Podcasts about california sb

We're exploring new California food allergy-related legislation with change-maker Robyn Huey Lao, who is a nurse practitioner, mother of 9-year-old food allergy advocate Addie, and the patient advocate leading the charge for California SB 68: ADDE, which stands for Allergen Disclosure for Dining Experiences. Robyn shares how passion and necessity turned an average family into advocates working to uplift our food allergy world. A special surprise guest joins Robyn! Resources to keep you in the know:AddieTellsAllFollow @Addie.Tells.All on InstagramCalifornia SB 68 - Bill summary and legislative informationYou can find FAACT's Roundtable Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Pandora, Spotify, Podbay, iHeart Radio, or wherever you listen to podcasts.Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, Threads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, and YouTube.Sponsored by: ACAAIThanks for listening! FAACT invites you to discover more exciting food allergy resources at FoodAllergyAwareness.org!

A barrage of tariffs are foisted onto the automotive marketplace and throw a wrench into the car importing business (including Derek's OTS and Co.). Are used cars affected? Not even ChatGPT knows. Jason wants to file a class action suit against VW for sunsetting 3G functionality in Mk7 cars, and Jay Leno puts his name behind California SB 712 to reduce the smog check burden on California-based classic car owners. We'll start off with 1980s turbocharged lag-mobiles: the Saab 99 Turbo, BMW 2002 Turbo, and Porsche 930. At the time, Lotus deemed this power curve and response time unacceptable and managed to create a significantly better turbocharged experience in the Esprit Turbo. So good in fact that it may be on par with the W124 Mercedes-Benz 300E with a Mosselman twin-turbo setup that Jason recently drove. Next, Jason thinks a class action lawsuit is in order against VW of America. That's because after 3G cell networks were shut down in 2022, VW failed to maintain the functionality of its Car-Net app that allowed for remote lock/unlock, cabin pre-heating, break-in alerts, charging start/stop and automatic crash notifications. Now, 3 years later, VW has admitted defeat, and has told owners that no fix will be provided. This is quite different from Tesla's approach, who called in owners and upgraded their modems to run on the newer networks. Derek also notes the class action lawsuit against Mercedes when it was discovered that the clear coat on their Mars Red paint didn't last. Then we dive into the tariff chaos. Mainly the 25% tax on all imported automobiles, which may be permanent like the “chicken tax” on imported trucks, or it may last a few hours? Does it apply to used vehicles? No one is sure. But Derek wasn't waiting around to find out when OTS was facing a $700,000 duty on a car it was actively importing for a client. Ronald Reagan briefly weighs in on the effectiveness of tariffs, and EU-allergic Switzerland enters the chat. Plus Ford and Mercedes-Benz both have extensive experience evading tariffs from their time importing non-tariffed “passenger” vans into the States, only to have their technicians immediately convert them into cargo trucks by removing the seats and windows then shipping the pieces back to Europe for the next batch. We'll also cover various shipping methods (container vs "RoRo") as both Derek and Jason have experienced shipping cars overseas – both Derek's W116 and W124 wagon made the voyage across the Atlantic, as did Jason's E30 Touring and 190E 2.3-16. We'll talk Boeing 747 8F cargo planes, RoRo cargo ships, 20- and 40-foot containers, and all of their associated pros, cons and costs. We'll also dive into the used car market and recent auction results. Why are similar cars fetching wildly different prices at major auctions and on websites like Bring A Trailer? Derek and Jason both weigh in on the factors at play, including two recent BMW 850CSi sales. Lastly, we'll touch on California SB712, now nicknamed Leno's Law. A new law working its way through the California legislature that aims to reduce the smog check burden on classic car owners and collectors (as well as the repair shops burdened with maintaining dynamometers for a dwindling pool of cars requiring one for proper smog testing). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Did you enjoy this episode? Text us your thoughts and be sure to include the episode name.A video of this podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, or PwC's website at viewpoint.pwc.com.California's climate disclosure laws have broad implications for businesses worldwide. In this episode, we break down the key reporting requirements, including on greenhouse gas (GHG) and climate risk, and discuss how companies—whether headquartered in California or not—can prepare.In this episode, we discuss:1:10 – Overview of California's climate disclosure laws3:45 – Scope of California SB 25314:05 – Greenhouse gas reporting required by California SB 25324:52 – Scope of California SB 26131:42 –Climate risk reporting under the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures framework37:57  – Interoperability with the International Sustainability Standards Board and the European Sustainability Reporting Standards39:18 – California legal challenges, activity in other states, and why companies should continue to move forwardLooking for more on the California climate disclosure laws?Read Chapter 22 of PwC's Sustainability reporting guide, Jurisdictional sustainability reporting – California.Follow our series and subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay in the loop.About our guestsMarcin Olewinski is a PwC Assurance practice partner with over 20 years of experience bringing valued perspectives and insights to large clients in the energy sector. Additionally, he's focused extensively within PwC's National Office on greenhouse gas emissions and sustainability reporting and leads PwC's global technical working group focused on GHG.Diana Stoltzfus is a partner in the National Office who helps to shape PwC's perspectives on regulatory matters, responses to rulemakings, and policy development, and implementation related to significant new rules and regulations. Prior to rejoining PwC, Diana was the Deputy Chief Accountant in the Office of the Chief Accountant (OCA) at the SEC where she led the activities of the Professional Practices Group within the OCA.Valerie Wieman is a PwC National Office partner with over 30 years of experience. She is one of the firm's technical experts on sustainability reporting and helps lead the creation, development, and publication of our brand-defining thought leadership, with a focus on domestic and international sustainability requirements.About our hostHeather Horn is the PwC National Office Sustainability and Thought Leader, responsible for developing our communications strategy and conveying firm positions on accounting, financial reporting, and sustainability matters. In addition, she is part of PwC's global sustainability leadership team, developing interpretive guidance and consulting with companies as they transition from voluntary to mandatory sustainability reporting. Transcripts available upon request for individuals who may need a disability-related accommodation. Please send requests to us_podcast@pwc.com.

Due to overwhelming demand (>15x applications:slots), we are closing CFPs for AI Engineer Summit NYC today. Last call! Thanks, we'll be reaching out to all shortly!The world's top AI blogger and friend of every pod, Simon Willison, dropped a monster 2024 recap: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Brian of the excellent TechMeme Ride Home pinged us for a connection and a special crossover episode, our first in 2025. The target audience for this podcast is a tech-literate, but non-technical one. You can see Simon's notes for AI Engineers in his World's Fair Keynote.Timestamp* 00:00 Introduction and Guest Welcome* 01:06 State of AI in 2025* 01:43 Advancements in AI Models* 03:59 Cost Efficiency in AI* 06:16 Challenges and Competition in AI* 17:15 AI Agents and Their Limitations* 26:12 Multimodal AI and Future Prospects* 35:29 Exploring Video Avatar Companies* 36:24 AI Influencers and Their Future* 37:12 Simplifying Content Creation with AI* 38:30 The Importance of Credibility in AI* 41:36 The Future of LLM User Interfaces* 48:58 Local LLMs: A Growing Interest* 01:07:22 AI Wearables: The Next Big Thing* 01:10:16 Wrapping Up and Final ThoughtsTranscript[00:00:00] Introduction and Guest Welcome[00:00:00] Brian: Welcome to the first bonus episode of the Tech Meme Write Home for the year 2025. I'm your host as always, Brian McCullough. Listeners to the pod over the last year know that I have made a habit of quoting from Simon Willison when new stuff happens in AI from his blog. Simon has been, become a go to for many folks in terms of, you know, Analyzing things, criticizing things in the AI space.[00:00:33] Brian: I've wanted to talk to you for a long time, Simon. So thank you for coming on the show. No, it's a privilege to be here. And the person that made this connection happen is our friend Swyx, who has been on the show back, even going back to the, the Twitter Spaces days but also an AI guru in, in their own right Swyx, thanks for coming on the show also.[00:00:54] swyx (2): Thanks. I'm happy to be on and have been a regular listener, so just happy to [00:01:00] contribute as well.[00:01:00] Brian: And a good friend of the pod, as they say. Alright, let's go right into it.[00:01:06] State of AI in 2025[00:01:06] Brian: Simon, I'm going to do the most unfair, broad question first, so let's get it out of the way. The year 2025. Broadly, what is the state of AI as we begin this year?[00:01:20] Brian: Whatever you want to say, I don't want to lead the witness.[00:01:22] Simon: Wow. So many things, right? I mean, the big thing is everything's got really good and fast and cheap. Like, that was the trend throughout all of 2024. The good models got so much cheaper, they got so much faster, they got multimodal, right? The image stuff isn't even a surprise anymore.[00:01:39] Simon: They're growing video, all of that kind of stuff. So that's all really exciting.[00:01:43] Advancements in AI Models[00:01:43] Simon: At the same time, they didn't get massively better than GPT 4, which was a bit of a surprise. So that's sort of one of the open questions is, are we going to see huge, but I kind of feel like that's a bit of a distraction because GPT 4, but way cheaper, much larger context lengths, and it [00:02:00] can do multimodal.[00:02:01] Simon: is better, right? That's a better model, even if it's not.[00:02:05] Brian: What people were expecting or hoping, maybe not expecting is not the right word, but hoping that we would see another step change, right? Right. From like GPT 2 to 3 to 4, we were expecting or hoping that maybe we were going to see the next evolution in that sort of, yeah.[00:02:21] Brian: We[00:02:21] Simon: did see that, but not in the way we expected. We thought the model was just going to get smarter, and instead we got. Massive drops in, drops in price. We got all of these new capabilities. You can talk to the things now, right? They can do simulated audio input, all of that kind of stuff. And so it's kind of, it's interesting to me that the models improved in all of these ways we weren't necessarily expecting.[00:02:43] Simon: I didn't know it would be able to do an impersonation of Santa Claus, like a, you know, Talked to it through my phone and show it what I was seeing by the end of 2024. But yeah, we didn't get that GPT 5 step. And that's one of the big open questions is, is that actually just around the corner and we'll have a bunch of GPT 5 class models drop in the [00:03:00] next few months?[00:03:00] Simon: Or is there a limit?[00:03:03] Brian: If you were a betting man and wanted to put money on it, do you expect to see a phase change, step change in 2025?[00:03:11] Simon: I don't particularly for that, like, the models, but smarter. I think all of the trends we're seeing right now are going to keep on going, especially the inference time compute, right?[00:03:21] Simon: The trick that O1 and O3 are doing, which means that you can solve harder problems, but they cost more and it churns away for longer. I think that's going to happen because that's already proven to work. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe there will be a step change to a GPT 5 level, but honestly, I'd be completely happy if we got what we've got right now.[00:03:41] Simon: But cheaper and faster and more capabilities and longer contexts and so forth. That would be thrilling to me.[00:03:46] Brian: Digging into what you've just said one of the things that, by the way, I hope to link in the show notes to Simon's year end post about what, what things we learned about LLMs in 2024. Look for that in the show notes.[00:03:59] Cost Efficiency in AI[00:03:59] Brian: One of the things that you [00:04:00] did say that you alluded to even right there was that in the last year, you felt like the GPT 4 barrier was broken, like IE. Other models, even open source ones are now regularly matching sort of the state of the art.[00:04:13] Simon: Well, it's interesting, right? So the GPT 4 barrier was a year ago, the best available model was OpenAI's GPT 4 and nobody else had even come close to it.[00:04:22] Simon: And they'd been at the, in the lead for like nine months, right? That thing came out in what, February, March of, of 2023. And for the rest of 2023, nobody else came close. And so at the start of last year, like a year ago, the big question was, Why has nobody beaten them yet? Like, what do they know that the rest of the industry doesn't know?[00:04:40] Simon: And today, that I've counted 18 organizations other than GPT 4 who've put out a model which clearly beats that GPT 4 from a year ago thing. Like, maybe they're not better than GPT 4. 0, but that's, that, that, that barrier got completely smashed. And yeah, a few of those I've run on my laptop, which is wild to me.[00:04:59] Simon: Like, [00:05:00] it was very, very wild. It felt very clear to me a year ago that if you want GPT 4, you need a rack of 40, 000 GPUs just to run the thing. And that turned out not to be true. Like the, the, this is that big trend from last year of the models getting more efficient, cheaper to run, just as capable with smaller weights and so forth.[00:05:20] Simon: And I ran another GPT 4 model on my laptop this morning, right? Microsoft 5. 4 just came out. And that, if you look at the benchmarks, it's definitely, it's up there with GPT 4. 0. It's probably not as good when you actually get into the vibes of the thing, but it, it runs on my, it's a 14 gigabyte download and I can run it on a MacBook Pro.[00:05:38] Simon: Like who saw that coming? The most exciting, like the close of the year on Christmas day, just a few weeks ago, was when DeepSeek dropped their DeepSeek v3 model on Hugging Face without even a readme file. It was just like a giant binary blob that I can't run on my laptop. It's too big. But in all of the benchmarks, it's now by far the best available [00:06:00] open, open weights model.[00:06:01] Simon: Like it's, it's, it's beating the, the metalamas and so forth. And that was trained for five and a half million dollars, which is a tenth of the price that people thought it costs to train these things. So everything's trending smaller and faster and more efficient.[00:06:15] Brian: Well, okay.[00:06:16] Challenges and Competition in AI[00:06:16] Brian: I, I kind of was going to get to that later, but let's, let's combine this with what I was going to ask you next, which is, you know, you're talking, you know, Also in the piece about the LLM prices crashing, which I've even seen in projects that I'm working on, but explain Explain that to a general audience, because we hear all the time that LLMs are eye wateringly expensive to run, but what we're suggesting, and we'll come back to the cheap Chinese LLM, but first of all, for the end user, what you're suggesting is that we're starting to see the cost come down sort of in the traditional technology way of Of costs coming down over time,[00:06:49] Simon: yes, but very aggressively.[00:06:51] Simon: I mean, my favorite thing, the example here is if you look at GPT-3, so open AI's g, PT three, which was the best, a developed model in [00:07:00] 2022 and through most of 20 2023. That, the models that we have today, the OpenAI models are a hundred times cheaper. So there was a 100x drop in price for OpenAI from their best available model, like two and a half years ago to today.[00:07:13] Simon: And[00:07:14] Brian: just to be clear, not to train the model, but for the use of tokens and things. Exactly,[00:07:20] Simon: for running prompts through them. And then When you look at the, the really, the top tier model providers right now, I think, are OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta. And there are a bunch of others that I could list there as well.[00:07:32] Simon: Mistral are very good. The, the DeepSeq and Quen models have got great. There's a whole bunch of providers serving really good models. But even if you just look at the sort of big brand name providers, they all offer models now that are A fraction of the price of the, the, of the models we were using last year.[00:07:49] Simon: I think I've got some numbers that I threw into my blog entry here. Yeah. Like Gemini 1. 5 flash, that's Google's fast high quality model is [00:08:00] how much is that? It's 0. 075 dollars per million tokens. Like these numbers are getting, So we just do cents per million now,[00:08:09] swyx (2): cents per million,[00:08:10] Simon: cents per million makes, makes a lot more sense.[00:08:12] Simon: Yeah they have one model 1. 5 flash 8B, the absolute cheapest of the Google models, is 27 times cheaper than GPT 3. 5 turbo was a year ago. That's it. And GPT 3. 5 turbo, that was the cheap model, right? Now we've got something 27 times cheaper, and the Google, this Google one can do image recognition, it can do million token context, all of those tricks.[00:08:36] Simon: But it's, it's, it's very, it's, it really is startling how inexpensive some of this stuff has got.[00:08:41] Brian: Now, are we assuming that this, that happening is directly the result of competition? Because again, you know, OpenAI, and probably they're doing this for their own almost political reasons, strategic reasons, keeps saying, we're losing money on everything, even the 200.[00:08:56] Brian: So they probably wouldn't, the prices wouldn't be [00:09:00] coming down if there wasn't intense competition in this space.[00:09:04] Simon: The competition is absolutely part of it, but I have it on good authority from sources I trust that Google Gemini is not operating at a loss. Like, the amount of electricity to run a prompt is less than they charge you.[00:09:16] Simon: And the same thing for Amazon Nova. Like, somebody found an Amazon executive and got them to say, Yeah, we're not losing money on this. I don't know about Anthropic and OpenAI, but clearly that demonstrates it is possible to run these things at these ludicrously low prices and still not be running at a loss if you discount the Army of PhDs and the, the training costs and all of that kind of stuff.[00:09:36] Brian: One, one more for me before I let Swyx jump in here. To, to come back to DeepSeek and this idea that you could train, you know, a cutting edge model for 6 million. I, I was saying on the show, like six months ago, that if we are getting to the point where each new model It would cost a billion, ten billion, a hundred billion to train that.[00:09:54] Brian: At some point it would almost, only nation states would be able to train the new models. Do you [00:10:00] expect what DeepSeek and maybe others are proving to sort of blow that up? Or is there like some sort of a parallel track here that maybe I'm not technically, I don't have the mouse to understand the difference.[00:10:11] Brian: Is the model, are the models going to go, you know, Up to a hundred billion dollars or can we get them down? Sort of like DeepSeek has proven[00:10:18] Simon: so I'm the wrong person to answer that because I don't work in the lab training these models. So I can give you my completely uninformed opinion, which is, I felt like the DeepSeek thing.[00:10:27] Simon: That was a bomb shell. That was an absolute bombshell when they came out and said, Hey, look, we've trained. One of the best available models and it cost us six, five and a half million dollars to do it. I feel, and they, the reason, one of the reasons it's so efficient is that we put all of these export controls in to stop Chinese companies from giant buying GPUs.[00:10:44] Simon: So they've, were forced to be, go as efficient as possible. And yet the fact that they've demonstrated that that's possible to do. I think it does completely tear apart this, this, this mental model we had before that yeah, the training runs just keep on getting more and more expensive and the number of [00:11:00] organizations that can afford to run these training runs keeps on shrinking.[00:11:03] Simon: That, that's been blown out of the water. So yeah, that's, again, this was our Christmas gift. This was the thing they dropped on Christmas day. Yeah, it makes me really optimistic that we can, there are, It feels like there was so much low hanging fruit in terms of the efficiency of both inference and training and we spent a whole bunch of last year exploring that and getting results from it.[00:11:22] Simon: I think there's probably a lot left. I think there's probably, well, I would not be surprised to see even better models trained spending even less money over the next six months.[00:11:31] swyx (2): Yeah. So I, I think there's a unspoken angle here on what exactly the Chinese labs are trying to do because DeepSea made a lot of noise.[00:11:41] swyx (2): so much for joining us for around the fact that they train their model for six million dollars and nobody quite quite believes them. Like it's very, very rare for a lab to trumpet the fact that they're doing it for so cheap. They're not trying to get anyone to buy them. So why [00:12:00] are they doing this? They make it very, very obvious.[00:12:05] swyx (2): Deepseek is about 150 employees. It's an order of magnitude smaller than at least Anthropic and maybe, maybe more so for OpenAI. And so what's, what's the end game here? Are they, are they just trying to show that the Chinese are better than us?[00:12:21] Simon: So Deepseek, it's the arm of a hedge, it's a, it's a quant fund, right?[00:12:25] Simon: It's an algorithmic quant trading thing. So I, I, I would love to get more insight into how that organization works. My assumption from what I've seen is it looks like they're basically just flexing. They're like, hey, look at how utterly brilliant we are with this amazing thing that we've done. And it's, it's working, right?[00:12:43] Simon: They but, and so is that it? Are they, is this just their kind of like, this is, this is why our company is so amazing. Look at this thing that we've done, or? I don't know. I'd, I'd love to get Some insight from, from within that industry as to, as to how that's all playing out.[00:12:57] swyx (2): The, the prevailing theory among the Local Llama [00:13:00] crew and the Twitter crew that I indexed for my newsletter is that there is some amount of copying going on.[00:13:06] swyx (2): It's like Sam Altman you know, tweet, tweeting about how they're being copied. And then also there's this, there, there are other sort of opening eye employees that have said, Stuff that is similar that DeepSeek's rate of progress is how U. S. intelligence estimates the number of foreign spies embedded in top labs.[00:13:22] swyx (2): Because a lot of these ideas do spread around, but they surprisingly have a very high density of them in the DeepSeek v3 technical report. So it's, it's interesting. We don't know how much, how many, how much tokens. I think that, you know, people have run analysis on how often DeepSeek thinks it is cloud or thinks it is opening GPC 4.[00:13:40] swyx (2): Thanks for watching! And we don't, we don't know. We don't know. I think for me, like, yeah, we'll, we'll, we basically will never know as, as external commentators. I think what's interesting is how, where does this go? Is there a logical floor or bottom by my estimations for the same amount of ELO started last year to the end of last year cost went down by a thousand X for the [00:14:00] GPT, for, for GPT 4 intelligence.[00:14:02] swyx (2): Would, do they go down a thousand X this year?[00:14:04] Simon: That's a fascinating question. Yeah.[00:14:06] swyx (2): Is there a Moore's law going on, or did we just get a one off benefit last year for some weird reason?[00:14:14] Simon: My uninformed hunch is low hanging fruit. I feel like up until a year ago, people haven't been focusing on efficiency at all. You know, it was all about, what can we get these weird shaped things to do?[00:14:24] Simon: And now once we've sort of hit that, okay, we know that we can get them to do what GPT 4 can do, When thousands of researchers around the world all focus on, okay, how do we make this more efficient? What are the most important, like, how do we strip out all of the weights that have stuff in that doesn't really matter?[00:14:39] Simon: All of that kind of thing. So yeah, maybe that was it. Maybe 2024 was a freak year of all of the low hanging fruit coming out at once. And we'll actually see a reduction in the, in that rate of improvement in terms of efficiency. I wonder, I mean, I think we'll know for sure in about three months time if that trend's going to continue or not.[00:14:58] swyx (2): I agree. You know, I [00:15:00] think the other thing that you mentioned that DeepSeq v3 was the gift that was given from DeepSeq over Christmas, but I feel like the other thing that might be underrated was DeepSeq R1,[00:15:11] Speaker 4: which is[00:15:13] swyx (2): a reasoning model you can run on your laptop. And I think that's something that a lot of people are looking ahead to this year.[00:15:18] swyx (2): Oh, did they[00:15:18] Simon: release the weights for that one?[00:15:20] swyx (2): Yeah.[00:15:21] Simon: Oh my goodness, I missed that. I've been playing with the quen. So the other great, the other big Chinese AI app is Alibaba's quen. Actually, yeah, I, sorry, R1 is an API available. Yeah. Exactly. When that's really cool. So Alibaba's Quen have released two reasoning models that I've run on my laptop.[00:15:38] Simon: Now there was, the first one was Q, Q, WQ. And then the second one was QVQ because the second one's a vision model. So you can like give it vision puzzles and a prompt that these things, they are so much fun to run. Because they think out loud. It's like the OpenAR 01 sort of hides its thinking process. The Query ones don't.[00:15:59] Simon: They just, they [00:16:00] just churn away. And so you'll give it a problem and it will output literally dozens of paragraphs of text about how it's thinking. My favorite thing that happened with QWQ is I asked it to draw me a pelican on a bicycle in SVG. That's like my standard stupid prompt. And for some reason it thought in Chinese.[00:16:18] Simon: It spat out a whole bunch of like Chinese text onto my terminal on my laptop, and then at the end it gave me quite a good sort of artistic pelican on a bicycle. And I ran it all through Google Translate, and yeah, it was like, it was contemplating the nature of SVG files as a starting point. And the fact that my laptop can think in Chinese now is so delightful.[00:16:40] Simon: It's so much fun watching you do that.[00:16:43] swyx (2): Yeah, I think Andrej Karpathy was saying, you know, we, we know that we have achieved proper reasoning inside of these models when they stop thinking in English, and perhaps the best form of thought is in Chinese. But yeah, for listeners who don't know Simon's blog he always, whenever a new model comes out, you, I don't know how you do it, but [00:17:00] you're always the first to run Pelican Bench on these models.[00:17:02] swyx (2): I just did it for 5.[00:17:05] Simon: Yeah.[00:17:07] swyx (2): So I really appreciate that. You should check it out. These are not theoretical. Simon's blog actually shows them.[00:17:12] Brian: Let me put on the investor hat for a second.[00:17:15] AI Agents and Their Limitations[00:17:15] Brian: Because from the investor side of things, a lot of the, the VCs that I know are really hot on agents, and this is the year of agents, but last year was supposed to be the year of agents as well. Lots of money flowing towards, And Gentic startups.[00:17:32] Brian: But in in your piece that again, we're hopefully going to have linked in the show notes, you sort of suggest there's a fundamental flaw in AI agents as they exist right now. Let me let me quote you. And then I'd love to dive into this. You said, I remain skeptical as to their ability based once again, on the Challenge of gullibility.[00:17:49] Brian: LLMs believe anything you tell them, any systems that attempt to make meaningful decisions on your behalf, will run into the same roadblock. How good is a travel agent, or a digital assistant, or even a research tool, if it [00:18:00] can't distinguish truth from fiction? So, essentially, what you're suggesting is that the state of the art now that allows agents is still, it's still that sort of 90 percent problem, the edge problem, getting to the Or, or, or is there a deeper flaw?[00:18:14] Brian: What are you, what are you saying there?[00:18:16] Simon: So this is the fundamental challenge here and honestly my frustration with agents is mainly around definitions Like any if you ask anyone who says they're working on agents to define agents You will get a subtly different definition from each person But everyone always assumes that their definition is the one true one that everyone else understands So I feel like a lot of these agent conversations, people talking past each other because one person's talking about the, the sort of travel agent idea of something that books things on your behalf.[00:18:41] Simon: Somebody else is talking about LLMs with tools running in a loop with a cron job somewhere and all of these different things. You, you ask academics and they'll laugh at you because they've been debating what agents mean for over 30 years at this point. It's like this, this long running, almost sort of an in joke in that community.[00:18:57] Simon: But if we assume that for this purpose of this conversation, an [00:19:00] agent is something that, Which you can give a job and it goes off and it does that thing for you like, like booking travel or things like that. The fundamental challenge is, it's the reliability thing, which comes from this gullibility problem.[00:19:12] Simon: And a lot of my, my interest in this originally came from when I was thinking about prompt injections as a source of this form of attack against LLM systems where you deliberately lay traps out there for this LLM to stumble across,[00:19:24] Brian: and which I should say you have been banging this drum that no one's gotten any far, at least on solving this, that I'm aware of, right.[00:19:31] Brian: Like that's still an open problem. The two years.[00:19:33] Simon: Yeah. Right. We've been talking about this problem and like, a great illustration of this was Claude so Anthropic released Claude computer use a few months ago. Fantastic demo. You could fire up a Docker container and you could literally tell it to do something and watch it open a web browser and navigate to a webpage and click around and so forth.[00:19:51] Simon: Really, really, really interesting and fun to play with. And then, um. One of the first demos somebody tried was, what if you give it a web page that says download and run this [00:20:00] executable, and it did, and the executable was malware that added it to a botnet. So the, the very first most obvious dumb trick that you could play on this thing just worked, right?[00:20:10] Simon: So that's obviously a really big problem. If I'm going to send something out to book travel on my behalf, I mean, it's hard enough for me to figure out which airlines are trying to scam me and which ones aren't. Do I really trust a language model that believes the literal truth of anything that's presented to it to go out and do those things?[00:20:29] swyx (2): Yeah I definitely think there's, it's interesting to see Anthropic doing this because they used to be the safety arm of OpenAI that split out and said, you know, we're worried about letting this thing out in the wild and here they are enabling computer use for agents. Thanks. The, it feels like things have merged.[00:20:49] swyx (2): You know, I'm, I'm also fairly skeptical about, you know, this always being the, the year of Linux on the desktop. And this is the equivalent of this being the year of agents that people [00:21:00] are not predicting so much as wishfully thinking and hoping and praying for their companies and agents to work.[00:21:05] swyx (2): But I, I feel like things are. Coming along a little bit. It's to me, it's kind of like self driving. I remember in 2014 saying that self driving was just around the corner. And I mean, it kind of is, you know, like in, in, in the Bay area. You[00:21:17] Simon: get in a Waymo and you're like, Oh, this works. Yeah, but it's a slow[00:21:21] swyx (2): cook.[00:21:21] swyx (2): It's a slow cook over the next 10 years. We're going to hammer out these things and the cynical people can just point to all the flaws, but like, there are measurable or concrete progress steps that are being made by these builders.[00:21:33] Simon: There is one form of agent that I believe in. I believe, mostly believe in the research assistant form of agents.[00:21:39] Simon: The thing where you've got a difficult problem and, and I've got like, I'm, I'm on the beta for the, the Google Gemini 1. 5 pro with deep research. I think it's called like these names, these names. Right. But. I've been using that. It's good, right? You can give it a difficult problem and it tells you, okay, I'm going to look at 56 different websites [00:22:00] and it goes away and it dumps everything to its context and it comes up with a report for you.[00:22:04] Simon: And it's not, it won't work against adversarial websites, right? If there are websites with deliberate lies in them, it might well get caught out. Most things don't have that as a problem. And so I've had some answers from that which were genuinely really valuable to me. And that feels to me like, I can see how given existing LLM tech, especially with Google Gemini with its like million token contacts and Google with their crawl of the entire web and their, they've got like search, they've got search and cache, they've got a cache of every page and so forth.[00:22:35] Simon: That makes sense to me. And that what they've got right now, I don't think it's, it's not as good as it can be, obviously, but it's, it's, it's, it's a real useful thing, which they're going to start rolling out. So, you know, Perplexity have been building the same thing for a couple of years. That, that I believe in.[00:22:50] Simon: You know, if you tell me that you're going to have an agent that's a research assistant agent, great. The coding agents I mean, chat gpt code interpreter, Nearly two years [00:23:00] ago, that thing started writing Python code, executing the code, getting errors, rewriting it to fix the errors. That pattern obviously works.[00:23:07] Simon: That works really, really well. So, yeah, coding agents that do that sort of error message loop thing, those are proven to work. And they're going to keep on getting better, and that's going to be great. The research assistant agents are just beginning to get there. The things I'm critical of are the ones where you trust, you trust this thing to go out and act autonomously on your behalf, and make decisions on your behalf, especially involving spending money, like that.[00:23:31] Simon: I don't see that working for a very long time. That feels to me like an AGI level problem.[00:23:37] swyx (2): It's it's funny because I think Stripe actually released an agent toolkit which is one of the, the things I featured that is trying to enable these agents each to have a wallet that they can go and spend and have, basically, it's a virtual card.[00:23:49] swyx (2): It's not that, not that difficult with modern infrastructure. can[00:23:51] Simon: stick a 50 cap on it, then at least it's an honor. Can't lose more than 50.[00:23:56] Brian: You know I don't, I don't know if either of you know Rafat Ali [00:24:00] he runs Skift, which is a, a travel news vertical. And he, he, he constantly laughs at the fact that every agent thing is, we're gonna get rid of booking a, a plane flight for you, you know?[00:24:11] Brian: And, and I would point out that, like, historically, when the web started, the first thing everyone talked about is, You can go online and book a trip, right? So it's funny for each generation of like technological advance. The thing they always want to kill is the travel agent. And now they want to kill the webpage travel agent.[00:24:29] Simon: Like it's like I use Google flight search. It's great, right? If you gave me an agent to do that for me, it would save me, I mean, maybe 15 seconds of typing in my things, but I still want to see what my options are and go, yeah, I'm not flying on that airline, no matter how cheap they are.[00:24:44] swyx (2): Yeah. For listeners, go ahead.[00:24:47] swyx (2): For listeners, I think, you know, I think both of you are pretty positive on NotebookLM. And you know, we, we actually interviewed the NotebookLM creators, and there are actually two internal agents going on internally. The reason it takes so long is because they're running an agent loop [00:25:00] inside that is fairly autonomous, which is kind of interesting.[00:25:01] swyx (2): For one,[00:25:02] Simon: for a definition of agent loop, if you picked that particularly well. For one definition. And you're talking about the podcast side of this, right?[00:25:07] swyx (2): Yeah, the podcast side of things. They have a there's, there's going to be a new version coming out that, that we'll be featuring at our, at our conference.[00:25:14] Simon: That one's fascinating to me. Like NotebookLM, I think it's two products, right? On the one hand, it's actually a very good rag product, right? You dump a bunch of things in, you can run searches, that, that, it does a good job of. And then, and then they added the, the podcast thing. It's a bit of a, it's a total gimmick, right?[00:25:30] Simon: But that gimmick got them attention, because they had a great product that nobody paid any attention to at all. And then you add the unfeasibly good voice synthesis of the podcast. Like, it's just, it's, it's, it's the lesson.[00:25:43] Brian: It's the lesson of mid journey and stuff like that. If you can create something that people can post on socials, you don't have to lift a finger again to do any marketing for what you're doing.[00:25:53] Brian: Let me dig into Notebook LLM just for a second as a podcaster. As a [00:26:00] gimmick, it makes sense, and then obviously, you know, you dig into it, it sort of has problems around the edges. It's like, it does the thing that all sort of LLMs kind of do, where it's like, oh, we want to Wrap up with a conclusion.[00:26:12] Multimodal AI and Future Prospects[00:26:12] Brian: I always call that like the the eighth grade book report paper problem where it has to have an intro and then, you know But that's sort of a thing where because I think you spoke about this again in your piece at the year end About how things are going multimodal and how things are that you didn't expect like, you know vision and especially audio I think So that's another thing where, at least over the last year, there's been progress made that maybe you, you didn't think was coming as quick as it came.[00:26:43] Simon: I don't know. I mean, a year ago, we had one really good vision model. We had GPT 4 vision, was, was, was very impressive. And Google Gemini had just dropped Gemini 1. 0, which had vision, but nobody had really played with it yet. Like Google hadn't. People weren't taking Gemini [00:27:00] seriously at that point. I feel like it was 1.[00:27:02] Simon: 5 Pro when it became apparent that actually they were, they, they got over their hump and they were building really good models. And yeah, and they, to be honest, the video models are mostly still using the same trick. The thing where you divide the video up into one image per second and you dump that all into the context.[00:27:16] Simon: So maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising to us that long context models plus vision meant that the video was, was starting to be solved. Of course, it didn't. Not being, you, what you really want with videos, you want to be able to do the audio and the images at the same time. And I think the models are beginning to do that now.[00:27:33] Simon: Like, originally, Gemini 1. 5 Pro originally ignored the audio. It just did the, the, like, one frame per second video trick. As far as I can tell, the most recent ones are actually doing pure multimodal. But the things that opens up are just extraordinary. Like, the the ChatGPT iPhone app feature that they shipped as one of their 12 days of, of OpenAI, I really can be having a conversation and just turn on my video camera and go, Hey, what kind of tree is [00:28:00] this?[00:28:00] Simon: And so forth. And it works. And for all I know, that's just snapping a like picture once a second and feeding it into the model. The, the, the things that you can do with that as an end user are extraordinary. Like that, that to me, I don't think most people have cottoned onto the fact that you can now stream video directly into a model because it, it's only a few weeks old.[00:28:22] Simon: Wow. That's a, that's a, that's a, that's Big boost in terms of what kinds of things you can do with this stuff. Yeah. For[00:28:30] swyx (2): people who are not that close I think Gemini Flashes free tier allows you to do something like capture a photo, one photo every second or a minute and leave it on 24, seven, and you can prompt it to do whatever.[00:28:45] swyx (2): And so you can effectively have your own camera app or monitoring app that that you just prompt and it detects where it changes. It detects for, you know, alerts or anything like that, or describes your day. You know, and, and, and the fact that this is free I think [00:29:00] it's also leads into the previous point of it being the prices haven't come down a lot.[00:29:05] Simon: And even if you're paying for this stuff, like a thing that I put in my blog entry is I ran a calculation on what it would cost to process 68, 000 photographs in my photo collection, and for each one just generate a caption, and using Gemini 1. 5 Flash 8B, it would cost me 1. 68 to process 68, 000 images, which is, I mean, that, that doesn't make sense.[00:29:28] Simon: None of that makes sense. Like it's, it's a, for one four hundredth of a cent per image to generate captions now. So you can see why feeding in a day's worth of video just isn't even very expensive to process.[00:29:40] swyx (2): Yeah, I'll tell you what is expensive. It's the other direction. So we're here, we're talking about consuming video.[00:29:46] swyx (2): And this year, we also had a lot of progress, like probably one of the most excited, excited, anticipated launches of the year was Sora. We actually got Sora. And less exciting.[00:29:55] Simon: We did, and then VO2, Google's Sora, came out like three [00:30:00] days later and upstaged it. Like, Sora was exciting until VO2 landed, which was just better.[00:30:05] swyx (2): In general, I feel the media, or the social media, has been very unfair to Sora. Because what was released to the world, generally available, was Sora Lite. It's the distilled version of Sora, right? So you're, I did not[00:30:16] Simon: realize that you're absolutely comparing[00:30:18] swyx (2): the, the most cherry picked version of VO two, the one that they published on the marketing page to the, the most embarrassing version of the soa.[00:30:25] swyx (2): So of course it's gonna look bad, so, well, I got[00:30:27] Simon: access to the VO two I'm in the VO two beta and I've been poking around with it and. Getting it to generate pelicans on bicycles and stuff. I would absolutely[00:30:34] swyx (2): believe that[00:30:35] Simon: VL2 is actually better. Is Sora, so is full fat Sora coming soon? Do you know, when, when do we get to play with that one?[00:30:42] Simon: No one's[00:30:43] swyx (2): mentioned anything. I think basically the strategy is let people play around with Sora Lite and get info there. But the, the, keep developing Sora with the Hollywood studios. That's what they actually care about. Gotcha. Like the rest of us. Don't really know what to do with the video anyway. Right.[00:30:59] Simon: I mean, [00:31:00] that's my thing is I realized that for generative images and images and video like images We've had for a few years and I don't feel like they've broken out into the talented artist community yet Like lots of people are having fun with them and doing and producing stuff. That's kind of cool to look at but what I want you know that that movie everything everywhere all at once, right?[00:31:20] Simon: One, one ton of Oscars, utterly amazing film. The VFX team for that were five people, some of whom were watching YouTube videos to figure out what to do. My big question for, for Sora and and and Midjourney and stuff, what happens when a creative team like that starts using these tools? I want the creative geniuses behind everything, everywhere all at once.[00:31:40] Simon: What are they going to be able to do with this stuff in like a few years time? Because that's really exciting to me. That's where you take artists who are at the very peak of their game. Give them these new capabilities and see, see what they can do with them.[00:31:52] swyx (2): I should, I know a little bit here. So it should mention that, that team actually used RunwayML.[00:31:57] swyx (2): So there was, there was,[00:31:57] Simon: yeah.[00:31:59] swyx (2): I don't know how [00:32:00] much I don't. So, you know, it's possible to overstate this, but there are people integrating it. Generated video within their workflow, even pre SORA. Right, because[00:32:09] Brian: it's not, it's not the thing where it's like, okay, tomorrow we'll be able to do a full two hour movie that you prompt with three sentences.[00:32:15] Brian: It is like, for the very first part of, of, you know video effects in film, it's like, if you can get that three second clip, if you can get that 20 second thing that they did in the matrix that blew everyone's minds and took a million dollars or whatever to do, like, it's the, it's the little bits and pieces that they can fill in now that it's probably already there.[00:32:34] swyx (2): Yeah, it's like, I think actually having a layered view of what assets people need and letting AI fill in the low value assets. Right, like the background video, the background music and, you know, sometimes the sound effects. That, that maybe, maybe more palatable maybe also changes the, the way that you evaluate the stuff that's coming out.[00:32:57] swyx (2): Because people tend to, in social media, try to [00:33:00] emphasize foreground stuff, main character stuff. So you really care about consistency, and you, you really are bothered when, like, for example, Sorad. Botch's image generation of a gymnast doing flips, which is horrible. It's horrible. But for background crowds, like, who cares?[00:33:18] Brian: And by the way, again, I was, I was a film major way, way back in the day, like, that's how it started. Like things like Braveheart, where they filmed 10 people on a field, and then the computer could turn it into 1000 people on a field. Like, that's always been the way it's around the margins and in the background that first comes in.[00:33:36] Brian: The[00:33:36] Simon: Lord of the Rings movies were over 20 years ago. Although they have those giant battle sequences, which were very early, like, I mean, you could almost call it a generative AI approach, right? They were using very sophisticated, like, algorithms to model out those different battles and all of that kind of stuff.[00:33:52] Simon: Yeah, I know very little. I know basically nothing about film production, so I try not to commentate on it. But I am fascinated to [00:34:00] see what happens when, when these tools start being used by the real, the people at the top of their game.[00:34:05] swyx (2): I would say like there's a cultural war that is more that being fought here than a technology war.[00:34:11] swyx (2): Most of the Hollywood people are against any form of AI anyway, so they're busy Fighting that battle instead of thinking about how to adopt it and it's, it's very fringe. I participated here in San Francisco, one generative AI video creative hackathon where the AI positive artists actually met with technologists like myself and then we collaborated together to build short films and that was really nice and I think, you know, I'll be hosting some of those in my events going forward.[00:34:38] swyx (2): One thing that I think like I want to leave it. Give people a sense of it's like this is a recap of last year But then sometimes it's useful to walk away as well with like what can we expect in the future? I don't know if you got anything. I would also call out that the Chinese models here have made a lot of progress Hyde Law and Kling and God knows who like who else in the video arena [00:35:00] Also making a lot of progress like surprising him like I think maybe actually Chinese China is surprisingly ahead with regards to Open8 at least, but also just like specific forms of video generation.[00:35:12] Simon: Wouldn't it be interesting if a film industry sprung up in a country that we don't normally think of having a really strong film industry that was using these tools? Like, that would be a fascinating sort of angle on this. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.[00:35:25] swyx (2): Agreed. I, I, I Oh, sorry. Go ahead.[00:35:29] Exploring Video Avatar Companies[00:35:29] swyx (2): Just for people's Just to put it on people's radar as well, Hey Jen, there's like there's a category of video avatar companies that don't specifically, don't specialize in general video.[00:35:41] swyx (2): They only do talking heads, let's just say. And HeyGen sings very well.[00:35:45] Brian: Swyx, you know that that's what I've been using, right? Like, have, have I, yeah, right. So, if you see some of my recent YouTube videos and things like that, where, because the beauty part of the HeyGen thing is, I, I, I don't want to use the robot voice, so [00:36:00] I record the mp3 file for my computer, And then I put that into HeyGen with the avatar that I've trained it on, and all it does is the lip sync.[00:36:09] Brian: So it looks, it's not 100 percent uncanny valley beatable, but it's good enough that if you weren't looking for it, it's just me sitting there doing one of my clips from the show. And, yeah, so, by the way, HeyGen. Shout out to them.[00:36:24] AI Influencers and Their Future[00:36:24] swyx (2): So I would, you know, in terms of like the look ahead going, like, looking, reviewing 2024, looking at trends for 2025, I would, they basically call this out.[00:36:33] swyx (2): Meta tried to introduce AI influencers and failed horribly because they were just bad at it. But at some point that there will be more and more basically AI influencers Not in a way that Simon is but in a way that they are not human.[00:36:50] Simon: Like the few of those that have done well, I always feel like they're doing well because it's a gimmick, right?[00:36:54] Simon: It's a it's it's novel and fun to like Like that, the AI Seinfeld thing [00:37:00] from last year, the Twitch stream, you know, like those, if you're the only one or one of just a few doing that, you'll get, you'll attract an audience because it's an interesting new thing. But I just, I don't know if that's going to be sustainable longer term or not.[00:37:11] Simon: Like,[00:37:12] Simplifying Content Creation with AI[00:37:12] Brian: I'm going to tell you, Because I've had discussions, I can't name the companies or whatever, but, so think about the workflow for this, like, now we all know that on TikTok and Instagram, like, holding up a phone to your face, and doing like, in my car video, or walking, a walk and talk, you know, that's, that's very common, but also, if you want to do a professional sort of talking head video, you still have to sit in front of a camera, you still have to do the lighting, you still have to do the video editing, versus, if you can just record, what I'm saying right now, the last 30 seconds, If you clip that out as an mp3 and you have a good enough avatar, then you can put that avatar in front of Times Square, on a beach, or whatever.[00:37:50] Brian: So, like, again for creators, the reason I think Simon, we're on the verge of something, it, it just, it's not going to, I think it's not, oh, we're going to have [00:38:00] AI avatars take over, it'll be one of those things where it takes another piece of the workflow out and simplifies it. I'm all[00:38:07] Simon: for that. I, I always love this stuff.[00:38:08] Simon: I like tools. Tools that help human beings do more. Do more ambitious things. I'm always in favor of, like, that, that, that's what excites me about this entire field.[00:38:17] swyx (2): Yeah. We're, we're looking into basically creating one for my podcast. We have this guy Charlie, he's Australian. He's, he's not real, but he pre, he opens every show and we are gonna have him present all the shorts.[00:38:29] Simon: Yeah, go ahead.[00:38:30] The Importance of Credibility in AI[00:38:30] Simon: The thing that I keep coming back to is this idea of credibility like in a world that is full of like AI generated everything and so forth It becomes even more important that people find the sources of information that they trust and find people and find Sources that are credible and I feel like that's the one thing that LLMs and AI can never have is credibility, right?[00:38:49] Simon: ChatGPT can never stake its reputation on telling you something useful and interesting because That means nothing, right? It's a matrix multiplication. It depends on who prompted it and so forth. So [00:39:00] I'm always, and this is when I'm blogging as well, I'm always looking for, okay, who are the reliable people who will tell me useful, interesting information who aren't just going to tell me whatever somebody's paying them to tell, tell them, who aren't going to, like, type a one sentence prompt into an LLM and spit out an essay and stick it online.[00:39:16] Simon: And that, that to me, Like, earning that credibility is really important. That's why a lot of my ethics around the way that I publish are based on the idea that I want people to trust me. I want to do things that, that gain credibility in people's eyes so they will come to me for information as a trustworthy source.[00:39:32] Simon: And it's the same for the sources that I'm, I'm consulting as well. So that's something I've, I've been thinking a lot about that sort of credibility focus on this thing for a while now.[00:39:40] swyx (2): Yeah, you can layer or structure credibility or decompose it like so one thing I would put in front of you I'm not saying that you should Agree with this or accept this at all is that you can use AI to generate different Variations and then and you pick you as the final sort of last mile person that you pick The last output and [00:40:00] you put your stamp of credibility behind that like that everything's human reviewed instead of human origin[00:40:04] Simon: Yeah, if you publish something you need to be able to put it on the ground Publishing it.[00:40:08] Simon: You need to say, I will put my name to this. I will attach my credibility to this thing. And if you're willing to do that, then, then that's great.[00:40:16] swyx (2): For creators, this is huge because there's a fundamental asymmetry between starting with a blank slate versus choosing from five different variations.[00:40:23] Brian: Right.[00:40:24] Brian: And also the key thing that you just said is like, if everything that I do, if all of the words were generated by an LLM, if the voice is generated by an LLM. If the video is also generated by the LLM, then I haven't done anything, right? But if, if one or two of those, you take a shortcut, but it's still, I'm willing to sign off on it.[00:40:47] Brian: Like, I feel like that's where I feel like people are coming around to like, this is maybe acceptable, sort of.[00:40:53] Simon: This is where I've been pushing the definition. I love the term slop. Where I've been pushing the definition of slop as AI generated [00:41:00] content that is both unrequested and unreviewed and the unreviewed thing is really important like that's the thing that elevates something from slop to not slop is if A human being has reviewed it and said, you know what, this is actually worth other people's time.[00:41:12] Simon: And again, I'm willing to attach my credibility to it and say, hey, this is worthwhile.[00:41:16] Brian: It's, it's, it's the cura curational, curatorial and editorial part of it that no matter what the tools are to do shortcuts, to do, as, as Swyx is saying choose between different edits or different cuts, but in the end, if there's a curatorial mind, Or editorial mind behind it.[00:41:32] Brian: Let me I want to wedge this in before we start to close.[00:41:36] The Future of LLM User Interfaces[00:41:36] Brian: One of the things coming back to your year end piece that has been a something that I've been banging the drum about is when you're talking about LLMs. Getting harder to use. You said most users are thrown in at the deep end.[00:41:48] Brian: The default LLM chat UI is like taking brand new computer users, dropping them into a Linux terminal and expecting them to figure it all out. I mean, it's, it's literally going back to the command line. The command line was defeated [00:42:00] by the GUI interface. And this is what I've been banging the drum about is like, this cannot be.[00:42:05] Brian: The user interface, what we have now cannot be the end result. Do you see any hints or seeds of a GUI moment for LLM interfaces?[00:42:17] Simon: I mean, it has to happen. It absolutely has to happen. The the, the, the, the usability of these things is turning into a bit of a crisis. And we are at least seeing some really interesting innovation in little directions.[00:42:28] Simon: Just like OpenAI's chat GPT canvas thing that they just launched. That is at least. Going a little bit more interesting than just chat, chats and responses. You know, you can, they're exploring that space where you're collaborating with an LLM. You're both working in the, on the same document. That makes a lot of sense to me.[00:42:44] Simon: Like that, that feels really smart. The one of the best things is still who was it who did the, the UI where you could, they had a drawing UI where you draw an interface and click a button. TL draw would then make it real thing. That was spectacular, [00:43:00] absolutely spectacular, like, alternative vision of how you'd interact with these models.[00:43:05] Simon: Because yeah, the and that's, you know, so I feel like there is so much scope for innovation there and it is beginning to happen. Like, like, I, I feel like most people do understand that we need to do better in terms of interfaces that both help explain what's going on and give people better tools for working with models.[00:43:23] Simon: I was going to say, I want to[00:43:25] Brian: dig a little deeper into this because think of the conceptual idea behind the GUI, which is instead of typing into a command line open word. exe, it's, you, you click an icon, right? So that's abstracting away sort of the, again, the programming stuff that like, you know, it's, it's a, a, a child can tap on an iPad and, and make a program open, right?[00:43:47] Brian: The problem it seems to me right now with how we're interacting with LLMs is it's sort of like you know a dumb robot where it's like you poke it and it goes over here, but no, I want it, I want to go over here so you poke it this way and you can't get it exactly [00:44:00] right, like, what can we abstract away from the From the current, what's going on that, that makes it more fine tuned and easier to get more precise.[00:44:12] Brian: You see what I'm saying?[00:44:13] Simon: Yes. And the this is the other trend that I've been following from the last year, which I think is super interesting. It's the, the prompt driven UI development thing. Basically, this is the pattern where Claude Artifacts was the first thing to do this really well. You type in a prompt and it goes, Oh, I should answer that by writing a custom HTML and JavaScript application for you that does a certain thing.[00:44:35] Simon: And when you think about that take and since then it turns out This is easy, right? Every decent LLM can produce HTML and JavaScript that does something useful. So we've actually got this alternative way of interacting where they can respond to your prompt with an interactive custom interface that you can work with.[00:44:54] Simon: People haven't quite wired those back up again. Like, ideally, I'd want the LLM ask me a [00:45:00] question where it builds me a custom little UI, For that question, and then it gets to see how I interacted with that. I don't know why, but that's like just such a small step from where we are right now. But that feels like such an obvious next step.[00:45:12] Simon: Like an LLM, why should it, why should you just be communicating with, with text when it can build interfaces on the fly that let you select a point on a map or or move like sliders up and down. It's gonna create knobs and dials. I keep saying knobs and dials. right. We can do that. And the LLMs can build, and Claude artifacts will build you a knobs and dials interface.[00:45:34] Simon: But at the moment they haven't closed the loop. When you twiddle those knobs, Claude doesn't see what you were doing. They're going to close that loop. I'm, I'm shocked that they haven't done it yet. So yeah, I think there's so much scope for innovation and there's so much scope for doing interesting stuff with that model where the LLM, anything you can represent in SVG, which is almost everything, can now be part of that ongoing conversation.[00:45:59] swyx (2): Yeah, [00:46:00] I would say the best executed version of this I've seen so far is Bolt where you can literally type in, make a Spotify clone, make an Airbnb clone, and it actually just does that for you zero shot with a nice design.[00:46:14] Simon: There's a benchmark for that now. The LMRena people now have a benchmark that is zero shot app, app generation, because all of the models can do it.[00:46:22] Simon: Like it's, it's, I've started figuring out. I'm building my own version of this for my own project, because I think within six months. I think it'll just be an expected feature. Like if you have a web application, why don't you have a thing where, oh, look, the, you can add a custom, like, so for my dataset data exploration project, I want you to be able to do things like conjure up a dashboard, just via a prompt.[00:46:43] Simon: You say, oh, I need a pie chart and a bar chart and put them next to each other, and then have a form where submitting the form inserts a row into my database table. And this is all suddenly feasible. It's, it's, it's not even particularly difficult to do, which is great. Utterly bizarre that these things are now easy.[00:47:00][00:47:00] swyx (2): I think for a general audience, that is what I would highlight, that software creation is becoming easier and easier. Gemini is now available in Gmail and Google Sheets. I don't write my own Google Sheets formulas anymore, I just tell Gemini to do it. And so I think those are, I almost wanted to basically somewhat disagree with, with your assertion that LMS got harder to use.[00:47:22] swyx (2): Like, yes, we, we expose more capabilities, but they're, they're in minor forms, like using canvas, like web search in, in in chat GPT and like Gemini being in, in Excel sheets or in Google sheets, like, yeah, we're getting, no,[00:47:37] Simon: no, no, no. Those are the things that make it harder, because the problem is that for each of those features, they're amazing.[00:47:43] Simon: If you understand the edges of the feature, if you're like, okay, so in Google, Gemini, Excel formulas, I can get it to do a certain amount of things, but I can't get it to go and read a web. You probably can't get it to read a webpage, right? But you know, there are, there are things that it can do and things that it can't do, which are completely undocumented.[00:47:58] Simon: If you ask it what it [00:48:00] can and can't do, they're terrible at answering questions about that. So like my favorite example is Claude artifacts. You can't build a Claude artifact that can hit an API somewhere else. Because the cause headers on that iframe prevents accessing anything outside of CDNJS. So, good luck learning cause headers as an end user in order to understand why Like, I've seen people saying, oh, this is rubbish.[00:48:26] Simon: I tried building an artifact that would run a prompt and it couldn't because Claude didn't expose an API with cause headers that all of this stuff is so weird and complicated. And yeah, like that, that, the more that with the more tools we add, the more expertise you need to really, To understand the full scope of what you can do.[00:48:44] Simon: And so it's, it's, I wouldn't say it's, it's, it's, it's like, the question really comes down to what does it take to understand the full extent of what's possible? And honestly, that, that's just getting more and more involved over time.[00:48:58] Local LLMs: A Growing Interest[00:48:58] swyx (2): I have one more topic that I, I [00:49:00] think you, you're kind of a champion of and we've touched on it a little bit, which is local LLMs.[00:49:05] swyx (2): And running AI applications on your desktop, I feel like you are an early adopter of many, many things.[00:49:12] Simon: I had an interesting experience with that over the past year. Six months ago, I almost completely lost interest. And the reason is that six months ago, the best local models you could run, There was no point in using them at all, because the best hosted models were so much better.[00:49:26] Simon: Like, there was no point at which I'd choose to run a model on my laptop if I had API access to Cloud 3. 5 SONNET. They just, they weren't even comparable. And that changed, basically, in the past three months, as the local models had this step changing capability, where now I can run some of these local models, and they're not as good as Cloud 3.[00:49:45] Simon: 5 SONNET, but they're not so far away that It's not worth me even using them. The other, the, the, the, the continuing problem is I've only got 64 gigabytes of RAM, and if you run, like, LLAMA370B, it's not going to work. Most of my RAM is gone. So now I have to shut down my Firefox tabs [00:50:00] and, and my Chrome and my VS Code windows in order to run it.[00:50:03] Simon: But it's got me interested again. Like, like the, the efficiency improvements are such that now, if you were to like stick me on a desert island with my laptop, I'd be very productive using those local models. And that's, that's pretty exciting. And if those trends continue, and also, like, I think my next laptop, if when I buy one is going to have twice the amount of RAM, At which point, maybe I can run the, almost the top tier, like open weights models and still be able to use it as a computer as well.[00:50:32] Simon: NVIDIA just announced their 3, 000 128 gigabyte monstrosity. That's pretty good price. You know, that's that's, if you're going to buy it,[00:50:42] swyx (2): custom OS and all.[00:50:46] Simon: If I get a job, if I, if, if, if I have enough of an income that I can justify blowing $3,000 on it, then yes.[00:50:52] swyx (2): Okay, let's do a GoFundMe to get Simon one it.[00:50:54] swyx (2): Come on. You know, you can get a job anytime you want. Is this, this is just purely discretionary .[00:50:59] Simon: I want, [00:51:00] I want a job that pays me to do exactly what I'm doing already and doesn't tell me what else to do. That's, thats the challenge.[00:51:06] swyx (2): I think Ethan Molik does pretty well. Whatever, whatever it is he's doing.[00:51:11] swyx (2): But yeah, basically I was trying to bring in also, you know, not just local models, but Apple intelligence is on every Mac machine. You're, you're, you seem skeptical. It's rubbish.[00:51:21] Simon: Apple intelligence is so bad. It's like, it does one thing well.[00:51:25] swyx (2): Oh yeah, what's that? It summarizes notifications. And sometimes it's humorous.[00:51:29] Brian: Are you sure it does that well? And also, by the way, the other, again, from a sort of a normie point of view. There's no indication from Apple of when to use it. Like, everybody upgrades their thing and it's like, okay, now you have Apple Intelligence, and you never know when to use it ever again.[00:51:47] swyx (2): Oh, yeah, you consult the Apple docs, which is MKBHD.[00:51:49] swyx (2): The[00:51:51] Simon: one thing, the one thing I'll say about Apple Intelligence is, One of the reasons it's so disappointing is that the models are just weak, but now, like, Llama 3b [00:52:00] is Such a good model in a 2 gigabyte file I think give Apple six months and hopefully they'll catch up to the state of the art on the small models And then maybe it'll start being a lot more interesting.[00:52:10] swyx (2): Yeah. Anyway, I like This was year one And and you know just like our first year of iPhone maybe maybe not that much of a hit and then year three They had the App Store so Hey I would say give it some time, and you know, I think Chrome also shipping Gemini Nano I think this year in Chrome, which means that every app, every web app will have for free access to a local model that just ships in the browser, which is kind of interesting.[00:52:38] swyx (2): And then I, I think I also wanted to just open the floor for any, like, you know, any of us what are the apps that, you know, AI applications that we've adopted that have, that we really recommend because these are all, you know, apps that are running on our browser that like, or apps that are running locally that we should be, that, that other people should be trying.[00:52:55] swyx (2): Right? Like, I, I feel like that's, that's one always one thing that is helpful at the start of the [00:53:00] year.[00:53:00] Simon: Okay. So for running local models. My top picks, firstly, on the iPhone, there's this thing called MLC Chat, which works, and it's easy to install, and it runs Llama 3B, and it's so much fun. Like, it's not necessarily a capable enough novel that I use it for real things, but my party trick right now is I get my phone to write a Netflix Christmas movie plot outline where, like, a bunch of Jeweller falls in love with the King of Sweden or whatever.[00:53:25] Simon: And it does a good job and it comes up with pun names for the movies. And that's, that's deeply entertaining. On my laptop, most recently, I've been getting heavy into, into Olama because the Olama team are very, very good at finding the good models and patching them up and making them work well. It gives you an API.[00:53:42] Simon: My little LLM command line tool that has a plugin that talks to Olama, which works really well. So that's my, my Olama is. I think the easiest on ramp to to running models locally, if you want a nice user interface, LMStudio is, I think, the best user interface [00:54:00] thing at that. It's not open source. It's good.[00:54:02] Simon: It's worth playing with. The other one that I've been trying with recently, there's a thing called, what's it called? Open web UI or something. Yeah. The UI is fantastic. It, if you've got Olama running and you fire this thing up, it spots Olama and it gives you an interface onto your Olama models. And t

Ralph welcomes Marc Rotenberg, founder and president of the Center for AI and Digital Policy to fill us in on the latest international treaty aimed at putting guardrails on the potential Frankenstein monster that is Artificial Intelligence. Plus, as we get to the end of the Medicare enrollment period, we put out one last warning for listeners to avoid the scam that is Medicare Advantage.Marc Rotenberg is the founder and president of the Center for AI and Digital Policy, a global organization focused on emerging challenges associated with Artificial Intelligence. He serves as an expert advisor on AI policy to many organizations including the Council of Europe, the Council on Foreign Relations, the European Parliament, the Global Partnership on AI, the OECD, and UNESCO. What troubles me is the gap between an increasingly obscure, technical, and complex technology—abbreviated into “AI” —and public understanding. You know, when motor vehicles came and we tried to regulate them and did, people understood motor vehicles in their daily lives. When solar energy started coming on, they saw solar roof panels. They could see it, they could understand it, they could actually work putting solar panels on roofs of buildings. This area is just producing a massively expanding gap between the experts from various disciplines, and the power structure of corporatism, and their government servants and the rest of the people in the world.Ralph NaderThe difference between these two types of [AI] systems is that with the old ones we could inspect them and interrogate them. If one of the factors being used for an outcome was, for example, race or nationality, we could say, well, that's impermissible and you can't use an automated system in that way. The problem today with the probabilistic systems that US companies have become increasingly reliant on is that it's very difficult to actually tell whether those factors are contributing to an outcome. And so for that reason, there are a lot of computer scientists rightly concerned about the problem of algorithmic bias.Marc Rotenberg[The sponsors of California SB 1047] wanted companies that were building these big complicated systems to undertake a safety plan, identify the harms, and make those plans available to the Attorney General…In fact, I work with many governments around the world on AI regulation and this concept of having an impact assessment is fairly obvious. You don't want to build these large complex systems without some assessment of what the risk might be.Marc RotenbergWe've always understood that when you create devices that have consequences, there has to be some circuit breaker. The companies didn't like that either. [They said] it's too difficult to predict what those scenarios might be, but that was almost precisely the point of the legislation, you see, because if those scenarios exist and you haven't identified them yet, you choose to deploy these large foundational models without any safety mechanism in place, and all of us are at risk. So I thought it was an important bill and not only am I disappointed that the governor vetoed it, but as I said, I think he made a mistake. This is not simply about politics. This is actually about science, and it's about the direction these systems are heading.Marc RotenbergThat's where we are in this moment—opaque systems that the experts don't understand, increasingly being deployed by organizations that also don't understand these systems, and an industry that says, “don't regulate us.” This is not going to end well.Marc RotenbergIn Case You Haven't Heard with Francesco DesantisNews 11/27/241. Last week, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. According to a statement from ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, the international legal body found reasonable grounds to believe that each has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare and intentionally directing attacks against civilians. This news has been met with varied reactions throughout the world. These have been meticulously documented by Just Security. The United States, which is under no obligation to honor the warrant as it is not a party to the Rome Statute, has said it “fundamentally rejects” the judgment and has called the issuing of warrants “outrageous.” Canada, which is party to the Rome Statue has vowed to uphold their treaty obligations despite their close ties to Israel. Germany however, another signatory to the Rome Statute, has suggested that they would not honor the warrants. In a statement, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said the warrants are “long overdue” and signal that “the days of the Israeli apartheid government operating with impunity are ending.” One can only hope that is true.2. On November 21st, 19 Senators voted for at least one of the three Joint Resolutions of Disapproval regarding additional arms transfers to Israel. As Jewish Voice for Peace Action puts it, “this is an unprecedented show of Senate opposition to President Biden's disastrous foreign policy of unconditional support for the Israeli military.” The 19 Senators include Independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King, progressive Democrats like Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen and Raphael Warnock, and Democratic caucus leaders like Dick Durbin, among many others. Perhaps the most notable supporter however is Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, whom Ryan Grim notes is the only Democrat representing a state Trump won and who is up for reelection in 2026 to vote for the resolution. Ossoff cited President Reagan's decision to withhold cluster munitions during the IDF occupation of Beirut in a floor speech explaining his vote. The Middle East Eye reports that the Biden Administration deployed Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer to whip votes against the JRD.3. Last week, we covered H.R. 9495, aka the “nonprofit killer” bill targeting pro-Palestine NGOs. Since then, the bill has passed the House. Per the Guardian, the bill passed 219-184, with fifteen Democrats crossing the aisle to grant incoming-President Trump the unilateral power to obliterate any non-profit organization he dislikes, a list sure to be extensive. Congressman Jamie Raskin is quoted saying “A sixth-grader would know this is unconstitutional…They want us to vote to give the president Orwellian powers and the not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.” The bill now moves to the Senate, where it is unlikely to pass while Democrats cling to control. Come January however, Republicans will hold a decisive majority in the upper chamber.4. President-elect Donald Trump has announced his selection of Congresswoman Lori Chavez-DeRemer as his pick for Secretary of Labor. Chavez-DeRemer is perhaps the most pro-labor Republican in Congress, with the AFL-CIO noting that she is one of only three Republicans to cosponsor the PRO Act and one of eight to cosponsor the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act. Chavez-DeRemer was reportedly the favored choice of Teamsters President Sean O'Brien, who controversially became the first ever Teamster to address the RNC earlier this year. While her selection has been greeted with cautious optimism by many labor allies, anti-labor conservatives are melting down at the prospect. Akash Chougule of Americans for Prosperity accused Trump of giving “A giant middle finger to red states,” by “picking a teachers union hack” and urged Senate Republicans to reject the nomination.5. Unfortunately, most of Trump's selections are much, much worse. Perhaps worst of all, Trump has chosen Mehmet Cengiz Öz – better known as Dr. Oz – to lead the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Beyond his lack of qualifications and history of promoting crackpot medical theories, Oz is a longtime proponent of pushing more seniors into privatized Medicare Advantage, or “Disadvantage,” plans, per Yahoo! Finance. This report notes that the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 called for making Medicare Advantage the default health program for seniors.6. According to CNN, Brazilian police have arrested five people who conspired to assassinate leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, in 2022. This assassination plot was allegedly cooked up even before Lula took office, and included plans to kill Lula's Vice President Geraldo Alckmin and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. The conspirators included a former high-ranking Bolsonaro advisor and military special forces personnel. Reuters reports investigators have discovered evidence that Bolsonaro himself was involved in the scheme.7. In more news from Latin America, Drop Site reports that the United States and Colombia engaged in a secretive agreement to allow the country's previous U.S.-backed conservative President Ivan Duque to utilize the Israeli Pegasus spyware for internal surveillance in the country. Details of the transaction and of the utilization of the spyware remain “murky,” but American and Colombian officials maintain it was used to target drug-trafficking groups and not domestic political opponents. Just two months ago, Colombia's leftist President Gustavo Petro delivered a televised speech revealing details of this shadowy arrangement, including that the Duque government flew $11 million cash from Bogotá to Tel Aviv. As Drop Site notes, “In Colombia, there's a long legacy of state intelligence agencies surveilling political opposition leaders. With the news that the U.S. secretly helped acquire and deploy powerful espionage software in their country, the government is furious at the gross violation of their sovereignty. They fear that Colombia's history of politically motivated surveillance, backed by the U.S. government, lives on to this day.”8. Following the Democrats' electoral wipeout, the race for new DNC leadership is on. Media attention has mostly been focused on the race to succeed Jamie Harrison as DNC Chair, but POLITICO is out with a story on James Zogby's bid for the DNC vice chair seat. Zogby, a longtime DNC member, Bernie Sanders ally and president of the Arab American Institute has criticized the party's position on Israel and particularly of the Kamala Harris campaign's refusal to allow a Palestinian-American speaker at this year's convention. He called the move “unimaginative, overly cautious and completely out of touch with where voters are.” This report notes Zogby's involvement in the 2016 DNC Unity Reform Commission, and his successful push to strip substantial power away from the so-called superdelegates.9. Speaking of Democratic Party rot, the Lever reports that in its final days the Biden Administration is handing corporations a “get out of jail free card.” A new Justice Department policy dictates that the government will essentially look the other way at corporate misconduct, even if the company has “committed multiple crimes, earned significant profit from their wrongdoing, and failed to self-disclose the misconduct — as long as the companies demonstrate they ‘acted in good faith' to try to come clean.” This is the logical endpoint of the longstanding Biden era soft-touch approach intended to encourage corporations to self-police, an idea that is patently absurd on its face. Public Citizen's Corporate Crime expert Rick Claypool described the policy as “bending over backward to protect corporations.”10. Finally, on November 23rd lawyer and former progressive congressional candidate Brent Welder posted a fundraising email from Bernie Sanders that immediately attracted substantial interest for its strong language. In this note, Sanders writes “The Democrats ran a campaign protecting the status quo and tinkering around the edges…Will the Democratic leadership learn the lessons of their defeat and create a party that stands with the working class[?]…unlikely.” The email ends with a list of tough questions, including “should we be supporting Independent candidates who are prepared to take on both parties?” Many on the Left read this as Bernie opening the door to a “dirty break” with the Democratic Party, perhaps even an attempt to form some kind of independent alliance or third party. In a follow-up interview with John Nichols in the Nation, Sanders clarified that he is not calling for the creation of a new party, but “Where it is more advantageous to run as an independent, outside of the Democratic [Party]…we should do that.” Whether anything will come of this remains to be seen, but if nothing else the severity of his rhetoric reflects the intensity of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party in light of their second humiliating defeat at the hands of a clownish, fascistic game show host. Perhaps a populist left third party is a far-fetched, unachievable goal. On the other hand, how many times can we go back to the Democratic Party expecting different results. Something has got to give, or else the few remaining pillars of our democracy will wither and die under sustained assault by the Right and their corporate overlords.This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven't Heard. Get full access to Ralph Nader Radio Hour at www.ralphnaderradiohour.com/subscribe

In this episode, Tad and Julianna sit down with Tanya Nesbitt, Partner at Thompson Hine, to discuss the evolving landscape of climate regulations and litigation; specifically California Senate Bills 253 and 261, Assembly Bill 1305, and the SEC Climate Disclosure Rules. Tanya explains the rise in climate-related lawsuits, the growing scrutiny around voluntary carbon offset disclosures, and the complexities of corporate sustainability reporting. Tune in to learn how these emerging legal challenges could impact your organization's sustainability initiatives and reporting practices. *This episode was recorded on 9/13/24 and one major update has occurred since then: California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Climate Disclosure Bill into law with the 2026 start date intact. Click here to read more about it. FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION: https://www.tadradzinski.com/tad-talks-sustainability-podcast/episode42-regulations-sb253-sb261-ab1305-sec-climate-disclosure-rules  

Text us your thoughts on this episodeThis week, host Heather Horn is joined by a special guest from the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). Vice Chair, Sue Lloyd gives us an inside look into the ISSB's workplan, new projects, and new strategic relationships. She also shares how the ISSB is supporting implementation of the standards.In this episode, they discuss:4:15 – Insights from the adoption of ISSB standards around the world9:20 – Variability of sustainability reporting and interoperability guidance19:08 – Challenges reporting under multiple frameworks and ISSB partnerships to address them25:31 – Responsibilities to report under other frameworks, such as California SB 261 (based on TCFD)29:41 – Working to address investor needs and concerns31:35 – Aligning ISSB reporting and sector standards35:10 – How the ISSB is supporting implementation38:40 – Advice for companies navigating the evolving sustainability reporting landscapeWant to hear more about the ISSB? Listen to our previous podcast discussing the ISSB standards and interoperability guidance. Also, as referenced in the podcast, check out the ISSB's Webcast: Overview of ESRS-ISSB Standards Interoperability Guidance or visit the IFRS Sustainability knowledge hub.Sue Lloyd is the Vice Chair of the ISSB and played a leading role in its establishment. Previously, she served as a member and Vice Chair of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and as Chair of the IFRS Interpretations Committee. Heather Horn is the PwC National Office Sustainability & Thought Leader, responsible for developing our communications strategy and conveying firm positions on accounting, financial reporting, and sustainability matters. In addition, she is part of PwC's global sustainability leadership team, developing interpretive guidance and consulting with companies as they transition from voluntary to mandatory sustainability reporting. She is also the engaging host of PwC's quarterly webcast series.Transcripts available upon request for individuals who may need a disability-related accommodation. Please send requests to us_podcast@pwc.com. 

On July 1, 2024 California SB-553 "Preventing Workplace Violence" went into effect and enforcemnt begins January 1, 2025. Joe DeLoach of Practice Compliance Solutions (PCS) joins to help us navigate what this means for practice owners, what compliance looks like and we discuss how this is *should* be positive for office culture. We also discuss the word *should* and how that can lead to unmet expectations. You can watch this episode on our YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/1POuzT7gK9Y?si=4jEiBRXarjaxh4tQ To contact PCS: info@practicecompliancesolutions.com To contact Joe DeLoach: joe@pcscomply.com   ------------------------- Let's Connect! Follow and join the conversation! Instagram: @aaron_werner_vision

California SB-1372 would restrict line-skipping service Clear at airports in name of equitySee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On the Proposed California SB 1047, published by Zvi on February 14, 2024 on LessWrong. California Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco introduces SB 1047 to regulate AI. I have put up a market on how likely it is to become law. "If Congress at some point is able to pass a strong pro-innovation, pro-safety AI law, I'll be the first to cheer that, but I'm not holding my breath," Wiener said in an interview. "We need to get ahead of this so we maintain public trust in AI." Congress is certainly highly dysfunctional. I am still generally against California trying to act like it is the federal government, even when the cause is good, but I understand. Can California effectively impose its will here? On the biggest players, for now, presumably yes. In the longer run, when things get actively dangerous, then my presumption is no. There is a potential trap here. If we put our rules in a place where someone with enough upside can ignore them, and we never then pass anything in Congress. So what does it do, according to the bill's author? California Senator Scott Wiener: SB 1047 does a few things: Establishes clear, predictable, common-sense safety standards for developers of the largest and most powerful AI systems. These standards apply only to the largest models, not startups. Establish CalCompute, a public AI cloud compute cluster. CalCompute will be a resource for researchers, startups, & community groups to fuel innovation in CA, bring diverse perspectives to bear on AI development, & secure our continued dominance in AI. prevent price discrimination & anticompetitive behavior institute know-your-customer requirements protect whistleblowers at large AI companies @geoffreyhinton called SB 1047 "a very sensible approach" to balancing these needs. Leaders representing a broad swathe of the AI community have expressed support. People are rightfully concerned that the immense power of AI models could present serious risks. For these models to succeed the way we need them to, users must trust that AI models are safe and aligned w/ core values. Fulfilling basic safety duties is a good place to start. With AI, we have the opportunity to apply the hard lessons learned over the past two decades. Allowing social media to grow unchecked without first understanding the risks has had disastrous consequences, and we should take reasonable precautions this time around. As usual, RTFC (Read the Card, or here the bill) applies. Close Reading of the Bill Section 1 names the bill. Section 2 says California is winning in AI (see this song), AI has great potential but could do harm. A missed opportunity to mention existential risks. Section 3 22602 offers definitions. I have some notes. Usual concerns with the broad definition of AI. Odd that 'a model autonomously engaging in a sustained sequence of unsafe behavior' only counts as an 'AI safety incident' if it is not 'at the request of a user.' If a user requests that, aren't you supposed to ensure the model doesn't do it? Sounds to me like a safety incident. Covered model is defined primarily via compute, not sure why this isn't a 'foundation' model, I like the secondary extension clause: "The artificial intelligence model was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations in 2024, or a model that could reasonably be expected to have similar performance on benchmarks commonly used to quantify the performance of state-of-the-art foundation models, as determined by industry best practices and relevant standard setting organizations OR The artificial intelligence model has capability below the relevant threshold on a specific benchmark but is of otherwise similar general capability.." Critical harm is either mass casualties or 500 million in damage, or comparable. Full shutdown means full s...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: On the Proposed California SB 1047, published by Zvi on February 14, 2024 on LessWrong. California Senator Scott Wiener of San Francisco introduces SB 1047 to regulate AI. I have put up a market on how likely it is to become law. "If Congress at some point is able to pass a strong pro-innovation, pro-safety AI law, I'll be the first to cheer that, but I'm not holding my breath," Wiener said in an interview. "We need to get ahead of this so we maintain public trust in AI." Congress is certainly highly dysfunctional. I am still generally against California trying to act like it is the federal government, even when the cause is good, but I understand. Can California effectively impose its will here? On the biggest players, for now, presumably yes. In the longer run, when things get actively dangerous, then my presumption is no. There is a potential trap here. If we put our rules in a place where someone with enough upside can ignore them, and we never then pass anything in Congress. So what does it do, according to the bill's author? California Senator Scott Wiener: SB 1047 does a few things: Establishes clear, predictable, common-sense safety standards for developers of the largest and most powerful AI systems. These standards apply only to the largest models, not startups. Establish CalCompute, a public AI cloud compute cluster. CalCompute will be a resource for researchers, startups, & community groups to fuel innovation in CA, bring diverse perspectives to bear on AI development, & secure our continued dominance in AI. prevent price discrimination & anticompetitive behavior institute know-your-customer requirements protect whistleblowers at large AI companies @geoffreyhinton called SB 1047 "a very sensible approach" to balancing these needs. Leaders representing a broad swathe of the AI community have expressed support. People are rightfully concerned that the immense power of AI models could present serious risks. For these models to succeed the way we need them to, users must trust that AI models are safe and aligned w/ core values. Fulfilling basic safety duties is a good place to start. With AI, we have the opportunity to apply the hard lessons learned over the past two decades. Allowing social media to grow unchecked without first understanding the risks has had disastrous consequences, and we should take reasonable precautions this time around. As usual, RTFC (Read the Card, or here the bill) applies. Close Reading of the Bill Section 1 names the bill. Section 2 says California is winning in AI (see this song), AI has great potential but could do harm. A missed opportunity to mention existential risks. Section 3 22602 offers definitions. I have some notes. Usual concerns with the broad definition of AI. Odd that 'a model autonomously engaging in a sustained sequence of unsafe behavior' only counts as an 'AI safety incident' if it is not 'at the request of a user.' If a user requests that, aren't you supposed to ensure the model doesn't do it? Sounds to me like a safety incident. Covered model is defined primarily via compute, not sure why this isn't a 'foundation' model, I like the secondary extension clause: "The artificial intelligence model was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 10^26 integer or floating-point operations in 2024, or a model that could reasonably be expected to have similar performance on benchmarks commonly used to quantify the performance of state-of-the-art foundation models, as determined by industry best practices and relevant standard setting organizations OR The artificial intelligence model has capability below the relevant threshold on a specific benchmark but is of otherwise similar general capability.." Critical harm is either mass casualties or 500 million in damage, or comparable. Full shutdown means full s...

In this episode, Lindsey Rogerson, senior editor at Regulatory Intelligence is joined by Henry Engler, senior editor, to discuss what is happening with climate reporting for U.S. financial firms.Uncertainty looms large over sustainability regulation at the Federal level. The possible return to the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump and two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and their likely effect on climate rules in the financial sector are discussed.At the State level it is a different picture. California lawmakers passing California SB-253 Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB253) and SB-261 Greenhouse gases: climate-related financial risk Act (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB261) mean there is a lot for compliance, legal and risk professionals to be getting on with.Henry sets out what firms need to be doing now to ensure they are ready for the new rules by 2026. LinksRecording of Henry Stern speaking on a panel at COP28: www.youtube.com/live/lGTasIEUmzA?feature=shareESG: Navigating past the noise by Henry Engler, Lindsey Rogerson and Yixiang Zeng can be downloaded here: www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/esg/esg-navigating-past-the-noise/Green House Gas Protocol: https://ghgprotocol.org/scope-3-calculation-guidance-2 Compliance Clarified is a podcast from Thomson Reuters Regulatory Intelligence.Listen to wide-ranging, insightful discussions on all things compliance for financial services firms. We delve into the hot topics of the day, the challenges faced and offer up practical ideas for emerging good practice. We de-mystify regulation and explore the art, as well as the science, of the ever-expanding role of the compliance officer.  Enforcements, digital transformation, regulatory change, governance, culture, conduct risk – anything and everything impacting the compliance function is up for discussion.

Sheriff Dirkse discusses California SB 2, it's status at the time of this recording, and how it will affect Stanislaus County CCW holding residents. Links to Listen to the CCW episode from 2023 on Apple or Spotify Additional resources mentioned in this podcast: 2024 New California Laws List: Capital Public Radio, KCRA News, NBC Los Angeles  The definition of Mass Shooting is briefly discussed in this episode. After the recording we verified the definition via Encyclopedia Britanica which sites and explains several resources regarding the definition. Read the details here.  

 So, you know how there's laws in most states now pertaining to the health and safety of rental properties using smoke detectors, dealing with mold, about lead based paint, and how to handle tenants with bed bugs?Several years ago, California passed a law, SB-721 which basically said rental property owners of certain sized properties had to have their decks and balconies inspected and remedied by 2025 and then within every 5 years thereafter.This was in response to a deadly balcony collapse with several other instances across the state severely injuring people just hanging out to have a good time.The point is, many other states have also experienced deaths and serious injuries from decks and balconies that collapsed since California has passed this law.  Now, those states are now following suit to force landlords to repair dry rotted or damaged decks or balconies.And this my friends is the subject of this week's podcast.You may think it doesn't apply to you but at some point, it will.It's risk management at its best!Listen to what we have to say about the law pertaining to deck and balcony inspections regardless of what state your rental property is in. LINKS

The Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) framework serves as a foundation for the major ESG disclosure frameworks, and also the basis for the California SB 261 climate disclosure rules recently signed into law. The UK first mandated reporting under the TCFD for listed companies beginning in 2021, and as such, there are two years of reports and insights available in 2023.  In today's podcast, host Heather Horn sat down with Mark O'Sullivan, PwC UK's Head of Corporate Reporting, to discuss PwC's review of the second year of mandatory TCFD reporting for certain companies in the UK, and how insights from this review can help companies looking to start or enhance their climate-related disclosures. In this episode, you'll hear:4:44 - Our review findings for year two of mandatory TCFD reporting in the UK10:12 - Current challenges, including the understanding and expectation gaps faced by companies required to “comply or explain”18:09 - Observations and trends by industry 24:01 - Key takeaways from year two for companies looking to start or enhance their own TCFD reporting30:09 - Regulatory findings from the UK's Financial Reporting Council (FRC) on metrics and targets34:36 - What's coming next for TCFD, and its relationship with other ESG frameworks that are becoming mandatory39:39 - Discussion of materiality assessments and the FRC's recent findings44:30 - Advice for companies preparing for mandatory UK, California, or other ESG reporting rulesWant to learn more about developments in ESG and TCFD? Read PwC UK's publications, The green shoots of TCFD reporting, and Still early days: A review of year two of TCFD reporting, along with our previous podcast on how TCFD is shaping today's reporting landscape. Additionally, refer to the FRC's latest report on its reviews of TCFD disclosures, as well as the FRC Lab's recent articles on materiality assessments and applications. Mark O'Sullivan is PwC UK's Head of Corporate Reporting. He has more than 15 years of experience advising leading organizations on current and best practices in reporting and the implementation of new reporting strategies to meet the needs of the capital markets. Mark also oversees PwC's annual review of corporate reporting practices in the FTSE 350.Heather Horn is PwC's National Office thought leader, responsible for developing our communications strategy and conveying firm positions on accounting and financial reporting matters. She is the engaging host of PwC's accounting and reporting weekly podcast and quarterly webcast series. With over 30 years of experience, Heather's accounting and auditing expertise includes financial instruments and rate-regulated accounting.Transcripts available upon request for individuals who may need a disability-related accommodation. Please send requests to us_podcast@pwc.com.

Contact your host with questions, suggestions, or requests about sponsoring the AppleInsider Daily:charles_martin@appleinsider.com (00:00) - 01 - Intro (00:12) - 02 - Apple finds a R2R bill it likes (01:28) - 03 - "Fake" news (02:53) - 04 - Vision (Pro) Quest (03:57) - 05 - Cash back promotion in US (04:35) - 06 - A Brilliant home add-on (05:20) - 07 - Care and clean your headphones, people! (07:02) - 08 - Outro Links from the showApple voices official support for California SB 244 right to repair billFeds seize $400,000 worth of counterfeit Apple devicesDevelopers evangelize Apple Vision Pro labs in latest updateSome Apple Card users will get 5% Daily Cash back on dining and travelBrilliant launches plug-in Smart Home Control with Siri supportRepair experts weigh in on AirPods Max condensation complaints Subscribe to the AppleInsider podcast on: Apple Podcasts Overcast Pocket Casts Spotify Subscribe to the HomeKit Insider podcast on:•  Apple Podcasts•  Overcast•  Pocket Casts•  Spotify

Join Coach Ashlie Walton and Detective Walton on The Tactical Living Podcast as they delve into a thought-provoking topic: the complexities surrounding rescued human traffickers and the impact of California SB 1322. In this episode, they shed light on the controversial issue of legalizing prostitution and how it can inadvertently hinder efforts to combat human trafficking.   Learn more by reading Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery.   Drawing upon recent developments, including the passage of California SB 1322, the hosts explore the unintended consequences of legalizing prostitution and the challenges it presents for law enforcement. They examine real-life cases where rescued human traffickers, despite being given a chance for a better life, choose to return to the streets, highlighting the intricate dynamics at play.   As Coach Ashlie and Detective Walton navigate through the complexities of this issue, they provide insights into the broader implications of legalizing prostitution and its potential impact on human trafficking prevention efforts. By discussing the recent changes brought about by California SB 1322 and referring to a credible source (link: https://capitolweekly.net/new-ca-law-removes-crime-of-loitering-to-commit-prostitution/), they offer a balanced analysis of the situation.   Join The Tactical Living Podcast to gain a deeper understanding of the intricate relationship between legalizing prostitution and combating human trafficking. Gain valuable insights into the challenges faced by law enforcement agencies and explore potential strategies to address these complex issues effectively. Tune in to this eye-opening episode and engage in an important conversation that affects us all.   ⩥ PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ⩤ https://bi3xbvVont.ly/   CLICK HERE for our best-selling products: https://amzn.to/3xaG3xw and https://rdbl.co/3DIQVUC   CLICK HERE to join our free Police, Fire, Military and Families Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/38w2e7r   Check out our website and learn more about how you can work with LEO Warriors by going to: https://www.leowarriors.com/   Like what you hear? We are honored. Drop a review and subscribe to our show.    The Tactical Living Podcast is owned by LEO Warriors, LLC. None of the content presented may be copied, repurposed or used without the owner's prior consent.   For PR, speaking requests and other networking opportunities, contact LEO Warriors:   EMAIL: ashliewalton555@gmail.com.   ADDRESS: P.O. Box 400115 Hesperia, Ca. 92340   ASHLIE'S FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/police.fire.lawenforcement   ➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤ This episode is NOT sponsored. Some product links are affiliate links which means if you buy something by clicking on one of our links, we'll receive a small commission.  

Welcome to The Tactical Living Podcast, where Coach Ashlie Walton and Detective Walton explore current affairs and their impact on personal growth and daily life. In today's episode, we delve into California Senate Bill 553 (SB 553) and its potential implications. Join us as we discuss the controversial aspects of the bill, focusing on how it may impact employee safety, businesses, and the challenges faced by business owners operating in the state.   Understanding SB 553:   Introducing California Senate Bill 553 (SB 553) and its objective to limit employee confrontation with shoplifters. Discussing the intent behind the bill, which aims to address safety concerns for employees in potentially dangerous situations.   Evaluating Potential Consequences:   Examining the potential consequences of SB 553, particularly its impact on businesses in California. Discussing concerns that the bill may lead to an increase in business departures from the state and heightened difficulties for business owners to operate and survive.   Balancing Employee Safety and Business Viability:   Exploring the delicate balance between employee safety and the challenges faced by business owners. Discussing the need for comprehensive strategies that consider both employee well-being and the sustainability of businesses in the state.   Seeking Practical Solutions:   Encouraging an open dialogue to find practical solutions that address both employee safety concerns and the viability of businesses. Discussing the importance of collaboration among policymakers, business owners, and law enforcement agencies to develop effective strategies.   Conclusion: In this episode of The Tactical Living Podcast, we've examined California Senate Bill 553 (SB 553) and its potential impact on employee safety and businesses in the state. Recognizing the importance of employee well-being and the challenges faced by business owners, we aim to foster an ongoing conversation that seeks practical solutions to strike a balance. Join us in our next episode, where Coach Ashlie Walton and Detective Walton continue to explore timely topics with a focus on personal growth and resilience.   ⩥ PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ⩤ https://bi3xbvVont.ly/   CLICK HERE for our best-selling products: https://amzn.to/3xaG3xw and https://rdbl.co/3DIQVUC   CLICK HERE to join our free Police, Fire, Military and Families Facebook Group: https://bit.ly/38w2e7r   Check out our website and learn more about how you can work with LEO Warriors by going to: https://www.leowarriors.com/   Like what you hear? We are honored. Drop a review and subscribe to our show.    The Tactical Living Podcast is owned by LEO Warriors, LLC. None of the content presented may be copied, repurposed or used without the owner's prior consent.   For PR, speaking requests and other networking opportunities, contact LEO Warriors:   EMAIL: ashliewalton555@gmail.com.   ADDRESS: P.O. Box 400115 Hesperia, Ca. 92340   ASHLIE'S FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/police.fire.lawenforcement   ➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤➤ This episode is NOT sponsored. Some product links are affiliate links which means if you buy something by clicking on one of our links, we'll receive a small commission.  

Joanne Brasch, PhD, is a textiles lecturer and Special Project Manager for the California Product Stewardship Council (CPSC), an NGO specializing in Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR). Dr. Brasch also holds two appointments with the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle).  In this episode, Dr. Brash outlines SB 707, a first-of-its-kind EPR textile recycling and repair program that has been introduced in California. SB 707 would require producers to implement an end-to-end system that would reduce textile waste going to landfills and promote a circular economy in the state. Dr. Brasch also shares tips for reducing textile waste at home and what not to put in your recycling bin. Plus, she shares our favorite fashion love story to date!  For show notes visit: https://www.swapsociety.co/pages/podcast

This week we have had the opportunity to work with some of the most dynamic individuals leading the charge to support victims of sex trafficking. During the show we talk about the services they provide. We also provide an update to what is happening in our communities as a result of the implementation of California SB 357. Literally vans of young girls are being brought in from out of state and loitering to solicit prostitution in front of Catholic schools and blocking the driveways for private residences. Operation Reclaim and Rebuild: Riverside County Anti Human Trafficking Task Force (RCAHT) announced a successful operation working with the FBI where 31 individuals were arrested on a variety of charges including solicitation of prostitution, prostitution and pandering. Most important there were 31 arrests, and 7 potential victims of sex trafficking were rescued. This was part of a Statewide program where there were 368 arrests and 131 potential sex trafficking victims were rescued. RCAHT is victim focused and the Task Force works closely with victim services providers to ensure they are provided with resources to escape and heal. San Bernardino County District Attorney Victim Advocates: Million Kids had the opportunity to meet many of the Victim Advocates serving San Bernardino County and share about the crime of sextortion. These are extraordinary individuals who work diligently to provide specialized services for victims of crime. Mama's House: Desert area. Mama's House held a fundraiser to expand their campus. What an incredible event. Dr. Ben Carson was the key note speaker and he mesmerized over 1000 people with inspirational stories of his life. It was heartwarming to see so many highly successful individuals willing to support a program that makes it possible for pregnant teens to deliver and keep their babies when they find themselves in a situation where they have little structure or financial support. Congratulations Jan Lupia. It was a fantastic experience. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/million-kids/support

WE NEED YOUR HELP TO CHANGE CALIFORNIA LAW SO HUMAN TRAFFICKING IS LEGALLY CLASSIFIED AS A “VIOLENT AND SERIOUS CRIME” WITH FEATURED GUEST Tyson McCoy, Deputy District Attorney, Homicide and Human Trafficking Prosecutions, Kern County District Attorney's Office DDA Mc Coy is leading the efforts to educate the public about California SB 14 that would make human trafficking in California a “Violent and Serious” crime. It is time to stop the early release of convicted felons charged with human trafficking offenses. We are seeking the public's assistance to sign a petition supporting SB 14. Click on link below: SB 14 Human Trafficking | Senator Shannon Grove Tyson McCoy is the Director of the Kern County Human Trafficking Task Force and oversees human trafficking prosecutions in Kern County. Mr. McCoy has trained hundreds of law enforcement personnel from across California on the topic of human trafficking. In addition to training law enforcement personnel, he has also trained doctors, nurses, social workers, military personnel, and various community organizations on the topic of human trafficking. Mr. McCoy is also a human trafficking instructor for California's statewide prosecutors' association, CDAA. He has also assisted state legislators in efforts to make human trafficking a serious and violent crime. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/million-kids/support

In September 2021, California SB 357 was passed by the House and the Assembly and for reasons unknown was held on Senator Weiner's Desk in Sacramento. The Gov. Newsom recall election came and went and then the June 7th Primary Elections were held. Almost ten months after the passing of the bill it was sent to Governor Newsom's desk and it was signed. It is scheduled to become effective January 1, 2023. Already our communities are seeing the negative effects of this bill. SB 357 is called the Safer Streets for All Act. The bill rewrote the penal code of "Loitering for purposes of soliciting prostitution" and stated that law enforcement can not intervene with individuals who are loitering for the purposes of soliciting for prostitution (it does not define if you are soliciting to buy or sell). The ACLU made this statement when proposing the bill: "SB357 will move California one step closer to acknowledging sex workers as deserving of full dignity and respect." During this show we will discuss the impact of that bill which will go into effect in six weeks. Pimps are already starting to bring their girls into California for solicitation. In many of our cities we have started to see a significant increase in the number of individuals soliciting sex walking the streets in scantily clad outfits . We are greatly concerned that while this bill does protect the sex worker from being targeted by law enforcement, we are concerned about who is going to protect the sex worker from pimps, gangs and organized crime? Who is going to protect our children and neighborhoods from being invaded by street sex sellers? --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/million-kids/support

As Colorado's Natural Medicine Health Act goes to voters, it's the perfect time to consider how powerful psychedelic molecules should enter mainstream consciousness. Today on Life is a Festival Ismail Lourido Ali, Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) explains the various pathways to legalization including the Decriminalization movement, medicalization, religious exception, and legal adult use. The first half of our conversation is dedicated to Ismail himself, whose life journey gives him a unique philosophy on ending prohibition and a toolkit for helping us get there. We open with Ismail's cultural identity and his spiritual journey from Islam to the rave scene. We discuss Izzy's exploration of queerness and gender identity and his work from Drug Policy Reform to becoming a lawyer for MAPS. Izzy clearly articulates the key paths to legalization and his philosophy around each. We discuss key pieces of legislation including California's SB 519, Colorado's Natural Medicine Health Act which goes to voters in this month, and Oregon's Bill 109 which will legalize and regulate adult use of psilocybin in that state. We conclude our conversation with an invitation to psychedelic entrepreneurs and Izzy's personal perspective on why Life is a Festival. As MAPS' Director of Policy and Advocacy, Ismail advocates to eliminate barriers to psychedelic therapy and research, develops and implements legal and policy strategy, and supports MAPS' governance, non-profit, and ethics work. Ismail earned his J.D. at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 2016, after receiving his bachelor's in philosophy from California State University, Fresno. Ismail has previously worked for the ACLU of Northern California's Criminal Justice & Drug Policy Project, and Berkeley Law's International Human Rights Law Clinic. Ismail is licensed to practice law in the state of California, and is a founding board member of the Psychedelic Bar Association. He also currently serves on the board of the Sage Institute, contributes to Chacruna Institute's Council for the Protection of Sacred Plants, and participates on the advisory council for the Ayahuasca Defense Fund. Ismail is passionate about setting sustainable groundwork for a just, equitable, and generative post-prohibition world. Links: Izzy's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sage_izzy/ Izzy Twitter: https://twitter.com/sage_izzy MAPS: https://maps.org/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/MAPS Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mapsnews/ Psychedelic Science 2023: https://psychedelicscience.org/ Psychedelic Bar Association: https://thepsychedelicbar.org/ Chacruna Institute: https://chacruna.net/ Sage Institute: https://sageinst.org/ MAPS analysis regarding Oregon's Measures 109 and 110 passed in Nov 2020. MAPS analysis regarding Colorado Proposition 122 MAPS analysis regarding our work on SB519 in CA to decriminalize the personal use of all psychedelics. Timestamps :09 - Blending cultural identities from religion to the rave scene :15 - Ismail's updated view on Islam, the way of peace :22 - Queerness and Izzy's personal gender conversation :33 - From drug policy reform advocate to lawyer for MAPS :40 - Experimenting with psychedelic legalization in different US States :52 - Paths to above ground use of psychedelics: Decriminalization :56 - Paths to above ground use of psychedelics: Medicalization :59 - Paths to above ground use of psychedelics: Religious Exemption 1:02 - Paths to above ground use of psychedelics: Adult Use 1:06 - California SB 519, Colorado's Natural Medicine Health Act, and Oregon Bill 109, 1:14 - Izzy's challenge to entrepreneurs who use psychedelics 1:20 - Life is a Festival

In this Special Episode Bryce Eddy speaks with our guests, Tara Thornton and Denise Aguilar. These amazing ladies are the co-founders of an organization called Freedom Angels. They were instrumental in defeating a California Bill, SB 866, that would have made it legal for teenagers to get the clot shot without their parents knowledge or permission from age 15.To get a FREE info kit on diversifying and protecting your savings with precious metals in a TAX-SHELTERED account text LIBERTY to 989898.Use discount code LIBERTY @ https://www.goodranchers.com/ to receive $20 off your purchase PLUS 2 FREE 18 oz Boneless Ribeye Steaks.BE A THREAT TO THE GREAT RESET!Join our community by Subscribing to us on:Liftable TV - https://watch.liftable.tv/series/XOi2uRcOSGlo-liberty-stationRumble - https://rumble.com/c/LibertyStationYouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiXnArqAIXmVLZSSwEyd1HQPodcast - https://omny.fm/shows/liberty-station

In this Special Episode Bryce Eddy speaks with our guests, Tara Thornton and Denise Aguilar. These amazing ladies are the co-founders of an organization called Freedom Angels. They were instrumental in defeating a California Bill, SB 866, that would have made it legal for teenagers to get the clot shot without their parents knowledge or permission from age 15. To get a FREE info kit on diversifying and protecting your savings with precious metals in a TAX-SHELTERED account text LIBERTY to 989898. Use discount code LIBERTY @ https://www.goodranchers.com/ to receive $20 off your purchase PLUS 2 FREE 18 oz Boneless Ribeye Steaks. BE A THREAT TO THE GREAT RESET! Join our community by Subscribing to us on: Liftable TV - https://watch.liftable.tv/series/XOi2uRcOSGlo-liberty-station Rumble - https://rumble.com/c/LibertyStation YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiXnArqAIXmVLZSSwEyd1HQ Podcast - https://omny.fm/shows/liberty-stationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Maria Valetta, certified sommelier and wine educator, joins Robert Tas in this episode of CorkRules where they discover the best wines on the list of Ocean Prime, a restaurant that offers an impressive menu of seafood and prime cuts of steak, signature cocktails, and a Wine Spectator honored wine list. Maria identifies the stellar wines on the list that are best paired with seafood, the crowd-pleasing value wines, a by-the-glass bubbly to kick off the evening, and a stellar, special bottle for a night to remember.  Wines reviewed include: Fattoria dei Barbi, Brunello di Montalcino, Italy, 2016 Cade, Napa Valley, California SB, 2020 Walt, Sonoma Coast, Pinot Noir California, 2017 For more information on today's episode, and the wines you love to love, visit www.corkrules.com.

California SB 357 had passed the House and the Assembly last October and was held for nine months on Sen. Weiner's desk because of the controversies surrounding the bill. The bill is sponsored in part by groups supporting gay and transgender rights and Sen Weiner said that he waited to send the measure to Gov. Newsom until Pride Month. The bill was also created to protect women of color that may be loitering for the purposes of prostitution from being targeted by Law Enforcement according to many supporters of the measure. SB 357 is designed to repeal the penal code and make it so law enforcement will not be able to intervene in any situation where the individual may be loitering for the purposes of soliciting prostitution. THIS BILL IS EXPECTED TO BE SIGNED BY GOV. NEWSOM WITHIN THE NEXT 10 DAYS, IN ESSENCE LEGALIZING STREET PROSTITUTION IN THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA. Please listen to this important broadcast. (being sent later by AM 590) Million Kids predicts that this bill will change the very fabric of our society. There are no provisions for truly protecting anyone, man, woman, gay, trans or straight. It simply states that law enforcement will not be able to intervene when someone is loitering to sell sex on the streets of California. That means that sex sellers (and pimps) from all over the world can come to California and sell sex (and send the money back to China or Eastern Europe). Homeless people will be the most victimized as they are desperate for income and living on the street. With open borders, foreign nationals in need of immediate capital will be targeted. Most important there are no restrictions on where the loitering can take place. Loitering for prostitution will be legal in front of schools, churches, private businesses, schools and our homes and in front of our children. Million Kids has been educating and combating sex trafficking in California for over twelve years. Never in our lifetime did we think we would see so many people who will be at great risk of exploitation. And this bill means, law enforcement will not be able to intervene. Our hearts are saddened at the number of people who will be exploited all the while telling the public they are "SAFER". --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/million-kids/support

SB 9 California went into effect on January 2022 and allows you to split your lot into multiple units. But how exactly does it work? and what does this mean for homeowners in the state of California?In today's video, we have Christian Walsh, a real estate agent with Wire Associates, who is here to talk to us about Senate Bill 9, Or SB 9, in California. He explains to us what is SB 9 and how you can take advantage of this bill to split your single-family lot and add UP TO 4 units.Other topics discussed:- Lot Splits and duplex conversion- Which properties are eligible for SB 9?- Having ADUs and SB9 properties- Can SB 9 units be rented?- How SB 9 lot splits can be done?- And much more!

Join us today in this special episode of Doxalogic where Scott and Chris discuss the California SB 245 Abortion Bill.

California SB 1162 would require companies of 100+ employees to publicly report how much they pay people.  Do you want your salary public?  Will making your salary public bridge the pay gap? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of Five Minute Friday, Bob is talking trash! No, not the smack talk variety, but rather new California legislation which has taken effect regarding the disposal of organic waste. This is something for CA landlords and property managers alike to be aware of, especially for multifamily buildings and apartment communities. Why is California doing this? California throws away more than 6 Million tons of food waste every year and more than 24 tons of combined “green organic waste”. SB 1383 is the new law which aims to reduce the short-lived pollutants that many Californians are currently putting in our landfills. Why is this important? The reason is that landfill organic waste emits methane, a super pollutant that is more powerful as a greenhouse gas than CO2. SB 1383 advocates are targeting Californians to reduce organic waste disposal by 75% by 2025. For those wanting more information on SB 1383 and California composting requirements, visit the Cal Recycle website at this web link: California Composting Requirements Website:https://www.calrecycle.ca.gov/organics/slcp/ Thank you for joining Five Minute Friday, TGIF and we will catch you next week!Connect with BobSan Diego Property Managementhttps://www.ncpropertygroup.com/This episode is always available for listening, sharing, or download at Property Management Brainstorm. Subscribe to Property Management Brainstorm on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, TunedIn, iHeart Radio and YouTube. 

On this episode of the Lifeline Podcast, our host Justin Edson discusses California SB 296 with Matt Silver. Matt is the 2nd Vice President of the California Association of Code Enforcement Officers and spearheaded this successful bill. 

Join Harry and Philip as they talk over today's Insight, "Squamish First Nation Provides a Glimpse at The City of Tomorrow." They go over housing policy, anti-development motivations and confusions, and the tensions (or lack thereof) between smart regulation and free, competitive markets. -Important References- https://www.spectacles.news/insight-housing-crises-and-interest-group-deception/ (Recent article on California SB 9 & 10) https://www.spectacles.news/focus-what-i-learned-in-becoming-an-e-resident-of-estonia/ (Recent article on Estonian digital bureaucracy) https://www.spectacles.news/birds-eye-small-gov-models/ (Bird's Eye on small gov't and liberal democracy) -Usual Links- https://www.spectacles.news/insight-normalcy-an-inadequate-solution-in-a-changing-world/#/portal/ (Visit our website and subscribe to our newsletter!) https://www.spectacles.news/insight-squamish-first-nation-provides-a-glimpse-at-the-city-of-tomorrow/ (To read, comment on, or listen to the article we discussed, click here.) https://twitter.com/SpectaclesMedia (Follow us on Twitter!)

Host: Alpha Mike Intro: Host Alpha Mike welcomes the Nation to episode #259. How to contact us RaiderCop.Com and RaiderCopNation.com. Join us on, our social media accounts, you can find us @RaiderCop @RaiderCopNation or @RaiderCopPodcast. Additionally you can hear Raider-Cop Podcast wherever you get your podcast, just look us up. Want to upgrade your old gun, well I got the guy for you. Pistol Pete The Gunsmith (8277 NW 64th Street Miami, Florida 33166/ p 786-294-0756), see below for details. Need gun training in the Jersey / Philly area, contact Kilo Sierra www.sepulvedainc.com and you can contact me, Alpha Mike at (raidercopnation@gmail.com) if you are in West Coast / Central Florida for gun training. Lastly need firearms training in South Florida, AAA Gun Safety,You'll thank me later. Please consider supporting Tunnel to Towers Foundation Living In The Bolshevik States of Woke: 1. Negative Nancy proposed Digital Dollar 2. Uncle Joe tells GOP to get out of the way on debt limit 3. Michigan Trump supporters line streets chanting F*** Joe Biden Joke: A horse walks into a bar, the bartender says, "Hey" the horse replies, "sure". Main Topic: One Big Happy Family In Jail 1. California SB -132 2. Why? because 3. Women's groups 4. So much for #MeToo 5. More wacky States to follow 6. What women groups are demanding Reference: Just In The News  WOLF (Women's Group) Up Next: The Woke Sheriff #258 October 3, 2021 Word Of The Week: But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin.1 John 1:7 Join the podcast via: Spotify   Stitcher  PodBean Join the Raider-Cop Nation TuneIn ApplePodcast  GooglePodcast  Pandora  Amazon Music YouTube  Rumble Audible Pistol Pete the Gunsmith                                                                                 Kilo Sierra's Firearms Training or Investigation: Sepulveda inc Consider Becoming A Member:Gun Owners Of America GOA joinUnited States Concealed Carry Association USCCA JOINMammoth Nation Support:  Tunnel to Tower FoundationDominican Law Enforcement Officers of FloridaBen Cantwell Art  #SOSCUBASocial Media:GETTRInstagram @milo_raider_cop & @raidercoppodcastMeWe, WimKin, Rumble.Parler: @RaiderCop  CloutHub:Wimkin: @AlphaMike and Raider-Cop PodcastMeWe: Raider-Cop Podcast & RaiderCopGab: @RaiderCopPodcastFacebook @RaiderCopNationPinterest#JailsLASD #CACorrections #MDCR #NYPD #LAPD #LASD #MDPD #MPD #NYSP #NJSP #LVPD #Security #HCSO #PBSO #BSO #OCSO #PCSO #SFPD #DPD #HPD #SAPD #LCSO #FMPD #CCSO #NYC #NYCDOC #NJDOC #PPD #SLPD #CPD #TestEverything @RaiderCopNation #RaiderCopNation #TrainUp #o9TG #WiseGuySeries #TrainUpSeries #RollCallSeries #ThinkOuttaDaBox #SideBarSeries #TheWord #Buccaneer #OfficerDeanJoseph #RaiderCopPodcast #BeLikeJack #Corrections #RaiderCop #EmpanadaLadiesOfGeorgiaYoutube Free Music: Triumph by Yung Logos, Rodeo Show by The Green Orbs, Minor Blues for Booker E's Jammy Jams, Happy Birthday Mambo, by E's Jammy James. The Awakening Patrick jazz Space, The Current Blues, Blue Infusion, Front Porch Blues, Crazy Blues, Midnight Special, Super Blues, Bright Eyed Blues, Bleeker Street Blues, Olde Salooner Blues, Miles Beyond, D.J. Freedem, Causmic, Verified Picasso, Coyote Hearing, Diamond Ortiz, Nico Staf Brooklyn & The Bridge, 2 Hearts Patrick Patikios, A Ghost Town Quinoas Moreira, Tacklebox Blues Mini Vandals. Road Tripzzz of shane 1 & Like That Anno Domini Beats, Seration from the sun Rage.PatrikiosMusic: I'm Back by Eye of the beholder.

In this episode of Life Matters, Commissioner Johnston issues a California action alert on Senate Bill 380. The measure has passed out of the Senate and is now going to the Assembly floor. Each and every member of the Assembly will be voting on it. If approved, it would go to the governor, who supports intentionally killing the depressed vulnerable patient. SB-380 removes all existing ‘safeguards' for depressed and dependent patients. The Assembly is preparing to vote, and the death folk are pushing it hard! Depressed COVID patients, nursing home residents, solitary elderly, the ill and infirm, disabled - all now in the crosshairs of a killing medical profession. Stop expansion of ‘assisted suicide'! When assisted suicide was narrowly passed with bipartisan opposition during a special legislative session on Medi-Cal in 2015, then-Senator Bill Monning, a co-author of the bill, assured opponents in California Healthline that, “the joint and co-authors on this bill … have endeavored to build in protections in this [measure] that are stronger than the protections in any of the states where this has been practiced." Now the bill authors are proposing to remove their own “safeguards.” ”SB-380 (Eggman) will roll back the following “safeguards” that were assured in 2015 including: •Prematurely ending the existing 2025 sunset date and legislative reevaluation option four years early with little to no scientific data to support this action (especially in light of the worldwide pandemic); •No future oversight or evaluation of Annual reports about assisted suicide requests and their out outcomes. Existing reports do not contain any data regarding complications, reasons for requesting the lethal drugs, and for the limited data provided, much is listed as “unknown.”  •Removes the 15 day waiting period “safeguard.” Please immediately URGE your Assemblymembers to vote 'NO' on SB-380 and protect patients.

Laura Foote and CA State Senator Scott Wiener talk about the conflict around SB 9 & 10, the power of op-eds in local newspapers, and what the next steps are for these two key bills in the CA legislature. Note: SB 10 passed through the Assembly yesterday! We're still fighting for SB 9 to pass, and we need your help. Use our call tool to tell your Assemblymember to support SB 9: https://actionnetwork.org/call_campaigns/get-sb9-across-the-finish-line/ Learn more about YIMBY Action and become a member: https://yimbyaction.org/join Read more about CA SB 9: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB9 Read more about CA SB 10: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220SB10

Senator Weiner introduced a bill that would in essence, legalize street prostitution. It has passed the House and is now in the Assembly Public Safety Committee getting ready for a final vote. California SB-357 will make it so law enforcement cannot intervene in street prostitution. This bill, if it passes will be devastating for communities around California and also to the thousands of victims of sex trafficking. We will return to the days of the "Blade" or "Track" on University (Riverside), Fifth Street (San Bernardino), Holt Blvd (Ontario), Florida Ave (Hemet). Businesses will be affected. Pimps will move in from across the US. Most important, law enforcement will not be able to intervene and assist victims of sex trafficking. Photo Credit: Louis --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/million-kids/support

California State Senator Weiner introduced a bill that would in essence, legalize street prostitution. It has passed the House and is now in the Assembly Public Safety Committee getting ready for a final vote. California SB-357 will make it so law enforcement cannot intervene in street prostitution. This bill, if it passes will be devastating for communities around California and also to the thousands of victims of sex trafficking. We will return to the days of the "Blade" or "Track" on University (Riverside), Fifth Street (San Bernardino), Holt Blvd (Ontario), Florida Ave (Hemet). Businesses will be affected. Pimps will move in from across the US. Most important, law enforcement will not be able to intervene and assist victims of sex trafficking. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/million-kids/support

On November 12, Darren Heitner was asked to provide the California SB 206 Working Group with a presentation on the topic of economic implications associated with name, image, and likeness (NIL) compensation for college athletes and the impact of related state-based legislation. Darren was asked to briefly describe his role in drafting language for the Florida NIL legislation and his background in consulting related to NIL issues in college athletics as well as any updates as to how the Florida Board of Education has proceeded to implement the Florida legislation. He discussed issues and/or concerns he envisions for states that have already enacted legislation in the event Congress similarly enacts federal NIL legislation which may pre-empt state laws. Additionally, Darren was asked to discuss the impact of the most recently proposed rules changes for college athletes at the NAIA and NCAA (DI, DII, and DIII) in terms of whether institutions adopting those new rules or regulations would be in conformity with the Florida legislation scheduled to become effective in summer 2021. Follow on Twitter/IG: @DarrenHeitner LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sportsagent/

President of California Advocates, Mike Belote, has a rich history in the lobbying industry for real estate in California. California SB 1079 recently passed will have undeniable impacts on local California investors that buy at trustee sale with the introduction of a 45-day redemption period. Mike, Sean, and Aaron discuss how this bill came to be, what it says, and likely impacts to Main Street. 00:00 The Data Driven Real Estate Podcast welcomes Mike Belote with California Advocates06:54 What is SB 1079 and how does it change the California trustee sale buying and foreclosure process?08:16 The important role that institutional Wall Street real estate buyers played during the Great Recession10:43 How the legislative process works in California in a supermajority state13:01 How many homes did Wall Street buy during the Great Recession and how many do they still have?18:43 Who really pays for the city fines on foreclosed homes? It's not the banks or lenders like some might think. 23:25 Why California SB 1079 and the 45-day redemption will create less competition and potentially create more foreclosures28:35 The new 45-day redemption rules after trustee sale and eligible bidders33:46 How less competition at trustee sale steals millions from homeowners39:49 How large institutional buyers and nonprofits might work together at trustee sale squeezing out local investors47:48 The issue with squatters after the trustee sale52:40 How real estate investors can better protect themselves from over-regulation or at least be aware of what's coming

On September 17th, California Governor Gavin Newsome signed SB 1159 into law. Unlike most legislation, this law is considered "emergency legislation" and takes effect upon its signing.It creates a rebuttable presumption in cases where COVID-19 infections occur in the workplace, creating a compensable injury under current Workers' Compensation insurance policies.Join Greg and John as they discuss the nuances of this legislation and what it means to your small business if you have employees.Record keeping is a must as are reporting requirements. Join the show and learn what these are and how to protect your employees and your company from running afoul of the Governor's new rules.Many other states have similar legislation or have considered putting similar plans in place. John will share his research on this with the audience as well.We would love your feedback, so please feel free to leave us a note and give us your thoughts. E-mail us your suggestions, ideas, comments and critiques at podcast@worklogichr.comhttps://worklogichr.com/resources/podcasts/disclaimer/

This week the guys take on a how a Post Apocalyptic world will look like. Will the Human race ever go extinct? We also touch base on one of the new bills recently passed in California SB-145.

This week Nick and Reg, discuss the passing of the late great Black Panther Star Chadwick Boseman and the stories that are now coming to the surface that are shedding more light on his kept secret and how much of a true hero is was. Also we talk about Jessica Krug, an Associate Professor at George Washington University that assumed the heritage and ethnicity of a black and hispanic woman. Sounds like Rachel Dolezal to me all over again. Also we discuss and try to understand the California SB 145. As well as the GMM, yes genetically modified mosquitoes. This and much, much more. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bro-rantz/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bro-rantz/support

Julie Wright talks with Thomas Gerhart about California SB 395, allowing Californians to salvage roadkill they find.

Stay close to "WakeUpCall" on Facebook, Twitter, & Instagram! Listen LIVE to "Wake Up Call with Dan Tortora" MON through FRI, 9-11amET on mixlr.com/wakeupcalldt & on the homepage of WakeUpCallDT.com from ANY Device! You can also Watch LIVE MON through FRI, 9-11amET on facebook.com/LiveNowDT. This special is Proudly Presented by: Carvel DeWitt Utica Pizza Company Charney's Men's Clothing The Wildcat Sports Pub Ma & Pa's Kettle Corn & Popcorn Factory The Pen & Trophy Center Dominick's Restaurant Honda City of Liverpool Home Team Pub K-9 Kamp Dog Daycare K-9 Kampground  Trapper's Pizza Pub

Stephen Hartzell and Wayne Cook discuss Week 6 of the 2019 college football season. Hartzell get's Wayne's reaction from the passing of California SB 206, and how he thinks it could potentially be damaging to the sports world. Phil Steele joins the show to break down all the action in Week 6 including UCF-Cincinnati, Auburn-Florida, plus his sneaky value pick for all the degenerates out there. Hartzell and Wayne do their head to head pick 'em for the weekend and in Wayne's World this week he discusses "change". Follow College Sports Now on Facebook and on Twitter @CSNowTweets!

Nick takes a look at all the ways California SB 206 may (and may not) change college athletics. Plus, Kent Spencer, Fast Five, and Watch Wednesday.

Henry Chisholm breaks down California SB 206, Mel Tucker's bye weekend and the future of the Buffs' running backs. Leave comments on the post for today's show at TheDNVR.com and Henry will read them on Tuesday’s show.

Imagine your firm 10 years from now. How much has it grown? For Michael Sullivan and Associates, the answer was 60 times. We sit down with Michael Bell of MSA for an in-the-trenches look for what that kind of growth looks like, and content marketing strategy that they're using to continue to grow.Note: Michael Bell sent us a correction – In the conversation he incorrectly referenced California SB 899 when in fact, it was California SB 863 that was passed in September 2012 that led to the tremendous opportunity discussed in the episode.Free bonus for show listeners! Click here to get access to the video course and scripts our clients have used to double their case files without spending another dime on marketing. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Tony Sands in the former president of the Right to Life League of Southern California as well as an award-winning film producer, writer, and director. He joins me this week to discuss California SB 24, a bill that would require state colleges and universities to provide free access to medical abortions for students. We also discuss Tony's work in film and the upcoming remake of Space Jam.

Can the Catholic church eliminate child sexual abuse and grooming by eliminating youth ministries? California SB 360: the seal of confession is not intended for an evangelization goal — it’s for the mercy of God. People want to improve their lives, and will pay for it. St. Anthony of Padua: more than a finder of […] All show notes at Abuse Reforms, CA SB 360, Coaching, St. Anthony of Padua 6.13.19 - This podcast produced by Relevant Radio

Effective January 1, 2019, California SB 1343 greatly expanded Golden State employers' anti-harassment training requirements. The law not only extends coverage to employers with as few as five employees, but it also mandates that employers provide anti-harassment training to all employees – not just supervisors – every two years. But what if an employer provided this training in 2018? Can the next training cycle wait until 2020? No, according to recent guidance from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH). In this podcast, Marissa Dragoo from the Littler Learning Group discusses potential SB 1343 compliance challenges with Littler Workplace Policy Institute members Bruce Sarchet and Corinn Jackson.

Guest contributor Kimberly Phillips joins us to talk about police accountability. Topics include the passage of California SB 1421, legislation that will provide state residents with access to police officers’ misconduct records. We’ll also discuss the guilty verdict in the Laquan McDonald police murder trial. Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke was convicted of murder and aggravated battery with a firearm.Our Policy Watch segment will focus on the ranked choice voting movement in Massachusetts. Real Talk will feature Black Panther Party Illinois Chairman Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by the Chicago Police and the FBI December 4, 1969.Hear COMMUNITY PARTY RADIO Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8p est | 7p cst | 5p pst on the GET GLOBAL NETWORK internet station SoMetro Radio.Community Party Radio Show is hosted by author and political activist David Samuels, author of the book False Choice: The Bipartisan Attack on the Working Class, the Poor and Communities of Color. Pick up your copy of the book on Amazon.Community Party Radio Show airs Tuesday nights at 8p est / 7p cst /5p pst and our new time on Wednesday nights at 7p est / 6p cst /4p pst on www.SoMetroRadio.com. You can also hear the show on the iRadio station SoMetro Talk that is available on apps like TuneIn and SoMetro Magazine. SoMetro Radio and SoMetro Talk are original member stations of the GET GLOBAL NETWORK.Take the time to subscribe to the show on iTunes, iHeart Radio, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spreaker and other podcast platforms.

Guest contributor Kimberly Phillips joins us to talk about police accountability. Topics include the passage of California SB 1421, legislation that will provide state residents with access to police officers’ misconduct records. We’ll also discuss the guilty verdict in the Laquan McDonald police murder trial. Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke was convicted of murder and aggravated battery with a firearm.Our Policy Watch segment will focus on the ranked choice voting movement in Massachusetts. Real Talk will feature Black Panther Party Illinois Chairman Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by the Chicago Police and the FBI December 4, 1969.Hear COMMUNITY PARTY RADIO Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8p est | 7p cst | 5p pst on the GET GLOBAL NETWORK internet station SoMetro Radio.Community Party Radio Show is hosted by author and political activist David Samuels, author of the book False Choice: The Bipartisan Attack on the Working Class, the Poor and Communities of Color. Pick up your copy of the book on Amazon.Community Party Radio Show airs Tuesday nights at 8p est / 7p cst /5p pst and our new time on Wednesday nights at 7p est / 6p cst /4p pst on www.SoMetroRadio.com. You can also hear the show on the iRadio station SoMetro Talk that is available on apps like TuneIn and SoMetro Magazine. SoMetro Radio and SoMetro Talk are original member stations of the GET GLOBAL NETWORK.Take the time to subscribe to the show on iTunes, iHeart Radio, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spreaker and other podcast platforms.

Guest contributor Kimberly Phillips joins us to talk about police accountability. Topics include the passage of California SB 1421, legislation that will provide state residents with access to police officers’ misconduct records. We’ll also discuss the guilty verdict in the Laquan McDonald police murder trial. Chicago cop Jason Van Dyke was convicted of murder and aggravated battery with a firearm. Our Policy Watch segment will focus on the ranked choice voting movement in Massachusetts. Real Talk will feature Black Panther Party Illinois Chairman Fred Hampton, who was assassinated by the Chicago Police and the FBI December 4, 1969. Hear COMMUNITY PARTY RADIO Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8p est | 7p cst | 5p pst on the GET GLOBAL NETWORK internet station SoMetro Radio. Community Party Radio Show is hosted by author and political activist David Samuels, author of the book False Choice: The Bipartisan Attack on the Working Class, the Poor and Communities of Color. Pick up your copy of the book on Amazon. Community Party Radio Show airs Tuesday nights at 8p est / 7p cst /5p pst and our new time on Wednesday nights at 7p est / 6p cst /4p pst on www.SoMetroRadio.com. You can also hear the show on the iRadio station SoMetro Talk that is available on apps like TuneIn and SoMetro Magazine. SoMetro Radio and SoMetro Talk are original member stations of the GET GLOBAL NETWORK. Take the time to subscribe to the show on iTunes, iHeart Radio, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spreaker and other podcast platforms.

If you want football-themed Opening Arguments, check out Episode 57 and Episode 58, which tell the tale of how one Donald J. Trump destroyed the USFL.  Everyone else can enjoy today's sports-free episode, which begins with a discussion of California SB 183 and so-called "sanctuary cities" in light of the State of the Union. In the main segment, Andrew and Thomas break down news about a proposed Department of Labor rule regarding the "tip credit." After that, the guys discuss yesterday's landmark opinion holding the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau constitutional. Finally, we end with our third Dungeons & Dragons-themed Thomas Takes the Bar Exam (Question #61) involving lightning, wildfires, an experienced woodsman, and possible assault by an errant crossbow bolt.  Remember that you can play along with #TTTBE by retweeting our episode on Twitter or sharing it on Facebook along with your guess.  We'll release the answer on next Tuesday's episode along with our favorite entry! Recent Appearances None!  Have us on your show! Show Notes & Links You can read the text of Cal. SB 183 here. This is the Bloomberg News article on the Trump DOL burying the factfinding report; here is a link to the NPRM. Finally, you can read PHH Corp. v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the D.C. Circuit opinion discussed during the "C" segment. Support us on Patreon at:  patreon.com/law Follow us on Twitter:  @Openargs Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/openargs/ And email us at openarguments@gmail.com  

Bob and Julia discuss the "is"/"ought" distinction and the process of recognizing and analyzing arguments that contain moral considerations, using passage of California SB 277 as an example.

On this episode, Jesse & Matt discuss the third most important element of The Golden Square which is so simple and obvious, that it's remarkable this idea is even contested as a human right in the Yankee-lands of Ol' Red, White and Blue: the absolute right to healthcare for every human being on Earth. Matthew will provide a surprising prologue about what's suddenly taken place in his personal life since this episode's initial recording and open up about his mother's life-long illness; in call & response fashion, Jesse will then talk about what it was like to get healthcare in Sarah-Palin-Land as a child. The co-hosts will also explore their personal relationships to this essential cornerstone to The Golden Square, and their own anxieties about having access to healthcare as middle-aged men with pre-existing conditions. And lastly, Matt & Jesse will look at healthcare systems around the world, and offer up a poignant portrait of the very near and immediate struggles facing activists as they fight for a momentous Single Payer bill in California (SB-562). Mentioned In This Episode: Matthew's Heavy-Breathing Prologue: What Is a Double Pulmonary Embolism? Wikipedia Wants to Help. The Speaker of the State Assembly, Anthony Rendon, Blocks SB-562 Why Is Single Payer in California Being Blocked? Money in Politics. The Start-Dates for Universal Healthcare in Other Nations: A 20th Century Invention Ready for America's 21st Century? Prologue Over & Now for the Actual Show! Kathy Griffin / Reza Aslan: Why Free Speech Is for Everyone! We Believe In It!Jehova's Witness & Blood Transfusions: Wikipedia Provides Bloodless Triage The Hanford Reservation, Plutopia: “The Bomb and the Explosions of U.S. Suburbs” Neil Burton in Psychology Today: “A Short History of Bipolar Disorder” The Fat Man & Little Boy Bombs: “The Men Who Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki”  Ronald Reagan's ‘Strange' Gift: COBRA: Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 PBS Newshour: 70% of American College Teachers Are Part-Time/Adjuncts Explaining Neoliberal Tourette Syndrome (NTS): Michael J. Sandel's What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets George Lakoff's Don't Think Like Elephants: Know Your Values & Frame the Debate George Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By YouTube Clip of George Lakoff: “Idea Framing, Metaphors and Your Brain” Salon Interviews Psychologist Gail Saltz: “Study: Liberals and Conservatives Have Different Brain Structures” Prefrontal Cortex Last to Form in Humans & Why Teenagers Do The Craziest Things Saul D. Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: A Practical Guide for Realistic Radicals Saul D. Alinksy on Being Your Own Witness & Why the Right Hates Him So Much Why the Left Falsely Thinks Logic Will Win the Day: “Keep Losing Arguments? A Psychologist Explains Why Emotions Are More Persuasive Than Logic.” Western Society's Classic Understanding of Rhetoric: “The Three Means of Persuasion: Pathos, Logos & Ethos” The U.S. Metrics For Healthcare Delivery Are Both Dizzying & Sad: We Spend 3 Trillion for Healthcare Annually U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective National Health Expenditures 2015 Highlights The United States Has Lowest Life Expectancy in the Industrialized World & the Rate Actually Went Down for First Time in Decades We Have the Highest Infant Mortality Rate in the Industrialized World 62% of US Bankruptcies from Healthcare Emergencies Medical Bankruptcy accounts for majority of personal bankruptcies Top 10 Reasons People Go Bankrupt Warren Buffett: America's Healthcare Costs “the Tapeworm to American Competitiveness” What Is a “5150”? A Wikipedia Working Definition. Time Magazine: “Here's How Much the Average Worker Has to Pay for Healthcare” Business Insider: Map of the Biggest Employers in the US: UC System Is #1 for California The Rich History of Workers Compensation Obamacare came from Heritage Foundation & It's Essentially a Nixonian Idea The Affordable Health Care Act for America Michael Moore's Masterpiece: Sicko (2007) - (At the Time the Documentary's  Release, France Had the Best System in the World) Top Ten Healthcare Rankings By Nation: Denmark Has #1 Healthcare System in the World; Not Surprisingly, Mostly Scandinavian Nations Are in the Rankings. Worldwide Spending on Healthcare Political Scientist Corey Robin's Book: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin Irony of Ironies: World Health Organization's Study on Healthcare Efficiency Ranked America's System 37 and Communist Cuba's 39 (with Cuba Having a Lower Infant Mortality Rate). The New Zealand Herald: “New Zealand Reclaims Title as World's Least Corrupt Country” Rose Ann Demoro, the Executive Director for the California Nurses Association Says, “There is a conspiracy of silence on Single Payer.” Daniel Marans in The Huffington Post: HR-676 - Medicare-for-All - Representative John Conyers' “Bill Has Never Been This Popular” Pew Research Center: “Currently, 60% say the federal government is responsible for ensuring health care coverage for all Americans, while 39% say this is not the government's responsibility.” The Economist/YouGov Poll April 2 - 4, 2017 Once Something Might Be Taken Away: TrumpCare Actually Made Obamacare More Popular and More Well-Known as to Its Benefits President Obama Jokes that Obamacare Is More Popular Than Trump Tragic Nostalgia Time: “Bernie Sanders for President” Website on Medicare for All: Save U.S. $5 trillion over 10 years; Families would pay $466 and save $5,807; Businesses would save $9,000 a year on average. Democracy Now!: “Report: Senator Max Baucus Received More Campaign Money from Health and Insurance Industry Interests than Any Other Member of Congress” Democracy Now!: “Baucus's Raucous Caucus: Doctors, Nurses and Activists Arrested Again for Protesting Exclusion of Single-Payer Advocates at Senate Hearing on Healthcare” The Problem with President Obama Thinking Like a Community Organizer: Unions Make Impossible Demands and Then Move to the Center, Whereas Community Organizers Start in the Middle: Jane F. McAlevey's No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age YouTube Clip: Rahm Emanuel Sold Us Short for Bad Healthcare Deals: “Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste” Curtis Black in the The Chicago Reporter: “Emanuel Is the Last Person to Give Democrats Advice on Strategy” YouTube Clip: During a Rare Townhall Appearance, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein Calls Medicare for All a “Government Take-Over” YouTube Clip: Lauren Steiner (from Robust Opposition) Questions Dianne Feinstein About Townhall Response Concerning Medicare for All. Healthy California's Website for SB-562: Healthy California Act Inland Empire: “The New Jersey of California” The 28ers: An Original Affinity Group from Occupy Riverside & Its Swarm Campaign for SB-562 Norway: #1 Is Now the Happiest Place on Earth - Very Strong Public Financing System: 74% Public Funds; 26% Party Memberships Dues Organizations in Support of SB-562: Healthy California Act California Nurses Association's Main Website Nurses Most Trusted Profession Again in America: 15 Years & Counting Bernie Sanders Gives a Shout-Out to SB-562 and Nurses Created the Biggest Ovation and Response at Chicago's People's Summit New York Quite Close to Getting Single Payer in the State: One Vote Short Vermont's Attempt to Establish a Single-Payer Healthcare System 2016 Colorado Care: “Single-Payer Health Care Dream Dies In Colorado” Previous Single Payer Bills in Calfornia “Dirty Little Secret: Insurers Actually Are Making a Mint from Obamacare” California Senate Passes SB-562 “Single Payer Would Save Us All a Lot of Money” Economic Analysis of the Healthy California Single-Payer Health Care Proposal (SB-562) - UMass Amherst Tommy Douglas: "The Greatest Canadian" Breaking Bad: All You Need To Know About The American Health Care System List of Countries with Universal Health Care Nina Turner's Keynote Speech in Sacramento for SB-562: “Dear Democrats: Stop Talking About Russia & Tell Us What You're Going To Do About Healthcare.” “Just when you think you're in a tomb, remind yourselves you're in a womb.” How The Labour Party Created Britain's National Health Service (NHS)

Kimberly and Dr. Stu dissect the beast that was California SB 457. http://ca-lm.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/SB457-SenBates_Official_04-17-2017.pdf

Kimberly and Dr. Stu dissect the beast that was California SB 457. http://ca-lm.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/SB457-SenBates_Official_04-17-2017.pdf

This episode is sponsored by NEI Energy Services, an EPC contractor delivering solar projects done right the first time across the East Coast. In this episode of EnergyWakeup, Bryan and I dig into the type of leadership that needs to happen on the left. Pushing the goal posts on energy policy agenda can be done. We look at two examples and speak with the sponsors of California SB 71, Senator Wiener (CA-11), and Nevada AB 206, Assemblyman Chris Brooks. Senator Wiener joined the California Senate after being a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He is the sponsor of SB 71 which would put solar on the roof of every new home and commercial building in California. This is similar to an initiative that he passed in San Francisco. Senator Wiener gives us some insight about politics in California in a Trump World and the possibility of passing the 100% RPS that the California Senate is pushing for and how the oil lobby is trying hard to stop it. The legislative agenda for Senator Wiener can be found here. Making news in Nevada is Assemblyman Chris Brooks. Brooks comes from a career in energy and has worked in the solar industry for over 15 years. We talk about the current NEM proceedings and how it may impact his bill, AB 206. AB 206 is an RPS increase to 80% by 2040 with a 50% hurdle by 2030. Assemblyman Brooks also made some news in the interview letting us know that several solar bills will be put forth this session regarding the rooftop solar policies and net metering. With a democratic Assembly and Senate, he does see the need to work with the Governor’s office to solve this and thinks it will be possible with a moderate Governor Sandoval. In the biggest news, he does make a prediction about the rooftop solar industry in Nevada during the show that everyone will want to hear. Follow the legislation and other solar bills in Nevada’s bill tracker. Find the episode on SolarWakeup.com, iTunes, SoundCloud and Stitcher radio. Please subscribe and share with your friends how much EnergyWakeup is helping you!