@MarkTLive - Killer Beach Umbrella

where the emphasis is now at Meta. You know, the meta world is interesting to me because you remember when he put those billions of dollars it was tens of billions of dollars into the metaverse. The word meta and the rebranding of Facebook as Meta kind of came out of that metaverse craze. Everything was going to be in the metaverse. We were going to meet in the metaverse. There were going to be concert venues in the metaverse. The metaverse is going to be a place where they're

going to be virtual cities. And that's still all maybe percolating, I don't know, but there was a time when it just seemed as though it was going to happen, like you know, at noon tomorrow. Now whenever it's going to happen, or the degree to which it's happening has sort of been put off. But what's replaced it is what AI. And AI is proving itself to be as transformational as everybody had said it would be. And so to Zuckerberg

and these compensation packages. He's putting together huge compensation packages related to AI. Apparently he spent months putting together a list of the top AI engineers and researchers across the globe, and he wants to offer these people potential recruits, right, lucrative compensation packages. And he's trying to poach AI talent from a lot of competitors. So how do you put together the perfect package? You offer up to one hundred

million dollars, which is what he's doing. He's personally reaching out to a lot of these most desirable AI developers. And you know this is a company Meta. Remember Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and they are competing in this attempt to be AI dominant. The dominant AI engines really

stand to control the future. See of open AI. Google has its own AI right, Microsoft, Amazon, and billions of dollars are being invested into AI research and product development, and it's being talked about Meta as being an also ran, like not really keeping up with the competition. They had a rollout scheduled and then it was delayed and so all of a sudden, that's their flagship AI model, and it seems like maybe it's still a little bit on the jankie side and that's the reason that you didn't

roll it out on time. So again they invested fourteen billion for a steak in Scale AI. And Scale ai is an AI founded by a guy named Alexander Wang. Guess how old Alexander Wang is. He is the founder of this Scale AI. And again Meta just paid for a steak in AI. They don't own it. This is just a piece of the party. They paid fourteen billion. The founder Alexander Wang is how old? Twenty eight? And Meta wants to put Alexander Wang, twenty eight, eight year old,

in charge of its super intelligence team. That's a lab team, an internal lab team that's going to focus on developing a hypothetical AI system that is smarter than humans. Google bought out the shares in Character ai. That's a chatbot service that just happened last year, So back to Zuckerberg

and these compensation packages. He's trying to go after all of these recent graduate from top PhD programs at schools like cal in the Bay Area, Carnegie Mellon and more and more of these deep mind project like their Google's got a deep mind project and Open AI and you know you've heard all of these names. Well, Zuckerberg's going to poach all of these companies for some of their top people. And so somebody who spoke to Zuckerberg, a recruit, said that he's trying to essentially this is a quote,

get a transfusion from the country's top AI labs. And so in that process, he's offering one hundred billion dollars to what he considers the best people in the field. On the other side of it are all of the creators who are being counterfeited and undercut by AI. And I'm talking about authors. An open letter written on Friday about the use of AI on in creating books. It showed up on the literary website lit hub. It's asking publishing houses to promise that they will never release books

that were created by machines. I see that as a request that may not go honored. It's just so easy for these publishers to frankenstein together all kinds of book on any number of subjects. They addressed, these seventy authors did the big five US publishers Penguin, Random House, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and they got more than eleven hundred signatures on the accompanying petition and their direct request to

publishers on a number of different things. And AI may already or could soon be in this publishing world, and the letter asks them, along with the accompanying petition, hey, please don't do this. The writing that AI produces feels cheap, they say, because it is cheap, they continue, It feels simple because it is simple to produce. That is the whole point. AI is an enormously powerful tool here to stay with the capacity for real societal benefits, but the

replacement of art and artists isn't one of them. And there have been lawsuits, as you know, from authors, mean big authors are going after publishers for having balkanized their work. You know, they take a piece of it and they are essentially guilty of potentially anyway copyright infringement. So these are ongoing cases from a lot of everybody from Sarah Silverman to Who's the Comedian? But she's also an author to some of the biggest names in writing. And some

of these cases are already beginning to render rulings. Federal judges were handing down judgments in two cases like this just on Friday of this past week. They ruled in favor of the defendants. They ruled in favor of the AI companies Anthropic AI and Meta, So they dealt a

blow to these authors. And this could give AI companies the legal right under the fair use doctrine to train their large language models on copyrighted work and do what I was just mentioning, essentially Frankenstein together bits of this work. AI is transforming everything, and that's why they're paying a premium for AI engineers, and it will change the way so much is done.

just I think this one is related to ICE. Somebody called in and left to talk back on this. I say, called in, you know, use the talkback feature I just described.

with each other. And finally there is this let me find this talk back which was just left here.

theft on the beach. I mean this kind of thing, but this is a threat to your physical person that emerges from beach umbrellas.

spend any money. We didn't have a lot of money, but she really grew up with nothing, so it was kind of anyway, My point is on the beach at Wildwood, this very beach, she would not ever dream about renting an umbrella. It was two dollars. I mean, she would never dream of it. I remember being scorched by the sun and begging her to get an umbrella. Nope, never

even take a meeting on it. But wow, the idea that these umbrellas could blow down the beach and they could do the kind of damage that that guy was just describing.

are the two thirty felon accounts involving grand theft. There's also a forgery and another felon account with bouncing checks. But between twenty twenty and twenty twenty two, the two of them operated this scheme under the guise of a cryptocurrency mining business. This is what is alleged. The cryptocurrency mining business was known as Zukra Platform Corporation. Now this

is what they say. This Zukray Platform Corporation was claiming they were going to install, maintain, and operate computing equipment to mine crypto. You know, crypto is this thing where its computations and computers and the more you mine it, the more you have. So if you can actually set up your computer to mine crypto, you can. Essentially it's

almost like a printing press for money. But the company had no installation, maintenance, or operation of any computing equipment to mind cryptocurrency, and they were not a registered business in California, according to prosecutors, So the people who were operating this allegedly fraudulent business tried to get victims through their existing financial services business. And you know, you guys are already here, you're going through all these other steps

to handle your finances investments. We've got something for you. We have this company, Zukra, and you should be part of that. So they also had them obtain high limit credit cards loans, and they were using the loan oftentimes to help them apply to pay into this scheme. Again, this is all alleged by the District Attorney's office. They've just leveled these charges against these two people from Bellflower. So they say they told victims that the investments were

risk free, guaranteed and protected by insurance. They said to these clients again, quote, clients, here are written contracts. You're going to download this mobile app, this Zoukre mobile app, and the mobile app's going to show you all the ongoing profits from your investments. You know, again, all this crypto that is accumulating while you sleep, You're getting rich.

six hundred thousand dollars. If they are convicted, they could get what would you guess what should they get?

but instead offer lies and devastating financial loss. Let me be clear, if you steal from our communities, whether in the streets or through sophisticated investment or cryptos schemes, we will find you hold you accountable to the fullest extent of the law. So again, that's a court case that's being adjudicated, but that is the very latest. When we

come back, there is a notable loss. I don't know if you'll know the name, but once I tell you the name, actually you'll put together the puzzle pieces and you may very well know the name. And then I'll kick open the door to everything this guy was all about.

what it was. He's just being chased by these Ice agents and anyway, we'll leave let's just call it.

come here in all of these different professions. It was really Brossero, I think was focused mostly on aggregate culture. But the idea was that you're allowing these immigrants to come here understanding that they are in work programs, agriculture, you could have it anything, agriculture, car wash, landscaping, construction, whatever you want. All of a sudden you are able to track everybody, and everybody's still able to provide for their families in the ways in which they likely arrived

in this country to begin with. That's just a thought as an aside. I mean, that's just you know, that's not even working through lunch, that idea. It's already existed. The PRASCO program was discontinued in the sixties.

Robbin's history. He's an heir to that Baskin Robbin's fortune, but he rejected the family business and wrote a seminal book, a cornerstone book advocating plant based nutrition. He was a big one of environmentalism, animal rights. And he just died

here in California with seventy seven. His son and collaborator, Ocean Robbins I get his newsletter regularly, said that the cause of his father's death was complications from a post polio syndrome that resulted in muscle weakness and other symptoms, nearly seven decades after he originally got polio as a boy. His book, and this is the thing. His book is very famous. It's called Diet for a New America. It was published in nineteen eighty seven, and it sold more

than a million copies. And it drew a link between heavy consumption of animal based products and the increased risk of chronic illnesses like heart disease and obesity. It looked at environmental damage caused by factory farming. It raised ethical questions about the treatment of animals in confined conditions. So you can see maybe why I like it because you kind of know where the way I lean on the

environment and on animal welfare. But you can see also how it might have a broader audience because he spoke a very common sense message. The message was that the healthiest, tastiest and most nourishing way to eat is also the most economic and most compassionate and least polluting way to eat. That was Diet for a New America, John Robbins. I mean, he was, and he's compared this way. He's compared to

Rachel Carson. She's the one who wrote that book Silent Spring, that warned about how the unlimited use of agricultural pesticides like DDT had contaminated the soil, the water, threatened the health of wildlife humans, and that created the modern environmental

movement that was Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring. This book, Diet for a New America is sort of the equivalent, and through the years, food writers have described this book, Diet for a New America as groundbreaking, the bible of the anti meat campaign.

He very much lamented the way that cows are treated in the dairy business, and how Baskin Robbins is an ice cream company really was in a sense he looked at it as blood money. So I think this is an extraordinary guy, regardless of what you think of him ultimately or you know, how you integrate his message or don't integrate it into your life. But John Robbins, the grandfather, I'm sorry, the son of the originator, the founder of Baskin Robbins, and the author of Diet for a New America.

John Robbins passes away here in California at the age of seventy seven. There's nothing I like more than going through a sad o bit, saying goodbye to someone who's made a great contribution to society, finishing that sad oh bit, and then pivoting immediately to the next host. And that's exactly what I am going to do. Now do we have there's no talkback?