Tues: People Like Messi More Than An Egg

Wells Has Found Out How Far They Can Go

Improperly repossessing cars. Erroneously denying mortgage loan modifications. Wrongfully freezing or closing customers' accounts.

Those are some of the infractions allegedly committed by Wells Fargo that has led the bank to agree to a $3.7 billion settlement with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The settlement, announced Tuesday morning, was described by the agency as merely another step in addressing long-running harms alleged against the Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based financial institution. More than 16 million consumers were affected from 2011 to 2022, it said.

“Wells Fargo’s rinse-repeat cycle of violating the law has harmed millions of American families,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement. “The CFPB is ordering Wells Fargo to refund billions of dollars to consumers across the country. This is an important initial step for accountability and long-term reform of this repeat offender.”

The settlement includes a $1.7 billion penalty and approximately $2 billion in restitution.

Why Would Anyone Still Be Doing Business With Them?

What's In a Budget?

Congressional negotiators released a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill early Tuesday, and the bill’s spending for the next year is a clear show of priorities: $858 billion for the military over the next year, and $772 billion for nondefense spending … of which $119 billion is for veterans’ care. That counts as not-military, you see. The long-term costs imposed by their military service, which the government correctly covers, get shifted over to compete with every domestic priority as Republicans try to keep that number low. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell counts it as a major win for Republicans that defense spending is higher than everything else.

The bill includes $44.9 billion in aid for Ukraine and $40.6 billion in relief for disasters like the hurricanes that hit Florida and Puerto Rico.

It also includes the Electoral Count Act, which, in response to Donald Trump’s attempted coup, makes crystal clear that the vice president cannot refuse to certify an election and increases the number of lawmakers required to object to certifying a state’s electors.

The bill does not include some key things: pandemic aid, an expanded child tax credit, cannabis banking legislation, and a corporate tax cut allowing businesses to write off research expenses immediately.

This Provision Might Affect You

Americans might be able to retire with more money in their savings accounts — but it probably won't help the people who need it most.

On Tuesday, the House appropriations committee released over 4,000 pages of text on its plans to allocate government spending for the upcoming fiscal year. It touched on a range of topics from TikTok to higher education to healthcare.

A significant element of the bipartisan government spending plan included changes to Americans' retirement funds. Specifically, the bill would allow people to be able to save longer for retirement. By raising the age people are required to start taking out money from their retirement accounts to 75, workers can spend more years contributing pre-tax earnings.

It also allows an increased contribution in retirement savings for older workers and paves the way for automatic enrollment for workers starting in 2025. Employees with student debt will also get some assistance through this bill — it would allow them to receive matching contributions in their retirement plans by way of repaying their student loans.

But critics of the plan say that it still tilts the scale towards wealthier retirees — and allows them to accumulate more money untouched by taxes. For people who are already financially stable, the higher age might mean they can stow away more untaxed funds in their 401ks, or even "transfer more of those tax-subsidized funds to their heirs," Chuck Marr and Samantha Jacoby of the 
Frank Clemente, the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, told Insider that he's "very disappointed in the retirement security provisions."

"They're getting retirement security to very wealthy people with the tax breaks in this legislation, but we're not doing much to help the average working people and working families to save for retirement and we're tired of it," Clemente said.

That's one reason that retirement provisions have provoked ire from some progressives, who argue that it could worsen racial wealth gaps. White Americans are far more likely to have retirement savings, and those savings dwarf those of Americans of color.

"Real retirement-savings reform would address the core problem: too many low- and middle-income workers with too little savings; too many high-income employees, and the rich, with too much savings that is heavily subsidized by taxpayers," a letter organized by the left-leaning Americans for Tax Fairness and co-signed by 45 national organizations said.

You Have 12 Years to Buy a Gas Guzzler in Oregon

Policymakers for the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality on Monday approved a rule that prohibits the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles in Oregon by 2035.

The effort comes as Oregon plans to cut climate-warming emissions by 50% by 2035 and by 90% by 2050, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. The transportation sector accounts for nearly 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon.

The rule is based on vehicle emission standards California adopted in August. The standards require car manufacturers to sell a certain percentage of zero-emission vehicles — electric cars, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles — as part of their total sales, starting with 35% in 2026 and increasing to 100% by 2035.

The rule allows for hybrid vehicle sales, which run primarily on electricity but can run on gas. The rule does not affect cars already on the road and used gas-powered cars will continue to be available for sale within the state.

The new rule also requires manufacturers to increase access to affordable zero-emission vehicles to low-income households and communities of color. It offers incentives to manufacturers to sell electric cars to community car share programs, to produce lower-cost zero-emission cars and to direct used electric cars to dealerships participating in low-income assistance programs.

Are We In Maximum Hype About ChatGPT?

Over the past few weeks, social-media feeds and tech-pundit newsletters have been filled with stories and conversations written by artificial intelligence.

All it was written by ChatGPT, a project from the "capped-profit" research group OpenAI. ChatGPT lets users ask its bot questions or give it prompts using GPT-3, an impressive piece of natural-language-processing AI tech.

GPT-3 has been available to the public since earlier this year. What caused some people to call ChatGPT AI's "iPhone moment" was its ease of use. Depending on the prompt, ChatGPT can write an essay on the Napoleonic Wars or craft someone's cover letter for a job application.

Some are now saying ChatGPT could be the end of Google's search dominance, pave the way for widespread cheating in universities, or even do away with many types of white-collar jobs.

But tech insiders and pundits are already becoming cynical about ChatGPT, with some calling it "overrated," "overhyped," and "dumber than you think."

It's what comes next, during the period when general sentiment toward ChatGPT turns skeptical, that will determine if and how tech like ChatGPT becomes an essential part of our lives.

ChatGPT and the Gartner Hype Cycle

In layman's terms, ChatGPT is a chatbot using GPT-3, a state-of-the-art AI model that uses a massive amount of data to generate humanlike text. It's capable of performing a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as answering questions, summarizing text, and generating complete sentences and paragraphs. It's considered one of the most advanced language-processing AI models currently available.

How advanced? The above paragraph was written by ChatGPT. You can criticize the prose — an editor might take issue with the use of the adjective "massive" for something nonphysical, and the sentence structure tends toward the simplistic — but it reads as if a human wrote it.
GPT-3 is of a branch of machine learning called "generative AI." Generative AI analyzes huge amounts of data and trains models that can generate new things. Feed a generative-AI program millions of pieces of art, and it learns how to produce art, like OpenAI's other viral sensation DALL-E. Feed a generative-AI program a huge amount of computer code, and it can create code.

It's all very exciting and new, which is where the Gartner Hype Cycle, from the tech-research and consulting firm Gartner, comes in handy. Debuted by the analyst Jackie Fenn in 1995, it lays out the five stages for any emerging technology.

They Like Him.  They Really, Really Like Him.

Lionel Messi has garnered another achievement along with this first World Cup victory: most-liked post on Instagram.

After taking home his first-ever title on Sunday, the soccer superstar posted a gallery of photos from the trophy presentation to his Instagram page, the first being an image of himself hoisting the trophy.

"World champions!!!!!!!" Messi wrote in Spanish to his 403 million followers. "I dreamed of this so many times, I wished for this so much I still haven't fallen, I can't believe it."

In the 48 hours since he hit publish, the post has racked up 62 million likes and counting. The gallery has comments from his Argentina teammates, Uruguay star and former Barcelona teammate Luis Suárez, the accounts from his clubs Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain, and Argentinian rapper and actor WOS and deejay Steve Aoki.

The Golden Ball winner now has four of the top 10 most-liked posts on Instagram, including a photo celebrating a victory in the World Cup semifinals, his post of a Louis Vuitton ad where he is playing chess against his rival Cristiano Ronaldo and an image of him on the team plane holding the trophy.

Messi's post passes a photo of an egg that previously held the record at 56 million double taps. The World Record Egg was posted in 2019 with the intent to outdo Kylie Jenner's post announcing the birth of her daughter as the most-liked Instagram post.

Want to See The Egg That Messi Overtook? 

It's Just An Egg