Do you think Republicans place guns above people? If your answer is no, perhaps these facts will make you think again?
MAGAt Republican Tennessee Governor Bill Lee Credit: AP
NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE — Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee has signed off on additional protections for gun and ammunition dealers, manufacturers and sellers against lawsuits within a bill that lawmakers passed after a deadly school shooting in March.
The Republican governor quietly signed the legislation Thursday. Its provisions kick in on July 1.
Lee’s choice to sign the bill comes as he keeps pushing for the same Republican lawmakers, who hold supermajorities in the House and Senate, to pass a proposal that aims to keep guns away from people who could harm themselves or others. Lee plans to call lawmakers back into an August special session that aims “to strengthen public safety and preserve constitutional rights” after they adjourned last month without taking up his “temporary mental health order of protection” proposal. His office hasn’t released […]
Local newspapers, where most people got local news, are dying all over the country like starving kittens, and in their place is a torrent of internet misinformation. But the real killer of fact based ethical journalism is AI, and it is going to radically reshape our culture by playing on the fears, resentments, and hate of the sad low IQ white supremacy contingent in our population, who are going to be played like hand puppets.
It’s been living up to that removal lately. At its annual I/O in San Francisco this week, the search giant finally lifted the lid on its vision for AI-integrated search — and that vision, apparently, involves cutting digital publishers off at the knees.
Google’s new AI-powered search interface, dubbed “Search Generative Experience,” or SGE for short, involves a feature called “AI Snapshot.” Basically, it’s an enormous top-of-the-page summarization feature. Ask, for example, “why is sourdough bread still so popular?” — one of the examples that Google used in their presentation — and, before you get to the blue links that we’re all familiar with, Google will provide you with a large language model (LLM) -generated summary. Or, we guess, snapshot.
“Google’s normal search results load almost immediately,” The Verge’s David Pierce explains. “Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase ‘Generative AI is experimental.’ A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: […]
By any standard by which you care to measure the United States does not like, does not care for, and does not support family values, or family wellbeing. The endless crap you hear politicians spewing out, be they Democrats or Republicans is just that, crap. The objectively verifiable hard facts tell the real truth. Of the top 41 developed nations in the world the United States ranks 40 in child care. And when you look at maternal mortality, or infant mortality, as two other examples, it is pretty much the same. So when you hear a politician telling you how much they support family wellbeing you know, with a few exceptions like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or Katie Porter, they are lying to your face. And now the whole thing is being turned into another profit scam.
On April 18, the Biden administration announced a set of executive orders aimed at mitigating the ongoing crises that have wracked the U.S. child care industry. At first glance, it appeared that President Joe Biden was taking steps toward fulfilling a longtime promise of his campaign and revisiting a priority of his signature (and failed) “Build Back Better” (BBB) initiative. While the press conference made for flattering PR, that was the extent of the orders’ utility: Among the more than 50 decrees, none mandated anything close to transformational changes. Biden’s directives to federal agencies contained a lot of “issuing guidance,” “consider[ing]” and “encouraging.” In other words, they chiefly amounted to nonbinding gestures and tinkering with existing policy.
The most impactful order stipulated increased pay and benefits for Head Start program educators — certainly welcome. But the package was a far cry from the ambitions of BBB or campaign rhetoric. Even the staid and stalwart AssociatedPress ventured that the orders’ “impact would be limited and possess more of a symbolic weight about what’s possible.”
Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate, Columnist, Professor City University of New York Graduate Center. - The New York Times
Stephan:
The corruption of Big Pharma is astounding as our its prices and profits but, because most in the American Congress are more interested in their personal power and wellbeing which depends on corporations renting them as needed nothing is likely to be done to correct this obscene situation.
Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by bernadg and londoneye/Getty
On Thursday, Brad Setser of the Council of Foreign Relations — esteemed by cognoscenti for his forensic analyses of balance of payments data — testified to a Senate committee about global tax avoidance by pharmaceutical companies. This issue may not have loomed large on many people’s radar screens, and with everything else going on you may wonder why you should care. But there are at least two reasons you should.
First, at a time when people are once again angsting about budget deficits — much of the angst is insincere, but still — it’s surely relevant that the U.S. government is losing a lot of revenue because multinational corporations are using accounting tricks to avoid paying taxes on profits earned here.
Second, now that it’s looking increasingly likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee, it seems relevant to note that his one major legislative success — the 2017 tax cut, which was supposed to bring corporate investment back to America […]
The Amazon is critical to the wellbeing of the planet, here is some wonderful good news.
A swath of the Amazon rainforest near Manaus, Brazil. Credit: Neil Palmer / CIAT / Flickr
So far this year, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is down 40 percent from the same period in 2022, according to government data. The drop comes as a win for President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has promised to curb forest less.
In April alone, deforestation was down 68 percent from last year. The region saw 127 square miles (329 square kilometers) of forest destroyed, running below the historical April average of 176 square miles (456 square kilometers), Reuters reports.
It is unclear, however, if the downward trend will continue into late summer, when forest loss typically peaks. “The numbers are at a very high level, and the dry season, which is favorable to deforestation, has not yet started,” Mariana Napolitano of WWF-Brazil, said in a statement.
In Brazil’s dry Cerrado region, land clearing is trending up. Officials have recorded a spike in deforestation in the Brazilian savanna this year. The loss comes “in a context of continuous and increasing […]
