootcamps: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week [From Fires to Black Friday: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need To Know](/video/1MOYvVWo/) ### From Fires to Black Friday: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need To Know [From Playoffs to Midterms: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week](/video/TWz4B2Eb/) ### From Playoffs to Midterms: Let’s Break Down Everything You Need to Know This Week --- ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Welcome to The Breakdown, I am your host Neha Joy and we are here with the top stories of the week from Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and Money Now this week we look at the devastating fires ravaging California. Sports gambling may be legal, but which states will be ready for NFL season. As L'Oreal partners with Facebook to ramp up its AR efforts, we examine the tech's impact on your future shopping habits. And Money weighs in on the public versus private university divide. So let's dive in. [ SOUND ] California is on fire. There are 14 active wildfires squashing the state, killing at least nine people, destroying thousands of structures and forcing numerous evacuations and closures. Including several national and state parks. Three of the largest California fires since 2000 are burning right now. The largest wildfire in state history is actually a result of two fires in Northern California. The River and Ranch fires are collectively known as the Mendocino Complex Fire which has killed one firefighter and continues to threaten over 1, 000 structures. The fire has engulfed more than 354, 000 acres And it's 60 % contained as of August 14th. More than 160 miles north, the car fire erupted in Reading, California, and sent a rare fire tornado through a neighborhood. It has burned more than a thousand homes and caused 8 deaths while ravaging more than 178, 000 acres of land. That's bigger than the City of Chicago. And the Ferguson fire near Yosemite National Park has burned more than 94, 000 acres, an area about half the size of New York City since it started in July. More than 3400 firefighters have fought this blaze. Officials are leveraging all resources to contain each of these fires scattered across the state. Air drop after air drop. You can see firefighters deploying specially equiped Boeing 747 just to contain California's most recent blaze, the Holy Fire. The rising intensity of wildfires seen over the past few decades is the result of several overlapping trends. California just got out of a six year drought, and that dried up a lot of the vegetation across the state. Paired with record setting temperatures have made it just even more dry, and more easily able. To catch fire. With climate change lengthening the fire season, and housing sprawl worsening the damage, California's fires have become a year- round phenomenon. And this is only the beginning. Governor Jerry Brown recently actually had said that the state needs to re- examine How communities are built, where communities are built, how much it's investing in its fire protection efforts, but with the kind of damage these fires have caused over the last few years, it's made a lot of people wonder what else can we do. There's a topic of conversation right now that has to do with land use management . >> Fire is now more a part of our ordinary experience. The predictions is that things would get drier and harder are incurring and that will continue. We gonna have to adapt, we gonna change our technology but in the meantime we gonna spend hell lot of money and there is gonna be a lot of unpleasant events and suffering as a result. And with California fires costing upward of billion dollars in damage. Solutions for this type of devastation are needed fast, especially a summer winds continue to fan the flames and residence stand at the crosshairs of the blazes. [ SOUND ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Wanna bet? Before this year you could only place legal bets on sporting events in one state in America, Nevada. But thanks to a 6- 3 ruling back in May the Supreme Court cleared the way for states to legalize sports betting. And while American sports leagues have fought for years to keep betting on their games illegal they're positioned to be some of the decisions biggest winners. Illegal sports betting already bounced to approximately $ 150 billion annually, so the money's on the table. Now three months after the supreme court's decision, a few states have already begun accepting wagers. First wave of states to move swiftly to permit sports betting include Delaware, New Jersey, West Virginia, and Mississippi. They already had the legal mechanisms in place and were just waiting for a green light from the high court. Since Delaware legalized sports gambling in June, folks have already placed about $ 7 million dollars in bets. Meanwhile, New Jersey's first month of sport betting took in over $ 16. 4 million dollars in bets. According to the Division of Gaming Enforcement, the Garden State raked in about $ 1. 2 million in revenue from June 14th to June 30th alone. Even the sleepy months of mostly baseball bets in July netted the state with the total handle of $ 40. 6 million. And West Virginia is not far behind. The West Virginia Lottery anticipates casinos will start accepting bets around September 1st Just in time for NFL season. All five casinos int her state plan to offer sports wagering and are expected to bring in about $ 5. 5 million in their first year. According to Nielson Research betters makeup a quarter of the NFL audience. But they watch nearly half of all NFL regular season games. To compare the average non- better catches 16 NFL games, while the average betting fan watches 35 games. This is powerful data as the league is constantly looking for new sources of revenue and creative ways to engage audiences. Mark Cuban believes the Supreme Court's ruling greatly impacted the value of franchises, Saying this to ESPN. I think it'd double the value of professional sports franchises in a second. It'll increase interest, it'll add to what happens in our arena and in stadiums, As the NFL looks to Congress to create a framework for sports betting to ensure the sports integrity, it'll also be working quickly to monetize this new bounty. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] So what's the biggest obstacle when you shop online? You never really know what it's going to look like in real life But now, L'Oreal is joining the ranks of Amazon and Ikea and taking some of the guess work out of online shopping. The largest beauty company in the world is launching an augmented reality feature on both Facebook and Instagram to allow users to experience virtual makeup tests within the app camera filters. Starting with L'oreal brands, NYX, Urban Decay, and Yves Saint Laurent. The AR experience will allow users a chance to superimpose makeup products onto themselves in a virtual makeup room. When everyone from Cover Girl to Estee Lauder have launched their own augmented reality cosmetic apps, tapping into Facebook's existing platform presents a unique opportunity for L'oreal The reality of it is no matter how many stores people like, they're only going to download a couple of shopping apps onto their phone. And so this allows Loreal to go straight to Instagram, which is where most people will be posting this kind of picture and soliciting their friends feedback anyway. And so it's a very [ UNKNOWN ] program. To solidify its edge within the AR space, Loreal acquired the Canadian beauty tech company Modiface earlier this year. This is just the beginning for Loreal's digital strategy. On the heels of it's partnership with Facebook, the company's Chief Digital Officer said after having adapted our creatives and contents to a mobile- first world, it will be very interesting to see how A. R. is going to change the creative playbook of our industry. And as A. R. continues to develop we will start to see applications that combine both online And offline environments. A lot of stores are bringing AR into their physical locations, notably target, notably calls. The idea there is that you want to offer more experiences inside the store and stores should not be boring at all anymore Ultimately retailers have to think about what's the ideal shopping experience for their customers regardless of the medium. Companies are beseiged with technologies that vendors say will improve the customer experience and the truth is that many technologies turn out to be bust, even if on Maybe they sound wonderful, and so they're being cautious with AR but at the same time they're certainly adopting it. I think that they've all learned their lesson from having been slow to e- commerce a decade ago. [ SOUND ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] College is now the second largest financial expense for many families, surpassed only by the purchase of a home. So it's not surprising that both parents and students are taking a hard look at the costs and payoffs of any college on their list. And the running assumption is that elite colleges with ivory towers, low acceptance rates and higher price tags are your best bet. But is that really true? Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce reports that your major actually plays as big role in determining what you earn after college than your choice in college. Students with specific interests should do their homework and figure out which institutions offer the best programs for their prospective majors. But two of the top highest paying areas of study stem in business, Ar e also the most popular majors making up 46 % of college graduates. So what makes a school worth it. According to a gallup Purdue of 30, 000 college graduates it doesn't actually matter what type of college you go to, public or private The type of institution you attend has little to no bearing on your long- term life, wellbeing and engagement at work. Money analyzed graduation rates, tuition charges, alumni earnings, as well as 22 other data points to determine colleges with best return on their investment. Many public universities, like the University of California, San Diego, and UC Irvine topped the list, alongside private institutions like MIT and Princeton. Here to make sense of the rankings and share further insights on the public / private school divide is Money writer Katelyn Mulhare All right, Kaitlyn, thanks so much for joining us. Now we've seen a lot of public universities in New York and California make Money's Best Colleges list, alongside elite private universities. So how did you get there? Yeah, so Money's rankings really reward colleges that promote economic mobility. And public colleges in general have a long history of doing that. But especially, that's true in New York and California, as you pointed out. So they admit a wide swath of the population and they really help them to be able to access a middle class lifestyle, which money thinks invaluable. The other thing is that a lot of the other public colleges in the country we find that their graduates are reporting salaries that are really on par with those private schools. And I know from talking with job recruiters, that they tell me that they're just as likely to go to the University of Washington, or to Purdue University, or to the University of Georgia, as they are to visit those elite private institutions to look for employers. So, what makes an elite private university worth is? Yeah, so a lot of the private universities that pop to the top of our rankings are, Frankly really wealthy. So that means that they have the money to offer a ton of financial aid and they are often some of the most affordable colleges in the country. They are also smaller and so it is a little bit easier for students to make really close connections with their professors. And that is valuable because Gallup has found that students who say they have had a mentor or professor who really inspired them and pushed them to pursue their passions. They are two times as likely to say that they are engaged at work when they are adults Wow okay so public versus private what's the takeaway for students here? So it's often a seperate that we make but I think the takeaway is that There's not really a difference in the quality of education or the affordability of a school just because it's a private college versus a public college. So it just really depends on what the student thinks is best for them. Very insightful. All right, Kaitlyn, thanks so much for joining us. Happy to be here. And that's the breakdown for this week. Until next Wednesday, I'm Neha Joy. And thanks for joining our weekly roundup of the news. 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