Sunday, May 7, 2023

And another day of massacres, death tolls, where ‘everything is on the table,’ AI picking better stocks than brokers, over-the-counter birth control pills, schools starting later to improve kids’ mental health, and the SATs comes to a close:

“America is fucking broken.” — Mayo

What we know about the slain Texas mall massacre suspect, Mauricio Garcia. The gunman who killed at least eight people and wounded a half-dozen more at a Dallas-area outlet mall was a 33-year-old suspected neo-Nazi sympathizer, two senior law enforcement officials said Sunday.

This is the 199th mass shooting this year, third on Saturday. The attack in Allen is one of at least 199 mass shootings in the US this year, in which four or more people have been shot, excluding a gunman, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

Death toll increases to 8 after car plows into a crowd in front of a Texas shelter that was housing migrants. A driver plowed into a group outside a shelter that had been housing migrants in a Texas border town on Sunday, leaving eight people dead – including several immigrants – and close to a dozen injured, authorities say.

Senate Judiciary chair says ‘everything is on the table’ in response to Clarence Thomas revelations. “The thing we’re going to do first, obviously, is to gather the evidence, the information that we need to draw our conclusions. I’m not ruling out anything,” he added. -- Mmm hmm. We’ll see.

Clarence Thomas Is How the Conservative Legal Movement Works. But this is not just a story about conflicts of interest and ethics and the importance of strong male friendships. The half-baked justifications, and the people who rally around them, are a kind of blueprint, too, for the way this whole world operates. The modern conservative legal movement is, in the simplest sense, about finding a way to the outcomes its proponents want. Over the last 40 years or so, that movement has often couched those outcomes in the lofty idea of “originalism,” arguing that Federalist Society jurists were applying a rigorous, almost-scientific rubric to settling legal questions in a judicious manner. It was useful, both as a branding exercise and as a vehicle—it turns out that you can get a lot of modernity thrown out just by setting as a baseline the writings of 15th-century exorcists. But the outcomes were always the point, and the philosophy of interpretation was a pretext to reinterpret what they wanted: An entirely new Second Amendment; a very old and enfeebled administrative state. That was what brought all those activists, donors, and strategists together. There is not really an originalist position on a mandatory federal financial disclosure form. But to watch Thomas and his friends defend his novel understanding of transparency—to listen to increasingly convoluted efforts to explain why a gift is not a gift (and by the way, thanks again)—is to see the conservative legal movement for the mercenary program that it is.

WHO says Covid-19 is no longer a global health emergency. There have been more than 765 million confirmed Covid-19 cases since the start of the pandemic, according to WHO data. Nearly 7 million people have died. Europe has had the most confirmed cases overall, but the Americas have reported the most deaths. About 1 in 6 total deaths have been in the US…Now, Covid-19 cases and deaths are about the lowest they’ve been in three years. Still, more than 3,500 people died in the last week of April and billions remain unvaccinated.

TurboTax customers to receive checks for $141M settlement. Consumers eligible for restitution payments do not need to file a claim, the New York Attorney’s General Office said Thursday. They will be notified by an email from Rust Consulting, the settlement fund administrator, and receive a check automatically.

ChatGPT can pick stocks better than your fund manager. A basket of stocks selected by ChatGPT, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence (AI), has far outperformed some of the most popular investment funds in the United Kingdom. Between March 6 and April 28, a dummy portfolio of 38 stocks gained 4.9% while 10 leading investment funds clocked an average loss of 0.8%, according to an experiment conducted by financial comparison site finder.com.

FDA considering first over-the-counter birth control pill. Advisers to the Food and Drug Administration will meet next week to review drugmaker Perrigo's application to sell a decades-old pill over the counter. The two-day public meeting is one of the last steps before an FDA decision.

To improve kids’ mental health, some schools start later. It’s a welcome shift from last year for him and thousands of students at the school, which pushed its start time back by more than two hours — from a 7:30 a.m. start time to 9:45 a.m. One goal for the change: to ease strains on students that were more visible than ever coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The SATs are: a) dying; b) already dead; c) alive and well; d) here forever. Even as the SAT and its chief rival, the ACT, have become less important in admissions, they are becoming more universal for a different purpose: as a measure of high school achievement. More and more high schools have turned to the SATs and ACTs as their standard assessment tool for their students’ progress, entirely separate from the college admissions process. The result is a standardized testing landscape that has been shaken up, and whose future looks murky, at best.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.