Warner Brothers Discovery is shutting down CNN+ streaming service!

CNN+ Streaming Service Shut Down After Less Than One Month (WBD) - Bloomberg

Dear Commons Community,

Warner Bros. Discovery is shutting down CNN+ as of April 30, marking one of the company’s first significant maneuvers since completing the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery less than two weeks ago. As reported by Variety.

“The decision puts an abrupt end to an ambitious venture that people familiar with the matter say rankled David Zaslav, the new CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, from the start. Zaslav was annoyed by the decision of Jason Kilar, the former CEO of WarnerMedia when it was owned by AT&T, to launch CNN+ just weeks before Discovery was set to take over operations.

“This decision is in line with WBD’s broader direct-to-consumer strategy,” said Chris Licht, the incoming CEO of CNN, in a statement. “In a complex streaming market, consumers want simplicity and an all-in service, which provides a better experience and more value than stand-alone offerings.” Zaslav has been open in the recent past about his desire to combine all of the company’s streaming-video assets, which also include Discovery+ and HBO Max, under a single umbrella.

Andrew Morse, the CNN executive vice president who oversees the newly-launched streaming-video outlet, as well as CNN’s digital and Spanish-language operations, was told of the decision ahead of time, these people said, and is expected to depart after a period of transition. Alex MacCallum was named to oversee digital, and CNN+ employees will be paid for the next 90 days and be given opportunities to explore other positions around the company.

The decision curtails CNN’s efforts to join the TV-news streaming wars, which are already being fought by NBCUniversal, CBS News, Fox News and ABC News. MSNBC has unveiled plans to roll out more opinion-led shows in a bid to generate more subscriptions for Peacock, its corporate parent’s streaming outlet. Fox News has expanded the purview of Fox Nation, adding true-crime documentaries and even movies to service in a bid to attract not only fans of its cable-news outlet, but also a broader array of potential subscribers CBS News recently overhauled its streaming-video efforts and added new shows led by anchors including Norah O’Donnell and Tony Dokoupil. Both NBC News and ABC News have bet on live news programming, setting up anchors like Tom Llamas and Linsey Davis in early-evening weekday programs.

CNN plowed millions into the venture, raiding news executives and producers from places like ABC News and NBC News, and singing on notables like food writer Alison Roman and business professor Scott Galloway. Current staffers like Anderson Cooper and Don Lemon were assigned, respectively, to lead a show on parenting and a talk show with a live audience. A show led by Jemele Hill and Cari Champion had yet to launch.

Inside CNN, executives were pleased with early progress of the new venture, which they said had nabbed 100,000 to 150,000 subscribers in its first few weeks online. They were encouraged by response to new programs like “5 Things,” an early-morning news roundup, and “Reliable Sources Daily,” an extension of CNN’s long-running media-affairs program. Earlier this week, Chris Wallace, who jumped to CNN from Fox News Channel for the streaming venture, landed an interview with White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on his new CNN+ interview show.

But little of that mattered to the new leaders of Warner Bros. Discovery, who are determined to bring to market an extremely broad streaming offering that mixes the premium storytelling of HBO programs and the unscripted documentary fare of Discovery’s cable networks. It remains unclear if CNN intends to keep on board some of its flashy new hires, which, in addition to Wallace, include Kasie Hunt, formerly of NBC News, and Audie Cornish, the NPR veteran. Some talent deals, according to one person familiar with the matter, were not contingent on working for CNN+, and included the ability to contribute to CNN’s broader array of properties.

In a noon meeting, Licht and JB Perrette, Warner Bros. Discovery’s head of streaming, told staffers the quality of the product was not at issue, but that CNN+ did not dovetail with the corporation’s strategy. “It is not your fault that you had the rug pulled out from underneath you,” Licht told employees. Even so, dozens of new staffers face the prospect of losing their jobs.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision will likely consign CNN+ to the heap of glitzy product launches that never got off the ground, either because of lackluster consumer reaction or shifts in corporate strategy. Quibi Holdings, a start up commanded by media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg to devise a streaming portal for short-form programming, didn’t last much more than six months, despite alliances with CBS News and other big media purveyors.”

I like CNN in general and watch it in the mornings but I don’t think I would have subscribed to its streaming service.  With all the news programs on cable and the major networks, I don’t think another news service that you have to pay for would be worthwhile.

Tony

 

AP-NORC poll:  Many say Biden not tough enough on Russia!

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research | NORC.org

Dear Commons Community,

In a new Associated Press-National Opinion Research Center (NORC) poll, many Americans question whether President Joe Biden is showing enough strength in response to Russia’s war against Ukraine, even as most approve of steps the U.S. is already taking and few want U.S. troops to get involved in the conflict.

A poll by the AP-NORC shows 54% of Americans think Biden has been “not tough enough” in his response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thirty-six percent think his approach has been about right, while 8% say he’s been too tough.  As reported by the Associated Press.

But as the war has dragged on, Americans’ desire to get involved has waned somewhat. Thirty-two percent of Americans say the U.S. should have a major role in the conflict. That’s ticked back down from 40% last month, though that remains slightly higher than the 26% who said so in February. An additional 49% say the U.S. should have a minor role.

The results underscore the conundrum for the White House. As images of Russian attacks on civilians and hospitals are shared around the world, there’s pressure to stop Russian President Vladimir Putin and help millions of Ukrainians under attack in their home country or fleeing for safety. But Biden must also manage the threat of escalation with Putin, who has raised the alert level on using Russia’s nuclear weapons, and prevent the U.S. from getting involved in a much larger conflict.

“Given the potential desperation of President Putin and the Russian leadership, given the setbacks that they’ve faced so far militarily, none of us can take lightly the threat posed by a potential resort to tactical nuclear weapons or low-yield nuclear weapons,” CIA Director William Burns said in a recent speech at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Burns added that “so far we haven’t seen a lot of practical evidence” of Russian nuclear escalation.

The White House has authorized more than $2 billion in weapons and led Western sanctions that have crushed the Russian economy. Biden has ruled out sending U.S. troops — a decision supported by a majority of Americans.

The U.S. has also held back some weapons and defensive systems sought by Ukraine and placed early limits on intelligence sharing that have been loosened throughout the conflict.

The poll and follow-up interviews with respondents indicate many Americans, responding to images of Ukrainians being killed and Russian forces allegedly committing war crimes, want to see more action to stop Putin. A majority — 57% — say they believe Putin has directed his troops to commit war crimes. Just 6% say he has not, while 36% say they aren’t sure.

“I know that we’re not directly responsible,” said Rachel Renfro, a 35-year-old from Nashville, Tennessee. “But we’ve always been the kind of people that insert ourselves into these kinds of situations and I don’t understand why we’re not doing that now to a bigger degree.”

Renfro wants to see the U.S. accept more refugees and provide more aid to Ukraine. Sending troops should be “an absolute last resort,” she said.

Most Americans are in favor of the U.S. sanctioning Russia for the invasion, providing weapons to Ukraine and accepting refugees from Ukraine into the U.S. More Americans also support than oppose deploying U.S. troops to Eastern Europe to support U.S. NATO allies in response to Russia’s invasion, and about two-thirds say NATO membership is good for the U.S.

But public support stops short of deploying U.S. troops to Ukraine to fight against Russian forces. Only 22% say they favor deploying U.S. troops to Ukraine to fight against Russian forces, while 55% are opposed; 23% say they are neither in favor nor opposed.

Michael Gonzalez, a 31-year-old from Fort Collins, Colorado, said Biden’s response was “about right,” citing wide-ranging sanctions on Russian banks, oligarchs, and government officials and their families.

“In a perfect world, I wish we can go out there with the troops,” said Gonzalez, whose father served in the Cuban military and whose stepfather worked as a private contractor during the U.S. war in Afghanistan. “I feel like we shouldn’t be policing the world and going everywhere. I wish we could help them, but we’ve been fighting for a while.”

Biden faces other significant political challenges heading into the midterms with inflation at a four-decade high and soaring energy prices exacerbated by the war. The poll suggests the balance in the tradeoff between sanctions on Russia and the U.S. economy might be shifting. By a narrow margin, Americans say the nation’s bigger priority is sanctioning Russia as effectively as possible over limiting damage to the U.S. economy, 51% to 45%. Last month, more said they prioritized sanctioning Russia over limiting damage to the economy, 55% to 42%.

Anthony Cordesman, emeritus chair in strategy at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, noted that Americans broadly support many actions the White House is already taking. Building up Ukraine’s air defense or sending more tanks and airplanes also requires setting up logistics, including radar and maintenance capabilities, that take far longer than many people would expect, Cordesman said.

The White House making that case to people who want more action carries its own risk.

“If you start communicating the limits to what we can do in detail, you may or may not reassure the American people, but you’re providing Russia with a lot of information that you scarcely want to communicate,” Cordesman said.

I am with the 36% who think Biden has handled the Ukraine War just about right.

Tony

Mitt Romney Urges Biden To ‘Ditch His Woke Advisers’ In Critical Op-ed!

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, speaking at a committee meeting on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Dear Commons Community,

Senator Mitt Romney urged President Joe Biden to shift course on the economy in order to tackle growing inflation in a critical op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal yesterday. Romney recommended Biden’s administration adopt several policies to address rising costs, including cutting regulations, expanding oil and gas production, and relieving the supply chain crisis.

The senator then called on Biden to shake up his economic team, writing that the president “needs to ditch his woke advisers and surround himself with people who want to get the economy working again.”

Hard-charging conservatives use “woke,” a word that has pretty much lost all its original meaning, as a catchall pejorative to bash Democrats. It’s striking to see it used by a “maverick” who has been one of the few Republicans to support parts of Biden’s agenda and who recently voted to confirm his Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Romney also called for reducing the deficit by cutting entitlement programs and blamed Democrats for expanding unemployment insurance in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, government spending he said contributed to growing inflation.

“The Biden administration did pretty much everything wrong, injecting $1.9 trillion into a supply-constrained economy, sending out stay-at-home checks, letting tenants live rent-free, squeezing oil and gas production, launching an avalanche of growth-killing regulations, lining up behind unions, and pushing yet another deficit-financed budget,” Romney wrote.

Economists are divided on how much federal spending has contributed to inflation, but either way, Republicans aren’t totally off the hook when it comes to pouring money into the U.S. economy since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Congress passed the $2.2 trillion CARES Act, its first major tranche of pandemic aid, on a broad bipartisan basis, and President Donald Trump signed it into law. Democrats then promised to pass more aid on the eve of the 2020 presidential election; indeed, the proposal to send another wave of stimulus checks to American families helped Democrats win two runoff elections in Georgia, giving them narrow control of the U.S. Senate.

Now, some Democrats want Congress to do even more. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) warned this week that the party could be headed toward “big losses” in the November midterm elections if they do not fulfill the promises they made to voters about policies like bolstering child care and tackling climate change. (Though at this rate, Democrats are likely to face big losses anyway.)

That would mean passing a scaled-down budget reconciliation bill that includes some elements of Build Back Better, the proposal that died in the Senate last year. It’s unlikely that Republicans will support that version either ― Romney wrote in the Journal op-ed that Biden must shelve his Build Back Better plan “permanently” ― meaning Democrats will once again be waiting hand and foot for Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to come around and endorse a proposal that can pass with only 50 Democratic votes.

Romney has been one of the lone moderate Republicans in the Senate who does not always tow the party line.  There are kernels of truth in what he is saying. I would add that Biden desperately needs to improve his messaging to the American people on economic issues.

Tony

Can Artificial Intelligence All but End Car Crashes? The Potential Is There!

Credit…Juan Carlos Pagan

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an  article this morning describing how A.I., can be used to significantly reduce fatalities due to car accidents.  It focuses not on self-driving cars but simpler approaches that can make roads much safer.  It sound like an idea whose time is about here and needs the ccooperation and interest of major automobile manufacturers to evaluate and implement.  Here is an excerpt. The entire article is below.

“Each year, about 1.35 million people are killed in crashes on the world’s roads, and as many as 50 million others are seriously injured, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, fatalities rose drastically during the pandemic, leading to the largest six-month spike ever recorded, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Speeding, distraction, impaired driving and not wearing a seatbelt were top causes.

Artificial intelligence is already being used to enhance driving safety: cellphone apps that monitor behavior behind the wheel and reward safe drivers with perks and connected vehicles that communicate with each other and with road infrastructure.

But what lies ahead? Can A.I. do what humans can’t? And will the technology develop before the proliferation of self-driving cars?

“In my view, there is too much hype around A.I., road safety and self-driving vehicles — it is super inflated,” said David Ward, president of the Global New Car Assessment Program, a nonprofit based in London. The focus, he said, should be on “the low-hanging fruit, and not on some far-off utopian promise.”

Advocates like Mr. Ward look to beneficial, low-cost, intermediate technologies that are available now. A prime example is intelligent speed assistance, or I.S.A., which uses A.I. to manage a car’s speed via in-vehicle cameras and maps. The technology will be mandatory in all new vehicles in the European Union beginning in July, but has yet to take hold in the United States.

Acusensus, based in Australia, is among the companies that employ artificial intelligence to address road safety. Its cameras — “intelligent eyes,” as Acusensus calls them — use high-resolution imaging in conjunction with machine learning to identify dangerous driving behaviors that are often difficult to detect and enforce.

“We’ve got technology that can save lives,” said Mark Etzbach, the company’s vice president of sales for North America.

Let’s do it!

Tony

———————————————-

The New York Times

Can A.I. All but End Car Crashes? The Potential Is There.

By Tanya Mohn

April 19, 2022

Each year, about 1.35 million people are killed in crashes on the world’s roads, and as many as 50 million others are seriously injured, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, fatalities rose drastically during the pandemic, leading to the largest six-month spike ever recorded, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Transportation. Speeding, distraction, impaired driving and not wearing a seatbelt were top causes.

Artificial intelligence is already being used to enhance driving safety: cellphone apps that monitor behavior behind the wheel and reward safe drivers with perks and connected vehicles that communicate with each other and with road infrastructure.

But what lies ahead? Can A.I. do what humans can’t? And will the technology develop before the proliferation of self-driving cars?

“In my view, there is too much hype around A.I., road safety and self-driving vehicles — it is super inflated,” said David Ward, president of the Global New Car Assessment Program, a nonprofit based in London. The focus, he said, should be on “the low-hanging fruit, and not on some far-off utopian promise.”

Advocates like Mr. Ward look to beneficial, low-cost, intermediate technologies that are available now. A prime example is intelligent speed assistance, or I.S.A., which uses A.I. to manage a car’s speed via in-vehicle cameras and maps. The technology will be mandatory in all new vehicles in the European Union beginning in July, but has yet to take hold in the United States.

Acusensus, based in Australia, is among the companies that employ artificial intelligence to address road safety. Its cameras — “intelligent eyes,” as Acusensus calls them — use high-resolution imaging in conjunction with machine learning to identify dangerous driving behaviors that are often difficult to detect and enforce.

“We’ve got technology that can save lives,” said Mark Etzbach, the company’s vice president of sales for North America.

The patent-pending technology, which unlike the human eye is unaffected by weather conditions or high speeds, can view and record behavior inside the vehicle, Mr. Etzbach said. Cameras can be installed on existing roadside infrastructure, like overpasses, messaging signs or movable structures. Images are then optimized for A.I., which is trained to specific parameters.

Acusensus’ algorithms can determine with a high degree of probability whether a particular driver is engaged in risky behavior, the company says. “We can assess distraction,” Mr. Etzbach said. “We can assess occupant restraint. We can assess vehicle speed. We’re able to look at three behaviors at the same time. Well over 90 percent of the behaviors are happening below the dashboard.”

Such technology would give law enforcement the ability to see clearly whether a driver is holding something besides the steering wheel — like a phone, perhaps — and whether that driver is looking down to text someone. (An invisible flash enables clear penetration of the windshield.)

The technology was developed by Acusensus’ co-founder, Alexander Jannink, after a friend and fellow software engineer was killed while biking in 2013. “He got struck and killed by an impaired driver that was also believed to be distracted,” Mr. Etzbach said.

The company’s primary product, Heads-Up, was first rolled out in 2019 in New South Wales, Australia. The Heads-Up system captures images that are later screened by the authorities for the likelihood of an offense. In the first two years, the company says, the state experienced a 22 percent reduction in fatalities and a reduction in phone use of more than 80 percent. The technology is currently deployed in New South Wales and Queensland, with additional pilot projects elsewhere in Australia and abroad.

The next iteration of the technology, Heads-Up Real Time, is being proposed for deployment in the United States. Data and images would be sent in real time to officers in patrol cars, which they can then view on laptops.

“It’s about being able to leverage technology, and A.I. in this case, to help us better understand what people are doing behind the wheel that potentially puts themselves and others at risk,” said Pam Shadel Fischer, senior director of external engagement for the Governors Highway Safety Association, a nonprofit representing state highway safety offices. “We think there’s real potential here.”

When there is high-visibility traffic enforcement — officers in marked cars, for example — Ms. Shadel Fischer said that “people behave better, they slow down, they put their phones down and they buckle up.”

She continued: “They do things they’re supposed to do. But we also know that we can’t put an officer on every road, so we’re always looking at technology that can help.”

Acusensus’ technology can also be used to identify “hot spots,” helping determine where officials may need to improve enforcement, make changes to infrastructure or adopt new legislation. In recent months, the company conducted demonstrations and evaluations for a number of local law enforcement agencies and state transportation departments.

During an 18-hour assessment in August of a high-risk corridor in Missouri that was averaging three and a half crashes a day, more than 11,000 vehicles drove by. At least 60 percent of the drivers were speeding; an average of 6.5 percent were using mobile phones, more than twice the national average; and just under 5.5 percent were engaged in two concurrent risky driving behaviors.

“They had one of their record years for road fatalities last year,” Mr. Etzbach said. “They want to change policy to be able to address some of these road safety issues.”

The technology is gaining interest at the state level. “We have contracted with two states for data projects, and are in discussion with many more,” Mr. Etzbach said. One of those states, Indiana, “is piloting the technology for the evaluation of enforcement deployability.”

Technology similar to Acusensus’ is also being considered in Europe. Alexandre Santacreu, secretary general of the European Metropolitan Transport Authorities in Paris, said large-scale data collection has huge potential for use in preventing collisions across road networks. “A.I. is data hungry, but currently there is very little data in the hands of road authorities,” he said.

In Barcelona, Spain, a recent trial used computer vision technology on city buses to map places along the route where there were conflicts with vehicles, pedestrians and others, to identify where accident risks were highest. “When you collect that kind of data for an entire year with thousands of buses and thousands of streets, you get somewhere,” said Mr. Santacreu, who wrote a report on A.I. and road safety published by the International Transport Forum. “This approach is not widely embraced, but should be. I would recommend every city to test it.”

Computer vision technology uses A.I. to make sense of raw video feeds — in this case, from bus cameras that record road layouts, positions of pedestrians and vehicles, and speed. The video data is often destroyed after it is processed to protect privacy, Mr. Santacreu said.

In regions where precise and relevant data exists, the report noted, “A.I. can identify dangerous locations proactively, before crashes happen.” In Bellevue, Wash., a recent assessment used advanced A.I. algorithms and video analytics at 40 intersections.

It is important that governments share data widely and make room for data marketplaces, “because they are the best way to procure quality data,” Mr. Santacreu said. “I’m optimistic that, ultimately, if we can take all this data and find a way to employ it, we get closer to Vision Zero.”

The goal of Vision Zero, first introduced in Sweden in the 1990s and now embraced by many cities globally, is to eliminate all road deaths and serious injuries by creating multiple layers of protection, so if one fails, others provide a safety net.

Not everyone is sold on a reliance on computer learning. Mr. Ward, of the Global New Car Assessment Program, said humans still outperform artificial intelligence.

“An observant driver who makes eye contact with a pedestrian can gauge whether or not there’s an intention for that person to cross the street. A.I. is not able to do that, not yet,” he said. “We know that A.I. has a tremendous capacity to improve, but we could be making a big mistake if we think that it can completely eliminate the human dimension in all of this.”

As with many A.I. innovations, the technology also raises privacy issues.

“It’s this classic question about how much intrusion we want in our lives to keep ourselves safe,” Mr. Ward said.

“We share our road space and there are limits to our liberty in the closed environment of cars, but it does imply a greater degree of intrusion,” he said of monitoring technology. “This is what A.I. is bringing to us.”

 

Billionaires cutting huge checks for the 2022 midterms!

Source: https://americansfortaxfairness.org/issue/billionaires-spending-39-times-federal-elections-since-citizens-united-supreme-court-decision-2010/

Dear Commons Community,

American billionaires are investing heavily in the 2022 midterm elections according to newly released filings from the Federal Election Commission.

An analysis by Yahoo Finance of the data running through March 31 finds that super PACs (Political Action Committees) have received over 30 donations so far this year of at least $1 million each. And Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison each gave eight-figure donations to Republican causes.

Across the political landscape, Senate campaigns are building up their back accounts. At the same time, so-called dark money groups have added money into the system anonymously while Donald Trump has built an enormous war chest of his own. But it’s super PACs — which can receive unlimited donations — that get the eye-popping checks. Here are some of the biggest donations revealed in the latest filings.

Two Republican mega-donors: Stephen Schwarzman and Ken Griffin

Schwarzman, the billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group, spent $20 million in just one day.

On March 8, he split his largesse evenly between a super PAC for House Republicans linked to Rep. Kevin McCarthy and an organization for GOP Senators controlled by allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. The McConnell-aligned group is reportedly set to use this money and other contributions to buy $141 million in TV ads this fall.

A longtime Republican donor and Trump confidante, Schwarzman is worth an estimated $34 billion and has also given hundreds of thousands of dollars to other GOP groups this election cycle.

Citadel CEO Ken Griffin has also given massively this election cycle, recently telling The Wall Street Journal that he plans to spend roughly $40 million this year on elections. The hedge fund founder sent $7.5 million to the House Republican-aligned super PAC, called the Congressional Leadership Fund. He gave another $5 million toward GOP Senators through a super PAC known as the Senate Leadership Fund.

Griffin and Schwarzman also cut large checks to a super PAC associated with David McCormick. The former CEO of Bridgewater Associates is running for Senate in Pennsylvania in the most expensive race in the country. It’s just one example of single candidate super PACs reshaping key races with huge sums of out-of-state money.

Ken Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel, speaks during the Milken Institute’s conference in 2019. (REUTERS/Mike Blake)

The Senate group also received $2 million from media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and $1 million each from Home Depot (HD) co-founder Ken Langone and hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer.

House Republicans were helped by $1.5 million from the investor Charles Schwab and $1.2 million from Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus among others prominent names.

Other billionaires sent big checks, too.

Larry Ellison sent $15 million to the Opportunity Matters Fund, a super PAC associated with Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC). Scott’s support from Ellison, disclosed in February, has fueled speculation of a presidential bid.

Oracle co-founder and Chairman Larry Ellison in 2018. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Another big Super PAC in elections this year is the Club for Growth Action, which has has received nearly $18 million this election cycle from Richard Uihlein, a great-grandson of a Schlitz beer co-founder.

Uihlein and his wife Liz have been spending money in GOP politics for years and have been called “The Most Powerful Conservative Couple You’ve Never Heard Of” by The New York Times. He has also sent over $7 million to another Republican super PAC, called Restoration PAC, in recent months.

Meanwhile, Trump’s main super PAC, “Make America Great Again, Again,” has raked in millions but hasn’t reported a seven-figure individual donation so far in 2022. Trump sits atop around $110 million in cash, mostly coming from smaller donors.

Democratic billionaires

Democratic aligned super PACs, meanwhile, have a few less high-profile billionaires writing big checks. Still, Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros made headlines by writing a $125 million check for his own Democratic super PAC this election season

George Soros at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020 (FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP via Getty Images)

Soros, estimated to be worth $8.6 billion, reportedly donated 64% of his original fortune to various causes.

Money from Soros has been spread around the Democratic super PAC world. It helped the Senate Majority PAC raise millions this quarter for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The billionaire James Simons, founder of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, added a check for $3 million to the group, which is expected to spend at least $100 million this fall.

American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic super PAC focused on the Senate, boasts multiple $1 million donations so far in 2022 — including donations from shopping mall heir Deborah Simon and from Soros.

As the Congressional and Senate races heat up so are big dollar donors.

Tony

Are Young White Evangelicals Leaving Their Churches?

Alexandria Beightol “God is going to have to forgive me. I am not going to die in this culture war.”

 

Dear Commons Community,

A 2020 study of religion in the U.S. found 14 percent of people identified as white evangelical, a sharp drop from 23 percent in 2006. As few as 8 percent of white millennials identify as evangelical, according to a 2018 study, compared to 26 percent of white people older than 65.  As reported by NBC News.

As the theologian Russell Moore, a key figure in modern evangelicalism, wrote in October: “Many of us have observed, anecdotally, a hemorrhaging of younger evangelicals from churches and institutions in recent years.”

The problem, he said, is “many have come to believe that the religion itself is a vehicle for the politics and cultural grievances, not the other way around.”

While not every white evangelical Christian supports Trump or a conservative agenda, the movement has long been associated with Republicanism and conservative values — not least through the shared emphasis on family and opposition to abortion rights. About three-quarters of white evangelicals supported Trump in the 2020 election.

Kristin Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the author of “Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation,” said that while churches themselves may claim to be simply spreading the gospel, what many do is deeply political.

“I’ve been told many times from people who attend highly politicized churches that nothing political happens inside those spaces,” she said. “They say, ‘We come, we worship.’ But then I attend and I hear prayers against the evils of big government.”

Jared Stacy spent four years as a youth pastor at Spotswood, a Baptist Church in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The church, in keeping with the wider evangelical movement, believes the Bible to be the literal word of God.

He worked at Spotswood as its interim communications director in 2012, then spent three years studying for a master’s degree in theology and working as a campus pastor in New Orleans. He returned to Spotswood as a youth pastor in 2016.

He said he was well aware of the politics of the area and the church, saying he had conversations with church members who espoused opinions and viewpoints that were not uncommon among conservatives, such as that the Civil War was about states’ rights.

But in the years that would follow, he said, he became more uncomfortable with what he saw as a politicized, conspiratorial mindset. Church members began to float QAnon-style conspiracy theories or claim that events like the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, a 90-minute drive from Fredericksburg, were the fault of the left.

“Someone would say ‘You know antifa was at the rally, right?’ or ‘Why are we having this conversation about racial justice when there is sex trafficking going all around us?’” Stacy recounted. “What concerns me is QAnon may go away, it may go out of style, but the apocalyptic paranoia that seized control — that’s not going anywhere.

“What made it urgent to me was if I have to go buy into this politicization and conspiratorial mind in order to follow this peasant from Nazareth, I don’t want anything to do with that,” Stacy said.

Chris Sosa, 32, grew up in Virginia and attended Spotswood up to five times a week until he moved away for college. He said the church was not shy about mixing politics and religion, even though its website, in a section outlining its beliefs, says, “Church and state should be separate.”

“I was taught that anyone who said they were separate just hated America,” he said.

Spotswood declined to address criticisms raised by Stacy and Sosa in detail. Instead, Drew Landry, a senior pastor, referred in an emailed response to the church’s mission: “We exist to be a community of light by making disciples who love God and love their neighbor through vertical worship, transformational teaching, biblical community and missional living.”

“As for our church doctrine and practice, we affirm The Baptist Faith and Message 2000,” he added, referring to a statement of faith that summarizes key Southern Baptist thought.

Stacy, who is studying for a doctorate in theology, said he views the Jan. 6 riot as a turning point. More than 100 prominent evangelical Christians attacked the “perversion” of rioters’ using Christianity to justify the violence of Jan. 6 in an open letter published six weeks later.

But Du Mez said she worries that much of the evangelical community is unwilling to listen to outside criticism.

Many evangelicals get their news from and form opinions based on a narrow set of media outlets, she said, including Christian talk radio and Fox News — because of a long-standing distrust of mainstream media.

“So their reality is just so different, and the conclusions they draw are so different. That’s where we see the popularity of ‘Stop the Steal’ in evangelical spaces, the idea that Biden is not a legitimate president — that’s a fairly widespread view,” Du Mez said.

As for the future, Stacy cautions that the forces that pushed him away from the church and from America are still just as strong.

“Just because people are being put in prison and there’s a [congressional Jan. 6] committee doesn’t mean anyone is watching for the ripple effects in the church. This isn’t going away.”

Tony

Michael Bloomberg announces $50 million for NYC charter schools to provide summer programs!

Mayor Eric Adams and Michael Bloomberg

Eric Adams and Michael Bloomberg

Dear Commons Community,

Natalie Trainor alerted me to this story that Michael Bloomberg launched a $50 million initiative to expand summer programming among New York City charter schools in an an effort meant to close learning gaps widened by the pandemic.

The initiative, called “Summer Boost,” will allow any of the city’s charter schools to apply for grant funding to bolster their existing summer programs or launch new ones. The privately funded effort is slated to reach 25,000 students in grades K-8, about 18% of those currently enrolled in city charter schools.  As reported by Chalkbeat.

“What we’re talking about today is the educational equivalent of long COVID,” Bloomberg said, referring to pandemic disruptions to student learning. “The good news is we know how to treat it: extra help and intensive instruction.”

Officials framed the new program as similar to “Summer Rising,” the city’s existing summer school initiative that combines morning academic support with enrichment activities in the afternoons, including sports and field trips. Mayor Eric Adams previously announced that the city is working to expand that program from 98,000 students last year to 110,000 elementary and middle school students this summer, alongside additional summer jobs slots for older students.

The city’s Summer Rising program is already open to all students, including those attending private or charter schools, but Bloomberg indicated some charter school leaders want to run their own programs. The Bloomberg-funded Summer Boost program will also provide a five-week reading and math curriculum as well as teacher training for schools that want to use it.

Schools that apply for the Summer Boost funding are expected to tailor their programs to serve students who are furthest behind. They must also promise to ensure students attend at least 80% of the program and are asked to “commit to measuring outcomes.” Bloomberg officials said they intend to offer funding to nearly every school that applies for it at a rate of about $2,000 per student.

Bloomberg’s  announcement was notable for its emphasis on learning loss, an issue Mayor Eric Adams has emphasized since taking office but has yet to reveal a detailed policy agenda to address. The joint press conference between Adams and Bloomberg also signals a changing relationship between City Hall and the city’s charter schools.

Adams’ immediate predecessor, Bill de Blasio, was largely critical of the charter sector, which educates about 14% of the city’s public school students. De Blasio also railed against Bloomberg’s education agenda and worked to unravel it.

Adams has been much warmer to Bloomberg and promised a friendlier approach to the publicly funded yet privately managed charter schools, a point he underscored on Monday. “I am not going to be caught up in the conversation of separating children based on the names of the schools they are in,” he said. “They are all of our children.”

Still, no charter leaders spoke Monday at the mayors’ announcement, and it was not immediately clear whether the city’s largest charter networks planned to take part in the new program.

Bloomberg has long been a booster of charter schools and worked to expand the sector’s footprint during his time as mayor. In December, he announced plans to spend $750 million to create 150,000 new charter seats across a slew of metro areas including New York. (No new charter schools are currently allowed to open in New York City because of a cap set by the state legislature.)

Asked whether the funding for summer programs is part of that $750 million effort, Bloomberg said it was not and declined to elaborate further on his plans for that money.

Quickly spinning up summer school programs could be a challenge for some charter schools, with summer fast approaching and as many educators are exhausted from three consecutive school years of disrupted teaching. Bloomberg officials acknowledged some of those concerns in an FAQ posted online that encourages schools to begin recruiting even before they’ve been formally approved for funding. It also says charter schools may join up to offer programs to help address staffing issues.

Stacey Gauthier, executive director of The Renaissance Charter Schools in Queens, said the two schools she oversees were already planning to run a combined summer program geared toward students who need the most help catching up.

But she said additional funding through Summer Boost could allow her to extend the program for younger grades beyond the planned half-day to include more science and art.

“It’ll definitely let us build it out,” Gauthier said, adding that she is interested in taking advantage of the curriculum offered through Summer Boost. “Any support to offset the cost would be helpful.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies will provide about two thirds of the funding for the $50 million summer grant program, with the rest provided by a slew of private groups. The program is not expected to continue after this summer.

“Private sector and philanthropic groups have a duty, I think, to step in,” Bloomberg said. “This really is an all hands on deck moment.”

Diane Ravitch a critic of charter schools tweeted yesterday:

“Bloomberg had total control of NYC public schools as mayor for 12 years. Failed to make a difference. Now he admits he cares only about charter schools.”

Tony

New Aircraft – Uses No Jet Fuel and Takes-Off/Lands Vertically!

 

Top, Alia, an experimental electric vertical aircraft built by Beta, during a test flight over Burlington, Vt.

Alia, an experimental electric vertical aircraft built by Beta, during a test flight in February.

Dear Commons Community,

A new aircraft being built in Vermont has no need for jet fuel. It can take off and land without a runway.  Alia, the  electric vertical aircraft built by Beta, an aviation tech start-up, has flown over Burlington during test flights. In the mind of Christopher Caputo, the pilot of Alia, each moment signals a paradigm shift in aviation.  As reported by the New York Times.

“You’re looking at history,” Mr. Caputo said recently, speaking from the cockpit of a plane trailing the Alia at close distance. It had an exotic, almost whimsical shape, like an Alexander Calder sculpture, and it banked and climbed in near silence.

It is, essentially, a flying battery. And it represented a long-held aviation goal: an aircraft with no need for jet fuel and therefore no carbon emissions, a plane that could take off and land without a runway and quietly hop from recharging station to recharging station, like a large drone.

The Alia was made by Beta Technologies, where Mr. Caputo is a flight instructor. A five-year-old start-up that is unusual in many respects, the company is the brainchild of Martine Rothblatt, the founder of Sirius XM and pharmaceutical company United Therapeutics, and Kyle Clark, a Harvard-trained engineer and former professional hockey player. It has a unique mission, focused on cargo rather than passengers. And despite raising a formidable treasure chest in capital, it is based in Burlington, Vt., population 45,000, roughly 2,500 miles from Silicon Valley.

A battery-powered aircraft with no internal combustion has been a goal of engineers ever since the Wright brothers. Larry Page, the Google co-founder, has been funding electric plane start-ups for over a decade. Electric motors have the virtue of being smaller, allowing more of them to be fitted on a plane and making it easier to design systems with vertical lift. However, batteries are heavy, planes need to be light, and for most of the last century, the e-plane was thought to be beyond reach.

That changed with the extraordinary gains in aviation technology realized since the 1990s.

Late last year, curious about the potential of so-called green aviation, I flew in a Pipistrel Alpha Electro, a sleek new Slovenian two-seater designed for flight training. The Electro looks and flies like an ordinary light aircraft, but absent the roar of internal combustion, its single propeller makes a sound like beating wings. “Whoa!” I exclaimed when its high-torque engine caused it to practically leap off the runway.

However, the Electro’s power supply lasts only about an hour. After ours nearly ran out, I wondered how many people would enjoy flying in an electric plane. That take off is fun. But then you do start to worry about the landing.

Despite the excitement about e-planes, the Federal Aviation Administration has never certified electric propulsion as safe for commercial use. Companies expect that to change in the coming years, but only gradually, as safety concerns are worked out. As that process occurs, new forms of aviation are likely to appear, planes never seen before outside of testing grounds. Those planes will have limitations as to how far and fast they can fly, but they will do things other planes can’t, like hover and take off from “runways in the sky.”

They will also, perhaps most importantly for an industry dependent on fossil fuels, cut down on commercial aviation’s enormous contribution to climate change, currently calculated as 3 to 4 percent of greenhouse gases globally.

“It’s gross,” Mr. Clark said. “If we don’t, the consequences are that we’ll destroy the planet.”

In 2013, Ms. Rothblatt became interested in battery-powered aircraft. United Therapeutics makes human organs, including a kidney grown inside a pig that was attached to a person last fall, the first time such a procedure has been done. Ms. Rothblatt wanted an electric heli-plane “to deliver the organs we are manufacturing in a green way,” she said, and fly them a considerable distance — say, between two mid-Atlantic cities.

At the time, though, batteries were still too heavy. The longest an electric helicopter had flown was 15 minutes. One group of engineers told her it would take three years of design and development, too long, in her mind, to wait.

“Every single person told me it was impossible,” Ms. Rothblatt said.

Kyle Clark flew alone for the first time in 1997 on a plane from Burlington to Erie, Pa. Mr. Clark, then 16, had just been selected by the U.S.A. Hockey national team. “I was the worst player on the ice,” he said, “so I decided to fight all the opposing players.” As a result, “the team named me captain.”

At 6 feet 7 inches, a self-described physical “freak,” Mr. Clark would go on to a brief professional hockey career as an extremely low-scoring right wing and enforcer. (His LinkedIn page shows him brawling, helmetless, as a member of the Washington Capitals organization.)

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After a stint in Finland’s professional hockey league, he left the sport and received an undergraduate degree in materials science at Harvard, where he wrote a thesis on a plane piloted like a motorcycle and fueled by alternative energy. It was named the engineering department’s paper of the year.

He then found himself considering a career on Wall Street, doing something he didn’t want to do away from where he wanted to be: back in Vermont.

“There’s a brain drain” among engineers from his home state, he said. “People go away to college and come back when they’re 40, because they realize San Francisco or Boston isn’t the cat’s meow.” Returning to Burlington in his mid-20s, Mr. Clark became director of engineering at a company that designed power converters for Tesla.

In 2017 he attended a conference where Ms. Rothblatt made her pitch for an e-helicopter.

“There were like 30 people in the room, none of whom excited me,” Ms. Rothblatt recalled. “Then Kyle stood up and said, ‘I’m an electronics and power systems person, and I’m confident we can achieve your specification with a demonstration flight within one to two years.’ Other people were shaking their head. He was probably the youngest guy in the room. So I came up to him during break and said, ‘Where’s your company located?’ And he said, ‘I live in Vermont.’”

A few weeks later, after a second meeting, Mr. Clark drew a watercolor of his design and sent it to Ms. Rothblatt. Within hours, $1.5 million in seed capital for Beta Technologies had been wired to his bank account.

“He drew a nice design,” Ms. Rothblatt said.

A prototype with four tilting propellers was assembled in eight months, with Mr. Clark piloting the vehicle himself. Built in Burlington, the plane had to be flown over Lake Champlain, away from population centers.

“It was so fun to fly it that we found an excuse to every chance we could,” Mr. Clark told an audience at M.I.T. in 2019. Ultimately, though, it turned out to have too complex a design and Mr. Clark threw it out. He created a streamlined prototype modeled after the Arctic tern, a small, slow bird capable of flying uncanny distances without landing.

Since then, Beta’s work force has grown to over 350 from 30. The company’s headquarters have expanded to several buildings wrapping around the runway at Burlington International Airport, with plans for an additional 40-acre campus.

The board is stocked with players in finance and tech, including Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, and John Abele, founder of Boston Scientific. It has $400 million of funding from the government and institutions, including Amazon. But it is not alone in trying to bring something like this — what’s known as a vehicle with “electric vertical takeoff and landing” or eVTOL — to market.

Propelled by advances in batteries, control systems and high performance motors, more than a dozen well-financed competitors have their own prototypes, nearly all focused on what the industry calls “urban air mobility,” or flying taxis or privately owned flying vehicles. That no major breakthrough has reached consumers in significant numbers yet gives skeptics ammunition, but does not tamp down the optimism within the industry, especially not at Beta.

Beta is alone in focusing on cargo, and is hoping to win F.A.A. approval in 2024. If it succeeds, it believes it will do more than make aviation history.

In the company’s grand vision, electric cargo planes replace fleets of exhaust-spewing short-haul box trucks currently congesting America’s roads.

A grand vision indeed!

Tony

 

Artificial Intelligence Is Mastering Language!

 

Dear Commons Community,

In an article in today’s New York Times, Steven Johnson describes advances in artificial intelligence and specifically  OpenAI’s GPT-3 that writes original prose with “mind-boggling fluency.” Here is an excerpt.

“A supercomputer complex in Iowa is running a program created by OpenAI, an organization established in late 2015 by a handful of Silicon Valley luminaries…. In its first few years, as it built up its programming brain trust, OpenAI’s technical achievements were mostly overshadowed by the star power of its founders. But that changed in summer 2020, when OpenAI began offering limited access to a new program called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3, colloquially referred to as GPT-3. Though the platform was initially available to only a small handful of developers, examples of GPT-3’s uncanny prowess with language — and at least the illusion of cognition — began to circulate across the web and through social media. Siri and Alexa had popularized the experience of conversing with machines, but this was on the next level, approaching a fluency that resembled creations from science fiction like HAL 9000 from “2001”: a computer program that can answer open-ended complex questions in perfectly composed sentences…

…GPT-3 belongs to a category of deep learning known as a large language model, a complex neural net that has been trained on a titanic data set of text: in GPT-3’s case, roughly 700 gigabytes of data drawn from across the web, including Wikipedia, supplemented with a large collection of text from digitized books. GPT-3 is the most celebrated of the large language models, and the most publicly available, but Google, Meta (formerly known as Facebook) and DeepMind have all developed their own L.L.M.s in recent years. Advances in computational power — and new mathematical techniques — have enabled L.L.M.s of GPT-3’s vintage to ingest far larger data sets than their predecessors, and employ much deeper layers of artificial neurons for their training.

Chances are you have already interacted with a large language model if you’ve ever used an application — like Gmail — that includes an autocomplete feature, gently prompting you with the word ‘‘attend’’ after you type the sentence ‘‘Sadly I won’t be able to….’’ But autocomplete is only the most rudimentary expression of what software like GPT-3 is capable of. It turns out that with enough training data and sufficiently deep neural nets, large language models can display remarkable skill if you ask them not just to fill in the missing word, but also to continue on writing whole paragraphs in the style of the initial prompt. For example, when I gave GPT-3 the prompt:

In 1958, Frank Rosenblatt introduced the Perceptron, an early version of a neural net that could only detect the location of a square on a printed card. Fifty years later, neural nets are capable of . . .

The software dutifully completed the thought, and then continued on, picking up on the historical framing of the initial text:

. . . detecting and classifying faces, finding patterns in data, and emulating the human brain. While the neural net matured in academia, it also found its way into the tech industry. In the late 1980s and early 90s, neural nets were used in speech recognition and character recognition applications. The growth in computing power and the ability to collect larger data sets allowed other neural net applications to emerge.

So far, the experiments with large language models have been mostly that: experiments probing the model for signs of true intelligence, exploring its creative uses, exposing its biases. But the ultimate commercial potential is enormous. If the existing trajectory continues, software like GPT-3 could revolutionize how we search for information in the next few years. Today, if you have a complicated question about something — how to set up your home theater system, say, or what the options are for creating a 529 education fund for your children — you most likely type a few keywords into Google and then scan through a list of links or suggested videos on YouTube, skimming through everything to get to the exact information you seek. (Needless to say, you wouldn’t even think of asking Siri or Alexa to walk you through something this complex.) But if the GPT-3 true believers are correct, in the near future you’ll just ask an L.L.M. the question and get the answer fed back to you, cogently and accurately. Customer service could be utterly transformed: Any company with a product that currently requires a human tech-support team might be able to train an L.L.M. to replace them.”

I found the article fascinating and worth a read!

Tony