Wild stats about America’s place in the world, plus what people actually ask AI: This week, we dive deep into new datasets from the World Bank and artificial intelligence researchers at Anthropic. - "Anthropic might dispute this, but the queries paint a disorienting picture of a world where teachers turn to chatbots to churn out educational materials, students press-gang those same bots into answering those same materials, and then teachers go back to the chatbots to create academic scoring systems and rubrics and to 'evaluate and score academic writing.'"
Bowser urges action to prevent D.C. Medicaid cuts: ‘This is a real threat’: D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, city officials and healthcare providers Friday outside Children’s National Hospital in Northwest D.C. to amplify the voices of those who would most acutely feel cuts and to urge residents to take action. - "'If we want a cleaner, safer and stronger city,' Bowser said, 'we cannot undercut the safety net services that help us support public safety.'"
This billionaire could unify the Democrats against Trump: JB Pritzker might not be the party’s choice in 2028, but he’s crucial for the Trump resistance. - "'Do-nothing Democrats want to blame our losses on our defense of Black people, of trans kids, of immigrants — instead of their own lack of guts and gumption,' Pritzker said in his New Hampshire speech.
"Similarly, in a March speech to activists with the Human Rights Campaign, a group that advocates LGBTQ+ rights, the governor said, 'I know that there are transgender children right now looking out at this world and wondering if anyone is going to stand up for them and for their simple right to exist.'
"He continued: 'Well, I am. We are. We will.'"
Fox and Frenemy: Trump may lash out at the network. But the two will always make up.
The Missing Part of Trump’s Minerals Math: Without demand from clean energy, the U.S. market for rare earth, graphite, and lithium will falter. - "Under the Biden administration, the Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office put up a $102 million loan to back the facility. The State Department, intent on competing with China to court mineral-rich African countries, had laid out a 10-year strategy for strengthening U.S. ties with Mozambique, from which Syrah obtains ore to refine. (The plan included improving transportation infrastructure, for instance, which would help get those rocks to port.) And the nation's landmark climate-infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act, was set up to redirect mineral supply chains away from China: Its electric-vehicle tax credit gave a major bonus for cars with batteries composed of American-made minerals.
...
"Already this year, companies have scrapped plans for nearly $8 billion worth of clean-energy projects, most of which were factories for batteries and electric vehicles, according to a Canary Media analysis of data from the research group E2. In his attempt to fulfill his campaign pledge to 'terminate' what he called the 'Green New Scam,' Trump appears to be jeopardizing the domestic supply of minerals for the military and industries he supports.
"'The administration is clearly worried about rare earths from a defense and aerospace perspective, and I've seen battery-industry players that are, in their rhetoric and advocacy in Washington, distancing themselves from EVs and selling themselves as strategic technology for grid resiliency and defense,' Seaver Wang, a researcher at the Breakthrough Institute, a think tank focused on policy around climate technology, told me. 'But we know EVs are like 80 percent of the demand.' (According to the International Energy Agency, electric-vehicles will account for 80 percent of global battery capacity in the future.)
''Meanwhile, China is following its own logic, in which it controls more variables. In March, the Financial Times reported that "at least half of China's 34 provincial-level governments, including those of top resource-producing regions such as Xinjiang, have announced increased subsidies or expanded access for mineral exploration" over the past year. Even outside China, Beijing sets the prices for global contracts. When financiers determine the price for a ton of lithium, they turn to where those prices are set, which thanks to China's dominance is typically in Asia. That means the price of a deal between a Tesla factory in Texas and a lithium mine in Quebec is ultimately determined by how much of the metal China is selling in a place like Vietnam.
"The U.S. could find a way around that, Datta told me, by building an alliance with other producers and establishing an integrated market for contracts, with countries such as Australia, Brazil, and Canada, that could set prices for selling materials to battery makers in Europe, South Korea, and Japan. That's what the Biden administration aimed to do; the electric-vehicle tax credits treated allies that had free-trade agreements with the United States as domestic sources. For those countries, U.S. minerals were supposed to offer a less risky alternative to China. But now, Datta said, 'we've pissed everyone off, and all these countries are looking to hedge away from the U.S.'" [ed. note: devastating]
