January 09 2025

1. Apocalypse LA: Historic Firestorm Forces Mass Evacuation
2. Study: Humanoid Robot Labor to Hit Sub-$1/hr Rates by 2035
3. Working Class Shifts Right as Democrats Lose Ground
4. TikTok Faces Global Backlash Ahead of Supreme Court Appeal, US Ban
5. Bodyguards Shield Impeached South Korean President from Arrest
January 9, 2007: Steve Jobs debuts the iPhone

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1. Apocalypse LA: Historic Firestorm Forces Mass Evacuation

Out-of-control wildfires are raging across greater Los Angeles, killing at least five people, devouring neighborhoods and forcing the evacuation of at least 130,000 people as the blazes enter their third day. “This fire storm is ‘the big one’ in magnitude,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said. There are now five active wildfires burning in Los Angeles County, according to Cal Fire. High wind speeds, which fueled the blazes, have decreased overnight, but another surge is forecast for late Thursday into Friday, with gusts up to 60 mph. 

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Article Source: WaPo

2. Study: Humanoid Robot Labor to Hit Sub-$1/hr Rates by 2035

Humanoid robots will enter the market at a cost-capability of under $10/hour for their labor, on a trajectory to under $1/hour before 2035 and under $0.10/hour before 2045 Humanoid robots won’t just displace human jobs. Instead, they will create an entirely new and vastly larger and more capable labor system. It is impossible to know in advance the full details of how the new labor system will differ from today, but the key feature is: the marginal cost of labor will rapidly approach zero. So long as humanoid robots are not sentient, they will not have jobs. They will only perform tasks. Most jobs involve much more than performing a single task. They typically entail responsibility for a range of tasks, each of which requires a different amount of training, experience, and skill to perform. The disruption of labor, with all of its world-changing implications, can therefore only be understood with tasks as the correct unit of analysis, and tasks per hour per dollar as the corresponding cost-capability metric.

Article Source: RethinkX

3. Working Class Shifts Right as Democrats Lose Ground

A key question emerging from the 2024 elections is whether the Democratic Party is significantly — or even permanently — wounded. Can it return to fighting trim in 2026 and 2028? A post-election YouGov poll commissioned by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank, sent a clear message to party loyalists. YouGov asked 5,098 working-class voters (defined as those without college degrees) — primarily in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, along with 881 people elsewhere in the nation — to evaluate the political parties on measures of trust and commitment. Asked which party they trusted “more to improve the economy, protect Americans from crime, handle the issue of immigration,” majorities of respondents chose the Republican Party, ranging from 55 to 34 percent on the economy to 57 to 29 percent on immigration. Asked whether the Democratic Party or the Republican Party was “in touch or out of touch” and “strong or weak,” majorities of working-class voters described the Democrats as out of touch (53 to 34 percent) and weak (50 to 32) and the Republicans as “in touch” (52 to 35) and “strong” (63 to 23).

Article Source: NYT

4. TikTok Faces Global Backlash Ahead of Supreme Court Appeal, US Ban

Russia fined TikTok for not removing prohibited content. The results of a presidential election in Romania were thrown out over concerns the app had been used to spread foreign influence. Albania banned TikTok for a year following the stabbing death of a teenager by another one after the two quarreled online. “Either TikTok protects the children of Albania, or Albania will protect its children from TikTok,” the prime minister, Edi Rama, said on X. That was all in just the last month. This week in the United States, where about 150 million people use the app, TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, are asking the Supreme Court to strike down a law that would force the app to be sold or banned. TikTok has confronted legal and political scrutiny around the world in recent years, facing outright or partial bans in at least 20 countries, as governments have grown alarmed by its ties to China and its wide influence, especially among young people. Despite the mounting scrutiny, TikTok remains incredibly popular worldwide. More than a billion people use the app every month.

Article Source: NYT

5. Bodyguards Shield Impeached South Korean President from Arrest

South Korea’s Presidential Security Service, a n agency assigned to protect the president, prides itself on being the “last bastion for a safe and stable state administration.” It is now at the heart of South Korea’s biggest political mess in decades, acting as a final line of defense to prevent criminal investigators from detaining President Yoon Suk Yeol on charges of insurrection. Since his impeachment over a short-lived martial law declaration last month, Mr. Yoon has been holed up in central Seoul, in a hilly compound that is now surrounded by barricades of buses, barbed wire and the presidential bodyguards . He has vowed to “fight to the end” to return to office. But a majority of South Koreans, according to surveys, want him ousted and arrested, and a court on Tuesday granted investigators a new warrant to detain him . The only thing standing between them and Mr. Yoon is the Presidential Security Service, or P.S.S., which blocked the first attempt to serve the warrant last Friday. When 100 criminal investigators and police officers showed up at his residence, the agency’s staff outnumbered them two-to-one and held them off, questioning the legality of the court-issued document. The two sides went back-and-forth during a five-and-a-half-hour standoff, before investigators abandoned efforts to detain Mr. Yoon.  

Editors note: the US has 30k troops in SK and they are a crucial Pacific ally

Article Source: NYT

January 9, 2007: Steve Jobs debuts the iPhone

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Sources

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/01/09/california-fires-palisades-eaton-los-angeles-updates/

2. https://www.rethinkx.com/labor/in-depth/insights-into-humanoid-robotics

3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/07/opinion/democratic-party-republican-realignment.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

4. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/09/technology/tiktok-ban-global-legal-battles.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/world/asia/south-korea-yoon-bodyguards.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare