Who Really Won Florida’s Legislative Session, The Real Jobs Report & Cybercrime in the Age of A.I. – Top 3 Takeaways – May 8th, 2023
- More than meets the eye. There’s far more than meets the eye in regard to Florida’s state legislative session. As someone who believes in delivering content that is helpful, useful and repeatable, it’s especially frustrating to see key conversation about the most effectual policies rarely presented and discussed in lieu of what amounts to click bait. Yes, Florida’s just completed state legislative session had its share of red meat. There was legislation addressing the use of public bathrooms, medically induced transgenderism for minors, the reining in of the influence of teachers’ unions among others. But while culture war material was a central focus of news reporting throughout the session and the concluding coverage of session is being painted largely as a DeSantis presidential primer, there’s so much more than meets the eye that’s seldom reported on. And it can best be summed up with the final budget vote on Florida’s record $117 billion budget passed through to Governor DeSantis. Do you know what that vote was? Unanimous. That’s right, the budget that pays for the proposals that the Legislature approved passed unanimously. And in our current state of politics, in which there seemingly is far more that divides than unites us, commonly lost in the reporting is the rest of the story. Did you know, for example, that of the 337 bills which passed the Legislature this session roughly a quarter of them, including the granddaddy of them all – the budget - passed on unanimous votes? Would you have suspected that there was bipartisan support for close to half of what passed? Did you know that one of the earliest bills signed into law this session was introduced by a Democrat? Yes, Republicans had a super majority, yes Governor DeSantis’ agenda was carried out, however no – Florida's Democrats and their constituents weren’t at all ignored, as they could have been, this session. And no, by way of policy which passed, none the least of which is the state’s budget, there isn’t nearly as much that divides us as is often portrayed in the news. Partisans seeking attention on culture war issues often make the news, however behind the scenes there’s much more than meets the eye. As I mentioned on Friday, the biggest winner of this year’s session wasn’t DeSantis, the GOP supermajority or culture war issues. It was us. Its too bad more time isn’t spent covering the issues that matter to Floridians as opposed to the drama, however for those who pay attention to what’s really happening, there’s much more to the story and often less partisanship than meets it as well. Speaking of headlines...
- Behind the headlines. The real story with Friday’s employment report was to be found behind the headlines. That’s largely because the headlines themselves, those espousing an acceleration in hiring, couldn’t have been further from the truth. Like literally, the headlines espousing an acceleration of hiring in April are patently false. That’s because there was a rapid declaration of job creation reported during the month. What was the real deal? The government was found to have wildly overestimated previous job gains in prior months leading to 149,000 fewer jobs having been added. The net effect was a gain of only 104,000 new jobs, the worst report in nearly three years – during the early impact of the pandemic. Details, right? We’ve consistently seen the government jobs number come in higher than the ADP Private Sector jobs report. What we saw is that yet again, the ADP Report, which pulls hard employment data, has initially proved far more accurate than the government callout survey that is the methodology behind the government jobs report. Now the good news is that the most recent ADP Report was strong, meaning there’s a good chance we really did add over 200,000 jobs last month – which is encouraging. However, the real number behind the government’s headlines was not at all what the headlines reported it to be. What we’ve had through the first four months of the year is the weakest job creation in three years – at the onset of the pandemic induced recession.
- Cybercrime in the age of AI. AI is like a lot like the platform it lives on, the internet. It’s neither inherently good nor bad. It can be used for either. But as we well know, the evil actors of the world are inclined to leverage all available resources in their efforts to harm others for their benefit. That time for AI has arrived. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the first consumer AI service, has already fallen victim and those exposed through their platform are now being held hostage. In late March OpenAI disclosed a material data breech. As they explained: We took ChatGPT offline earlier this week due to a bug in an open-source library which allowed some users to see titles from another active user’s chat history. It’s also possible that the first message of a newly-created conversation was visible in someone else’s chat history if both users were active around the same time. The bug is now patched. We were able to restore both the ChatGPT service and, later, its chat history feature, with the exception of a few hours of history. As promised, we’re publishing more technical details of this problem below. Upon deeper investigation, we also discovered that the same bug may have caused the unintentional visibility of payment-related information of 1.2% of the ChatGPT Plus subscribers who were active during a specific nine-hour window. In the hours before we took ChatGPT offline on Monday, it was possible for some users to see another active user’s first and last name, email address, payment address, credit card type and the last four digits of a credit card number, and credit card expiration date. Whoopsido right? Anyway, what’s now commonly happening with those who were exposed is data extortion. That’s in part because many of the earliest adopters to ChatGPT were companies and top officers at them. Just as AI makes obtaining information much faster, albeit subjectively based on those who’re programming it, it also makes cyber security threats faster and more pervasive as well. Ransomware has been an issue for years. We’re now starting to see the evolution of it with data ransom. Users beware. In my view it’s as important as ever to have a good identity theft protection service to be as protective as possible if there is a breach – lest your info isn’t just abused but held for ransom as well.