October 09 2024

FLASH ...MILTON A CATASTROPHIC CAT 5 HURRICANE... ...FORECAST TO MAKE LANDFALL ON THE FLORIDA GULF COAST EARLY THURSDAY AS A CAT 4 HURRICANE...

NOBLE PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work With AI and Proteins

1. THE issue in the coming decades: automation vs jobs
2. Silicon Valley update: Google breakup? / massive lobbying operation
3. Republicans Surpass Democrats in Voter ID for First Time in Decades
4. Health Insurance Premiums Skyrocket 7% for Second Year
5. Global speech war: Brazil Lifts X Ban as Elon Musk Bows to Supreme Court Orders
October 9 1936: Hoover Dam begins transmitting electricity to Los Angeles

See the new Ad Astra Podcast! Released on Apple and Spotify around 10a CST.

Editors note: We’re still waiting on Israel’s retaliatory strike on Iran. It will come and when it does, we’ll cover it.

FLASH ...MILTON A CATASTROPHIC CAT 5 HURRICANE... ...FORECAST TO MAKE LANDFALL ON THE FLORIDA GULF COAST EARLY THURSDAY AS A CAT 4 HURRICANE...

NOBLE PRIZE IN CHEMISTRY Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work With AI and Proteins

Demis Hassabis and John M. Jumper were part of a Google DeepMind team whose A.I. technology predicts protein shapes. David Baker designed “a new protein that was unlike any other,” the committee said.

Article Source: NYT

1. THE issue in the coming decades: automation vs jobs

At the annual convention of the International Longshoremen’s Association last year, two large screens played a TikTok video from a crane operator over the docks of Los Angeles.  “Aaaall of this, man, is all automated,” he said, pointing toward acres of stacked containers stretching to the Pacific. He marveled at the automated vehicles driving amid the containers: “No drivers in any of those machines…. They’re no joke, man.” From the podium, Harold Daggett, the union’s pugnacious leader, was having none of it. “They say that’s the future,” he bellowed to the thousands of gathered workers. “Over my dead body.” Tens of thousands of dockworkers last week returned to their jobs on East Coast ports after a three-day strike that threatened to snarl trade and hobble the economy. Workers won a 62% pay increase. But a much larger, thornier issue remains—one that’s playing out in other businesses as well, from factories to grocery stores to Hollywood: How much, and how quickly, are humans willing to concede to machines? The new dockworker agreement extends only until mid-January. Daggett’s opposition to automation of any kind threatens to derail the continuing negotiations over the next three months and push the dockworkers back to the picket lines. The long march of technological advancement has transformed manufacturing and countless industries over the decades—and brought attempts to defy change. Workers in a range of industries today fear being displaced by ever-more sophisticated machines, particularly with the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.  “Someone has to get into Congress and say, ‘Whoa, time out,’” Daggett said in a recent video interview. “What good is it if you’re going to put people out of work?”

Article Source: WSJ

2. Silicon Valley update: Google breakup? / massive lobbying operation

A. U.S. Faces Decision on Breaking Up Google After 40-Year Hiatus  

U.S. antitrust enforcers haven’t broken up a company in 40 years. Several high-stakes cases, including two involving Google, could determine whether that dormant period comes to an end. The Justice Department submitted a filing Tuesday that presented a federal court with a range of potential options—from conduct restrictions to a breakup—aimed at ending what a judge said was Google’s unlawful monopoly in search.  

B. Tech Titans Are Shaping U.S. Politics 

a strategy that had begun more than a decade earlier to turn Silicon Valley into the most powerful political operation in the nation. As the tech industry has become the planet’s dominant economic force, a coterie of specialists—led, in part, by the political operative who introduced the idea of “a vast right-wing conspiracy” decades ago—have taught Silicon Valley how to play the game of politics. Their aim is to help tech leaders become as powerful in Washington, D.C., and in state legislatures as they are on Wall Street. It is likely that in the coming decades these efforts will affect everything from Presidential races to which party controls Congress and how antitrust and artificial intelligence are regulated. Now that the tech industry has quietly become one of the most powerful lobbying forces in American politics, it is wielding that power as previous corporate special interests have: to bully, cajole, and remake the nation as it sees fit.

Article Source: WSJ, New Yorker

3. Republicans Surpass Democrats in Voter ID for First Time in Decades

Beneath the headline results in many polls, something unusual has turned up with big implications for politics: More voters are calling themselves Republicans than Democrats, suggesting that the GOP has its first durable lead in party identification in more than three decades. Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster who works on NBC News surveys, first noticed in May that more voters were calling themselves Republicans. “Wow, the biggest deal in polling is when lines cross, and for the first time in decades, Republicans now have the national edge on party ID,’’ he wrote. He called the development “the underrecognized game-changer for 2024.’’ In combined NBC polls this year, Republicans lead by 2 percentage points over Democrats, 42% to 40%, when voters were asked which party they identified with. That compares with Democratic leads of 6 points in 2020, 7 points in 2016 and 9 points in 2012.  

Article Source: WSJ

4. Health Insurance Premiums Skyrocket 7% for Second Year

Inflation is easing across much of the economy. For healthcare? Not yet.  The cost of employer health insurance rose 7% for a second straight year, maintaining a growth rate not seen in more than a decade, according to an annual survey by the healthcare nonprofit KFF. The back-to-back years of rapid increases have added more than $3,000 to the average family premium, which reached roughly $25,500 this year. Businesses absorbed this year’s higher premium costs—one of several signals in recent years that employers are sensitive to the limits of what workers can afford, said Matthew Rae, associate director of the KFF healthcare marketplace program and an author of the survey.  

Article Source: WSJ

5. Global speech war: Brazil Lifts X Ban as Elon Musk Bows to Supreme Court Orders

Brazil lifted its ban on the social network X on Tuesday after its owner, Elon Musk, capitulated in his fight with the country’s Supreme Court, ending a five-week suspension of the platform across the nation of 200 million. Brazil’s Supreme Court said X had complied with the court’s orders to take down certain accounts, which the court called necessary to protect Brazil’s democracy and which Mr. Musk called illegal censorship. The company also complied with other orders, including paying fines and naming a new representative in the country. X’s compliance was a stark reversal for Mr. Musk, who had loudly criticized and defied the court for months, going so far as to publish its sealed orders and to close X’s offices in Brazil. The court responded by blocking X across Brazil in August, sending millions of Brazilians to the platform’s competitors. But now, X is returning in Brazil and obeying orders that Mr. Musk had vowed to resist. X said in a post on Tuesday that “giving tens of millions of Brazilians access to our indispensable platform was paramount throughout this entire process.” It added that it would “continue to defend freedom of speech, within the boundaries of the law, everywhere we operate.”

Article Source: NYT

October 9 1936: Hoover Dam begins transmitting electricity to Los Angeles

Sources

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/science/nobel-prize-chemistry.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

3. https://www.wsj.com/business/logistics/us-ports-automation-union-strike-f94bb4b7

4. A https://www.wsj.com/tech/breaking-up-is-hard-to-do-antitrust-officials-weigh-splitting-google-others-712bba46
B https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster

5. https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/more-americans-identify-as-republican-than-democrat-heres-what-that-means-for-the-election-150e12ae

6. https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/health-insurance-inflation-charts-612812ed

7. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/08/world/americas/brazil-x-ban-musk.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb