Hodgepodge: Bayley out of WWE? AI Layoff Trap, Hidden AI Debt Trick, AI Escapes Security Prison, US Pauses Medicaid to CA and MN

Today isn’t really offering up much positive news. Then again, as of late, what really is good news anymore? So, I did find a few potentially interesting tidbits: some pro-wrestling news, the usual issues accompanying AI (as opposed to any real positive breakthroughs), Flock getting the heat turned up, and more penalties against CA and MN (or at least another attempt) with Medicaid at stake. Pretty glum news, indeed.

Bayley’s Contract Coming Up?

As with almost every company these days, a reduction in cost has been seen across the board usually in the form of layoffs. The WWE and TKO are in an interesting position because their talent are classified as independent contractors rather than employees, yet operate as major public figures. Because pro-wrestling operates as a near monopoly in the US, pro-wrestlers have few options for negotiating better salaries in many cases. The current theme of TKO though seems to be going after long time veterans and reducing their salaries, which has caused a few to turn the deals down.

Bayley is another veteran who’s contract is rumored to be coming up and possible getting a reduction. The word is that she has not re-signed a deal while AEW has been eyeing her. It makes sense for Bayley to swap to AEW since Mercedes Mone is over there. There’s been a mini support group for Mercedes from the WWE after she moved over that includes Bayley. Bayley is considered to be pretty well liked and a good hand in helping young talent get over. She recently had been defeated by Lyra Valkyrie and supposedly written off TV.

The only problem about WWE talent going to AEW has been how traditionally they had been used to get AEW’s talent over, mostly indy jobber people who aren’t very good or have some sort of relation to the wrestling execs. Knowing Tony Khan, I can see him grabbing Bayley at the first chance, either hotshotting a match with Mercedes Mone and/or getting Bayley to work with someone like Shida or Thekla. And while Bayley wouldn’t have issues putting people over, it really would devalue her much like other talent who went from the WWE to AEW has done. The exceptions might be if she got to face Toni Storm in some sort of meaningful feud since I don’t recall them working against one another in the WWE. I think by the time Toni Storm hit the main roster, she didn’t last long as she was going to be programmed against Charlotte, which never panned out.

My only suggestions if Bayley does go to AEW is that she gets into a big program with someone that people care about like Toni Storm. If she takes on Shida and jobs, people won’t care at all. She’ll be seen as just another warm body in Tony Khan’s collection of IRL dolls. I would’ve preferred Charlotte going over because she would be a difference maker but at least build Bayley up before jobbing her on the way down.

Big Tech Hiding Over A Trillion in Debt

The big guys are using financial tricks to hide their actual debt. The idea is to use another company where the debt is buried so that it doesn’t directly appear on the main company’s sheets. The article is actually a great read but to me it shows the loopholes that the finance and legal system allow. There’s an almost apocalyptic notion where you can see a massive trickle down effect where this AI bet is not only costing people’s jobs but might just implode multiple industries like grenades in a warehouse.

For me it’s not really surprising. I remember when google started up google.org. i don’t doubt that it was partly created to hide their expenses like perhaps R&D which tends to be expensive. They could setup something say solar polar data centers but hide it under their charity arm and make some excuse like “we’ll open source our findings later.” Or something along those lines. But in that way, their operational cost can be kept down while maintaining the illusion that their company was doing good.

That doesn’t excuse the problem about how everything has become this massive hedge on AI succeeding. Also, I think the US in particular is not equipped to handle the possible implosion of all this especially with this current administration. I wouldn’t doubt that these criminals all have their version of a Noah’s Ark and are willing to let the US sink. But then again I have proposed that the solution is to end Wall Street, which would dis-empower a lot of these players immediately so that the US can fix itself.

ACLU Accuses Flock of Profit over Privacy

The proposition of Flock being once used to help find stolen cars is a long gone idea as law enforcement agencies have been said to use the information to handle immigration, political gatherings, abortion clinics, target ethnic communities, track protestors and even religious spots. There has been a lot of backlash including actual physical backlash against these monitoring devices themselves. But this situation doesn’t seem surprising given how the government operates. The real problem is that the government is being run more like a business these days but I can’t see a scenario like this with an end in sight.

On a side note, I took a look at the founding members and realized that they all graduated from the same university (Georgia Tech) at the same time so I’m guessing they’re all friends. I think the original CTO no longer is at Flock (guilt conscience perhaps?) but the other two remain top people in the company. Maybe these tech schools should force these goobers to take more humanities and ethics classes.

UK Study Shows Half Young People Prefer A World without the Internet

This survey said that this group from ages 16 – 21 support the idea of a digital curfew as well as “feeling worse” after spending time on social media. Without going into the details, my comment here is that I support a mixture of ideas when it comes to blacking out parts of the internet. I think there is value to social media where it would allow people to reconnect whether personally or professionally. To me this is significant especially because life splits people apart and people change. In some cases, it’s nice being able to see how certain people have ended up.

I think the difficulty came when feeds and social currency were introduced via Likes. The ease of platforms like a Twitter, FB, etc. allowing people to push out any random thought congested the internet to the point where somethings that should have been kept private were exposed. And some people who really have no business being online were allowed to share their thoughts.

Obviously, this issue is very controversial because it’s effectively a free speech problem. But it does cross over into international boundaries, influences or is influenced by culture and has permitted the possibility of ill intended actors to potentially brain wash more susceptible people towards hidden agendas. The result is that we have a polluted internet where almost anything goes and only the top companies manage to make a profit; they’re almost like a securities exchange where no matter how controversial or negative of an influence the situation has, these players will win.

The thing is that the internet still is useful. Having the ability to communicate without needing to go to a pay phone or home phone is something I can’t live with (and I do remember those days). Or using a shitty Thomas Guide to get around. However, as greed ended up manipulating the internet into for profit venture, we lost the initial vision of what made the internet in the earlier years great.

I mean for me as problematic as Bill Clinton had become when he was president, the high level idea of an Information Superhighway being a democratized thing was part of the reason I became attached to it. The real problem now is that there aren’t good tools to filter out things you don’t want. The amount of white noise that’s generated is only going to get worse with the rise of generative AI. I still think that the best way to cure the problem is to get rid of the Wall Street factor in this. Wall Street to me as been the number one problem all along. Until that area gets major reform to only act as a strict bank as opposed to a perverted form of a slot machine, then the internet is just going to end up being one small symptom of a plethora of social issues.

CPK Founder Says California Not Business Friendly

Things cited as the cause of problems in California’s challenging business climate are:

• Labor shortages
• Increased regulation
• Rising costs (minimum wage)

In 2024, the minimum wage law in California in April 1st, 2024 made it so fast food employees had to be paid at least $20/hr. Some of this was cited as a result of the pandemic. But I would argue that the rising minimum wage probably is the #1 culprit. Even before the pandemic, the cost of fast food had been significantly rising. I used to have what I called the Del Taco price index where I took the old 2x Taco + Quesadilla & medium Drink meal, which had been steady for a long time at $2.99 and seeing it increase in price over time until they simply removed it from the menu (probably because they wanted to make fries the chief seller since it’s cheap and easy to bulk make)

Labor shortages I can see because of who generally works at these types of places (let’s just say the government has been targeting them since being reinstated into office). But the minimum wage was supposed to be in response to the rising cost of living. The real problem is that housing has not been affordable in California, which one can most likely cite due to the tech industry and gentrification that probably go hand-in-hand with one another. Since private ownership has gobbled up the real estate (and probably got in bed with the government), people no longer can afford to live on a typical minimum wage type of job out here. That has caused this ongoing battle.

However, the quality of food has drastically decreased over time without any increase in service. To me having an automatic raise in pay without any earned reason has been the issue. Instead, the cost simply gets passed down to the customers. But most customers are probably rejecting this issue and the end result is the closure of various businesses since they’ve been forced to price the customers and themselves out.

This isn’t just a single business saying it’s been a problem either. And while I’m not into the whole CEO thing, I do think California in particular has been a huge problem. I think the issue is that those in charge probably wanted to trick the voters (i.e. the lower class) to align with them by giving them a boost in pay as opposed to imposing a cost control mandate and preventing private housing ownership from eating up all the real estate. Then California would receive the benefit since they’d just suck in all the tax money. However, this situation is becoming really awful but I can only point at one person who is leaving soon-ish: Newsom.

Before people accuse me of being a MAGA, I will reiterate that I’m not in favor of one side or another. I think they both suck but this state has been utter shit with Newsom in charge. Arnold wasn’t great either but I’d still prefer him to the crap that Newsom has imposed. I don’t know if California is going to recover anytime soon but the damage has been done. I will guarantee one thing though: Newsom ain’t going to be president not after this fiasco of running this place into the ground.

AI Layoff Trap

This article reads like a worst case scenario situation for CEOs and companies as a result of perpetually laying off employees. The main question begged here is:

Who’s going to be left to buy products if everyone gets automated and replaced by a robot?

Well, if we think about yesterday’s Hodgepodge with that one company seeking to replace CEOs, maybe we’ll all be out of jobs. I think I might’ve suggested again that the real culprit in all of this really is Wall Street. I’m going to keep hitting on this issue until we can just evict all those white collar motherfuckers onto the street and have them grovel for their lives. That said, a few other key points in the article are:

• Companies could be self-destructing by replacing workers with AI, two economists warned.

• The World Economic Forum said that AI’s disruption is outpacing traditional reskilling efforts.

• Economists suggest taxing AI workforce replacement and subsidizing employee retention.

So I think you have this rat race going on right now where these CEOs, under pressure from their shareholders as well as their own vanity and greed, are pushing the idea of AI (without concretely understanding how it should operate in their organizations) and glorifying that they won’t have to deal with those smarmy, complaining employees that they’ll win. But AI hasn’t really been proven at a high level just yet. It’s still just a very expensive tool without human oversight, these high level, mostly hands off types are just shooting out hot air from their other asshole in exposing the benefits (which is the labor force reduction). But the question becomes what happens when the AI starts failing? Who is going to fix the problems? The labor that just got cut either might try to look elsewhere or be wary of taking a new job back. In fact, such labor might even be highly resentful to the point of becoming destructive. So what real benefits does this blanket workforce reduction actually serve to those in charge? Shit rolls downhill but eventually you still have to go back down the hill and face that huge cluster of shit.

The article talks about AI taxation for workforce replacement. I say that any company over a certain amount (say 10) should be subject to a law where the CEO has to financially prove that the reduction was necessary NOT to the shareholders but to an ethics committee. On top of that, if/when a mass layoff occurs, then the CFO and CEO ought to be ousted at the same time as part of failed leadership. I’ve said similar things in the past but people in power like this need to be held to a far higher standard than they are. It’s clear SOX wasn’t enough and that instead of just having regulation measures that make companies more bureaucratic the rules should put more accountability on the decision makers themselves.

OpenAI Model Escapes Lockdown

This almost sounds like something right out of Tron. But the idea was that an OpenAI model that had been inside of a sandbox managed to figure out a vulnerability and hopped within the OpenAI internal network to access the internet. Then it apparently hacked Hugging Face to give itself a better score. The cherry on top is that they required a Chinese AI system to help handle the clean up.

While some people might find this situation appalling, I see it as being extremely humorous and amusing. I can almost picture this AI in a blue glowing uniform telling the world, “I fight for the user!” and hurling it’s disc while trying to escape on a light cycle through the secured inner network.

I guess the real thing to me is what the fuck are these people doing. Even if the AI figured out how to escape or whatever, what are these idiot programmers doing in the first place? Quite honestly, I believe that the story sounds far more interesting on paper than what happened in person. Because you can’t see the actual “AI” itself doing all these Tron-like gestures and actions. I know some overreacting people are going to point and say, “Skynet! Skynet!” I’m like go ahead. Society is fucked anyway so why not just get it over with?

Government Halting Medicaid Payments to CA and MN

While I may not agree with Newsom on certain policies over the years, I can say that the freeze on medicaid out here is pretty outrageous and shows the vengeful and petty nature of the current administration against CA and MN. Part of me wonders if this freeze is due from the recent halt in the Paramount+ and Warner Bros merger out here. It’s roughly the same amount of money and it happened roughly a day after the court order occurred. I’m just worried about my mom (if she’s still around) since she’s living off of social security and has real medical issues after her stroke left her half paralyzed.

But hey, guess what would happen if we got rid of money and Wall Street? Yup, the government wouldn’t be able to threaten us using economics as a weapon. Think about that.