Monday, January 01, 2024

· Early in 2023, Donald Trump clearly thought he had a winning issue with stocks. A regular part of his message was to claim President Biden was market poison ...

America’s economy will be wiped out if Joe Biden stays in power, the former president has claimed

Former US President Donald Trump has warned that the national economy will completely collapse if he does not return to the White House next year. He described the grim scenario in a post on his Truth Social platform on Friday.

“The stock market is only high because people… expect me to win the presidential election of 2024,” Trump wrote in all caps. “If I don’t win, it is my prediction that we will have a stock market ‘crash’ worse than that of 1929 – a Great Depression!!!”

“The only thing that is keeping the economy ‘alive’ is the fumes of what we accomplished during the Trump administration,” he stated.

He added that, under President Joe Biden’s watch, high inflation has “totally destroyed the buying power of the consumer.”

Trump argued that the Biden administration’s official inflation statistics, which show prices have risen by about 17% since his inauguration in 2021, were underestimating the real figure by nearly half, referencing an older method of measuring the phenomenon that placed it over 30%.
Inflation surged to a 40-year high under Biden, though it has since declined.

Americans running out of savings – JPMorgan

The 1929 stock market crash kicked off an economic death spiral that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average lose 89% of its value over three years, a slump it would not fully recover from until two decades later after World War II helped boost the recovery of the US economy. The crash was triggered by several factors, including rampant speculation and Federal Reserve rate hikes.

Biden’s approval rating among prospective voters has plumbed new depths over the last month. A recent Monmouth University poll found just 34% of voters viewed his performance favorably.
Despite the insistence of the White House that the nation’s finances are robust and healthy, credit card debt among US consumers hit a historic high last month, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and JP Morgan analysts revealed earlier this month that any extra savings Americans had accumulated during the Covid-19 pandemic had been wiped out for all but 1% of the population.

A survey conducted in May found nearly four in ten Americans lacked enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense.

At the same time, the S&P 500 is approaching an all-time high, and the Dow Jones recently broke its own record.

“ The Inventory ” offers an unsettling vision of the future:

FOR JOURNALISTS WHO work — or used to work — at G/O Media, the disclaimer at the bottom of numerous articles on the company’s e-commerce site, The Inventory, offers an unsettling vision of the future: “This article was generated by an AI engine which may produce inaccurate information.”

That warning appears on every article credited to “The Inventory Bot,” a highly productive virtual employee with its byline on 10 articles published on December 14th alone.

“It’s absolutely the most inane way to announce that your article is trash, like pure garbage,” says a former G/O writer who lost their job in a recent round of human-employee layoffs.
“There’s no thought process going on behind this except, ‘we want as many articles on our site as possible as quickly as possible. And we don’t give a shit about the content.'”
(A G/O spokesperson emphasizes that The Inventory “is an e-commerce site, separate and apart from our other editorial properties.”)
The former G/O writer doesn’t blame the advent of AI for his own layoff, but there have been some job losses at the company due to automation: The entire staff of Gizmodo en Español was replaced by a years-old translation tool in August, according to the spokesperson.

G/O Media at least labels its robo-content. A more venerable brand, Sports Illustrated, became the face of AI-journalism calamity in recent weeks after publishing what were reported to be AI-written articles attributed to nonexistent people, complete with AI-generated headshots.

(The articles came from a third-party company, Advon Commerce. SI’s parent company, Arena Group, says the vendor told them the articles were human-written, albeit with fake bylines and photos.
The outlet Futurism, which broke the news about the articles, quoted a newsroom source insisting at least some of the text was AI-generated, as well.)
Four Arena Group executives, including the CEO, Ross B. Levinsohn, were fired after the scandal, though an Arena Group spokesperson says the timing was coincidental and related to ownership changes. . .

Rolling Stone

Sports Illustrated, G/O Media and the Future of News Media and AI

“Journalism is going to change more in the next three or five years than it has in the last 30 years.”

david caswell, storyflow ltd. founder

“People generally overestimate what the system can do now and underestimate what it can do in 10 years,” says Infobot’s Harvey.

“People probably overestimate what it can do now by 20% or something, and they underestimate what it’s gonna be able to do in the future by 10,000 percent.

But probably most people can’t even begin to grapple with the concept of where this is going. ”