You Might Be Able to File Your Taxes With the IRS for Free

Taxpayers in 12 states will have the first chance to test out the Internal Revenue Services’ new pilot program that will allow taxpayers to file their federal tax return online for free. 

The program, known as Direct File, began rolling out in phases in January to ensure that the service is “easy to use” and accessible, the IRS said. Certain government employees were invited to test out the service first, though the number of taxpayers who can use the program will later expand throughout the 2023 tax season.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Eligible taxpayers will be able to follow a step-by-step guide to file their taxes and can benefit from access to a real-time representative who can provide support Monday through Friday, from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern Time. The program is available to use on a computer, smartphone, or tablet, and is available in both English and Spanish.

However, taxpayers should be aware that they will only be able to prepare their federal tax returns through Direct File and will be directed to a separate site to file state taxes, if that service is available in your state. 

Here’s what to know about the program.  

Who is eligible for Direct File? 

As of right now, Direct File is only available in states that have, or were able to develop, their own state tax filing solution. That means the pilot program is limited to residents who live in: Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, or Wyoming. 

Direct File is also only available to taxpayers with certain types of income, and who are “claiming limited credits and deductions,” according to the IRS. That means that taxpayers who itemize deductions, have business or gig economy income, and claim credits like the child and dependent care credit, will not be able to use Direct File. 

You can find out if you are eligible for Direct File by filling out this IRS survey. 

What is IRS Free File?

Direct File is not to be confused with IRS Free File, a separate federal tax software that allows eligible taxpayers to file their federal tax returns for free. That program, which began in 2003,  is part of a public-private partnership between the IRS and tax preparation companies, and provides taxpayers with two options. 

Taxpayers who make an adjusted gross income of $79,000 or less can use the Guided Tax Software, which “lets the software do the work” after a user answers simple questions. The software also allows users to file taxes in Spanish.

Taxpayers can also choose the free file fillable forms option, which provides general instructions on how to file taxes, instead of completing the work for a taxpayer.

source https://time.com/6691546/file-taxes-irs-free/

Inside OpenAI’s Plan to Make AI More ‘Democratic’

One afternoon in early May 2023, Colin Megill nestled into a chair in a plant-filled meeting space at OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters.

He was surrounded by seven staff from the world’s leading artificial intelligence lab, which had launched ChatGPT a few months earlier. One of them was Wojciech Zaremba, an OpenAI co-founder. He wanted Megill’s help. 

For over a decade, Megill had been toiling in relative obscurity as the co-founder of Polis, a nonprofit open-source tech platform for carrying out public deliberations. Democracy, in Megill’s view, had barely evolved in hundreds of years even as the world around it had transformed unrecognizably. Each voter has a multitude of beliefs they must distill down into a single signal: one vote, every few years. The heterogeneity of every individual gets lost and distorted, with the result that democratic systems often barely reflect the will of the people and tend toward polarization.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Read More: What to Expect From AI in 2024

Polis, launched in 2012, was Megill’s solution. The system worked by allowing users to articulate their views in short statements, and letting them vote on others. Using machine learning, the system could produce detailed maps of users’ values, clearly identifying clusters of people with similar beliefs. But the real innovation was simpler: with this data, Polis could surface statements that even groups who usually disagreed could agree upon. In other words, it cut through polarization and offered a path forward. The Taiwanese government saw enough promise in Polis to integrate it into its political process, and Twitter tapped a version of the technology to power its Community Notes fact-checking feature. Now OpenAI had come knocking.

Teams of computer scientists at OpenAI were trying to address the technical problem of how to align their AIs to human values. But strategy and policy-focused staff inside the company were also grappling with the thorny corollaries: exactly whose values should AI reflect? And who should get to decide? 

OpenAI’s leaders were loath to make those decisions unilaterally. They had seen the political quagmire that social media companies became stuck in during the 2010s, when a small group of Silicon Valley billionaires set the rules of public discourse for billions. And yet they were also uneasy about handing power over their AIs to governments or regulators alone. Instead, the AI lab was searching for a third way: going directly to the people. Megill’s work was the closest thing it had found to a blueprint.

Zaremba had an enticing proposal for Megill. Both men knew that Polis’s technology was effective but labor-intensive; it required humans to facilitate the deliberations that happened on the platform and analyze the data afterwards. It was complicated, slow, and expensive—factors Megill suspected were limiting its uptake in democracies around the world. Large language models (LLMs)—the powerful AI systems that underpin tools like ChatGPT—could help overcome those bottlenecks, Zaremba told him. Chatbots seemed uniquely suited to the task of discussing complex topics with people, asking follow-up questions, and identifying areas of consensus.

Eleven days after their meeting, Zaremba sent Megill a video of a working prototype in action. “That’s sci-fi,” Megill thought to himself excitedly. Then he accepted Zaremba’s invitation to advise OpenAI on one of its most ambitious AI governance projects to date. The company wanted to find out whether deliberative technologies, like Polis, could provide a path toward AI alignment upon which large swaths of the public could agree. In return, Megill might learn whether LLMs were the missing puzzle piece he was looking for to help Polis finally overcome the flaws he saw in democracy.

On May 25, OpenAI announced on its blog that it was seeking applications for a $1 million program called “Democratic Inputs to AI.” Ten teams would each receive $100,000 to develop “proof-of-concepts for a democratic process that could answer questions about what rules AI systems should follow.” There is currently no coherent mechanism for accurately taking the global public’s temperature on anything, let alone a matter as complex as the behavior of AI systems. OpenAI was trying to find one. “We’re really trying to think about: what are actually the most viable mechanisms for giving the broadest number of people some say in how these systems behave?” OpenAI’s head of global affairs Anna Makanju told TIME in November. “Because even regulation is going to fall, obviously, short of that.”

Read More: How We Can Have AI Progress Without Sacrificing Safety or Democracy

Megill would sit on an unpaid committee of three experts who would advise OpenAI on which applications to fund. (The findings from the experiments would not be binding, “at least for now,” the company wrote.) As an example of the kind of research projects it was looking for, OpenAI published a mockup of a supercharged version of Polis, where ChatGPT would facilitate a deliberation at scale, canvassing people’s views and identifying areas of consensus. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, was clearly enthused by the potential of this idea. “We have a new ability to do mass-scale direct democracy that we’ve never had before,” he told TIME in an interview in November. “AI can just chat with everybody and get their actual preferences.”

But before OpenAI could publicly announce the results of its grant program, the company was thrown into chaos. The board of the nonprofit that governs OpenAI fired Altman, alleging he had been dishonest with them. After a tumultuous five days Altman was back at the helm with a mostly-new board in place. Suddenly, the questions of AI governance that the recipients of OpenAI’s $100,000 grants were trying to answer no longer seemed so theoretical. Control over advanced AI was now clearly a matter of hard political and economic power—one where OpenAI and its patron, Microsoft, appeared unlikely to relinquish much, if any, significant leverage. A cutthroat competition was brewing between Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon for dominance over AI. The tech companies had begun competing to build “artificial general intelligence,” a hypothetical system that could match or even surpass human capabilities, delivering trillions of dollars in the process. In this climate, was OpenAI seriously about to let the public decide the rules that governed its most powerful systems? And with so much at stake, would it ever truly be possible to democratize AI? 

In an auditorium at OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters in September, representatives from the 10 grant-winning teams gathered to present their work. Two large indoor palms flanked the stage, and a row of creeping plants hung over a projector screen. A warm golden light filled the room. Tyna Eloundou, a researcher at OpenAI, took to the podium to welcome the gathered guests. “In our charter, we expressly make the commitment to build AI that benefits all of humanity,” she told them, referring to a document to which OpenAI staff are expected to adhere. “With humanity’s multitude of goals and ambitions, that is a tall order.” Was it even possible to design a system that could reflect the public’s democratic will? What would such a system look like? How to address the fact that AI systems benefit some communities more than others? “These are questions that we are grappling with, and we need to seriously question who has the authority and legitimacy to create such systems,” Eloundou said. “It’s not an easy question, and so that’s why we’ve tasked all of you with solving it.” Laughter rippled across the room.

The next speaker put a finer point on the gravity of the occasion. “You can’t really benefit someone if you don’t take their input, and as human beings we all want agency over the things that play an important role in our lives,” said OpenAI product manager Teddy Lee. “Therefore, as these [AI] models get more powerful and more widely used, ensuring that a significant representative portion of the world’s population gets a say in how they behave is extremely important.”

Read More: CEO of the Year: Sam Altman

One of the people in the audience was Andrew Konya. Before he submitted a grant application to OpenAI’s program, Konya had been working with the United Nations on ceasefire and peace agreements. His tech company, Remesh, made its money helping companies conduct market research, but the U.N. found a use for its tools in countries like Libya and Yemen, where protracted civil conflicts were simmering. “We were comfortable with coming up with 10 bullet points on a piece of paper, that people who really normally disagree on things can actually come together and agree on,” Konya says of Remesh. “If there is middle ground to be found, we can find it.”

The experience led Konya, an earnest man in his mid-thirties with thick square glasses, to wonder whether Remesh might be able to help AI companies align their products more closely to human preferences. He submitted a proposal to OpenAI’s grant program. He wanted to test whether a GPT-4-powered version of Remesh could consult a representative sample of the public about an issue, and produce a policy document “representing informed public consensus.” It was a test run, in a sense, of the AI-powered “mass scale direct democracy” that had so enthused Altman. An algorithm called “bridging-based ranking,” similar to the one used by Polis, would surface statements that the largest number of demographic groups could agree on. Then, GPT-4 would synthesize them into a policy document. Human experts would be drafted in to refine the policy, before it was put through another round of public consultation and then a vote. OpenAI accepted the proposal, and wired Konya $100,000.

As Konya saw it, the stakes were high. “When I started the program, I leaned skeptical about their intentions,” Konya tells TIME, referring to OpenAI. “But the vibe that I got, as we started engaging with them, was that they really took their mission dead seriously to make AGI [artificial general intelligence] benefit everyone, and they legitimately wanted to ensure it did not cause harm. They seemed to be uncomfortable with themselves holding the power of deciding what policies AGI should follow, how it should behave, and what goals it should pursue.”

Konya is keen to stress that his team’s experiment had plenty of limitations. For one, it required GPT-4 to compress the abundant, nuanced results of a public deliberation down into a single policy document. Large language models are good at distilling large quantities of information down into digestible chunks, but because their inner workings are opaque, it is hard to verify that they always do this in a fashion that is 100% representative of their source material. And, as systems that are trained to emulate statistical patterns in large quantities of training data originating from the internet, there is a risk that the biases in this data could lead them to disproportionately ignore certain viewpoints or amplify others in ways difficult to trace. On top of that, they are also known to “hallucinate,” or confabulate, information. 

Integrating a system with these flaws into the heart of a democratic process still seems inherently risky. “I don’t think we have a good solution,” Konya says. His team’s “duct-tape” remedies included publishing the contents of the deliberations, so people could audit their results; putting a human in the loop, to monitor GPT-4’s summaries for accuracy; and subjecting those AI-generated summaries to a vote, to check they still reflected the public will. “That does not eliminate those failure modes at all,” Konya admits. “It just statistically reduces their intensity.”

There were other limitations beyond the ones intrinsic to GPT-4. Konya’s algorithm didn’t surface policies that the largest number of participants could agree on; it surfaced policies that the largest number of different demographic groups could agree on. In this way, it calcified one’s identity as their most significant political characteristic. Policies that won consensus across the most ages, genders, religions, races, education levels and political parties would rise to the top, even if a larger absolute number of people belonging to fewer demographic groups preferred a different one. It was a characteristic designed to protect the system from “tyranny of the majority,” Konya says. 

But it also underlined how fraught future battles were likely to be over who gets the right to decide the structure of any system built to democratically crowdsource values for AI to follow. Should the public get a say in that, too? Konya is keen to stress that the experiment was a proof-of-concept with a long way to go before becoming the basis for any democratically representative system. “Rather than thinking of this approach as an intrinsically perfect thing, it’s a crude approximation of some ideal thing,” he says. “Baby steps.”

There is a hint of wishful thinking to the idea that the source of the world’s disagreements is the lack of a magical document that reflects some hitherto-unarticulated consensus position. Konya accepts that criticism. “Finding the document is not enough,” he says. “You have not solved the problem.” But the act of seeking consensus, he says, is still beneficial. “There is, actually, power in the very existence of the document. It takes away the ability of those in power to say, ‘This is what my people want’ if it is indeed not what they want. And it takes away their ability to say, ‘There is no common ground, so we’re going to rely on our internal team to make this decision.’ And although that is not hard power, the very existence of those documents subtly redistributes some of the power back to the people.”

There are many potential benefits to a company consulting the public and adjusting its strategy based on the voice of the people, but it is not “democratic” in the commonly-understood sense of the word. “Democracy is about constraints,” says Alex Krasodomski, a member of a team from London-based policy think tank Chatham House that received a grant from OpenAI as part of the project. “The difference between a consultation and a referendum is one is advisory, and one is binding.”

In politics, democratic governments derive their legitimacy from the fact voters can eject those who do a bad job. But in business, giving the public that level of power would usually be seen as corporate suicide. “Technology companies are in a really tough spot, because they may want to go to the public and build legitimacy for the decisions they make,” Krasodomski says. “But slowing down risks falling behind in the race.”

OpenAI has made no commitment to make any “democratic inputs” binding upon its own decision-making processes. In fairness, at this stage, it would be strange if it had. “Right now, we’re focusing on the quite narrow context of, how could we even do it credibly?” says Eloundou, one of the two OpenAI staffers who ran the project. “I can’t speak to the company’s future decisions, especially with the competitive environment in the future. We hope that this could be very helpful for our goals, which are specifically to continue to let AI systems benefit humanity.”

“We don’t want to be in a place where we wish we had done this sooner,” says Lee, the other staffer. “We want to work on it now.”

For Megill, the name of the program he advised OpenAI on—“Democratic Inputs to AI”—is a slight misnomer. “They use ‘democracy’ more loosely than I would,” he says. Still, he is overjoyed by the life that OpenAI’s $1 million in grants has breathed into deliberative technologies, a corner of the nonprofit tech ecosystem that has long been overlooked by deep-pocketed investors. OpenAI has open-sourced all the research done by the 10 grant-winning teams, meaning their ideas and code can be freely taken and built upon by others. “What has been done to date is objectively beneficial,” Megill says. “The public can own the next generation of these technologies. It would be worrying if they didn’t.”

The board chaos at OpenAI meant the company had to delay by two months its announcement of the program’s results. When that announcement finally came, in a January blog post, OpenAI also said it would establish a new team, called “collective alignment,” led by Eloundou and Lee, the staffers in charge of the grant program. Their new responsibilities would include building a system to collect “democratic” public input into how OpenAI’s systems should behave, and encoding that behavior into its models. The public, in other words, might soon be able to signal to OpenAI what values and behaviors should be reflected in some of the most powerful new technologies in the world.

But the question of power remained unaddressed. Would those signals ultimately be advisory, or binding? “If any company were to consult the public through some kind of democratic process and were told to stop or slow down, would they do it? Could they do it?” Krasodomski says. “I think the answer at the moment is no.”

Altman gave an unequivocal answer to that question during an interview with TIME in November. Would his company ever really stop building AGI if the public told them to? 

“We’d respect that,” the OpenAI CEO said.

source https://time.com/6684266/openai-democracy-artificial-intelligence/

Back-to-Back Atmospheric Rivers Pummel California With Dangerous Flooding and Mudslides

(LOS ANGELES) — The second of back-to-back atmospheric rivers took aim at Southern California early Monday, unleashing mudslides, flooding roadways and knocking out power as the soggy state braced for another day of heavy rains.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

About 1.4 million people in the Los Angeles area, including the Hollywood Hills and Beverly Hills, were under a flash-flood warning Monday morning. Up to 9 inches (23 centimeters) of rain had already fallen in the area, with more expected, according to the National Weather Service, which called the flash flooding and threat of mudslides “a particularly dangerous situation.”

In Northern California, the storm inundated streets and brought down trees and electrical lines Sunday across the San Francisco Bay Area, where winds topped 60 mph (96 kph) in some areas. Gusts exceeding 80 mph (128 kph) were recorded in the mountains.

Just to the south in San Jose, emergency crews pulled occupants out of the windows of a car stranded by floodwaters and rescued people from a homeless encampment alongside a rising river.

The storm then moved into Southern California, where officials warned of potentially devastating flooding and ordered evacuations for canyons that burned in recent wildfires that are at high risk for mud and debris flows.

“We’ve had flooding, we’ve had gusty winds, we’ve had the whole gamut here,” said Todd Hall, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service near Los Angeles.

“I’ve been doing damage reports all night, so I’ve seen a fair amount of damage, and of people being evacuated from homes due to mudslides,” Hall said.

Read more: Weird Weather Words for Our Climate Change Era

Classes were canceled Monday for schools across Santa Barbara County, which was devastated by mudslides caused by powerful storms in 2018.

Further down the coast, strong winds and heavy rain brought treacherous conditions to the city of Ventura, said Alexis Herrera, who was trying to bail out his floodwater-filled sedan. “All the freeways are flooded around here,” Herrera said in Spanish. “I don’t know how I’m going to move my car.”

More than 543,000 customers were without electricity statewide on Monday morning, according to poweroutage.us.

Palisades Tahoe, a ski resort about 200 miles (320 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco, said Sunday it was anticipating the heaviest snowfall yet this season, with accumulations of 6 inches (15 centimeters) per hour for a total of up to two feet (60 centimeters). Heavy snow was expected into Monday throughout the Sierra Nevada and motorists were urged to avoid mountain roads.

Much of the state had been drying out from the atmospheric river that blew in last week, causing flooding and dumping welcome snow in mountains. The latest storm, also called a “Pineapple Express” because its plume of moisture stretches back across the Pacific to near Hawaii, arrived offshore in Northern California on Saturday, when most of the state was under some sort of wind, surf or flood watch.

Atmospheric rivers are relatively narrow plumes of moisture that form over an ocean and can produce torrential amounts of rain as they move over land.

The weather service issued a rare “hurricane force wind warning” for the Central Coast, with wind gusts of up to 92 mph (148 kph) possible from the Monterey Peninsula to the northern section of San Luis Obispo County.

Evacuation orders and warnings were in effect for mountain and canyon areas of Monterey, Santa Barbara, Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsay Horvath urged residents near wildfire burn areas of Topanga and Soledad canyons to heed orders to get out ahead of possible mudslides.

“If you have not already left, please gather your family, your pets, your medications and leave immediately,” Horvath said at a Sunday briefing. The county set up shelters where evacuees could spend the night.

Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. The Governor’s Office of Emergency Services activated its operations center and positioned personnel and equipment in areas most at risk.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, said its schools will be open Monday morning, with the exception of Topanga Elementary Charter School and Vinedale College Preparatory Academy.

The weather service forecast up to 8 inches (20 cm) of rainfall across Southern California’s coastal and valley areas, with 14 inches (35 cm) possible in the foothills and mountains. Heavy to moderate rain is expected in Southern California until Tuesday.

“The storm will actually sit on top of us for today,” Hall said. “There’s really no relief, unfortunately, because this band is just stalled right over us and it’s going to dump moderate to heavy rain on us all day.”

___

Associated Press videographer Eugene Garcia in Ventura, Calif., and radio reporter Julie Walker in New York contributed to this report.

source https://time.com/6689867/atmospheric-rivers-california-flooding-mudslides/

10 Surprising Facts About Joni Mitchell in Honor of Her Debut Grammys Performance

The Grammys 2024 will attract top stars with the hopes of bringing home the music world’s biggest awards. Among them will be a musician taking to the Grammys stage for the first time in a decades-long career.

Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, 80, who received a nomination for Best Folk Album for Joni Mitchell At Newport [Live], a recording of her surprise return to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022, will deliver her debut performance at the Grammys.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The nine-time Grammy winner will share the stage with Billie Eilish, Billy Joel, Burna Boy, Dua Lipa, Luke Combs, Olivia Rodrigo, SZA, Travis Scott, and U2. Comedian Trevor Noah will host.

As Mitchell graces the Grammys’ stage, here are 10 surprising facts about her. 

Joni is not her birth name

The singer-songwriter was born Roberta Joan Anderson on Nov. 7, 1943, in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, according to her website. After the end of World War II, Mitchell’s family moved to the province of Saskatchewan, where she grew up.

She had polio as a child

Mitchell told Star in 1995 that she contracted polio as a nine-year-old and at the time of the interview was experiencing returning symptoms. Post-polio syndrome impacts between 25 and 40 out of every 100 polio survivors, starting around 15 to 40 years after the first infection, according to the CDC.

Mitchell first got paid to perform at a Canadian coffee house in 1962

The musician’s first paid performance was at The Louis Riel coffee house in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada on Oct. 31, 1962. She is quoted as saying that she started making music that same year near Lake Waskesiu in Saskatchewan.

She reunited with a daughter she placed for adoption

Mitchell became pregnant by her college ex-boyfriend and gave birth to a daughter in 1965, she told Vogue. She quickly married folk singer Chuck Mitchell and soon after, has said she felt like she had no choice but to put her daughter up for adoption. The couple moved to the U.S. and later divorced. Mitchell and her daughter reunited in 1997.

Her song “Big Yellow Taxi” was inspired by Hawaii

Mitchell was inspired to write her environmental anthem “Big Yellow Taxi” by a trip to Hawaii. She reportedly told New Musical Express that she looked down from her hotel room balcony, amid picture-perfect palm trees, to see an “ugly, concrete car park on the hotel grounds.” The scene inspired the chorus: “Don’t it always seem to go/That you don’t know what you got ’til it’s gone?/ They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

She memorialized “Woodstock” in a song but didn’t attend

Mitchell wrote another hit “Woodstock,” inspired by the famous music festival held in the summer of 1969 in New York state. However, she didn’t actually attend the event.

She was scheduled to perform on Sunday that weekend, according to her website, but when her manager saw the traffic jams caused by the event broadcast on TV, he advised her not to go because she might have trouble getting back to New York City for an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show the following day.

Mitchell survived a brain aneurysm

The singer was found unconscious in her home in Los Angeles after suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015. At first, Mitchell couldn’t walk or talk, she told the Guardian. She also told CBS that she taught herself to play guitar again.

She has said she suffers from Morgellons disease

Mitchell has said in interviews that she suffers from Morgellons disease, a controversial and little-known condition in which sufferers describe itching or crawling sensations on the skin.

Some doctors define the condition as a delusion and prescribe psychiatry. Studies on the cause vary: A 2012 CDC study found no infectious agent, while a 2018 peer-reviewed investigation reported the condition is characterized by the “presence of multicolored filaments that lie under, are embedded in, or project from skin” and “results from a physiological response to the presence of an infectious agent.”

She didn’t perform a full-length concert for two decades

Mitchell didn’t perform a full-length concert from 2000 to 2022, when she appeared in a surprise performance at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island with singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, who is expected to perform again with Mitchell at the Grammys. The last time Mitchell had performed at the festival was in 1969.

Mitchell has already received the Grammys highest honor

The celebrated singer has received a slew of awards during her career, including being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. And she already received the Grammys’ top honor in 2002—a lifetime achievement award for performers who during their lifetimes make creative contributions of outstanding artistic significance to the field of recording.

source https://time.com/6658304/joni-mitchell-grammys-debut-surprising-facts/

Unpacking the Facebook Tragedy as it Turns 20

Which of two historic developments this past week ought most symbolize the importance of Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg as his company, Meta, today marks exactly 20 years of existence? Should it be the CEO’s humiliation on Wednesday at the hands of American senators, who told him he “had blood on his hands” and prompted him to turn and contritely address the relatives of young people whose tragic deaths, those relatives believe, were the result of using his company’s products? Or should it be what happened Thursday, when Meta announced vast corporate earnings and its stock the next day soared, adding $197 billion to its overall valuation—more in one day than had any company, ever?

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The answer, of course, is both. The unprecedented journey of this society-altering corporate behemoth continues in ways that are almost as hard to comprehend and digest as the generative artificial intelligence technology it is racing to deploy. This company’s genuine financial and business success is, at the same time, a tragedy of world-historical proportions.

That’s because Facebook and its parent company Meta have truly harmed the world. That it has also been uniquely profitable in the course of doing that is not a coincidence. The willful omission of sufficient guardrails makes everything on Meta’s services go faster, including profit. The company this week announced a $50 billion share buyback alongside huge quarterly earnings. It even launched a shareholder dividend, unusual for a still fast-growing company. Zuckerberg himself, by far the largest stockholder, is set to earn around $700 million a year from that dividend.

I have had a unique perspective on this saga because I was the first journalist to seriously engage with the company’s story, starting in September 2006 when it had a mere 9 million users. (As of the end of 2023, Meta’s various services had a total of 3.98 billion users. The number it directly affects will surpass half the planet’s population in the very near future.) After meeting Zuckerberg for lunch back then in midtown Manhattan, I wrote an article for Fortune entitled “Why Facebook Matters,” which impressed the then 22-year-old Zuckerberg and led, eventually, to a 2010 book chronicling the company’s already-remarkable story, The Facebook Effect.

So I’ve watched carefully as Zuckerberg evolved from an ambitious and generally decent young man into someone I view as a cold-blooded and amoral schemer whose successes are the envy of his fellow capitalists. This 20-year chronicle is entirely about him. He is not just a talented visionary and business leader. Because he has had total control of his globe-spanning enterprise and has led it without sufficient concern for its effects on the world, his culpability for those effects is uniquely large.

In the last day or so I’ve read several judicious and relatively neutral essays in the business press marking Facebook’s 20th anniversary. But they just didn’t capture the sheer oddity and awfulness of the company’s story. It’s critical people not underestimate the awful part.

I was deeply struck by how the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken analyzed what’s going wrong with the world in a conversation with Tom Friedman of The New York Times a few weeks ago at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “The biggest poison that we face around the world internally in our societies and externally in our relations with others,” Blinken said, “is dehumanization—the inability to see the humanity in the other.” He was talking about the tragedy of Israel and Gaza as well as Ukraine and even U.S.-China relations. But he could as easily have been talking about the dynamic in the cafeteria of any high school on the planet, or among the alumni of Zuckerberg’s alma mater Harvard, for that matter. In my opinion, Zuckerberg played a major part in worsening that shift towards hatred, intolerance, and the attempted cancellation of those we don’t agree with.

It’s not that Zuckerberg wants the world to be fractured. It’s more that he didn’t realize it mattered until it was too late, more or less around the time Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. He won with the help, in part, of disingenuous Facebook ads paid in rubles from Russia and strategically targeted at voters in critical swing counties in Wisconsin and Michigan. By then, though, Zuckerberg was the richest person his age in history. It seems to me he became more concerned with maintaining that status than doing what would be necessary to reduce the polarizing and dehumanizing effects of his company’s systems.

Of course, there are also innumerable good and even great social and political impacts of these systems. This is the most popular media in the world because people enjoy using these services. It’s just another complication when assessing the macro impact of this company. But we don’t prevent someone from going to jail for murder just because they volunteer at a homeless shelter.

I spend a lot of time asking myself why Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have contributed so horribly to the rise of autocrats and to the epidemic of teen suicide and self-harm, just to mention two especially tragic effects. In part, it’s because this company seemingly built its systems from the beginning with far more concern about their ability to generate clicks and attention than about governance mechanisms that might mitigate their harmful impacts. For example, in 2008, the company introduced systems to enable its users in countries around the world to themselves translate Facebook’s English into their local languages, which people everywhere promptly did. Yet Facebook had no employees who spoke most of those languages or who were assigned to ensure their speakers were not harming each other. That remains the case, to this day, in many languages. In Myanmar, an official U.N. inquiry concluded that Facebook disinformation and harassment contributed to genocide.

The harms also continue because, despite the umbrage of the senators and their peers in numerous other countries, governments and regulators have notoriously failed to sufficiently assess and restrain this company and other social media giants. The European Union is beginning to establish laws that can be models for other jurisdictions, but it’s too little too late.

But there’s another way to understand why Facebook and so many other social media companies have such a pernicious socio-cultural effect. It’s because these systems were not designed with a sufficient appreciation for the toxic impact of human ego and emotion.

Fifteen or 20 years ago, I wrote a regular email column for Fortune. I occasionally tackled unpopular topics, like outsourcing American manufacturing, which I suggested might not always be so bad. In reply, I got some scathingly critical emails from readers, calling me terrible names. Sometimes I would email them back, saying I was sorry they felt that way and adding a bit of further explanation. Often, probably more often than not, I would then receive a far less hyperbolic note from the reader, thanking me for my note. But such an exchange is far less likely on social media. That’s because much of the  interaction happens in public. And in public, people have a reputation to maintain. When you speak in front of an audience, as one does on Facebook or Instagram, you want to impress your friends and those you hope are your admirers. We play to our audience. Concessions and efforts to find concord are not what we expect. And as Blinken notes, we too often demonize the other, and polarization worsens.

So happy birthday, Meta. Not. Your shareholders may be celebrating, but the rest of us should not be naive. Much of your impact on our world is not happy.

source https://time.com/6656392/facebook-20th-anniversary-mark-zuckerberg-meta-legacy/

‘Houthi Attacks Must Stop’ Says U.K. Foreign Secretary After Latest Joint Strikes With U.S.

The U.K.’s top foreign official has said “the Houthi attacks must stop” after the U.K. and U.S. joined forces for the third time on Saturday to carry out strikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have initiated a series of attacks in the Red Sea amid the Israel-Hamas war. 

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“We have issued repeated warnings to the Houthis,” foreign secretary David Cameron said in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on Sunday. “Their reckless actions are putting innocent lives at risk, threatening the freedom of navigation and destabilizing the region. The Houthi attacks must stop.” 

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak posted on X that the Royal Air Force “successfully took out specific Houthi military targets in Yemen, further degrading the Houthis’ capabilities. Recent attacks on U.K. and international vessels are unacceptable. It’s our duty to protect innocent lives and preserve freedom.”

U.K. Secretary of State for Defense Grant Shapps commented on X that the Houthis’ attacks are “illegal and unacceptable and it is our duty to protect innocent lives and preserve freedom of navigation,” and called the third wave of strikes “proportionate and targeted,” saying the U.S. and U.K. acted in “self-defense and in accordance with international law.” 

“This is not an escalation,” he said in the statement. “We have already successfully targeted launchers and storage sites involved in Houthi attacks, and I am confident that our latest strikes have further degraded the Houthis’ capabilities.” 

Ahead of the third round of joint strikes from the U.K. and U.S., Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani, in a statement on X, condemned military attacks on Yemen. He also criticized the U.S. strikes in Iraq and Syria, which were in response to a fatal drone attack that killed three American troops in Jordan. He said such strikes violate the sovereignty of the countries and would lead to “no result other than the escalation of tensions and instability in the region.” 

In a follow-up post on Sunday, Kanaani condemned the most recent strikes from the U.S. and U.K. against Yemen, calling them a worrying threat to international peace and security.

The Houthis were undeterred by the latest military action, instead vowing to respond. Mohammed Al-Bukhaiti, a spokesman for the group, which is also called Ansar Allah, said on X: “The American-British aggression against Yemen will not go unanswered, and we will meet escalation with escalation.” 

The Iran-supported militant group––one side in Yemen’s yearslong civil war––began launching attacks on commercial shipping vessels it says are linked to Israel in solidarity with Hamas after the Palestinian militant group attacked Israel on Oct. 7, leading to the conflict in Gaza. The attacks have crippled global shipping, leading some companies to pause operating in the Red Sea and take longer, more expensive routes. 

The barrage triggered a joint military response from the U.S. and U.K. on Jan. 11 and Jan. 22, while the U.S. has carried out additional smaller attacks. 

President Joe Biden acknowledged in mid-January that the attacks were not yet working to stop the Houthis, but would continue. Experts questioned to TIME whether the attacks would deter the Houthis or could backfire if world powers underestimate the Yemeni group’s military might, while another observer said the Western superpowers’ attacks were instigating further responses that continue to destabilize shipping. 

Al-Bukhaiti said on X that the latest bombing wouldn’t change the group’s position and its military actions against Israel would continue until “the crimes of genocide in Gaza are stopped and the siege on its residents is lifted, no matter the sacrifices it costs us.” 

Israel is currently fighting accusations from South Africa in the International Court of Justice that it is committing genocide in its war in Gaza, which has killed more than 27,000 people, according to the Hamas-run health ministry. The court ruled preliminarily in January that “at least some of the acts and omissions alleged by South Africa to have been committed by Israel in Gaza appear to be capable of falling within the provisions of the [Genocide] Convention,” and called on Israel to take steps to mitigate such acts, but stopped short of ordering a ceasefire. An Israeli government spokesperson had denied the accusations as “spurious and specious charges.” 

As tensions escalate, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to travel again to the Middle East on Sunday. 

source https://time.com/6645344/uk-us-strikes-yemen-houthis-david-cameron-warning/

House Republicans Announce Bill That Provides More Military Aid to Israel But Leaves Out Ukraine

WASHINGTON — House Republicans will move forward with a $17.6 billion package that provides military aid to Israel and replenish U.S. weapons, but leaves out more help for Ukraine, underscoring the challenges facing supporters of a comprehensive national security package that would also include billions of dollars for immigration enforcement.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The move gives Speaker Mike Johnson and House Republicans the chance to show support for Israel even though there is little chance the Senate will go along. Meanwhile, text of a broader Senate compromise is expected to be released this weekend and a key test vote on that package will be held during the week.

Johnson said that Senate leadership is aware that by failing to include the House in their negotiations, they have eliminated the ability for swift consideration of any legislation.

“As I have said consistently for the past three months, the House will have to work its will on these issues and our priorities will need to be addressed,” Johnson said in a letter to colleagues.

The House has already approved a nearly $14.5 billion military aid package in November for Israel that the Senate declined to take up. Republicans also insisted it be paid for with cuts elsewhere. The bill targeted the Internal Revenue Service for cuts, though the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said doing so would end up costing the federal government a net $12.5 billion because of lost revenue from tax collections.

The tactic of including IRS cuts also turned it into a more partisan, 226-196 vote. Johnson said in his letter to colleagues that removing the offsets should allow for swift passage of the Israel aid.

“During debate in the House and in numerous subsequent statements, Democrats made clear that their primary objection to the original House bill was with its offsets,” Johnson said. “The Senate will no longer have excuses, however misguided, against swift passage of this critical support for our ally.”

Rep. Ken Calvert, R-Calif., released the text of the military assistance bill for Israel. It would provide $4 billion to replenish missile defense systems and $1.2 billion to counter short-range rockets and mortar threats. There’s also funding for the procurement of advanced weapons system and to enhance the production of artillery and other munitions.

To ensure the support does not compromise U.S. readiness, it includes $4.4 billion to replenish U.S. stocks of weapons provided to Israel. There’s also $3.3 billion for current U.S. military operations in the region.

source https://time.com/6645365/house-republicans-bill-military-aid-israel-not-ukraine/