All posts tagged: single year

Joe Biden and Donald Trump Have Thoughts About Your Next Car

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Get ready for the EV election. Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux March 20, 2024, 6:32 PM ET The Biden administration earlier today issued a major new rule intended to spur the country’s electric-vehicle industry and slash future sales of new gas-powered cars. The rule is not a ban on gas cars, nor does it mandate electric-vehicle sales. It is a new emissions standard, requiring automakers to cut the average carbon emission of their fleets by nearly 50 percent by 2032. It would speed up the transformation of the car industry: The simplest way for automakers to cut emissions will likely be to shift more of their fleets to electric and hybrid models, and the Biden administration estimates that the rule would result in electric vehicles making up as much as half of all new cars sold by 2032. It also gives the country more of a chance of meeting the administration’s goal of cutting U.S. emissions in half by 2030 and eliminating them by 2050. The final rule is a …

AI in Politics Is So Much Bigger Than Deepfakes

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Last week, on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, some of the state’s voters received a robocall purporting to be from President Joe Biden. Unlike the other such prerecorded calls reminding people to vote, this one had a different ask: Don’t bother coming out to the polls, the voice instructed. Better to “save your vote for the November election.” The message was strange, even nonsensical, but the voice on the line sure did sound like the president’s. “What a bunch of malarkey!” it exclaimed at one point. And caller ID showed that the call came from a former chair of the New Hampshire Democratic Party, according to the Associated Press. But this robocall appears to have been AI-generated. Who created it, and why, remains a mystery. Although the stunt likely had no real effect on the outcome of the election—Biden won, as anticipated, in a landslide—it vividly illustrated one of the many ways in which generative AI might influence an election. These tools can help candidates more easily get out their message, but …

The Benefits of Thinking of Your Life in Seasons

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] For many of us—the vitamin-D-deprived, the sugar-addled, perhaps the suddenly jobless or those dreading family gatherings—’tis the season not so much to be jolly, but just to be “in a season.” The phrase has become a common way of talking yourself through a sudden upheaval, or of explaining that you’ll be doing things a little differently for a while. Diddy is in “a season of total independence” because he has “come too far to ask somebody that isn’t where I’m from about cultural and artistic things.” The expression can fend off societal pressures (“I’m in a season of really wanting to … enjoy this phase of our relationship,” the singer Becky G said in March after getting engaged) or tacitly ask for space (after the actor Lupita Nyong’o’s breakup in October, she found herself “in a season of heartbreak.”) You might have noticed this phrasing if you are a Christian, or run in Christian-adjacent circles, where it seems especially prominent. Many believers tend to say that they are, for example, “going through a hard …

Why the Studios Are Risking Everything

Published by skeptic

[ad_1] Labor stoppages are, first and foremost, about money, and the concurrent Screen Actors Guild and Writers Guild of America strikes are no exception. The actors and the writers want more of it, as well as limits on the use of AI. The studios say they don’t have nearly as much to distribute as the actors and the writers would like given the massive expenses they’ve incurred while standing up their streaming services. They find themselves at an impasse that threatens to reduce the overall pot even further by putting in jeopardy one of the industry’s greatest assets: movie theaters. Hollywood has a history of treating evolving consumer habits first as a threat to theatrical dollars and then as a tool to be co-opted in the pursuit of earning ever-greater profits. Studios were first hesitant to license their films to television networks and then realized the small screen was an untapped market. Hollywood fought tooth and nail against VHS—fearing both illegal piracy and customers legally taping the movies that studios had licensed to TV and …