You're listening to Bill Handle on demand from KFI AM six forty KFI AM six forty.
Bill Handle here Veterans Day, Tuesday, November eleventh, coming up at seven fifty. Little handle history. The history of Veterans Day very interesting, to say the least. Now, as we spoke yesterday, we knew that the vote to avert the shutdown, to shut down the shutdown, the governmental shutdown was going to happen, and it did on a sixty to forty vote, and he needed sixty votes to stop the shutdown, and the Republicans won out. The Democrats caved. A couple things
that take away here. One of them is Chuck Schumer individually. It is now being argued in the Senate. He has lost control of the Democrats. It is time to get him out as a leader. Okay, that's one argument, even to the point where running for office out of New York.
So that's one issue.
The other issue is what happened, why the Democrats caved and why the Republicans and particularly Donald Trump won Why did this happen? Well, this is we saw that those lines at food banks were increasing. We saw that government employees were not as they said. We don't have the money to pay our mortgage, to buy food because the government shut down because they weren't getting checks. And the philosophy of the Republicans and Donald Trump was very simple,
and that is, the Democrats are going to cave. All we have to do is wait them out. The Republicans got everything they wanted, exactly what was proposed by the Republicans, and what.
Was the issue.
The issue now is and was the extension of Obamacare, and the extension of Obamacare. The tax credits enabled well actually tens of millions of Americans to have Obamacare, to have insurance, and that is sunseted. That extension sunset, that sunsets stops at the end of the year. And the Republicans were adamant saying, we are not going to vote on that. We are not going to pass the extension. We first want to avert the shutdown. We'll talk about
everything later. We want a clean bill, relatively clean bill. I mean, there was some money in the bill for construction for the Pentagon and some administrative money for agencies, but for the most part, it was a clean bill. And what does it mean, continuing resolution that we just fund the government as it has been. You want to talk about this extension, You want to talk about health insurance for millions of Americans who are going to lose it.
We'll talk about that later. We'll have a vote about that later. Well, the reality, it doesn't matter when the vote comes. The Republicans will never vote for the extension. Their philosophy is real simple. It's sunsets. It ends the end of the year, and the extension under the Biden administration that's really important ends. And does it really matter that people lose their insurance?
I don't think so.
Does it matter that premiums are going to explode?
I don't think so. I mean, I don't buy that.
And here is what the Republicans and the Democrats, eight of them who jumped over to the Republican side, said, you give us this bill, you stop the shutdown, you avert the shutdown, then later on will negotiate and vote on this extension. Business of healthcare. Well, the Bruges have been fighting this forever. They're never going to this government, this Congress will never vote for the extension. As long as Republicans are in power, and as long as President
Trump he controls it, he decides. It's that simple. He wants the extension, he's going to get the extension. He doesn't want the extension, he is not going to get the extension. Whatever he says, the Republicans decide they're going to go for exactly what he says. And this is fascinating.
And this is the power that this president has. Most presidents have some power, but Congress can in cases, in many cases, negotiate with the president and say, you know, we really don't like this, and let's try this.
Not with Donald Trump. Whatever he says goes.
It doesn't matter whether And so here's what the Democrats took away from this, because this is where the Republicans and the president went out. If we wait long enough, the Democrats will cave. And why is that Because the Republicans and President Trump had the ammunition. Because look at those lines at food banks, Look at the stories of you have federal employees who can't make mortgage payments, who
were going for extra jobs. Look at those air traffic controllers who buy law had to go to work and we're not getting paid.
That hits very deep, very quickly.
So that was right now, and that is more powerful than at the end of the year. People losing their insurance because that's two that's two months down the line, right, lack of food is right now, so of course lack of food is going to prevail. Now do the Republicans win. I don't think so, because here's what's going to happen. This extension only goes to the end of January. And then the same argument, because between now and the end of January, the Republican Republicans say, of course we'll talk
about that extension. Of course, we'll talk about the tax credits that we're allowing under Obamacare, the extra tax credits because of the COVID because of COVID, and we want to we'll talk about whether we keep those or not.
We'll have a vote. Let me give you the reality.
Since Congress is controlled by Republicans, since the Senate is controlled by the Republicans, there will never be a vote to extend, and all of a sudden, people will have lost their insurance. You've got all these billions of people who have no insurance or have premiums that are so high they can't afford the insurance, and.
Now they're in the middle of it, and they're going to know that.
The Republicans saying, oh, we'll talk about that later on.
It's a bunch of crap.
They're not going to and that's going to hit home, and we're right back to where we were. And at some point, this is where the Democrats said, at some point, we have.
To come to a meeting. We have to have a meeting. You know, it's we have to deal with it. The Republicans don't want to deal with it.
There'll be another stoppage, and again, well, you people are starving. We'll do it later, because these what these continuing resolutions are about.
We'll talk about it later.
Most of the stoppages of the government where the government is shut down, most of them are and there's a lot of them that happened. Clinton had one almost every year. It's one day, two days at at the outside a week, which barely ever happens. This is forty days. There's never been anything close. There are governmental employees that lost three paychecks, and mortgages still do, utility bills are still due, you
still have to go to the grocery store. You can't tell the clerk at the grocery store, oops, I'm gonna get paid next week or the week later. It doesn't fly that way. So we'll see what happens. This discussion is going to come back with a vengeance at the end of January.
All right, LAPD is.
It's a national story because it's Los Angeles and the LAPD. Boy, what a history it has, both good and bad. So the city council cut police spending this year, chopping in half the number of officers that the mayor wanted.
In May, the.
Council voted to give the LAPD need just enough money to recruit two hundred and forty officers. Bass, the mayor had requested for eighty Why first of all, to close that billion dollar budget shortfall, but also to prevent other city workers from being laid off because that's the.
Only way they were going to be able to afford the new cops.
Okay, the problem is, how do you pay for police officers when you don't have the money to pay for police officers? Bass says, she is scrambling to find the money. Is she in a scavenger hunt looking for money under rocks? Are they going to raise city taxes? Are they going to raise development costs where developers pay more and more money because they're an easy hit developers, because everybody hates developers,
but that's passed on to the housing market. Where is she going to find the money at this point, no one knows. Bass has seen LAPD. Who's hundreds of officers since she took office, and she's hoping at a minimum keeping the department from shrinking again this year.
Now here are some numbers.
If those cops are hired per Bass's request, sixteen hundred civilian workers would be laid off. It's one or the other. So what do you choose, the layoffs or the cops. Because cities around the country, particularly la I mean, there's a billion dollars shortfall in this city. The city spends far more money.
Than it gets in.
The city has decided that, for example, homelessness is a huge issue, which it is, and has spent hundreds of million dollars on the homeless issue. Okay, where do you get the money? It's part of the budget. Can you make Can you balance the budget? Not with additional cops, not with additional programs, not with additional civil service workers working for the city.
You cannot do it.
And she almost vetoed the bill as it was voted, and she ended up signing it and not happily. So are we going to get the money, where we get the cops?
Who the hell knows? Who the hell knows.
According to the police chief Jim McDonald, he said, at least more people are applying to be cops than before.
There was a period of time when no one wanted to be a cop.
You know, police officers used to be I mean they were put on pedestals, particularly the police officers that walk the beat.
I mean, everybody love them.
You know, they go to a donut shop, they all you think they all had dandruff, but they didn't. That was the powdered sugar for the free donuts they got.
Those days are gone. No free donuts.
Sometimes they get half off, but those are day old donuts.
All right, We're done with that.
I have to go and see I explained this and it's deep explanation and analysis.
Neil, You notice.
That, I well, I think there's people still want to be cops, just not in LA I think, yeah, I agree, I agree. And people go through the police academy because it's one of the best academies in the country, and they are police officers for a period of time, and then they go to smaller police departments and there are many police departments that pay a whole lot more than in LA pays a good chunk of money, that have better pensions and sports and as many powdered sugar donuts
as you could ever want to eat. Okay, Mike Dubuski, ABC News reporter who is with us on a regular basis, Good morning, Mike. How are things doing in the world of Mike Dubuski. Not that I care, but I have.
You know, hanging in. I suppose yeah, okay, good, good answer, hanging in. Okay. I want to spend a minute talking.
About shopping online for the holidays and how AI is affecting that, because it.
Seems to be Yeah, absolutely so.
There's some new numbers that we have from Adobe Analytics that looks into this, and what they found was that in the month of October, traffic from AI platforms to retail sites was up twelve hundred percent over last year, meaning that people are going to services like chat, GPT or Google Gemini. They're talking to these chatbots for a little while, and some of the answers that these chatbots give back are recommendations for products or links to other websites.
People are then clicking those links and increasingly buying things on online retail platforms. In fact, Adobe also found that once a person was sent to one of these third party websites, whether it be Walmart or eBay or Amazon dot Com, they were sixteen percent more likely to buy something if they came from an AI platform, and they
found this was true in September as well. So as we head into the holiday shopping season, it seems like this is a growing trend people going to these AI services and using them to kind of get an idea of what to buy in the online e commerce space.
Hey, a quick question about AI, and that is that major companies, particularly the tech companies, are spending hundreds of billions.
Of dollars Yeah, on AI, and.
Most of the economists we're looking at this are saying, there is no way on God's Earth they're going to be able to monetize this. It's virtually impossible because of the money that's being invested in this.
What is your take on this? Do you think that's the case?
I think that's increasingly going to be a point of discussion. Yeah, this next couple months, these next few quarters are going to be crucial for the AI industry as they try to monetize this technology, because they are spending way more than they're making. We think that open Ai, which is the maker of JGBT, made about twenty billion dollars last year, a pretty penny certainly, but they also lost twelve billion
dollars last quarter alone. It is incredibly expensive to build this technology, to build the data centers, and hire the talent that is needed to make these systems work. And it's worth mentioning these systems don't even entirely work yet they still hallucinate, they still make mistakes. There still some real questions about deploying this at scale. So, you know, I think it's interesting to see them kind of move
into this e commerce space. Chat GPT recently announced integrations with PayPal and Shopify that will let you check out on the app without ever having to leave and actually go to a third party to make your purchase. You can actually stay within the app and make your purchase there.
Of course, they get a cut of that. It seems like that's a revenue stream for them, or they certainly hope it will be, because eventually these bills are going to start coming doe and they are pretty hefty bills, you know, to the order of nine figure deals that OpenAI has struck with the likes of Oracle and Nvidia and others.
You know, I, I'm just starting to use AI and just for research purposes. Not that I have this problem, but I looked at Penis extenders with a I. You should have seen the stuff that I got. That's just an aside. So people are buying with AI, is it? I know it's way up the number of people doing it. Do you actually save a good chunk of money? Is worthwhile strictly monetarily.
Well from the customer's perspective, maybe a good thing that these AI systems are pretty good at doing is like comparing prices, But of course there's still the hallucination problem. They might be pulling a price that is outdated or not accurate, so there's definitely some level of risk there. I think that there's a bigger cost question when it
comes to deploying these things at scale. McKinsey put out a survey last week that found that while ninety percent of companies that they surveyed are regularly using AI, nearly two thirds are not deploying it at scale into their workflows. And this, of course comes nearly three years after the launch of chant GPT, these companies are still adopting a weight and see sort of approach to this technology, and that creates a really existential threat for the AI industry.
Do we have any numbers or at least pronostications as to how many people will or are unemployed because of AI and it's wiping out entire industries. I know that, for example, entry level computer programmers, engineerings that's gone because of AI. And I'm being told, oh, if people are there, if they know how to use AI, well, that's a fraction of the number of people who lost their jobs.
Do we have any idea where that's going.
Not at the moment. Again, it's the very early stages of this, and it's worth mentioning. While we are seeing a lot of layoffs across the tech sector. Amazon made you know, huge headlines recently for nag off thousands upon thousands of workers. A lot of it doesn't actually have
to do with AI. And in fact, Amazon, you know, made that announcement that they were making about a ten percent staff reduction globally, and they actually had to come out after the fact because many people were speculating it's because oh, they're integrating generative artificial intelligence. Later they came out and said, no, actually, we're just doing this because
of other sort of economic winds that are blowing. And that really does speak to the fact that this technology, despite the fact that we talk about it all the time, is still really imperfect and still not a really trustworthy thing for these companies to integrate.
All right, Mike, thank you for the information. It's always good you have a good day. You did because because you're in New York, it's actually almost night. Got it, all right? Today is Veterans Day, also known as Armisice Day. And what's that about a little bit of history here. Armisist Day was declared because because World War One ended in nineteen eighteen, the Armistice, I mean the fighting stopped between the Germans and the Austrians against the quote Allies.
It's sort of the same. It's some sort of the same breakup as World War Two. And it ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh month, the eleventh day. And that's why it's November eleven, nineteen eighteen.
I did a story a.
Few years ago about they literally put down their arms at eleven o'clock. I mean it stopped right there, and there was a story about I think it was an English soldier who was killed three minutes before eleven o'clock ten fifty seven. He was shot. Boy, wrong place, wrong time in any case. In nineteen fifty four it officially.
Became Veterans Day.
The Armisice Day, originally a day to remember those who had served in World War One, the Great War, the War to end all wars. Boy, they jumped on that one, didn't they coming back to World War Two and then remembering those who served in that war. But then you have World War two and you have the Korean War. So the US decided to honor all veterans instead of Joe, just those that came out of World War One, and in nineteen fifty four it officially became Veterans Day, honoring
everyone who has served. Now most people confuse Veterans Day with Memorial Day.
Isn't Memorial Day about people will have served?
Yeah, it actually is, but Memorial Day honor service members who have died in the service to their country. On Veterans Day, also deceased veterans are remembered. The difference is Veterans Day talks about thinking and honoring living veterans as opposed to Memorial Day.
That's the big one.
And so in nineteen thirty eight, Armistices Day was established to remember that armistice signed on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, nineteen eighteen. And that was first proclaimed by the first Armists Day nineteen nineteen by President Woodrow Wilson. And then you had World War two, the Korean War, so in nineteen fifty four
it became Veterans Day as opposed to Armistice Day. I kind of like Armistice Day, but the reality is, we really have to honor our veterans, and we didn't honor them.
We don't honor them at all. To give you an idea of honoring veterans, when I was in the middle of the Vietnam Draft and soldiers coming back from Vietnam and the fight over there, and it's a fight we shouldn't have had, and I don't want to go into politics of that, but do you know that soldiers coming back couldn't wear their uniforms on the street because people would spit on them, because the armed services were looked at in such disregard. And today, of course we all
those who have served. As a matter of fact, on Handle on the law. If anybody says I'm a veteran, I go thank you for your service.
That's a given. Boy.
Life has changed and for the better. So the thing I think to remember is.
Veterans Day came out of World War One Armistice Day on November eleventh.
Because of the history, thought i'd share that with you a little bit.
You've been listening to The Bill handle Show.
Catch My Show Monday through Friday six am to nine am, and anytime on demand on the iHeartRadio app.