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Elon Musk’s COVID Vaccine Comment Goes Viral
A tweet by Elon Musk about the COVID-19 vaccine has gone viral after he posted about “disinformation.” The Tesla CEO took to X, formerly Twitter, which he also owns, to share a montage of news headlines that said the various vaccines for the virus were “100% effective.”
“Have you heard dis information?” Musk captioned the tweet on Tuesday. But political journalist Ed Krassenstein questioned the billionaire. “I think efficacy changes are a result of new strains and the vaccine immunity wearing off. It’s stupid anyone ever claimed it was 100% effective. No vaccine is 100% foolproof,” Krassenstein replied.
Then Musk’s tweet to Krassenstein’s comment went viral racking up 3.2 million views. “My concern was more the outrageous demand that people *must* take the vaccine and multiple boosters to do anything at all. That was messed up,” Musk wrote.
“We cannot ascribe everything to the vaccine, but, by the same token, we cannot ascribe nothing,” Musk tweeted. “Myocarditis is a known side-effect. The only question is whether it is rare or common.”
LAUSD Ends COVID Vaccine Mandate for Staff. Displaced Workers Can Apply for Openings
Two years ago, the L.A. Unified School District set a high bar for COVID safety, telling employees: Get vaccinated or lose your job. That vaccine mandate — which achieved a 99% compliance rate among teachers — ended Tuesday following a 6-1 vote by the Board of Education.
The nation’s second-largest school system — widely viewed as a national pacesetter in strong COVID-19 safety measures early in the pandemic emergency — had been among the last public school systems to continue a mandate. LAUSD, however, has been under pressure to change course because of ongoing litigation. Officials stressed that their actions were based on evolving science. And no one made any apologies.
The district on Tuesday did not provide the number of employees who declined to be vaccinated or lost jobs. Hundreds of unvaccinated teachers were initially accommodated by allowing them to transfer to online academies that were set up after most students returned to in-person instruction in the fall of 2021.
Officials said unvaccinated former employees would not automatically reclaim jobs but could be considered for open positions.
Creepy ChatGPT ‘Voice Conversation’ Mimics a Human With a Convincing Personality and Knows Almost Everything
Alexa and Siri are about to get really jealous. The voice technology smart speakers are being taken on by a full-fledged humanoid AI robot being rolled out on the ChatGPT app for Plus paying customers.
Starting this week, a new feature will be available on the iOS and Google Play ChatGPT apps that could potentially eliminate the need for keyboards. Let’s dive in and see exactly what is going to be at our fingertips.
What new development is coming to ChatGPT? The new development, Voice Conversation, allows you to have a direct conversation with ChatGPT. I’m not talking about the typed-out conversations that you can already have with the platform. I’m talking about real conversations like you would have with a friend on the phone.
You will be able to ask this feature anything you would normally type, except this time you can use your voice. The craziest part about it? It sounds nearly indistinguishable from a real human being. It’s almost like having a robot friend on your phone, and it’s more advanced than Alexa and Siri.
Shameless Biden Will Double Down in His Fight to Censor Americans
President Joe Biden is pitching himself as democracy’s savior: “I will always defend, protect and fight for our democracy.” He’s been saying it for four years. It’s a blatant lie. He’s the king of censorship, silencing his critics like a despot and even trying to defend his censorship regime before the U.S. Supreme Court.
He and his staff have masterminded a vast censorship scheme, coercing media platforms such as X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook and YouTube to take down views that challenge the administration on everything from vaccine safety and gas prices to Biden family mischief.
This month, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the Biden White House to stop threatening and coercing social media executives to do what the federal government is constitutionally barred from doing on its own: censoring the public. Undeterred, Team Biden has gone to the Supreme Court to fight this limit on censorship.
The evidence shows Biden threatened the social media platforms with punitive regulations, such as repealing liability immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and enforcing antitrust rules if the companies didn’t do his bidding.
Kids and Teens Are Inundated With Phone Prompts Day and Night
A new report about kids and their smartphone use may offer other parents a warning: Children like fourteen-year-old Armita Mojazza of White Plains, New York, are inundated with hundreds of pings and prompts on their phones all day and all night — even when they should be paying attention in class or getting a good night’s rest.
New research Common Sense Media released Tuesday finds about half of 11- to 17-year-olds get at least 237 notifications on their phones every day. About 25% of them pop up during the school day, and 5% show up at night. In some cases, they get nearly 5,000 notifications in 24 hours. The pop-ups are almost always linked to alerts from friends on social media.
Dr. Benjamin Maxwell, the interim director of child and adolescent psychiatry at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, said he is “immensely concerned” by the findings.
Such a “highly stimulating environment” may affect kids’ “cognitive ability, attention span and memory during a time when their brains are still developing,” Maxwell said. “What are the long-term consequences? I don’t think we know.” Maxwell was not involved with the Common Sense report.
CIA Creating AI Tool to Sort Through Public Information: Report
The CIA is planning to unleash an artificial intelligence tool to give analysts better access to sort through vast amounts of public information, according to a Bloomberg report.
Randy Nixon, director of the CIA’s Open-Source Enterprise division, told the outlet that the ChatGPT-style tool will likely be used by all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies, like the National Security Agency (NSA), FBI, and various military agencies to find clues through primary information sources.
Mass gathering of information from U.S. agencies comes as China has pledged to become the global leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, which has raised concerns over its use of AI in several surveillance systems to track civilians within the nation and worldwide.
FBI Director Christopher Wray accused China in July of stealing “more of our personal and corporate data than every nation big or small, combined,” warning that the Chinese government poses a “double” threat regarding AI, according to The Register.
Earlier this year, Bloomberg reported that NSA Research Director Gil Herrera said the intelligence community needs to “find a way to take benefit of these large models without violating privacy.”
The Government’s New Attack on Amazon Could Completely Restructure the Giant
The U.S. government is launching its most consequential attack on the dominance of Big Tech in Americans’ daily lives: a sweeping antitrust lawsuit targeting retail giant Amazon Inc.
The legal challenge, filed in a federal court in Washington State Tuesday, will be a defining cornerstone of the Biden administration’s pledge to curb the power of the nation’s largest tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Apple, which have been accused of running modern monopolies that don’t fit within the confines of antiquated antitrust laws.
The suit could have far-reaching implications for the way Americans shop, run their households, sell products, and run small and large businesses.
J&J, IBM Face Class-Action Lawsuit Over Patient Data Breach
As if the talc product liability lawsuits weren’t enough headache for Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey pharma is now facing another lawsuit from patients, this time about a recent data breach.
J&J and IBM were hit with a proposed class action over a recent data breach at J&J’s patient assistance program, Janssen CarePath, which is managed by IBM.
A Florida resident alleged that the companies failed to properly protect personal identity and health information up to industry standards or as required by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, according to a complaint filed with the federal court in the Southern District of New York.
Besides a class-action designation and a jury trial, the lawsuit is seeking an award of damages, among several other demands for J&J and IBM to purge existing personal information and improve their data security.
