Thursday, June 01, 2023

THIRD WORLD U$A
Sanders Report Uncovers Looming Child Care Cliff If Congress Lets Funding Expire

One in 5 child care centers will soon have to decrease the number of children they serve if Congress fails to act.
PublishedMay 31, 2023
Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on May 18, 2023, in Washington, D.C.
ALEX WONG / GETTY IMAGES

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) released a report on Tuesday finding that the U.S. is quickly hurtling toward a child care cliff that will plunge the country even deeper into its child care crisis come September unless Congress acts.

The report, released by Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee chair Sanders and member Sen. Patty Murray (D-Washington), finds that both families and child care workers will face trouble if the child care funding passed in the COVID-19 economic stimulus bills is allowed to expire this fall.

According to data from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), those grants have helped more than 220,000 child care providers and served nearly 10 million children across the country. This funding was a saving grace for the child care industry at a time when the industry was already in deep crisis — with sky-high prices and a vast labor shortage, which are still at play despite the increased funding of about $37.5 billion provided by various stimulus packages.

These problems will worsen when the extra aid runs out on September 30, the report finds. According to a National Association for the Education of Young Children survey of over 12,000 early child care educators conducted last November and cited by the report, 19 percent of family child care providers say they will have to cut the amount of children they can serve when the funding expires. Forty-three percent of child care center directors said they would have to raise tuition.

Meanwhile, these centers would be forced to lose or cut wages for staff, the survey found. Over one-fourth of child care providers said they would have to cut wages or salary increases, and over one-fifth of center directors said they’d have to lay off staff altogether.

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Poll Finds 4 in 5 Voters Support Capping Child Care Costs for All Families in US
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In an industry that has already lost 100,000 workers through the course of the pandemic, in large part due to low pay, forcing wages to stay stagnant or become even lower would be disastrous for the labor force. Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that child care workers make a median wage of just $13.22 an hour, or $27,490 a year — not even enough for a worker to afford their own service, with child care costing about $16,000 a year on average across the country as of 2021.

On the other hand, the report cites findings from HHS that the stimulus funding has helped families of at least 700,000 children access lower health care costs. Ohio used the funding to implement provisions like free child care for eligible families, while Montana capped copayments to $10 a month for certain families. In West Virginia, administrators were able to expand child care subsidies for “essential” workers during the pandemic. And, in North Carolina and Michigan, the funding paved the way for an increase in child care subsidies for lower-income families.

Congress must authorize permanent investments in child care to begin to heal a system “that is hanging on by a thread,” the report read.

Sanders pointed out that the cost of child care is “outrageously high” in a HELP hearing on the subject on Wednesday, citing surveys that have found that roughly 40 percent of parents report being unable to afford child care and going into debt in order to obtain it.

“In other words, you want to have a child in America and you’re working class? Well, we’re going to make you pay for that. You’re going to go deeply in debt. Thank you for having a child. Not exactly what I think we should be doing as a nation,” the senator said.

“If Congress does nothing, this funding will expire on September 30th of this year, making a very bad situation worse. We cannot allow that to happen. We need to renew that vital funding,” he said.

But, Sanders added, “That is not all we need to do. We need a vision — for all those with the family values — we need a vision for the future which understands that every family in America has the right to high quality, affordable child care, that child care workers deserve decent pay for the important work they do, and we must expand the number of child care programs available so anybody in America can get the quality child care they need.”
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Wednesday, May 31, 2023

74 Percent of US Voters Support Raising Federal Minimum Wage to $20 an Hour

The federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in 14 years, a record-long stretch.
PublishedMay 30, 2023 
Workers who assist people with disabilities in their homes through the In-Home Supportive Services program urge the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to increase their pay on November 1, 2022, in Los Angeles, California.
ROBERT GAUTHIER / LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES

Amid the longest period in Congressional history without any raising of the federal minimum wage, new polling finds that the vast majority of voters not only support raising the minimum wage, but also nearly tripling it.

According to polling by Data for Progress released last week, 74 percent of voters support raising the federal minimum wage to $20 an hour — almost three times the current level of $7.25 an hour. A majority of 50 percent of respondents said they “strongly support” the proposal, while 24 percent said they “somewhat” support it.

This support includes majorities of voters across the political spectrum. Support is strongest among Democrats, with 89 percent saying that they favor raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour. But independents and Republicans back the idea as well, with 74 percent and 60 percent support from both groups, respectively.

The polling comes amid a 14-year stretch since the last time the federal minimum wage was raised, with its real value reaching its lowest point in 67 years. The minimum wage is not a living wage – the wage required to afford basic needs like shelter – nearly anywhere in the U.S.

According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology living wage calculator, in a typical family of four with two adults and two children, both adults would need to work 98 hours a week in order to survive on a $7.25 wage. In fact, research in 2021 found that even a $15 minimum wage — more than double the current minimum wage — isn’t a living wage in any state in the U.S. MIT’s living wage calculator estimated that, in 2021, the living wage for a family of four was $24.16 an hour, or about $100,500 a year.

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A $20 an hour wage is a nonstarter in Congress. Thirty states and many municipalities have raised their minimum wage above $7.25, with four states with a minimum wage of $15 an hour.

Progressive and Democratic lawmakers have tried to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, but have been thwarted by the GOP and conservatives in their own party.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) is embarking on a tour of several Southern states this week in order to promote his bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour, which he says should be the new benchmark after over a decade of labor activists’ Fight for $15 campaign.

The Data for Progress polling found significant support for Sanders’s proposal as well. A slightly higher proportion of voters support raising the federal minimum to $17 an hour, with 76 percent support overall and 94 percent support from Democrats.

The survey further found that voters overwhelmingly recognize that workers must be paid more than $20 an hour in order to have a “decent quality of life” — as in, being able to afford basic necessities like food and rent without struggling. Sixty-three percent of respondents said that workers must earn more than $20 an hour to have a decent quality of life. When asked to estimate a benchmark at which that quality of life could be achieved, voters responded with an average answer of $26.20.

Even if the federal minimum wage were raised, a large swath of workers like tipped workers, whose federal minimum wage is $2.13, and gig workers, would be exempt from it. In some places, voters and lawmakers have passed legislation to end the tipped wage or set a minimum wage for gig workers like Uber drivers, but the initiatives have little chance of being considered by Congress.

Truthout is widely read among people with lower ­incomes and among young people who are mired in debt. Our site is read at public libraries, among people without internet access of their own. People print out our articles and send them to family members in prison — we receive letters from behind bars regularly thanking us for our coverage. Our stories are emailed and shared around communities, sparking grassroots mobilization.

We’re committed to keeping all Truthout articles free and available to the public. But in order to do that, we need those who can afford to contribute to our work to do so.

We’ll never require you to give, but we can ask you from the bottom of our hearts: Will you donate what you can, so we can continue providing journalism in the service of justice and truth?

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.


SHARON ZHANG is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter: @zhang_sharon.
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Trump Makes Xenophobic Campaign Pledge to End Birthright Citizenship


Over a century of legal precedent and a constitutional amendment would bar Trump from taking such an egregious action.
Published  May 31, 202
3
Former President Donald Trump is seen arriving at Trump Tower on May 28, 2023, in New York City.
JAMES DEVANEY / GC IMAGES

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump announced on his campaign site that, if he’s elected in 2024, on his first day back in the White House he’d issue an executive order ending birthright citizenship — an action that would be unconstitutional and likely face an immediate challenge in the courts.

“As part of my plan to secure the border, on Day One of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship,” Trump said in a statement, wrongly asserting that current law was being interpreted incorrectly.

In addition to claiming without evidence that his executive action would “secure the border,” Trump’s campaign website also stated that the order would stop so-called birth tourism — a practice that is so rare it is often labeled as a myth.

The announcement by Trump came during the same week as an important legal anniversary directly related to the topic of birthright citizenship. It was this week 125 years ago, in the court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, that the Supreme Court first recognized that the 14th Amendment established the legal right of people born in the country to be citizens.

The idea that Trump could change that precedent through an executive order (or anything short of a constitutional amendment) borders on the absurd. The amendment’s first sentence says:

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All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.

Legal experts have suggested that, rather than being a serious promise to alter law, Trump’s call to end birthright citizenship is simply a dog whistle to appeal to xenophobic and bigoted far right members of his base of support.

“I think it’s pretty clear that, for political purposes, he thinks that this kind of announcement will appeal to his base,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University, speaking to CBS News on the matter. “It shows that he has anti-immigration credentials. And most of his voters don’t know or don’t care about whether such an executive order would be legal.”

Trump set off a firestorm of anger when he made a similar promise weeks before the 2018 midterms, stating in an interview with Axios that he’d soon make an executive order ending birthright citizenship, and that it’d be easy for him to do so in a purportedly legal way.

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump said incorrectly.

If Trump’s theory was true, it would render any section or amendment of the Constitution pointless, as presidents in the future could nullify it by decree.

Ultimately, Trump didn’t follow through on his pledge.

Fifteen professors from prestigious law schools throughout the U.S. blasted the former president in 2018 for suggesting he could ignore the rule of law and legal precedent, noting that there was “no serious scholarly debate about whether a president can, through executive action, contradict the Supreme Court’s long-standing and consistent interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment.”

Civil and immigration rights groups also condemned Trump’s bigotry. Mijente, a Latinx rights organization, described his calls for ending birthright citizenship as a “barely-veiled assault on the rights of immigrants and other communities of color” that sought to rile up his base of voters before the 2018 midterms.

“[Trump] is using us for his political purposes right now — as scapegoats, as punching bags, as bogeymen and bogeywomen, as a collection of old stereotypes to be exploited for the benefit of sowing division and hate,” the group said.

Truthout is widely read among people with lower ­incomes and among young people who are mired in debt. Our site is read at public libraries, among people without internet access of their own. People print out our articles and send them to family members in prison — we receive letters from behind bars regularly thanking us for our coverage. Our stories are emailed and shared around communities, sparking grassroots mobilization.

We’re committed to keeping all Truthout articles free and available to the public. But in order to do that, we need those who can afford to contribute to our work to do so.

We’ll never require you to give, but we can ask you from the bottom of our hearts: Will you donate what you can, so we can continue providing journalism in the service of justice and truth?

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.


CHRIS WALKER  is a news writer at Truthout, and is based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Focusing on both national and local topics since the early 2000s, he has produced thousands of articles analyzing the issues of the day and their impact on the American people. He can be found on Twitter: @thatchriswalker
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Who does the U.S. owe $31.4 trillion?


Janet Nguyen
May 26, 2023

The debt limit is the amount of money the Treasury can borrow to meet its obligations. The deadline for Congress to lift the limit, lest the U.S. default, is quickly approaching. 
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

This is just one of the stories from our “I’ve Always Wondered” series, where we tackle all of your questions about the world of business, no matter how big or small. Ever wondered if recycling is worth it? Or how store brands stack up against name brands? Check out more from the series here.

Listener David Friedli from Murray, Nebraska, asks:

The debt limit: Who do we owe money to? Do other countries owe us money? Has anyone ever defaulted on their debt to us? Why is it that the United States’ budget and debt limit are on different timelines … wouldn’t it make great sense to have them both tied to the same deadline, perhaps forcing Congress and the executive branch to see them as one issue, not two separate discussions?

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has announced June 5 as the new deadline for when the U.S. could default on its debt, which she and many other experts say could lead to catastrophic economic consequences.


Debt Held by the Public
Intragovernmental Holdings

So far, the White House and Congress have failed to reach a deal to raise the government’s borrowing limit due to demands for steep spending cuts from Republican officials. Earlier this year, the U.S. hit the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling, which is the amount it’s allowed to borrow to pay existing obligations, like Social Security, Medicare benefits and military salaries. A default could mean a delay in these payments, higher borrowing costs throughout the economy, greater volatility in the stock market and a range of unpredictable effects.

But late Friday, President Joe Biden said a deal to increase the debt limit was close. Since 1960, that limit has been upped or extended about 80 times, and the nation has never defaulted. “There’s a negotiation going on,” Biden said. “I’m hopeful we’ll know by tonight whether we’re going to be able to have a deal.”

First, the debt held by the public stands at more than $24.64 trillion. This represents debt securities, like Treasury bonds and notes, bought by banks, insurance companies, state and local governments, foreign governments and private investors.

The remaining debt, which totals about $6.83 trillion, can be classified as intragovernmental holdings. This is basically debt the government owes itself. “For example, some federal trust funds invest in Treasury securities, thereby lending money to [the] Treasury,” according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The Social Security Administration, the Department of Defense and the United States Postal Service all have investment holdings in federal debt.

Japan
$1.1T
China (mainland)
$859.4B
United Kingdom
$668.3B
Belgium
$331.1B
Luxembourg
$318.2B
Switzerland
$290.5B
Cayman Islands
$285.3B
Canada
$254.1B
Ireland
$253.4B
Taiwan
$234.6B


In total, other territories hold about $7.4 trillion in U.S. debt. Japan owns the most at $1.1 trillion, followed by China, with $859 billion, and the United Kingdom at $668 billion.

In isolation, this $7.4 trillion amount is a lot, said Scott Morris, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. “But the way an economist would look at this is to say, ‘Well, how does that compare to the size of our economy?’” he said.

And when you do that, the amount of debt we owe other countries is not “particularly problematic,” Morris said.

The United States supported China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization at the turn of the millennium, which led to an export boom of Chinese goods into the U.S. China ended up parking much of its sales in U.S. Treasurys, CNN reported, because of their perceived safety as an investment. By 2008, China had overtaken Japan as the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt.

But over the past decade, Japan reclaimed its top spot. Like China, Japan also sells lots of goods to the U.S. and then invests much of the proceeds in U.S. Treasurys, explained Insider.

Has anyone defaulted on their debts to us?

Anna Gelpern, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said over email that many countries have owed us money and paid it late. She pointed to Britain, which took more than 60 years to pay off a $4.3 billion U.S. loan to refinance the battered country at the end of World War II. The final payment was made six years after it was supposed to come in.

In the 1930s, the country also defaulted on debt to the U.S. that it had accrued during World War I. This had lasting consequences, according to author David James Gill, with London being frozen out of U.S. securities and money markets.

But when a country is struggling to repay the money it’s borrowed, the debt might be rescheduled or even forgiven, Morris noted.

“When it comes to one government owing money to another government, you may never see a moment that is called ‘default,’” he said.

The United States has forgiven debt owed by other countries, like it did with Iraq in 2004, shortly after President George W. Bush invaded the country. In late 2000, President Bill Clinton signed a law that would "forgive or alleviate" $435 million worth of debt for the world's poorest countries.

Why don't we address the debt limit when passing the budget?

The president is supposed to submit a budget to Congress by the first Monday in February every year. Naturally, this includes estimates of the government’s income and spending. Congress is then tasked with agreeing on a joint budget resolution by April 15. But if it fails to do so by May 15, a House committee can begin the appropriations process.

If appropriations aren’t done by the start of October, then federal agencies without an appropriation can be funded through continuing resolutions, according to the Tax Policy Center.

But even though a budget has been approved, the Treasury’s ability to borrow the money to fund government operations can bump up against the debt ceiling. In the early 20th century, Congress enabled the Treasury to issue bonds without congressional approval — up to a certain amount — to provide greater flexibility. Thus, the birth of the debt ceiling.

But what was supposed to give the Treasury flexibility has become a tool for what people call political gamesmanship. To solve this issue, the Bipartisan Policy Center has proposed an approach that would link the debt limit to the annual budgeting process.

The BPC says that if Congress adopts a budget resolution by April 15, legislation to suspend the debt limit should be sent to the president. If Congress doesn’t, then the president should be able to ask Congress for a debt limit suspension that would last till the end of the fiscal year.

A bipartisan bill known as the Responsible Budgeting Act, which ties these goals together, was introduced in Congress in 2021 and endorsed by the BPC. Under the bill, a concurrent budget resolution should meet “a certain fiscal threshold” by reducing the ratio of debt to gross domestic product by at least 5 percentage points in the 10th year.

“These recurring debt limit episodes showcase that there really is no time on the congressional calendar that lawmakers have set aside to really debate about our future fiscal path,” said Rachel Snyderman, director of economic policy at BPC.

Attempts to align the debt limit and budget-making have been difficult because it would require reform to the budget process itself, Snyderman said. She added that it’s already tough enough for Congress to pass 12 appropriation bills each year for discretionary funding.

But there are some lawmakers and groups, including the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who say the United States should abolish the debt limit entirely so we don’t run into this issue.

"Using the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip is always irresponsible, but it’s especially dangerous given recent turmoil in the banking industry and interest-rate increases by the [Federal Reserve] to address inflation," the CBPP wrote on its website.
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Tech layoffs ravage the teams that fight online misinformation and hate speech

CNBC
UPDATED SAT, MAY 27 2023
Hayden Field@HAYDENFIELD
Jonathan Vanian@JONATHANVANIAN

KEY POINTS
Meta, Amazon, Alphabet and Twitter have all drastically reduced the size of their teams focused on internet trust and safety as well as ethics as the companies focus on cost cuts.

As part of Meta’s mass layoffs, the company ended a fact-checking project that had taken half a year to build, according to people familiar with the matter.

“Abuse actors are usually ahead of the game; it’s cat and mouse,” said Arjun Narayan, who previously served as a trust and safety lead at Google and ByteDance.

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., left, arrives at federal court in San Jose, California, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2022.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Toward the end of 2022, engineers on Meta’s team combating misinformation were ready to debut a key fact-checking tool that had taken half a year to build. The company needed all the reputational help it could get after a string of crises had badly damaged the credibility of Facebook and Instagram and given regulators additional ammunition to bear down on the platforms.

The new product would let third-party fact-checkers like The Associated Press and Reuters, as well as credible experts, add comments at the top of questionable articles on Facebook as a way to verify their trustworthiness.

But CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s commitment to make 2023 the “year of efficiency” spelled the end of the ambitious effort, according to three people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named due to confidentiality agreements.

Over multiple rounds of layoffs, Meta announced plans to eliminate roughly 21,000 jobs, a mass downsizing that had an outsized effect on the company’s trust and safety work. The fact-checking tool, which had initial buy-in from executives and was still in a testing phase early this year, was completely dissolved, the sources said.

A Meta spokesperson did not respond to questions related to job cuts in specific areas and said in an emailed statement that “we remain focused on advancing our industry-leading integrity efforts and continue to invest in teams and technologies to protect our community.”

Across the tech industry, as companies tighten their belts and impose hefty layoffs to address macroeconomic pressures and slowing revenue growth, wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet’s most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits. The cuts come at a time of increased cyberbullying, which has been linked to higher rates of adolescent self-harm, and as the spread of misinformation and violent content collides with the exploding use of artificial intelligence.

In their most recent earnings calls, tech executives highlighted their commitment to “do more with less,” boosting productivity with fewer resources. Meta, Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft have all cut thousands of jobs after staffing up rapidly before and during the Covid pandemic. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently said his company would suspend salary increases for full-time employees.

The slashing of teams tasked with trust and safety and AI ethics is a sign of how far companies are willing to go to meet Wall Street demands for efficiency, even with the 2024 U.S. election season — and the online chaos that’s expected to ensue — just months away from kickoff. AI ethics and trust and safety are different departments within tech companies but are aligned on goals related to limiting real-life harm that can stem from use of their companies’ products and services.

“Abuse actors are usually ahead of the game; it’s cat and mouse,” said Arjun Narayan, who previously served as a trust and safety lead at Google and TikTok parent ByteDance, and is now head of trust and safety at news aggregator app Smart News. “You’re always playing catch-up.”

For now, tech companies seem to view both trust and safety and AI ethics as cost centers.

Twitter effectively disbanded its ethical AI team in November and laid off all but one of its members, along with 15% of its trust and safety department, according to reports. In February, Google cut about one-third of a unit that aims to protect society from misinformation, radicalization, toxicity and censorship. Meta reportedly ended the contracts of about 200 content moderators in early January. It also laid off at least 16 members of Instagram’s well-being group and more than 100 positions related to trust, integrity and responsibility, according to documents filed with the U.S. Department of Labor.

Andy Jassy, chief executive officer of Amazon.Com Inc., during the GeekWire Summit in Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images

In March, Amazon downsized its responsible AI team and Microsoft laid off its entire ethics and society team – the second of two layoff rounds that reportedly took the team from 30 members to zero. Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Microsoft pointed to a blog post regarding its job cuts.

At Amazon’s game streaming unit Twitch, staffers learned of their fate in March from an ill-timed internal post from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

Jassy’s announcement that 9,000 jobs would be cut companywide included 400 employees at Twitch. Of those, about 50 were part of the team responsible for monitoring abusive, illegal or harmful behavior, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details were private.

The trust and safety team, or T&S as it’s known internally, was losing about 15% of its staff just as content moderation was seemingly more important than ever.

In an email to employees, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy didn’t call out the T&S department specifically, but he confirmed the broader cuts among his staffers, who had just learned about the layoffs from Jassy’s post on a message board.

“I’m disappointed to share the news this way before we’re able to communicate directly to those who will be impacted,” Clancy wrote in the email, which was viewed by CNBC.

‘Hard to win back consumer trust’

A current member of Twitch’s T&S team said the remaining employees in the unit are feeling “whiplash” and worry about a potential second round of layoffs. The person said the cuts caused a big hit to institutional knowledge, adding that there was a significant reduction in Twitch’s law enforcement response team, which deals with physical threats, violence, terrorism groups and self-harm.

A Twitch spokesperson did not provide a comment for this story, instead directing CNBC to a blog post from March announcing the layoffs. The post didn’t include any mention of trust and safety or content moderation.

Narayan of Smart News said that with a lack of investment in safety at the major platforms, companies lose their ability to scale in a way that keeps pace with malicious activity. As more problematic content spreads, there’s an “erosion of trust,” he said.

“In the long run, it’s really hard to win back consumer trust,” Narayan added.

While layoffs at Meta and Amazon followed demands from investors and a dramatic slump in ad revenue and share prices, Twitter’s cuts resulted from a change in ownership.

Almost immediately after Elon Musk closed his $44 billion purchase of Twitter in October, he began eliminating thousands of jobs. That included all but one member of the company’s 17-person AI ethics team, according to Rumman Chowdhury, who served as director of Twitter’s machine learning ethics, transparency and accountability team. The last remaining person ended up quitting.

The team members learned of their status when their laptops were turned off remotely, Chowdhury said. Hours later, they received email notifications.

“I had just recently gotten head count to build out my AI red team, so these would be the people who would adversarially hack our models from an ethical perspective and try to do that work,” Chowdhury told CNBC. She added, “It really just felt like the rug was pulled as my team was getting into our stride.”

Part of that stride involved working on “algorithmic amplification monitoring,” Chowdhury said, or tracking elections and political parties to see if “content was being amplified in a way that it shouldn’t.”

Chowdhury referenced an initiative in July 2021, when Twitter’s AI ethics team led what was billed as the industry’s first-ever algorithmic bias bounty competition. The company invited outsiders to audit the platform for bias, and made the results public.

Chowdhury said she worries that now Musk “is actively seeking to undo all the work we have done.”

“There is no internal accountability,” she said. “We served two of the product teams to make sure that what’s happening behind the scenes was serving the people on the platform equitably.”

Twitter did not provide a comment for this story.


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Advertisers are pulling back in places where they see increased reputational risk.

According to Sensor Tower, six of the top 10 categories of U.S. advertisers on Twitter spent much less in the first quarter of this year compared with a year earlier, with that group collectively slashing its spending by 53%. The site has recently come under fire for allowing the spread of violent images and videos.

The rapid rise in popularity of chatbots is only complicating matters. The types of AI models created by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and others make it easier to populate fake accounts with content. Researchers from the Allen Institute for AI, Princeton University and Georgia Tech ran tests in ChatGPT’s application programming interface (API), and found up to a sixfold increase in toxicity, depending on which type of functional identity, such as a customer service agent or virtual assistant, a company assigned to the chatbot.

Regulators are paying close attention to AI’s growing influence and the simultaneous downsizing of groups dedicated to AI ethics and trust and safety. Michael Atleson, an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission’s division of advertising practices, called out the paradox in a blog post earlier this month.

“Given these many concerns about the use of new AI tools, it’s perhaps not the best time for firms building or deploying them to remove or fire personnel devoted to ethics and responsibility for AI and engineering,” Atleson wrote. “If the FTC comes calling and you want to convince us that you adequately assessed risks and mitigated harms, these reductions might not be a good look.”
 
Meta as a bellwether

For years, as the tech industry was enjoying an extended bull market and the top internet platforms were flush with cash, Meta was viewed by many experts as a leader in prioritizing ethics and safety.

The company spent years hiring trust and safety workers, including many with academic backgrounds in the social sciences, to help avoid a repeat of the 2016 presidential election cycle, when disinformation campaigns, often operated by foreign actors, ran rampant on Facebook. The embarrassment culminated in the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed how a third party was illicitly using personal data from Facebook.

But following a brutal 2022 for Meta’s ad business — and its stock price — Zuckerberg went into cutting mode, winning plaudits along the way from investors who had complained of the company’s bloat.

Beyond the fact-checking project, the layoffs hit researchers, engineers, user design experts and others who worked on issues pertaining to societal concerns. The company’s dedicated team focused on combating misinformation suffered numerous losses, four former Meta employees said.

Prior to Meta’s first round of layoffs in November, the company had already taken steps to consolidate members of its integrity team into a single unit. In September, Meta merged its central integrity team, which handles social matters, with its business integrity group tasked with addressing ads and business-related issues like spam and fake accounts, ex-employees said.

In the ensuing months, as broader cuts swept across the company, former trust and safety employees described working under the fear of looming layoffs and for managers who sometimes failed to see how their work affected Meta’s bottom line.

For example, things like improving spam filters that required fewer resources could get clearance over long-term safety projects that would entail policy changes, such as initiatives involving misinformation. Employees felt incentivized to take on more manageable tasks because they could show their results in their six-month performance reviews, ex-staffers said.

Ravi Iyer, a former Meta project manager who left the company before the layoffs, said that the cuts across content moderation are less bothersome than the fact that many of the people he knows who lost their jobs were performing critical roles on design and policy changes.

“I don’t think we should reflexively think that having fewer trust and safety workers means platforms will necessarily be worse,” said Iyer, who’s now the managing director of the Psychology of Technology Institute at University of Southern California’s Neely Center. “However, many of the people I’ve seen laid off are amongst the most thoughtful in rethinking the fundamental designs of these platforms, and if platforms are not going to invest in reconsidering design choices that have been proven to be harmful — then yes, we should all be worried.”

A Meta spokesperson previously downplayed the significance of the job cuts in the misinformation unit, tweeting that the “team has been integrated into the broader content integrity team, which is substantially larger and focused on integrity work across the company.”

Still, sources familiar with the matter said that following the layoffs, the company has fewer people working on misinformation issues.

WATCH NOW
VIDEO04:09
Meta Q1 earnings were a ‘tour de force’, says Wedgewood’s David Rolfe


For those who’ve gained expertise in AI ethics, trust and safety and related content moderation, the employment picture looks grim.

Newly unemployed workers in those fields from across the social media landscape told CNBC that there aren’t many job openings in their area of specialization as companies continue to trim costs. One former Meta employee said that after interviewing for trust and safety roles at Microsoft and Google, those positions were suddenly axed.

An ex-Meta staffer said the company’s retreat from trust and safety is likely to filter down to smaller peers and startups that appear to be “following Meta in terms of their layoff strategy.”

Chowdhury, Twitter’s former AI ethics lead, said these types of jobs are a natural place for cuts because “they’re not seen as driving profit in product.”

“My perspective is that it’s completely the wrong framing,” she said. “But it’s hard to demonstrate value when your value is that you’re not being sued or someone is not being harmed. We don’t have a shiny widget or a fancy model at the end of what we do; what we have is a community that’s safe and protected. That is a long-term financial benefit, but in the quarter over quarter, it’s really hard to measure what that means.”

At Twitch, the T&S team included people who knew where to look to spot dangerous activity, according to a former employee in the group. That’s particularly important in gaming, which is “its own unique beast,” the person said.

Now, there are fewer people checking in on the “dark, scary places” where offenders hide and abusive activity gets groomed, the ex-employee added.

More importantly, nobody knows how bad it can get.
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USE A SKULL AND CROSSBONES
Canada to require warning labels on individual cigarettes

Agence France-Presse
May 31, 2023

A woman smoking a cigarette [Shutterstock]

The messaging, to be phased in starting August 1, will include lines such as "Poison in every puff," "Tobacco smoke harms children" and "Cigarettes cause cancer."

Addictions Minister Carolyn Bennett said tobacco use continues to kill 48,000 Canadians each year. The new labelling rule is a world first, she said, although Britain has flirted with a similar regulation.

"This bold step will make health warning messages virtually unavoidable and, together with updated graphic images displayed on the package, will provide a real and startling reminder of the health consequences of smoking," Bennett said.

The Canadian government noted that some young people, who are particularly susceptible to the risk of tobacco dependence, start smoking after being given a single cigarette rather than a pack labeled with health warnings.

In 2000, Canada became the first country to order graphic warnings on packs of cigarettes -- including grisly pictorials of diseased hearts and lungs -- to raise awareness of the health hazards associated with tobacco use.

Smoking has been trending down over the past two decades.

Ottawa aims to further reduce the number of smokers in the country to five percent of the population, or about 2 million people, by 2035 -- from about 13 percent currently.

According to government data, almost half of the country's health care costs are linked to substance use.

© 2023 AFP

E-cigarettes won’t help you quit smoking regular cigarettes, study suggests

E-cigarettes won’t help you quit smoking regular cigarettes, study suggestsVuse e-cigarette packages are seen displayed at Cigar N Vape on Oct. 13, 2021 in the Park Slope neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough in New York City. - Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images North America/TNS
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'Constantly watched': AI facial surveillance is measuring how much workers are concentrating
Brad Reed
May 31, 2023,

A stressed woman works at her laptop (Shutterstock).

Some companies are now using tools that combine facial recognition software with artificial intelligence to constantly monitor and assess how much their workers are concentrating while on the job, The Guardian reports.

A woman in her 20s called Mae who spoke with the Guardian recounted how incredibly stressful it is to have your facial expressions monitored and cataloged in ways that will be used to evaluate your performance.

"Tracking doesn’t allow for thinking time or stepping away and coming back to work – it’s very intense," she explained.

What's more, she says that the technology has hurt her productivity and she has found she actually gets more work done when she's not being "constantly watched."

Of course, this actually requires her to do more work in secret after hours just to keep up with what she needs to get done.

Another worker who spoke with The Guardian, who goes by the name of Carlos, revealed that he's being surveilled minute by minute at his job and revealed to the publication that "I have found myself having to explain the reasons for a longer toilet break."

Henry Parkes, a senior economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, tells The Guardian that "this technology can just be used to exert power over employees in a way that wasn’t possible before," while adding that " it’s dehumanizing and not how people are able to operate all day."

However, a worker who goes by the name of Adam tells The Guardian that he was able to get his boss to back off intensive tracking as soon as he reported it to his union.

"They are now aware that the watchers are being watched," he told the publication.
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‘Man, the hunter’? Archaeologists’ assumptions about gender roles in past humans ignore an icky but potentially crucial part of original ‘paleo diet’

The Conversation
May 31, 2023, 

What if prehistoric men and women joined forces in hunting parties? 
gorodenkoff/iStock via Getty Images Plus


One of the most common stereotypes about the human past is that men did the hunting while women did the gathering. That gendered division of labor, the story goes, would have provided the meat and plant foods people needed to survive.

That characterization of our time as a species exclusively reliant on wild foods – before people started domesticating plants and animals more than 10,000 years ago – matches the pattern anthropologists observed among hunter-gatherers during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Virtually all of the large-game hunting they documented was performed by men.


Stone Folsom points, which date to between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, are associated with the prehistoric hunting of bison. UMMAA 27673, 39802, 30442 and 37737, Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology

It’s an open question whether these ethnographic accounts of labor are truly representative of recent hunter-gatherers’ subsistence behaviors. Regardless, they definitely fueled assumptions that a gendered division of labor arose early in our species’ evolution. Current employment statistics do little to disrupt that thinking; in a recent analysis, just 13% of hunters, fishers and trappers in the U.S. were women.

Still, as an archaeologist, I’ve spent much of my career studying how people of the past got their food. I can’t always square my observations with the “man the hunter” stereotype.
A long-standing anthropological assumption

First, I want to note that this article uses “women” to describe people biologically equipped to experience pregnancy, while recognizing that not all people who identify as women are so equipped, and not all people so equipped identify as women.

I am using this definition here because reproduction is at the heart of many hypotheses about when and why subsistence labor became a gendered activity. As the thinking goes, women gathered because it was a low-risk way to provide dependent children with a reliable stream of nutrients. Men hunted either to round out the household diet or to use difficult-to-acquire meat as a way to attract potential mates.

One of the things that has come to trouble me about attempts to test related hypotheses using archaeological data – some of my own attempts included – is that they assume plants and animals are mutually exclusive food categories. Everything rests on the idea that plants and animals differ completely in how risky they are to obtain, their nutrient profiles and their abundance on a landscape.


It is true that highly mobile large-game species such as bison, caribou and guanaco (a deer-sized South American herbivore) were sometimes concentrated in places or seasons where plants edible to humans were scarce. But what if people could get the plant portion of their diets from the animals themselves?


Herbivores can consume and digest some plant material that humans usually can’t. 
pchoui/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Animal prey as a source of plant-based food

The plant material undergoing digestion in the stomachs and intestines of large ruminant herbivores is a not-so-appetizing substance called digesta. This partially digested matter is edible to humans and rich in carbohydrates, which are pretty much absent from animal tissues.

Conversely, animal tissues are rich in protein and, in some seasons, fats – nutrients unavailable in many plants or that occur in such small amounts that a person would need to eat impractically large quantities to meet daily nutritional requirements from plants alone.

If past peoples ate digesta, a big herbivore with a full belly would, in essence, be one-stop shopping for total nutrition.


Killing a bison could provide a source of both protein and carbs, if you consider the digesta. 
UMMAA 83209 a and b, Courtesy of the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology

To explore the potential and implications of digesta as a source of carbohydrates, I recently compared institutional dietary guidelines to person-days of nutrition per animal using a 1,000-pound (450-kilogram) bison as a model. First I compiled available estimates for protein in a bison’s own tissues and for carbohydrates in digesta. Using that data, I found that a group of 25 adults could meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recommended daily averages for protein and carbohydrates for three full days eating only bison meat and digesta from one animal.

Among past peoples, consuming digesta would have relaxed the demand for fresh plant foods, perhaps changing the dynamics of subsistence labor.

Recalibrating the risk if everyone hunts

One of the risks typically associated with large-game hunting is that of failure. According to the evolutionary hypotheses around gendered division of labor, when risk of hunting failure is high – that is, the likelihood of bagging an animal on any given hunting trip is low – women should choose more reliable resources to provision children, even if it means long hours of gathering. The cost of failure is simply too high to do otherwise.


What 19th-century ethnographers recorded might not be a good representation of prehistoric conditions. MPI/Archive Photos via Getty Images

However, there is evidence to suggest that large game was much more abundant in North America, for example, before the 19th- and 20th-century ethnographers observed foraging behaviors. If high-yield resources like bison could have been acquired with low risk, and the animals’ digesta was also consumed, women may have been more likely to participate in hunting. Under those circumstances, hunting could have provided total nutrition, eliminating the need to obtain protein and carbohydrates from separate sources that might have been widely spread across a landscape.

And, statistically speaking, women’s participation in hunting would also have helped reduce the risk of failure. My models show that, if all 25 of the people in a hypothetical group participated in the hunt, rather than just the men, and all agreed to share when successful, each hunter would have had to be successful only about five times a year for the group to subsist entirely on bison and digesta. Of course, real life is more complicated than the model suggests, but the exercise illustrates potential benefits of both digesta and female hunting.


Winter in the Arctic offers Indigenous hunters more chances to kill herbivores than to find edible plants. Topical Press Agency/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Ethnographically documented foragers did routinely eat digesta, especially where herbivores were plentiful but plants edible to humans were scarce, as in the Arctic, where prey’s stomach contents was an important source of carbohydrates.

I believe eating digesta may have been a more common practice in the past, but direct evidence is frustratingly hard to come by. In at least one instance, plant species present in the mineralized plaque of a Neanderthal individual’s teeth point to digesta as a source of nutrients. To systematically study past digesta consumption and its knock-on effects, including female hunting, researchers will need to draw on multiple lines of archaeological evidence and insights gained from models like the ones I developed.

Raven Garvey, Associate Professor of Anthropology; Curator of High Latitude and Western North American Archaeology, Museum of Anthropological Archaeology; Faculty Affiliate, Research Center for Group Dynamics, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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WHAT ABOUT OTHER  NON CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS
Editorial: If Missouri public schools teach Bible classes, whose version of religion rules?

2023/05/25

The Missouri State Capitol in Jefferson City, Missouri. - Wayne Mckown/Dreamstime/TNS

Missouri legislators have adopted yet another solution in search of a problem. They’ve passed a bill — and sent it to Gov. Mike Parson to sign (he shouldn’t) — that would allow public schools to offer elective courses on the Bible.

This isn’t the first time lawmakers have attempted this, even though there seems to be no prohibition against teaching about scripture in public schools. In fact, there can be value in that. What is — and should be — prohibited is teaching that promotes a particular religion. People are right to be suspicious that backers of this Missouri legislation are simply trying to slide the Christian camel’s nose under the public school tent as an initial way of advancing that faith tradition.

Sponsors of the bill may not realize it, but for almost two decades, educators have had available quality, constitutionally appropriate material to use when teaching students about the Bible and its influence. Those resources have come from the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Bible Literacy Project and have been used in hundreds of public schools in dozens of states. Why not just suggest parents and schools investigate this respected resource — recognizing, however, that even it doesn’t deal with other sacred texts that helped shape America, such as the Book of Mormon?

The Missouri bill at least pays lip service to the idea of not proselytizing in public classrooms. As the online summary of the bill notes: “This act requires that any course offered shall follow applicable laws maintaining religious neutrality, and shall not endorse, favor, promote, or show hostility to any particular religion, nonreligious faith, or religious perspective.”

That summary also says that any elective social studies course need not be limited to using the Bible — either the Jewish or Christian versions. But that’s far from encouraging students to explore the influence on society of Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist or other sacred writings.

There are many good reasons for students to be familiar with the Bible, given that it’s been so influential in U.S. history. Beyond that, of course, our language and literature are full of biblical references (“go the second mile,” “Good Samaritan laws,” “the patience of Job” and more) that will mean nothing to students without at least an introductory look at the book’s influence.

In a nation in which the religious landscape has been changing rather dramatically over the last 50-plus years, basic religious literacy is important. It’s exactly what such groups as the Greater Kansas City Interfaith Council promote as a way of living in peace in a society that’s becoming more religiously diverse, including a fast-growing number of religiously unaffiliated people.

But focusing on just one sacred text — even if a rapidly-shrinking majority of Americans still identify as Christian — is an incomplete answer. In fact, public school teaching that uses only the Bible can be problematic in various ways.

Which translation should be used? (There are dozens, and sometimes they offer conflicting English versions of the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic.) Whose interpretation of those texts should be given priority? Will the Bible be seen through the eyes of people who say it’s “inerrant” in all ways, including the idea that the world was created in six literal 24-hour days? Or should more metaphorical and allegorical interpretations be offered? Should students get a Mainline Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal or evangelical approach, or one from a branch of Judaism?

Rabbi Doug Alpert of Congregation Kol Ami of Kansas City is on target when he suggests that it’s not the legislature’s place to say it’s legal to teach about the Bible: “It sounds like they’re doing the courts’ job.” Exactly.

Public school families who want their children taught about the many ways the Bible has influenced our nation and its citizens should be careful how they go about making that happen. Letting Missouri lawmakers set the boundaries is far from the best idea.

___

© The Kansas City Star
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CANADIAN FASCIST SAYS;
'We want dictator Trump': America First activist publicly calls for 'Trumpian Reich'

David Edwards
May 31, 2023,

Twitter/screen grab

Tyler Russell, a Canadian nationalist leader of the America First movement, has called for Donald Trump to be installed as "dictator" in a "Trumpian Reich."

In a clip obtained by Right Wing Watch, Russell told the audience of his daily broadcast about his vision for a Trump government.

"All of these DeSantis, you know, libertarian populist people that are like, we need to actually have political substance," he complained. "No, I don't give a f--k about that, okay? I don't care about your political substance."

"I want a Trump Reich," he continued. "And I want Trump's face to be, you know, projected onto every single tallest skyscraper in every city around America, okay?"

Russell insisted that his followers did not want "freedom."

"We want a total Trumpian Reich, okay?" he said. "That's what we want. We want a total Trumpian Reich. We want dictator Trump."

"We want Trump to rule forever and ever and make America great again," Russell added. "And we want all these people who are acting in bad faith, who are traitors to this nation, to go to jail. That's what we want."

Watch the video clip at this link.

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