THAT'S LIFE
Several hundred AI researchers, executives, investors, and other promoters signed on to an extremely [[link removed]] well-publicized [[link removed]] statement last week urging the public to reckon with the "risk of extinction" they claimed was posed by the development of the same AI technology the signers are currently researching, managing, investing in, and promoting. Their chatbots and image generators have unlocked such extraordinary power, they suggest, that AI is now at least as big a threat to human existence as nuclear war .
Meanwhile, at the same time as the headline-grabbing statement [[link removed]] was circulating, Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT developer OpenAI, threatened to stop doing business in Europe [[link removed]] if the European Union followed through with plans to regulate AI technology. Altman signed onto the extinction statement too, so apparently, the sum of his position is that AI could very well lead to the complete destruction of all human beings…but also must not be regulated by any human government .
Make it make sense.
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$6 billion [[link removed]] will be paid out by members of the Sackler family to settle hundreds of legal claims over their role in the opioid crisis [[link removed]] . In exchange, the billionaire owners of Purdue Pharma — notorious for its promotion of OxyContin — will retain half their fortune and receive total immunity from all current and future civil claims against them.
16 percent [[link removed]] is how much PepsiCo raised consumer prices on snacks and beverages [[link removed]] in the first quarter of the year, boosting their profit margins and pleasing investors. Some economists continue to express skepticism that corporate profit-seeking could be driving prices higher, trusting their Econ 101 models over what is actually happening in the world and what CEOs are actually saying to shareholders on quarterly earnings calls.
41 percent of outbreaks [[link removed]] of food-borne illnesses at restaurants are due to people working while sick [[link removed]] . Congress has failed to pass a federal law mandating workers have access to paid sick days , and most restaurant chains do not provide sick days except where required by local statute.
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Even for those who already have some idea of the scale of the racial wealth gap, it's worth really reckoning with this simple graph from the Institute for Policy Studies [[link removed]] showing that median wealth for Black and Latino households is projected to fall to $0 over the next 30-50 years . The trend highlighted here is not the product of Adam Smith's invisible hand of the free market, and it's not a force of nature. Rather, it’s a choice: the result of decades of policy decisions that extract resources from poor and middle-class people in order to turbocharge wealth accumulation by the already wealthy. This radical level of inequality and exclusion is utterly unsustainable, and it holds back our economy, too: including more and more people in a thriving middle class is how the economy grows in the first place.
a multi-line chart that shows The Racial Wealth Divide's Bankrupting Effect on the Middle Class [[link removed]]
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American banks collected a total of $1.6 billion in overdraft fees in the fourth quarter of last year, which sounds like (and is!) a lot of money, but as American Banker reports [[link removed]] , this figure also represents a 50% decline in fees since 2019 . This is a welcome reversal from the trend of the past couple of decades, over which banks transformed the experience of not having enough money in your account from a humiliating hassle into a profit center . Of course, the change didn't come about from bank CEOs seeing the light about the ghoulish greed of vacuuming billions from the pockets of people living check-to-check. And it didn't come from market competition between retail banking giants. Nope, it happened the old-fashioned way: through ongoing regulatory attention by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as part of a comprehensive effort to lower consumer costs by cracking down on junk fees [[link removed]] . (But don't worry, the big banks are still doing fine.)
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