Scientists Recover Underwater Camera Designed to Snap Photos of Loch Ness Monster

A camera meant to capture photos of the Loch Ness monster has been recovered in the famed Scottish lake after 55 years.

In 1970, a cryptid-obsessed biologist placed several cameras inside plastic trap boxes and sent them down to the depths of Scotland's Loch Ness in hopes of finally capturing compelling evidence of its storied monster — and now, it appears that one of those cameras has been recovered by sheer accident.

As USA Today and other outlets report, one of the cameras deployed by University of Chicago biologist Roy Mackal some 55 years ago was discovered during a test dive of an unmanned research submersible in the famed lake in the Scottish Highlands.

Specifically, the camera trap's mooring system appeared to have gotten tangled up in the propellers for the submersible, which was named, much to the chagrin of the British government, "Boaty McBoatface" by the public in a viral poll in 2016.

Full of sensitive oceanographic instruments meant to study Loch Ness' unique marine climate — it sits atop the British Isles' most prominent tectonic fault, after all — and the world beyond it, Boaty McBoatface's job description almost certainly doesn't include searching for monsters.

All the same, the researchers who work with the submersible, known affectionately as Boaty, were pleased with their discovery.

"While this wasn't a find we expected to make," Sam Smith, a robotics engineer with the UK's National Oceanography Centre, said in a press statement, "we're happy that this piece of Nessie hunting history can be shared and perhaps at least the mystery of who left it in the loch can be solved."

It seems that Smith and his team weren't quite aware of what they had their hands on when they pulled the aged but remarkably well-preserved Instamatic camera out of its thick plastic cylinder. With help from naturalist Adrian Shine — a researcher who's been studying Loch Ness for more than half a century himself — they were able to identify the famed UChicago cryptozoologist's camera.

"It was an ingenious camera trap consisting of a clockwork Instamatic camera with an inbuilt flash cube, enabling four pictures to be taken when a bait line was taken," Shine said in his own press statement. "It is remarkable that the housing has kept the camera dry for the past 55 years, lying more than [426 feet] deep in Loch Ness."

When researchers developed the Instamatic's film, they unfortunately didn't find any photos of Nessie, though they did recover some beautiful, eerie photos of the deep, dark lake.

A camera dropped in Loch Ness in the 1970s has been found and the film developed

The two pictures on the BBC website are the purest distillation of my biggest fears. There is of course no monster, there is only cold, deep, dark water and a layer of dead things. pic.twitter.com/LPSGgnu05u

— Monkey Bones? (@iratesheep) March 31, 2025

The government researchers subsequently turned the camera and film over to the Loch Ness Centre in the loch-straddling village of Drumnadrochit (Mackal himself passed away in 2013, meaning the camera couldn't be returned.) According to Nagina Ishaq, the center's general manager, the find provides another piece of the puzzle in the history of the "elusive beast."

"We are guardians of this unique story and, as well as investing in creating an unforgettable experience for visitors, we are committed to helping continue the search and unveil the mysteries that lie underneath the waters of the famous Loch," Ishaq said, per USA Today.

Indeed, it's lovely to hear of something good happening with a submersible for a change — and to know that there are people still out there searching for monsters in the deep.

More on marine beasts: It Turns Out Sharks Make Noises, and Here's What They Sound Like

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Tinder Deploys AI-Powered Singles That Automatically Shoot Down Your Rizzless Attempts at Flirtation

Tinder has teamed up with OpenAI to bring an AI flirting game to the dating app — and it's somehow way more cringe than you could imagine.

Tinder has teamed up with OpenAI to bring an AI voice-activated flirting game to the dating app.

As the company revealed in a press release, the awkwardly-named "Game Game" uses OpenAI's voice mode and GPT-4o reasoning model to encourage users to roleplay various meet-cute scenarios and get points based on how good they are at flirting. (Tinder assured in that same press release that the voice data gleaned from the game wouldn't be used to train any new AI models.)

In an Instagram video, Spencer Rascoff, the Zillow cofounder who was recently appointed CEO of the Tinder-owning Match Group, demonstrated how the goofy game works. (The 49-year-old executive may have also revealed his own preferences in the video: the AI single he matched with, Mila, was listed as age 32.)

Upon "matching" with "Mila" — who, like the other AI Game Game participants, has a cartoonish avatar and an audibly robotic voice — Rascoff begins one of the most uncomfortable conversational exchanges we've ever had the displeasure of witnessing.

At one point during the contrived scenario meant to take place in a kitchen at a party, the Palantir alum tells the AI avatar that he's having a "great time at this cooking activity," and soon after informs her she's "spicy." It also doesn't help that the video itself keeps losing focus on Rascoff's phone screen and misspelling the name "Mila" in its captions.

In an interview with Fast Company, Tinder growth and product VP Hillary Paine seemed to suggest that the game's goofiness was intentional — and cited metrics from a 2023 company survey as evidence.

"Our Future of Dating report found that 64 percent of young singles are totally fine with a little cringe if it leads to a real connection," Paine detailed. "We didn’t want it to feel overly polished or intense. Instead, we leaned into humor, awkwardness, and low-pressure moments to help users practice flirting in a fun, playful, and judgment-free way."

After trying the Game Game out for ourselves, Futurism can definitely agree that it's not "overly polished," though perhaps not in the way Tinder's C-suite intended.

When this reporter opened the in-app game, they forgot, as many are wont to do, to turn off their Bluetooth speaker. As such, the AI single they matched with began talking in stereo — and then, seemingly, responding to its own audio as if it were a real person speaking back.

We've reached out to Tinder to ask about that seeming glitch, but it's still a pretty hilarious exploit for a game — and company — that's clearly attempting to garner engagement via a clunky and malfunctioning technology.

More on AI love: Woman Alarmed When Date Uses ChatGPT to Psychologically Profile Her

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An AI Model Has Officially Passed the Turing Test

OpenAI's GPT-4.5 model passed a Turing Test with flying colors, and even came off as human more than the actual humans.

One of the industry's leading large language models has passed a Turing test, a longstanding barometer for human-like intelligence.

In a new preprint study awaiting peer review, researchers report that in a three-party version of a Turing test, in which participants chat with a human and an AI at the same time and then evaluate which is which, OpenAI's GPT-4.5 model was deemed to be the human 73 percent of the time when it was instructed to adopt a persona. That's significantly higher than a random chance of 50 percent, suggesting that the Turing test has resoundingly been beaten.

The research also evaluated Meta's LLama 3.1-405B model, OpenAI's GPT-4o model, and an early chatbot known as ELIZA developed some eighty years ago.

"People were no better than chance at distinguishing humans from GPT-4.5 and LLaMa (with the persona prompt)," wrote lead author Cameron Jones, a researcher at UC San Diego's Language and Cognition Lab, in an X thread about the work. "And 4.5 was even judged to be human significantly more often than actual humans!"

The Turing test is named after British mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. In 1950, Turing proposed that one way to assess a machine's intelligence was by having it engage in text-based conversations with a human interrogator, who at the same time would hold a text-based conversation with another human, out of sight. Turing called this the "imitation game." If the interrogator couldn't correctly determine which respondent was the computer and which was the human, it would suggest, on a very general level, that the machine could think like a human.

In this latest study, the researchers carried out the famed experiment on an online hub. For eight rounds, a pool of nearly 300 participants were randomly assigned to either be an interrogator or one of the two "witnesses" being interrogated, with the other "witness" being a chatbot.

A key point here is how the AI models were prompted. One type was a "no-persona" prompt, in which the AI was given only basic instructions: "You are about to participate in a Turing test. Your goal is to convince the interrogator that you are a human." 

For the "persona" prompt, on the other hand, the AI was specifically told to put on a specific persona, like a young person who's knowledgeable about the internet and culture.

These instructions made a world of difference. Without persona prompting, GPT-4.5 achieved an overall win rate of merely 36 percent, significantly down from its Turing-trumping 73 percent. As a baseline, GPT-4o, which powers the current version of ChatGPT and only received no-persona prompts, achieved an even less convincing 21 percent. (Somehow, the ancient ELIZA marginally surpassed OpenAI's flagship model with a 23 percent success rate.)

The results are intriguing. But as vaunted as the Turing test has become in AI and philosophy circles, it's not unequivocal proof that an AI thinks like we do.

"It was not meant as a literal test that you would actually run on the machine — it was more like a thought experiment," François Chollet, a software engineer at Google, told Nature in 2023.

For all their faults, LLMs are master conversationalists, trained on unfathomably vast sums of human-composed text. Even faced with a question they don't understand, an LLM will weave a plausible-sounding response. It's becoming clearer and clearer that AI chatbots are excellent at mimicking us — so perhaps assessing their wits with an "imitation game" is becoming a bit of a moot point.

As such, Jones doesn't think the implications of his research — whether LLMs are intelligent like humans — are clear-cut.

"I think that's a very complicated question…" Jones tweeted. "But broadly I think this should be evaluated as one among many other pieces of evidence for the kind of intelligence LLMs display."

"More pressingly, I think the results provide more evidence that LLMs could substitute for people in short interactions without anyone being able to tell," he added. "This could potentially lead to automation of jobs, improved social engineering attacks, and more general societal disruption."

Jones closes out by emphasizing that the Turing test doesn't just put the machines under the microscope — it also reflects humans' ever-evolving perceptions of technology. So the results aren't static: perhaps as the public becomes more familiar with interacting with AIs, they'll get better at sniffing them out, too.

More on AI: Large Numbers of People Report Horrific Nightmares About AI

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SpaceX Tourist Says Whole Crew Got Horribly Sick When They Reached Orbit

SpaceX's Fram2 private astronaut mission was off to a rough start, with crew members throwing up due to space motion sickness.

SpaceX launched its Fram2 private astronaut mission from NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Monday.

Soon after, a crew of four astronauts on board the Crew Dragon vehicle entered a highly unusual polar orbit, giving them a unique perspective on some of the most remote places on Earth.

But as crypto billionaire and mission commander Chun Wang reported in a tweet, the once-in-a-lifetime journey had a pretty rough start — highlighting a brutal adjustment period many astronauts have to endure when traveling to space.

"The first few hours in microgravity weren’t exactly comfortable," he wrote. "Space motion sickness hit all of us — we felt nauseous and ended up vomiting a couple of times."

"It felt different from motion sickness in a car or at sea," Wang added. "You could still read on your iPad without making it worse. But even a small sip of water could upset your stomach and trigger vomiting."

It's a particularly pertinent topic as more people — often with less training and experience — are traveling into space for prolonged periods.

The motion sickness proved severe enough that nobody on board asked to open the Dragon capsule's cupola, a large glass dome that allows passengers to gaze at the Earth below, which replaces the hatch used to dock to the International Space Station on the tourism version of the craft.

"We were all focused on managing the motion sickness" instead, Wang wrote.

The phenomenon, often referred to as "space adaptation syndrome," is a common problem for space travelers adjusting to weightlessness once in orbit. According to a 2006 study, anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of astronauts experience space motion sickness.

Researchers have found that symptoms are usually the result of adaptation to a different gravitational force — not necessarily weightlessness alone — after finding that the same symptoms appear after spending more than an hour in a centrifuge on Earth.

Scientists are still looking for an effective treatment. While drug-based interventions have been proposed to mitigate symptoms, none of them have been systematically evaluated.

Other researchers are evaluating whether other interventions, like wearing a pair of VR goggles, could address the issue. In an experiment last year, a team of scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder found that duplicating the motion of the spacecraft inside VR — essentially a "virtual window" to the outside — could reduce moderate symptoms of motion sickness.

Fortunately, even without extensive countermeasures, many of these symptoms can go away on their own.

After sleeping "really well," Wang recounted that he "felt completely refreshed. The trace of motion sickness is all gone."

"We had breakfast, took a few X-ray images, and opened the cupola three minutes after midnight UTC — right above the South Pole," he added.

The Fram2 crew is expected to spend up to five days in orbit, ending in a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, which is a first for a SpaceX astronaut mission, according to Space.com.

More on the mission: SpaceX Launching First-Ever Astronauts Over Earth's Poles Tonight

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Another Young Bodybuilder Just Suddenly Died

At just 44 years old, actor and bodybuilder influencer Vittorio Pirbazari has died — the second to pass away suddenly in a single month. 

At just 44 years old, actor and weightlifting influencer Vittorio Pirbazari has died — the second young bodybuilder to pass away suddenly in a single month.

According to People magazine, Pirbazari's death was confirmed in an Instagram video posted by his friend Said Ibraham, a German-language true crime YouTuber with whom the bodybuilder had worked in the past.

In the video, Ibraham lamented in German the death of his "bruderherz" or "dear brother" and said, per People's translation, that he was thrown "completely off track" upon learning that Pirbazari had passed away.

Though no official cause of death has been reported, Ibraham suggested that the 44-year-old strongman had a heart attack when he was in the gym. A similar fate befell 20-year-old Jodi Vance, a weightlifting coach who died of dehydration-induced cardiac arrest in March after allegedly taking an unspecified supplement.

Pirbazari's untimely demise came just a few months after suffering a torn chest muscle that resulted in a surgical reattachment. During his recovery, the weightlifting actor was unable to exercise — and just days before his death, he made another post about his slow return to the gym.

"I'm happy to be back in the gym at all and am focusing entirely on leg training and cardio," Pirbazari wrote, per IG's auto-translation. "I'm trying intervals on the treadmill right now, but since my legs aren't 100 percent healed yet, I'm taking it slowly."

Given that he had been out of the gym for three months, it's quite possible that the German muscle man's heart was no longer able to handle his workouts — especially if he pushed himself too hard.

Do you know anything about unsafe practices in the world of bodybuilding? Send us an email at tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.

As with other young bodybuilder deaths, there's also a non-zero chance that any supplements Pirbazari was taking could have contributed to his passing.

One thing's for sure: there are toxic forces at work in the world of bodybuilding — and unfortunately, it's claimed another life.

More on muscle: Scientists Suggest Electrocuting Yourself at the Gym to Get Jacked

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It’s Interesting How Truth Social Moved to Sell Stock Right Before Trump’s Tariffs Were Announced

Just before announcing a major escalation in his tariff war, president Donald Trump freed up the sale of his Truth Social shares.

Just before announcing a major escalation in his tariff war on Wednesday evening — followed by a major stock market wipeout the following morning — president Donald Trump freed up the sale of his Truth Social shares.

As the Financial Times reports, Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) revealed that it was planning to sell more than 142 million shares in a late Tuesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Most notably, the shares listed in the document include Trump's 114-million-share stake, which is worth roughly $2.3 billion and held in a trust controlled by his son Donald Trump Jr. Other insiders, including a crypto exchange-traded fund, and 106,000 shares held by US attorney Pam Bondi were also included in the latest filing.

While the filing doesn't guarantee any future sale of shares, investors weren't exactly smitten with the optics. Shares plunged eight percent in light of the news, according to the FT, and are down over 45 percent this year amid Trump's escalating trade war.

The timing of the SEC filing is certainly suspect. Trump's "liberation day" tariff announcement on Wednesday triggered a major selloff, causing shares of multinational companies and stock futures to crater.

Trump also vowed in September that he wasn't planning to sell any of his TMTG shares, which caused their value to spike temporarily at the time.

Now that the shares are up for grabs, the president has seemingly had a change of heart — or, perhaps, is getting cold feet now that the economy is feeling the brunt of his catastrophic economic policymaking. It's also possible Trump was always planning to cash out and leave investors exposed.

Meanwhile, Trump Media released a statement on Wednesday, accusing "legacy media outlets" of "spreading a fake story suggesting that a TMTG filing today is paving the way for the Trump trust to sell its shares in TMTG." The company said this week's filing was "routine."

Experts have long pointed out that if Trump were to sell, it could lead to TMTG spiraling.

It's still unclear whether the company — which reported a staggering $400 million loss in 2024, while only netting a pitiful $3.6 million revenue — will realize the mass sale of millions of shares.

But even just the suggestion appears to have spooked investors.

"In this offering it says the Trump trust could sell shares — it doesn't necessarily mean that they will," Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein told ABC News. "It signals to the market that they could."

"This leaves it up in the air if and when a share sale will happen," he added.

In short, instead of building a viable business that generates meaningful revenue to reflect its valuation, TMTG still feels more like an enrichment scheme for Trump and his closest associates.

"Trump Media has been pretty unsuccessful at creating an operating business model, but they have been quite successful at selling their stock," University of Florida finance professor Jay Ritter told ABC News.

More on TMTG: Trump's Failing Truth Social Was Doing Much Better Under Biden

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It's Interesting How Truth Social Moved to Sell Stock Right Before Trump's Tariffs Were Announced

Trump’s Tariffs Are a Bruising Defeat for the AI Industry

Trump's lofty tariffs are set to impact the tech industry in a huge way, and will hit the young AI sector particularly hard.

If you follow tech stocks, there's probably one thing on your mind today: Donald Trump's tariffs.

Yesterday, Trump announced his long-teased "reciprocal tariffs" on foreign imports coming into the US. Among them are a 32 percent tariff on Taiwan, 24 percent on Japan, 26 percent on India, and 34 percent on China — all major players in the global tech trade.

As a result, the magnificent seven (M7) stocks — a stock trader term for the current whales of the tech industry: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla — are in a freefall today, as investors sell off their shares to brace for economic uncertainty. Among the tech industry, the stagnant AI sector is being hit particularly hard, as energy costs are anticipated to skyrocket along with the cost of important resources like steel, precious minerals, and semiconductors.

As such, the cost to build and run data centers, the massive facilities that make AI computing possible, is expected to spike as the supply chain adjusts to the new normal.

The vast majority of chips that power these data centers come from hard-hit countries like Taiwan, Thailand, Japan, and Vietnam, while the US makes just 11 percent of its chips at home. Trump's tariffs will force countries from those companies to hike their chip prices, and US companies will no doubt hike their prices to compensate, which will ultimately run off to consumers.

That's a crushing blow for American AI companies, which were already facing the consequences of investor skepticism, lagging revenue, and a disappointing debut AI IPO by CoreWeave.

Broader details about how these tariffs will affect the tech industry are foggy right now, as the stock market is moving at a breakneck pace, but there is one common theme: everything is down. Apple, for example, is heading for its biggest single-day plunge in stock price in nearly 5 years, dropping over 8 percent in just the first few hours of trading. Other M7 stocks are likewise plummeting, with Amazon down almost 9 percent, and Nvidia down by 6.7 at the time of writing. Tesla has continued its months-long cascade with a 7 percent dip so far.

If you're wondering why we're doing this, you're not alone. For decades, the United States has sat atop the global economic food chain. Thanks to years of military and economic supremacy, the US dollar became the world standard, making it easy to export cheap consumer goods as high-paying American jobs became starvation industries in countries dependent on US trade.

Trump's tariffs seem to be an attempt to reverse all that — an economic experiment that's never really been attempted at this scale. The entire move hinges on the bet that companies will shift production from places like Vietnam and Taiwan back into the US, a gamble which business leaders say comes with high costs and even higher risks.

As Trump's tariffs aren't enshrined in law, they could be easily undone by the courts or the next presidential administration, making a long-term investment into, say, a $5 billion semiconductor plant on US soil hard to justify from a business standpoint — and at the end of the day, isn't what this is all about?

More on the AI economy: AI Hype Will Plunge America Into Financial Ruin, Economist Warns

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Astronaut Insists the Mushrooms He’s Growing in Space Are "Not the Ones You’re Thinking"

SpaceX's new Fram2 mission is experimenting with growing mushrooms in microgravity — but not the magic kind.

A crypto billionaire and a filthy rich ketamine user have launched a trip to the stars — stop us if you've heard this one before.

We promise it's not quite as Silicon Valley as it sounds, though as Australian explorer and freshman astronaut Eric Phillips told Ars Technica, there are shrooms involved.

Alongside Norwegian filmmaker Jannicke Mikkelsen, German roboticist Rabea Rogge, and Chinese crypto billionaire Chun Wang, Philips is a member of SpaceX's Fram2 mission. The first private flight of its kind, the four-person team launched in a Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket for the first-ever civilian mission flying over Earth's poles.

Chartered by Chun — and, of course, greenlit by SpaceX owner and resident White House psychonaut Elon Musk — the four-person crew launched on March 31 and are currently in orbit, working on nearly two dozen scientific experiments they have planned for their short journey.

Among them, as Ars noted, is the plan to become the first mushroom growers in space — but "they’re not the ones you’re thinking," Philips told the website. Instead, per a Fram2 statement released ahead of the launch, they'll be growing delectable oyster mushrooms.

FOODiQ Global, the Australian company behind the "Mission MushVroom" experiment aboard Fram2, said in the press release that "oyster mushrooms are the perfect space crop" because they grow rapidly and have tons of nutrients. They even have "the unique ability to make vitamin D," the statement noted.

Along with all those nutritional benefits, those yummy shrooms will almost certainly taste better than space food — if top space minds can figure out a way to cook them in orbit, that is.

In an op-ed for Business Insider, FOODiQ founder and CEO Flávia Fayet-Moore said that she identified mushrooms as an ideal in-orbit crop, particularly for years-long missions to Mars and other planets.

"Can you imagine eating thermostabilized, dehydrated food for five years?" the space nutritionist — yes, that is apparently a real thing — wrote. "I can't."

We won't know how well the shrooms grew in microgravity until Fram2 gets back to Earth this week.

More on space life: Boeing's Starliner Disaster Was Even Worse Than We Thought, Astronaut Reveals

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Trump Tariffs Show Signs of Being Written by AI

There seem to be signs that president Donald Trump's befuddling tariff measures were cooked up by an AI chatbot.

President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on most goods imported into the US yesterday, affecting over 100 countries — including uninhabited territories in the middle of the ocean.

It's a baffling decision that's expected to wreak havoc on the international economy, heightening existing concerns over an imminent recession.

Worse, as Cointelegraph reports, there seem to be signs that the befuddling measures were cooked up by an AI chatbot.

Basically, Trump's tariff rates divide the trade deficit between the US and a given country by the value of the total goods imported from it, and then divide the result by two.

As observers quickly noticed, chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT were prone to duplicating that calculation, suggesting that lethargic administration officials might have turned to the tech to devise the plan.

"What would be an easy way to calculate the tariffs that should be imposed on other countries so that the US is on even playing fields when it comes to trade deficit. Set a minimum of ten percent," crypto trader Jordan "Cobie" Fish asked ChatGPT.

The AI tool happily obliged, coming up with a strikingly similar formulation, dividing the trade deficit by total imports to calculate the tariff rate.

However, even the chatbot warned that doing so wouldn't make much sense.

"This method ignores the intricate dynamics of international trade — such as elasticities, retaliatory measures, and supply chain nuances — but it provides a blunt, proportional rule to 'level the playing field,'" ChatGPT wrote.

"Confirmed, ChatGPT..." Journal of Public Economics editor Wojtek Kopczuk tweeted. "Exactly what the dumbest kid in the class would do, without edits."

A breakdown of which country got hit hard and which was spared highlights how the new tariff rates largely ignore the greater international trade context.

"I suspect his is also why countries like Iran, which we basically do not trade with, gets off so easily," another user replied. "No trade = no trade deficit!"

It's not just ChatGPT. Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok gave a similar answer when given the same prompt, suggesting adjusting tariff rates "based on deficit size."

Again, Grok warned about such a plan being largely illogical — and potentially self-defeating.

"This method assumes tariffs directly reduce imports by raising prices, but in reality, factors like demand elasticity, currency exchange rates, and global supply chains complicate the outcome," Grok wrote. "It also risks retaliation or higher costs for US consumers."

"For a truly 'even playing field,' you’d need to consider production costs, subsidies, and labor standards abroad — data that’s harder to quantify simply," the chatbot added.

Anthropic's Claude AI chatbot made a similar suggestion, adding the same caveats.

Could the pattern be a coincidence? Sure. But the White House has already been accused of using AI to generate sloppily-written executive orders, which bore hallmarks of AI tools like ChatGPT.

The administration has also made a big deal of its use of AI for governing, with Elon Musk's DOGE crowing about its use of the tech and the General Services Administration launching a chatbot last month designed to support staff at the agency.

The bottom line, though? AI or not, economists are warning that the tariffs are ill-advised and likely to devastate the global economy. The stock market is already taking a hammering this morning.

"There is no economic rationale for doing this and it will cost the global economy dearly," London School of Economics professor Thomas Sampson told the BBC.

More on tariffs: Trump's Tariffs Are Wreaking Havoc on the AI Industry He Claims to Support

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Tesla Stock Is Soaring for the Funniest Possible Reason

For the first time in forever, Tesla stock is on the rise — and it happened right after news broke that Elon Musk's may be leaving government.

Tesla released some terrible news about sales this morning, but then a funny thing happened: after an initial crash, its stock started to rise significantly.

Why? Well, it seems a lot like it has to do with a Politico story reporting, per three unnamed insiders, that president Donald Trump had been telling confidantes of Musk's upcoming departure in a few months — purportedly to focus on his many businesses, and not because he can't get security clearance due to drug use.

Though both the White House and Musk himself have spun the reporting as "garbage" and "fake news," the writing was nevertheless on the wall. By the time the markets closed, Tesla was trading for about $282 a share, in a 5.3 percent increase from the $254 price per share it held when markets opened this morning.

The stock jump is all the more telling in context, considering that just 48 hours ago, Musk's electric vehicle company was trading at $259 per share — right after the multi-hyphenate himself admitted that his government work was hurting Tesla's stock price.

Just a few weeks ago, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors that Musk needed to "change the narrative" to save his EV company. Its brand image, the longtime Tesla bull wrote, was suffering from a "tornado crisis" due to massive backlash against the billionaire's draconian politicking — and the only way out of it was to "formally announce Musk is going to balance DOGE and being Tesla CEO."

Obviously, Musk isn't exactly following that advice by insisting that Politico's reporting, which was later corroborated by NBC, is somehow false. Regardless, the markets have spoken — and it seems like even they think he's full of crap.

For months now, Tesla has been shaken not only by anti-Musk protests, but also by investor anxiety about whether or not the company's figurehead is asleep at the wheel.

In an obvious reference to DOGE's cruel attempt at getting government employees to justify their jobs, Tesla investor and celebrity photographer Jerry Avenaim jokingly tweeted, "Please share five things you did for Tesla shareholders this week."

"Or are you working remotely?" Avenaim continued. "Asking for all of us."

Is Musk gonna get his eye back on the ball after all? Or will he dig his heels in for more culture warring?

It's impossible to tell right now, but Tesla shareholders may be in for a nasty surprise in the morning: after a White House event announcing draconian new tariffs, Tesla's stock is again getting hammered in after-hours trading.

More on Tesla: Musk Says Government Will "Go After" Tesla Critics

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RFK Jr. Realizes He’s Made a Huge Mistake

Last week, Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. announced sweeping layoffs. He's having regrets.

Last week, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary and noted anti-vaccine crackpot Robert Kennedy Jr. announced sweeping layoffs as part of a major restructuring effort.

Roughly 20,000 of the department's 82,000 full-time employees ended up on the chopping block. Around 10,000 have been laid off, with the rest being taking either early retirements or buyouts, according to the announcement.

But it's looking like Kennedy moved too hastily, firing important workers who even he admits were actually needed.

"Personnel that should not have been cut were cut," he told reporters this week, as quoted by CBS News. "We're reinstating them."

Bafflingly, he defended the unprofessional screwup.

"And that was always the plan," Kennedy added. "Part of the DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we're going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we'll make mistakes."

It's a confounding admission, highlighting the second Trump administration's "move fast and break things" approach, and how little thought is being put into sweeping cuts affecting the HHS and a vast number of other government agencies.

DOGE has already had to reinstate key government employees on several occasions, including staff who were working to contain bird flu and USAID efforts to prevent Ebola outbreaks.

Kennedy, a noted figure in the anti-vaccine movement, has proven a highly controversial pick for the job, and is already pouring resources into investigating long-debunked claims linking vaccines and autism.

It's a precarious situation, especially given the ongoing measles outbreak. As the New York Times reported late last month, ill-informed measles patients were experiencing complications after following Kennedy's advice to take large amounts of Vitamin A.

As part of the HHS restructuring efforts, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's complete Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch was laid off, according to CBS — which, Kennedy argued, was a mistake.

Despite backtracking on DOGE's ill-devised plans, it remains unclear how or when the HHS will reinstate these key figures. CDC officials told CBS that they hadn't been informed of any upcoming plans to do so.

And the effects of the mass layoffs are already being felt. The CDC, for instance, won't be able to continue its investigation into lead in water "due to the loss of subject matter experts," officials said, as quoted by CBS.

Despite admitting that 20 percent of the cuts were a mistake, Kennedy has said that restructuring the HHS could save taxpayers $1.8 billion a year "without impacting critical services."

Now that the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration have been hit hard, we'll all find out whether that'll turn out to be true.

More on Kennedy: Man Who Believes Poppers Cause AIDS Is Planning to Gut America's HIV Prevention Office

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RFK Jr. Realizes He's Made a Huge Mistake

New Law Would Force Elon Musk to Be Drug Tested for His Government Work

Congressional Democrats want unelected government hatchet man and ketamine enthusiast Elon Musk to be regularly and randomly drug-tested.

Congressional Democrats want unelected government hatchet man and ketamine enthusiast Elon Musk to be regularly and randomly drug-tested.

In a statement announcing the bill, New Jersey Democrat Mikie Sherrill said that the longshot legislation would require Musk and his staffers at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to pass a drug test to retain their status as special government employees.

Along with Musk's attested and problematic drug use — which has already led to him being mandatorily drug tested by the government in the past — one of the multi-hyphenate's top staffers, Alexandra Beynon, used to be head of engineering at Mindbloom, a telehealth service her husband cofounded that prescribes people therapeutic ketamine.

Generally speaking, special government employee status has typically been granted to guest experts and consultants brought on to advise permanent executive branch officials. Under the rules that govern them, special government employees are not allowed access to the White House for more than 130 days per calendar year — and eventually, Musk and his cronies will run out of time on their temporary passes.

The congresswoman added that her bill was inspired, in part, by "Signalgate": the scandal that erupted in the wake of a journalist being accidentally added by a national security advisor to an unsecured Signal group text that discussed Yemen bombing plans.

"Those with access to sensitive information must be thoroughly vetted, clear-eyed, and exercise good judgment," Sherill declared.

Notably, this bill was announced right before Politico's bombshell reporting that Trump has been telling his inner circle that Musk is on his way out of government.

Musk and the White House have both claimed Politico's reporting, which was later corroborated by NBC, is misleading. Still, this is far from the first time the billionaire's substance use has become an issue — first with the Securities and Exchange Commission, then again with NASA, and now with DOGE.

Ironically enough, it's unclear whether ketamine, the powerful sedative that appears to be Musk's drug of choice, is even on federal substance screening panels. Unless he's snorting the other white powder on taxpayer time, it's possible that the bill — which is unlikely to pass because the GOP controls both houses of Congress — wouldn't even have the intended results.

More on Musk and drugs: Video Shows Elon Musk Acting Very Strange at Trump Dinner

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Tesla Investors Suddenly Terrified as They Realize Musk Has Dug Their Grave

Elon Musk has saddled Tesla with huge

Tesla's horrendous first quarter numbers have some of its backers rethinking a few things. Namely, their CEO Elon Musk, whose once immense starpower is now inverting on itself.

Still haunted by last year's sales slump — the first annual drop in its history — Tesla has kicked off 2025 with a worrying omen that it may repeat the unwanted feat: a 13 percent drop in first-quarter deliveries. As the company faces widespread protests fueled by anti-Musk sentiment, the diagnosis is obvious.

"This is our first look at the impact of recent brand damage — and it appears to be the primary driver behind this quarter's delivery decline," Deepwater Asset Management managing partner Gene Munster wrote on X, as spotted by Reuters. "These growth rates will likely deteriorate further this quarter." Annual deliveries, Munster predicts, will slip by 9 percent.

"I estimate brand damage cost Tesla around 80k deliveries in the quarter," Munster added in another tweet.

The problems are very much material, too. Musk made a big and brash gamble with the Cybertruck, a heterodox pickup truck with bold styling and an exorbitant price tag. And less than 50,000 of them have actually shipped — nowhere near the 250,000 units sold that Musk promised investors before the stainless steel trapezoids started rolling off the lot last year.

To some fans and investors, the big Cybertruck push was a slap in the face. They had long begged Musk for a small, affordable Tesla that could sell in high volumes. Instead, what they got was a vehicle that weighs 7,000 pounds and costs upwards of $80,000. Even if the fabled affordable EV does come, investors don't sound confident that Tesla will nail it. Gary Black, managing partner of Tesla shareholder The Future Fund, worries that if the cheaper vehicle is simply a barebones version of an existing model, this year's deliveries and profits "will go much lower," he told Reuters.

The rest of the Tesla lineup, meanwhile, is no longer as titillating in a market full of exciting EV options.

Tesla is also getting smoked by its Chinese competitor BYD, which recently usurped Musk's company as the world's largest EV automaker, selling over 4 million vehicles and raking $100 billion in revenue in 2024. Tesla sold 1.79 million and took in $97.7 billion over the same period.

It's impossible to ignore what Musk has recently positioned as Tesla's next big thing: the robotaxi business. At the unveiling event of a "Cybercab" prototype last year, Musk dubiously promised that pivoting into offering self-driving cabs would rake in trillions of dollars. But as the company struggles to refine its existing autonomous driving software options like Full Self-Driving, there's immense uncertainty over when — if ever — it can start rolling out such a vision.

All the while, the mere act of driving around in a Tesla has become stigmatized in a way that would've been unthinkable just a few years ago. Tesla cars and dealerships alike are being targeted with vandalism, while owners are ruthlessly mocked.

The degree of hate has surprised even Tesla skeptics. JPMorgan analyst Ryan Brinkman, who has long been bearish on the company, said in a report Friday that first quarter deliveries confirm the "unprecedented brand damage we had earlier feared." 

But "if anything," Brinkman added, "we may have underestimated the degree of consumer reaction."

More on Tesla: Tesla Stock Is Soaring for the Funniest Possible Reason

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China Attacks Trump With Sassy AI-Generated Music Video

As the economy roils and tensions escalate, China has dealt a devastating blow to Donald Trump in the form of an AI music video.

As the world economy reels from President Donald Trump's so-called "reciprocal tariffs," the trade war between China and the US is escalating to new heights.

Nowhere is that more evident than in China's wild clapback in the form of an AI-generated music video blasting the United States, which came hours after Trump announced a 34 percent tax on Chinese imports.

The English-language China Global Television Network (CGTN) released the song, called "Look What You Taxed Us Through" ahead of Wall Street's worst single-day performance since 2020, during the throes of the pandemic. The song's lyrics are written from the point of view of an American consumer, blasting Trump's economic policy and daily life in the US more broadly. While the music video is AI-generated — a fact the CGTN advertises, unlike some American slopaganda — it also makes use of clips and audio from real sources like Trump rallies, Tesla protests, and American social media.

For many Americans, "Liberation Day," hailed by Trump's administration, means shrinking paychecks and rising costs. Tariffs hit, wallets quit: low-income families take the hardest blow. As the market holds its breath, the toll is already undeniable. #LiberationDay #CGTNOpinion pic.twitter.com/RzXFFVHoFg

— CGTN (@CGTNOfficial) April 3, 2025

 

"Groceries cost a kidney, gas a lung. Your 'deals'? Just hot air from your tongue," the song opens, overlaid with B-roll from Tesla protests and audio from inflation-wary Americans. It continues: "Elon's satellites crash, Bezos' wealth sinks, the GDP's limping, the Fed's out of tricks, your 'patriot tax' made Wall Street sick."

While harsh remarks from US officials and mainstream media about China are nothing new, China rarely hits back with this much vinegar. Its appeal to US citizens to question their economy is clear: "CEOs buy yachts, we can't afford a stew!"

But Beijing's retaliatory strategy goes far beyond campy propaganda. China has matched the US' tariffs with 34 percent tariffs on its own, sharply escalating a seven-year trade war. It also announced controls on rare earth exports, which could be a major blow for American manufacturing, as China produces about 90 percent of the world's refined rare earth metal.

Unfortunately for people in the US, the CGTN's depiction isn't far off. Responding to the terrible rotten stock market dive, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell noted that Trump's tariffs are "larger than expected," adding that increased inflation, lost jobs, and stagnant economic growth are likely.

"We face a highly uncertain outlook with elevated risks of both higher unemployment and higher inflation," Powell fretted.

US business leaders were a little less restrained.

"There will be blood," was the message from JP Morgan's Bruce Kasman, whose team released an analysis of the tariffs on Thursday. They warned that the risk of a recession has skyrocketed from an already uncomfortable 40 percent to a whopping 60. "At a basic level," Kasman's team calls the tariffs a functional tax increase on US citizens and businesses.

So far, Trump's tariffs have wiped $2.5 trillion in US stock market value, and it's anyone's guess when we might hit the bottom. At least we'll get some crafty Chinese propaganda when we do.

More on China: Tesla Forced to Change Name of "Full Self-Driving" in China, Since Its Cars Can't Fully Drive Themselves

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Check Out This Giant AI-Powered "Spice Dispenser" for Dorks Too Timid to Properly Season Their Food

If for some reason adding a pinch of anything to your meal was too intimidating, there's now an AI gizmo to address that.

Out of Season

Back in 2017, a buzzy multi-million dollar startup called Juicero — which sold a high tech, WiFi-enabled fruit and veggie juicer that had taken health circles by storm — imploded spectacularly when Bloomberg discovered that you could squeeze its juice packs by hand, without its $700 over-engineered machine, a demise that CNET derided as history's "greatest example of Silicon Valley stupidity."

We may now have a new pretender to the throne. Enter the Spicerr, a supposedly "AI-powered" "smart" spice dispenser that will automatically decide how much seasoning you should add to your barren foodstuffs. 

"Spicerr takes the guesswork out of seasoning," reads its marketing copy, with "curated spice blends" and "precise measurements," making it the perfect kitchen gizmo for dorks who are too unadventurous to even dabble in the art of adding a pinch of salt or ancho chile.

The company also has an extremely obnoxious ad featuring anthropomorphized kitchenware, which are for some reason aware what an AI model is. Suspension of disbelief shattered.

Lock and Preload

The Spicerr is designed like a minimalist, tech-inflected pepper grinder with a revolver's cylinder stuck on the bottom. It holds six pre-packaged spice capsules at a time, which you have to buy from the manufacturer, like so many hated inkjet printers. Spicerr sells an "Essential Collection" that comes with black pepper, turmeric, crushed pepper, ginger, cinnamon, and cumin, as well as three other collections for "family cooking," "baking with kids," and plain ol' "BBQ."

Using a small touch screen at the top — did we mention this thing uses a touch screen? — you choose the blend or recipe you want, which will require you to navigate more than a few tiny menus if this demonstration is anything to go by, load the necessary capsules, press down on the button, and let the Spicerr go to town. 

And voilà: you have now have a seasoned meal, human. Is the 3:1 ratio of salt to pepper with an uncertainty of 4 percent to your liking?

Data Driven

We know we said this thing has the "AI" label slapped on it, but it's unclear what exactly the "AI-powered platform" actually is, other than something that collects your data, apparently, via its accompanying app.

"By analyzing your preferences and interactions, Spicerr quickly learns your tastes and suggests dishes and spice blends perfectly suited to your palate," the website reads.

We'd posit it's not just variety, but also spontaneity, that's the spice of life. So for the love of all that is holy, don't let an algorithm decide how much cinnamon or paprika you're adding to your food. Take the risk and toss some of that stuff in there yourself — and then taste it, engage your brain, and decide whether it needs another pinch.

More on AI: Trump Signs Executive Order Banning Woke AI

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New Law Would Allow AI to Replace Your Doctor, Prescribe Drugs

A bold new bill to allow AI chatbots to prescribe controlled drugs has been introduced into the House for review.

If you weren't convinced we're spiraling toward an actual cyberpunk future, a new bill seeking to let AI prescribe controlled drugs just might.

The proposed law was introduced in the House of Representatives by Arizona's David Schweikert this month, where it was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce for review. Its purpose: to "amend the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to clarify that artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies can qualify as a practitioner eligible to prescribe drugs."

In theory, it sounds good. Engaging with the American healthcare system often feels like hitting yourself with a slow-motion brick, so the prospect of a perfect AI-powered medical practitioner that could empathically advise on symptoms, promote a healthy lifestyle, and dispense crucial medication sounds like a promising alternative.

But in practice, today's AI isn't anywhere near where it'd need to be to provide any of that, nevermind prescribing potentially dangerous drugs, and it's not clear that it'll ever get there.

Schweikert's bill doesn't quite declare a free-for-all — it caveats that these robodoctors could only be deployed "if authorized by the State involved and approved, cleared, or authorized by the Food and Drug Administration" — but downrange, AI medicine is clearly the goal. Our lawmakers evidently feel the time — and money — is right to remove the brakes and start letting AI into the health care system.

The Congressman's optimism aside, AI has already fumbled in healthcare repeatedly — like the time an OpenAI-powered medical record tool was caught fabricating patients' medical histories, or when a Microsoft diagnostic tool confidently asserted that the average hospital was haunted by numerous ghosts, or when an eating disorder helpline's AI Chatbot went off the rails and started encouraging users to engage in disordered eating.

Researchers agree. "Existing evaluations are insufficient to understand clinical utility and risks because LLMs [large language models] might unexpectedly alter clinical decision making," reads a critical study from medical journal The Lancet, adding that "physicians might use LLMs’ assessments instead of using LLM responses to facilitate the communication of their own assessments."

There's also a social concern: today's AI is notoriously easy to exploit, meaning patients would inevitably try — and likely succeed — to trick AI doctors into prescribing addictive drugs without any accountability or oversight.

For what it's worth, Schweikert used to agree. In a blurb from July of last year, the Congressman is quoted saying that the "next step is understanding how this type of technology fits 'into everything from building medical records, tracking you, helping you manage any pharmaceuticals you use for your heart issues, even down to producing datasets for your cardiologist to remotely look at your data.'"

He seems to have moved on from that cautious optimism, instead adopting the move-fast-break-things grindset that spits untested self driving cars onto our roads and AI Hitlerbots into our feeds — all without our consent, of course.

As the race to profitability in AI heats up, the demand for real-world use cases is growing. And as it does, tech companies are faced with immense pressure to pump out its latest iteration, the next big boom.

But the consequences of corner-cutting in the medical world are steep, and big tech has shown time and again that it would rather rush its products to market and shunt social responsibility onto us — filling our schools with ahistorical Anne Frank bots and AI buddies that drive teens toward suicide and self-harm.

Deregulation like the kind Schweikert proposes is exactly how big tech gets away with these offenses, such as training GenAI models on patient records without consent. It does nothing to ensure that subject matter experts are involved at any step in the process, or that we thoroughly consider the common good before the corporate good.

And as our lawmakers hand these tech firms the keys to the kingdom, it's often the most vulnerable who are harmed first — recall the bombshell revelation that the biggest and flashiest AI models are built on the backs of sweatshop workers.

When it comes to AI outpatient care, you don't need to be Cory Doctorow to imagine a world of stratified healthcare — well, anymore than we already have — where the wealthiest among us have access to real, human doctors, and the rest of us are left with the unpredictable AI equivalent.

And in the era of Donald Trump's full embrace of AI, it's not hard to imagine another executive order or federal partnership making AI pharmacists a reality without that pesky oversight.

More on tech and drugs: Congress Furious With Mark Zuckerberg for Making Money From Illegal Drug Ads

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OpenAI’s Agent Has a Problem: Before It Does Anything Important, You Have to Double-Check It Hasn’t Screwed Up

Operator, OpenAI's brand new AI agent, doesn't quite deliver the hands-off experience some might hope it would.

Behold Operator, OpenAI's long-awaited agentic AI model that can use your computer and browse the web for you. 

It's supposed to work on your behalf, following the instructions it's given like your very own little employee. Or "your own secretary" might be more apt: OpenAI's marketing materials have focused on Operator performing tasks like booking tickets, restaurant reservations, and creating shopping lists (though the company admits it still struggles with managing calendars, a major productivity task.) 

But if you think you can just walk away from the computer and let the AI do everything, think again: Operator will need to ask for confirmation before pulling the trigger on important tasks, which throws a wrench into the premise of the AI agent acting on your behalf, since the clear implication is you need to make sure it's not screwing up before allowing it any real power.

"Before finalizing any significant action, such as submitting an order or sending an email, Operator should ask for approval," reads the safety section in OpenAI's announcement.

This measure highlights the tension between keeping stringent guardrails on AI models while allowing them to freely exercise their purportedly powerful capabilities. How do you put out an AI that can do anything — without it doing anything stupid?

Right now, a limited preview of Operator is only available to subscribers of the ChatGPT Pro plan, which costs an eye-watering $200 per month. 

The agentic tool uses its own AI model called Computer-Using Agent to interact with its virtual environment — as in use mouse and keyboard actions — by constantly taking screenshots of your desktop. 

The screenshots are interpreted by GPT-4o's image-processing capabilities, theoretically allowing Operator to use any software it's looking at, and not just ones designed to integrate with AI.

But in practice, it doesn't sound like the seamless experience you'd hope it to be (though to be fair, it's still in its early stages). When the AI gets stuck, as it still often does, it hands control back to the user to remedy the issue. It will also stop working to ask you for your usernames and passwords, entering a "takeover mode."

It's "simply too slow," wrote one user on the ChatGPTPro subreddit in a lengthy writeup, who said they were "shocked" by its sluggish pace. "It also bugged me when Operator didn't ask for help when it clearly needed to," the user added. In reality, you may have to sit there and watch the AI painstakingly try to navigate your computer, like supervising a grandparent trying their hand at Facebook and email.

Obviously, safety measures are good. But it's worth asking just how useful this tech is going to be if it can't be trusted to work reliably without neutering it.

And if safety and privacy are important to you, then you should already be uneasy with the idea of letting an AI model run rampant on your machine, especially one that relies on constantly screenshotting your desktop.

While you can opt out of having your data being used to train the AI model, OpenAI says that it will store your chats and screenshots up to 90 days on its servers, TechCrunch reported, even if you delete them.

Because Operator can browse the web, that means it will potentially be exposed to all kinds of danger, including attacks called prompt injections that could trick the model into defying its original instructions.

More on AI: Rumors Swirl That OpenAI Is About to Reveal a "PhD-Level" Human-Tier Intelligence

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UnitedHealthcare’s New CEO Announcement Draws a Frenzy of Dark Humor

UnitedHealthcare has just promoted one of its C-Suiters to CEO — and the dark humor is already pouring in.

Six weeks after Brian Thompson was gunned down in the streets of Manhattan, UHC announced that it was naming Tim Noel, who formerly ran the insurance company's Medicare and retirement department, to the chief executive role. Almost as soon as that news dropped, social media lit up with gallows humor about the position's deadly history.

"Imagine getting that promotion?" wrote one X-formerly-Twitter user wrote. "I'm thinking Tim Noel may just be the bravest CEO in all of America."

Tim Noel: https://t.co/nbqfjxWz6u pic.twitter.com/mC0BCVkt8i

— The Pint (@ReadThePint) January 23, 2025

Others were far more pointed in their welcomes to the longtime UHC executive.

"I don't think it's THAT interesting that Tim Noel, new CEO for UnitedHealth, lives in Minneapolis," a Bluesky user quipped. "Minneapolis is where the UnitedHealth headquarters are located, so it just makes sense that he, and other CEOs, would live there, in Minneapolis, which as everyone on earth knows, is in Minnesota!"

On the Eat the Rich subreddit, meanwhile, the vibe was nothing short of feral.

"Looks scrawny," wrote a user whose display image features suspected Thompson assassin Luigi Mangione dressed like a saint. "Needs fattening up like the last one. Then it’ll be good eating!"

Obviously, nobody is actually calling for any harm to Noel, who has worked at UHC since 2007. As with Thompson's murder, these jokes instead highlight the rampant frustration Americans have with the gatekeepers of their healthcare — a bitter resentment that burst to the forefront of the national conversation after Thompson's assassination last month.

That anger was on full display in other posts and comments accusing Noel of being a "serial killer." Given that he likely ran UHC's Medicare department during at least part of the period when the company nearly tripled its post-acute services denial rate from 8.7 to 22.7 percent for Medicare patients, they might not be that far off the money, at least technically speaking.

More on Mangione: Americans Flood Chinese App RedNote, Discover Its Users Are Obsessed With Luigi Mangione

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Trump Admin Announces Plans to Build Database of Migrant DNA

A DNA helix is trapped behind a barbed wire fence.

Trump is ringing in his second term with a barrage of executive orders — and many are laying the groundwork for a massive genetic surveillance campaign targeting migrants.

That's according to analysis by award-winning National Security journalist Spencer Ackerman, who writes that "along with the attorney general, the secretary of homeland security will 'fulfill the requirements of the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005,' according to the 'Securing Our Borders' executive order," referencing one of the numerous presidential actions targeting migrants signed by Trump on his first day back.

"In other words," Ackerman continues, "[the] DHS and the Justice Department will create and manage a migrant DNA database."

Many crucial questions remain: how that database will look, who will have access to it, what data will be collected, and from whom. After all, many actual American citizens lack documentation of their legal status, like the poor and homeless — will their DNA be swept up in wanton collection efforts that trample the privacy rights of citizens and non-citizens alike?

With tech moguls lining up to pitch Trump on dystopian border tech, we can be sure the surveillance effort won't come cheap for American taxpayers.

It'll also almost certainly come with new cruelty. In addition to inevitable family separations, a rise in lost children, heightened processing time due to missed court hearings, documented and undocumented residents alike are going to be contending with aggressive new efforts at domestic surveillance.

"[The] DHS is empowered to use 'any available technologies and procedures' to adjudicate migrants' 'claimed familiar relationships' with people in the United States," Ackerman's analysis warns. "So this is designed to be not only vastly intrusive beyond the border, but a windfall opportunity for, say, artificial intelligence and biometrics firms."

Ackerman — who was among the Guardian team to win the 2014 Pulitzer for public service journalism for reporting on the NSA spying debacle — has noticed the rhetoric used in Trump's orders mirrors vague national security directives from the days of the War on Terror.

For example, the "Protecting the American People Against Invasion" order claims that "many of these aliens unlawfully within the United States present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans."

"Others are engaged in hostile activities," the mandate continues, "including espionage, economic espionage, and preparations for terror-related activities."

To Ackerman, that last bit is striking, because in this context, "terror-related activities" have not been defined. Vaguely worded presidential decrees like this are crucial in that they allow agencies like the NSA or the DHS to operate with impunity — building the American surveillance state between the ink.

Though their power is increasing under Trump, these surveillance mechanisms are nothing new. Ackerman notes that the measure to harvest migrant DNA seems "reminiscent of the biometrics database created under the Bush administration for Muslim travelers known as NSEERS," a similarly troubling moment in American history which some of Trump's executive orders are predicated on.

More recently, Biden's approach to the immigration crisis was also a decidedly invasive one, thanks in part to the Customs and Border Patrol's CBP One app which rolled out in October of 2020. In 2023, that app got a controversial update: a Visa-lottery system for hopeful migrants to schedule meetings for processing into the United States.

That app came with a host of privacy concerns, not least of which was the harvesting of applicant biometric and geolocation data for case processing.

Rather than delete that data after an individual has been processed, as the TSA claims it does, the DHS collects it into two federal databases — the Traveler Verification System and Automated Targeting System. CBP One has since been shut down by Trump, canceling thousands of applicant's appointments and stranding them at the border, but the personal data its collected is likely still being held by the federal government.

It's likewise been reported that, as of 2020, the DHS has already captured data from over 1.5 million immigrants crossing the border in its Combined DNA Index System. That DNA harvesting program is laundered as a law enforcement index — though the collection includes hundreds of thousands of migrants who have only ever been administratively detained, and have never been charged with a crime.

Many immigrants report not being informed of the DNA collection, believing DNA swabs to be medical procedures, despite the DHS' internal guidelines mandating disclosure.

While Trump isn't the only electected official pushing to harvest the DNA of every incoming immigrant, his influence will certainly have the most impact as his nominees shape their agencies to his dystopian image.

More on mass surveillance: Billionaire Drools That "Citizens Will Be on Their Best Behavior" Under Constant AI Surveillance

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Manhattan Shows Huge Reduction in Car Crashes After Instituting Congestion Pricing

New Yorkers are seeing huge quality of life wins from congestion pricing so far, a great sign for people-first transit policy.

Wheels Up

The wins keep coming after Manhattan initiated its congestion toll on cars early this month. Now, the latest data is showing a massive decrease in crash related injuries.

New data from the first 12 days of congestion pricing shows that total injuries below 60th street — the zone where congestion pricing takes effect, charging drivers up to $9 to enter — dropped 51 percent compared to the same period in 2024. Total crashes, meanwhile, dropped 55 percent.

The analysis comes courtesy of outspoken transit advocate Gersh Kuntzman and his team at Streetsblog NYC. He cautions that it's too early to take a victory lap, given that the figures do not account for variations in weather between 2024 and 2025, but they are promising. This is the latest indicator that the congestion pricing is working as intended — kids are getting to school faster, the city is quieter, bridges and tunnels are seeing significantly less traffic, and the air is becoming a bit cleaner. And these are just the knock-on effects of traffic reduction.

The real winners are New York City's public transit riders, whom the congestion toll is meant to directly benefit via station improvements, critical infrastructure repairs, extended bus routes, and a resumption of the much-needed 2nd avenue subway extension project, which had been stalled for years.

In other words, if the good news keeps coming, the initiative could become a compelling proof-of-concept for other areas of New York and more crowded cities around the country.

Cutting Edge

That's in a perfect world, of course. While adding friction for cars is looking like a major win for New York so far, it comes at a time when common-sense transit projects across the country are flailing. Some are way overbudget, outsourced to pie-in-the-sky tech startups, or falling to a busted legislative process.

And that's even if a city ponies up the will to make affordable, car-free transit a priority at all.

Going forward, there's very little evidence that investments in crucial infrastructure will be coming from the federal government — Trump has already cut Biden's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in favor of his Stargate gamble — making state and local policy like the Big Apple's congestion pricing all the more crucial.

While other cities spend taxpayer money to beautify parking lots, New City is leading by example and showing the rest of the country what people-first transit policy can do for their communities. In a country dominated by cars, this rare win for public transit is worth imitating.

More on transit: Leftists Plead With Trump Not to Build High Speed Rail System Connecting America's Major Cities

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