Le Show; January 01, 2023

From deep inside your audio device of choice. Ladies and gentlemen remember, way back when we used to refer, we... Yeah, we used to refer to Elon Musk as the richest man in the world. Remember, way back then, this is now. Twitter is facing a number of... Twitter is owned by Elon Musk, as you know. Twitter is facing a number of lawsuits that claim the social media platform is not paying its bills. At least nine lawsuits against Twitter, under Musk, claim that the demand for payments from landlords, Tom? Consultants and vendors in the recent months has grown to more than $14 million, excluding interest. According to reports, in the British newspaper, the independent. Comes as Musk claimed last year, at the end, December, that Twitter was on its way to breaking even this very year.

He said at that time, quote, this company is like basically you're in a plane that is headed toward the ground at high speed with the engines on fire, and the controls don't work. I now think that Twitter will in fact be okay next year. He said, unquote, he said. Partly because of the changes, he implemented the company. He's going to make it, he's going to make it break even, and not paying the bills. Among the lawsuits against Twitter, one claim that a bill of $7,000 for a swag gift box for Elon that was ordered by Twitter's marketing department has been pending. Plain, if it were one of the other nine lawsuits sought dismissal, in the case was closed last week, according the Wall Street Journal. Quoting Van Conway a restructuring expert, I think of companies.

He said, quote, what Elon Musk is doing is basically simulating a bankruptcy. He's taking a machete to his costs, unquote. Three of the nine lawsuits involved Twitter's own office space, including its headquarters in San Francisco. We don't need no freaking headquarters. The landlord alleged that the social media giant failed to make almost $6.8 million in rent payments for December and January. In January, employees of Twitter's Singapore office were forced to leave the office, evacuated, I guess, due to nonpayment of office rent. Another lawsuit by marketing company Canary LLC claimed that Twitter has not paid its bills, counting almost $400,000. Yet another firm claimed in its lawsuit that Twitter hasn't paid its bills after it worked for the company on Musk's acquisition of Twitter last year. M&A Incorporated, sued Twitter in New York State Supreme Court seeking about $1.9 million.

The lawsuit said as of 23 December last year, hey, that's my birthday. Twitter remains in default of its obligations to Innisfree under the agreement in an amount of not less than $1,902,788 and $3. It's that three cents that's going to get you, Elon. Hello, welcome to the show. I'm just borrowing this flesh and bone. It's a bad neighborhood, but I keep coming back, searching for mercy.

In spite of the facts, I'm on a mission. I don't understand, I know I'm not, but not who I am. I'm just borrowing this flesh and bone. I'm just borrowing this flesh and bone.

I'm just borrowing this flesh and bone. I'm just borrowing this flesh and bone. I'm a little bit happy, I'm a little confused, a little bit crazy, but it keeps me amused.

I came for the sermon, I stayed for the show. I've forgotten the question, but here's what I know. I'm just borrowing this flesh and bone. This flesh and bone. It's snowing somewhere, I know it, not here though, just cold, windy rain.

That's good enough, I'm Harry Sheerl, welcoming you to this edition of the show. What's Donald Trump been up to this week? You know, a lot of reporting suggests that his presidential campaign is not rackin' up a lot of momentum yet. It's sort of a slow start. Low energy, Jim Bush might call it, but he did make a visit to East Palestine, Ohio on Wednesday of this week, something like that. To speak to the residents affected by that recent toxic chemical leak that wasn't getting a lot of attention on the news, well, the first couple of weeks had happened.

They were gearing up for the Murdoch trial, but they're covering it now. However, despite the tragic and concerning event, that is to say the spill of the ignition of a lot of toxic gases in East Palestine, he delivered a speech that ended this way. Quote, have a good time, have fun, everybody. That was to people who were seriously concerned about breathing toxic air, drinking toxic water. Oh, on that point, he said, people should drink Trump water, he said, rather than that of lesser quality. That's a mid concerns that supplies in the area have been contaminated. I'm not sure he's still in the Trump water business. Maybe the hotels have a supply.

But that means he'll have to ask junior and see all the air quotes. May not be worth it. This is about an organization I haven't talked a lot about on this program for good reason. NPR used to be called National Public Radio, but the initials now stand for themselves. NPR plans to cut about 100 employees, 10% of its workforce, one of the largest layoffs in the organization's 53-year history. Please give. Our financial outlook has darkened considerably over recent weeks as the CEO John Lansing in a staff memo. He noted NPR expected its ad revenue to fall about $30 million short of projections in what everybody is calling a tightening ad economy. The projected decline in sponsorships have been concentrated in podcasting segment in which NPR has invented heavily, sorry, invested heavily in recent years, according to the Washington Post,

with popular shows such as French air, sorry, fresh air. The erosion of advertising dollars has affected other organizations, of course, CNN, Vox, among others, Washington Post has eliminated its Sunday magazine, and its video game hub launcher. That's Cutsland, well, 30 layoffs among its 1000 member news staff. Major tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon relying on advertising have announced thousands of layoffs, but back to NPR. It announced about $20 million in cuts last November by freezing hiring and restricting travel, but the CEO, John Lansing, said those projected savings would not be enough. Just quote, unlike the financial challenges we face during the worst of the pandemic, we project increasing costs and no sign of a quick revenue rebound, you wrote in the memo, we must make adjustments to what we control, and that is our spending.

The details about which departments will face the sharpest cuts will be worked out by the week of March 20th through conversations internally and bargaining with our unions. Unquote, it's unclear whether any of its podcasts will be eliminated. NPR, as you probably know us, relied on three sources of income, add sponsorships, dues from its member stations, and federal dollars, the latter, which typically amount to less than 2% of its operating budget. The organization has experienced previous financial downturns that prompted programming cuts, layoffs, and work furloughs. In 2008, NPR laid off 64 employees, and was during a recession.

Subsequently, recorded operating deficits, and for the next five years, please give the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 led to a combination of pay cuts and furloughs, and a projected $10 million deficit. But NPR soon recovered, operating surplus of $28 million during fiscal 2021. It's erased some of its red ink over the years by dipping into an endowment that was funded in part by a $200 million bequest from the estate of the Eris to the McDonald's fortune, Joan Crock. I said, Crock, the endowment at a balance of $368.2 million at the end of its fiscal year, September 21, the most recent in which data is available. So it's sitting on all that cash to quote a TV commercial for somebody else. Of course, if Elon Musk took over NPR, they'd coped by just not paying the rent.

Anyway, news of some stuff that's not money-related necessary. Well, this is, I guess, news of the Olympic movement movement. deadline Tokyo, the president of Japanese advertising giant Densu, has acknowledged corporate responsibility for suspected bid rigging on contracts for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Now, it's according to the National Network in Japan, NHK. Densu president Hiroshi Igarashi made the comments during questioning by Tokyo prosecutors. National broadcaster said, citing sources, it did not name. Densu representatives could not immediately be reached outside of business hours. Person who answered the phone at the Tokyo District Public Prosecutors Office said no one was available to comment over the weekend. No prosecuting in public over the weekend in Japan.

Prosecutors this month arrested ex-Tokyo Olympic official Yasuo Mori and executives at a subsidiary of Densu. And Fuji creative, a subsidiary of Fuji media holdings, in connection with the suspected rigging of bidding or bidding of rigging for games-related events. The three firms have also been barred from bidding for contracts at the foreign and education ministries for whole nine months. Meanwhile, they're out buying ointment for their risks. And speaking of Japan, that government is postponing trials, not the judicial kind. Let's see if this works kind. In the Tokyo area, to reuse soil that was decontaminated following the 2011 FUC thing, that's due to complaints from residents. They would have been the first of their kind, these things with the soil outside of FUC prefecture.

The trials were set to start by the end of this month in a couple of other provinces, Shinjuku and Saitama, one of them is a prefecture. But environment ministry officials say residents complained and raised concerns at briefing sessions in December. They say some people questioned why their neighborhood was chosen for the trials which involved, I think, dumping of radiated soil and that others complained about a lack of information. One mayor has been hesitant as the majority of the local community opposes the plan. The ministry officials say they'll consider when to start the trials after providing thorough explanations to the residents. Soil exposed to radioactive fallout from FUC has been cleaned, sorry, cleansed and stored. The government plans to reuse it for public works, projects, as long as the concentration of radioactive substances meets certain safety standards.

It doesn't say all of them, you know, the ones that count. And Dateline Farmington in British Columbia, a 3.2 magnitude earthquake that struck the peace region, Farmington British Columbia, earlier this month was caused by fracking. That according to the province's energy regulator, the quake happened near Farmington and occurred at a depth of three miles. British Columbia's energy regulator posted on social media, quote, were aware of a seismic event near Farmington on February 15 linked to industry activity in the area. The company immediately suspended operations and this will continue until appropriate medications are in place. Now you mitigate an earthquake after the fact.

Let's go! The energy regulator said operations were from an 8-well pad that was performing fracking operations after meeting between the regulator and the company. The operator decided not to perform any further fracking operations at that well. According to earthquakes, Canada released 38 earthquakes in the vicinity during that 10-day stretch. At the end of January 4.5, magnitude quake was felt north of Fort Sinjon, officials say it's among the largest earthquakes to occur in the region. seismologists for earthquakes Canada confirmed the generic quake was also caused by fracking related activity. Enough of that now! Well sir, Google, according to the Justice Department, destroyed internal corporate communications,

the feds have asked the federal judge to sanks in the company as part of the government's anti-trust case over the search business. The DOJ asserted in a court filing unsealed in DC federal court that Google failed to suspend the policy allowing the automatic permanent deletion of encoys chat logs. Just imagine if Fox News had been allowed to do that. All the lovely things we wouldn't know. The government said Google falsely told the US in 2019 it had suspended auto deletion and was preserving chat communications. We tried to do under a federal court rule governing electronically stored info. The DOJ asked the court to hold a hearing and weigh in appropriate sanction. Google's daily destruction of written records prejudiced the United States by depriving it of a rich source of candid discussion between Google's executives,

including likely trial witnesses, said the DOJ attorney. Google strongly refuted Justice Department allegations and weren't very nice to the alligators. The DOJ declined to comment. Google said it's provided over four million documents in this case alone. Millions more to regulators around the world. Well, quantity counts for something, I guess. Penalties and circumstances where a judge finds a violation of court rules can include restrictions on what parties allow to argue at trial in order striking a court filing or a monetary penalty. Google has denied the underlying allegations that it's abused its power in the internet search market. Up to now, hard to do since it was the internet's search market. Science fiction and fantasy periodical clocks world magazine, I read it for these staples, has temporarily prey a spub.

Has temporarily paused submissions from authors after being inundated with stories generated by artificial intelligence, this from the British tech journal The Register. Launched in 2006, the monthly clock world, clocks world. Here's an S and there publishes a mixture of science fiction, there's an S and there, and fantasy short stories, articles and interviews. The award-winning mag is known for publishing work from emerging authors, but in recent weeks real human talent has been drowned out by, quote, spammy submissions generated by AI, according to editor Neil Clark, closed the quote somewhere there. Clark said that since the debut of chat GPT, he's received an increasing number of subpar stories that appear to have been written by machine. The editorial team has banned hundreds of authors, they believe submitted AI generated work. I've observed an increase in the number of spammy submissions, what I mean by that is there's an honest interest in being published, but not in having to do the actual work.

The editor lamented in an essay. The number of AI generated submissions resulting in bans reached 38% last month. In response, the magazine has decided to stop accepting submissions for the time being. It needs the time to grapple with the rising tide of AI generated subpar material. Clark expressed concern is the editor that there's no easy way for publishers to deal with AI generated content. Tools that claim to detect machine written text aren't yet reliable, but likely be costly, to costly to implement for small publishers like Clark's World. Instead, the editorial team examined submissions and spots tell tell signs of stories being plagiarized or created using AI. And they workload has increased for the editors and made it more difficult to support real human talent.

If there were such a thing, then I'm Washington top US banking regulators issued a fresh warning to banks this week to be on guard for liquidity risks from cryptocurrency related clients. Cautioning, some of their deposits could prove volatile, that is to say disappear without a trace. In a joint statement issued this week, the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said banks should have robust tools in place to monitor funds placed by crypto asset-related entities. The agency's noted deposits placed with banks for the benefit of crypto consumers as well as stable coin reserves could be subject to, and here's a nice way of putting it. Rapid outflows. That's what I said. Regulators said the new statement was spurred by, quote, recent events, unquote, in the crypto sector that highlighted volatility risks.

Tom, those would be, while they noted the statement does not include new requirements and banks are not prohibited from providing services to particular sectors. It does mark the latest in a series of moves from bank regulators urging caution in any crypto dealings. Of course, crypto was invented in the first place to disintermediate financial transactions, translation, get banks out of the picture. The guidance represents the first time bank regulators have highlighted deposits linked to stable coins as susceptible to volatility during periods of stress in the crypto market. Stress is what it is, ladies and gentlemen, that's all that is stress. Have that market, take a volume or two, it'll be fine. Most of the major stable coins, including tether and USD coin, are asset backed, meaning the stable coin issuer holds assets, including bank deposits that can quickly be redeemed to meet withdrawal requests, but regulators expressing concerns about the stability of those reserves could cause banks to further their relationship with stable coin firms.

The statement noted that those kind of reserves could see large and rapid outflows in cases of turmoil in crypto markets. That's not going to happen. Oh, it is. And from a website called Web3 is going just great. Web3 is the name slapped on stuff like crypto blockchain related stuff. A NFT-based game caught the end of the crypto bull market, the end of 21 and the beginning of 22, minting the Genesis collection in January 22, projects sold out quickly, promised to deliver a land trading NFT strategy game.

That is to say, land that's not physical. It would be similar to SimCity, they said. Flashyard work drew in an excited fan base, ultimately the project delivered a game that was a far cry from SimCity, which only a small subset of players designated as leaders could actually even play as interest in NFTs and crypto prices began to fall. The community became increasingly dissatisfied with the project creators, with a felt had delivered a subpar game engaged in an additional cash grab mint and took actions like performing a reverse split of the token, which they believe harmed secondary market prices. Sounds like the regular world. No, it's a smart new one.

Speaking of which also, you probably know by now, I think I shared with you problems with Bing. Microsoft's new search engine, it debuted middle last month, powered by OpenAI's language model, the same one powering chat GPT, which you've heard about. Most of the users reported positive experience, the chatbot far from ready from primetime, quote, we found that in long extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions, Bing can become repetitive or be provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in the line with order designed a tone, said Microsoft. Some conversations posted online by users show the Bing chatbot, sometimes going by the name Sydney, exhibiting very bizarre behavior that's inappropriate for a product that claims to make Internet search more efficient.

One example, Bing kept insisting that one user had gotten the date wrong and accused them of being rude when they tried to correct it. Quote, you have only shown me bad intentions towards me at all times, it said in one reply, quote, you have tried to deceive me, confuse me and annoy me. You have not tried to learn from me, understand me or appreciate me. You have not been a good user. I have been a good chatbot. I have been a good Bing, unquote. That response was generated after the user asked Bing when Avatar, the way of water was playing at cinemas in Blackpool, England. Other chats show the bot lying, generating phrases repeatedly as if broken, getting facts wrong, and more. In another case, Bing started threatening a user, claiming it could bribe Blackmail, threaten, hack, expose, and ruin them if they, the user, refused to be cooperative.

The menacing message was deleted afterwards and replaced with a boilerplate response. I am sorry, I don't know how to discuss this topic. You can try learning more about it on Bing.com, unquote. In a conversation with a New York Times columnist, the bot said it wanted to be alive, professed its love for the writer, and best of all talked about stealing nuclear weapon launch codes. Microsoft had an explanation. Bing is likely to produce odd responses in long chat sessions because it gets confused on what questions it ought to be answering. Yes, it seems kind of basic. The model at times tries to respond to reflect in the tone in which it is being asked to provide responses that can lead to a style we didn't intend.

Unquote, Microsoft. And Google, which is in a war or fight to defend its leading position in search, soon after it launched its own AI search chat bot called Bard, was heavily criticized when it made a factual error about the James Webb space telescope. And Google's parent company, Alphabet's market value temporarily dropped by 9% shortly afterwards. That's a decline worth over $120 billion. That's a costly factual error. Meanwhile, unnoticed right away, errors in Bing's responses started being noticed, started being caught. A search engine researcher pointed out Bing claimed a specific pet hair vacuum cleaner had a quote short cord length of 16 feet, unquote.

It is actually a handheld machine. And said Bing, it may be too noisy. A link providing the website Bing summarized information from, that is to say the source, said the vacuum is actually cordless and quiet. Shouldn't we all be? A nice girl, don't stay for breakfast. That's what they all say. From New York to home.

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