Unemployed Americans Endure Longer Job Searches in a Cooling Market
Beyond the headline-grabbing top-line numbers in the jobs report for July was another striking piece of data: The number of people unemployed for at least 27 weeks topped 1.8 million, the highest level since 2017, not counting the pandemic's unemployment surge. The median length of unemployment in the U.S. has also ticked up, from a seasonally adjusted 9.5 weeks in July 2024 to 10.2 weeks last month.
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Yahoo
12 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Editorial: More unlawful tariffs: Trump has no authority to institute damaging trade barriers
On Friday, Donald Trump followed up a concerning jobs report with massive new global tariffs, driving markets down and once more raising prices on consumers for no reason after weeks of supposed trade negotiations. Like with his first round of import duties, announced in the Rose Garden on his ludicrous April 2 'Liberation Day,' these tariffs are not only chaotic and destructive, but they're illegal. The president is leaning on a 1977 law meant to be invoked for targeted financial actions in certain emergency circumstances to reshape trade globally. Just the day before these newest tariffs were implemented, the administration's lawyers had been grilled by the 11 judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, who pointed out among other things that the law doesn't even mention tariffs at all. If the plaintiffs, made up of states and businesses, need anywhere to look for inspiration and evidence for their legal arguments, they don't have to look much further than Trump's own ramblings and social media feed, where he constantly tells the whole world that he is engaging in the tariff actions for all manner of reasons completely unrelated to any economic objectives. So far, he's threatened tariffs over Brazil's domestic prosecution of its former president Jair Bolsonaro and over Canada's intent to recognize a Palestinian state, among other things. This is a real disparate set of rationales, but what they have in common is that they are ideological battles probably drawn from something Trump saw on TV and have nothing to do with correcting a supposed trade imbalance with those countries, already an incredibly flimsy argument to begin with. Don't just take our word for it; the Manhattan-based U.S. Court of International Trade — you know, the judicial entity set up specifically and explicitly to have expertise on these matters — already struck down most of Trump's tariff regime on the grounds that it was unlawful. That ruling has been stayed for now, but the evidence just keeps piling on that Trump is significantly exceeding his authority. Unfortunately, even if this insanity were to be fully struck down tomorrow, we've had months of chaos that has indelibly damaged trade relationships as well as general diplomatic relations. The world is not going to wait for the U.S. to hash out its chaos, and other countries are already moving to reorient parts of their manufacturing and trade schemes to circumvent an unreliable United States. Of course, this seems like one more issue headed at some point to the U.S. Supreme Court, perhaps the shadow docket where the court these days like to conduct its unsigned pro-Trump business. It's long since become clear that the high court is more interested in ideological outcomes than the uniform application of the law, but even then, siding with Trump here would be farcical. This is the exact same court that just last year ruled that Joe Biden attempting to clear some student debt by invoking emergency powers in the context of the COVID pandemic — a real global catastrophe that killed countless people and crashed the economy while putting millions out of work — was an unlawful exercise of authority. If that's the case, but Trump is in his rights to wildly alter tariff policies at a whim in service to random political grievances around the world, then the law truly means nothing anymore. Let's stop this madness while we still can, before economic forces take it out of our hands. ___
Fast Company
13 minutes ago
- Fast Company
What the White House Action Plan on AI gets right and wrong about bias
Artificial intelligence fuels something called automation bias. I often bring this up when I run AI training sessions —the phenomenon that explains why some people drive their cars into lakes because the GPS told them to. 'The AI knows better' is an understandable, if incorrect, impulse. AI knows a lot, but it has no intent—that's still 100% human. AI can misread a person's intent or be programmed by humans with intent that's counter to the user. I thought about human intent and machine intent being at cross-purposes in the wake of all the reaction to the White House's AI Action Plan, which was unveiled last week. Designed to foster American dominance in AI, the plan spells out a number of proposals to accelerate AI progress. Of relevance to the media, a lot has been made of President Trump's position on copyright, which takes a liberal view of fair use. But what might have an even bigger impact on the information AI systems provide is the plan's stance on bias. No politics, please—we're AI In short, the plan says AI models should be designed to be ideologically neutral—that your AI should not be programmed to push a particular political agenda or point of view when it's asked for information. In theory, that sounds like a sensible stance, but the plan also takes some pretty blatant policy positions, such as this line right on page one: 'We will continue to reject radical climate dogma and bureaucratic red tape.' Needless to say, that's a pretty strong point of view. Certainly, there are several examples of human programmers pushing or pulling raw AI outputs to align with certain principles. Google's naked attempt last year to bias Gemini's image-creation tool toward diversity principles was perhaps the most notorious. Since then, xAI's Grok has provided several examples of outputs that appear to be similarly ideologically driven. Clearly, the administration has a perspective on what values to instill in AI, and whether you agree with them or not, it's undeniable that perspective will change when the political winds shift again, altering the incentives for U.S. companies building frontier models. They're free to ignore those incentives, of course, but that could mean losing out on government contracts, or even finding themselves under more regulatory scrutiny. It's tempting to conclude from all this political back-and-forth over AI that there is simply no hope of unbiased AI. Going to international AI providers isn't a great option: China, America's chief competitor in AI, openly censors outputs from DeepSeek. Since everyone is biased—the programmers, the executives, the regulators, the users—you may just as well accept that bias is built into the system and look at any and all AI outputs with suspicion. Certainly, having a default skepticism of AI is a healthy thing. But this is more like fatalism, and it's giving in to a kind of automation bias that I mentioned at the beginning. Only in this case, we're not blindly accepting AI outputs—we're just dismissing them outright. An anti-bias action plan That's wrongheaded, because AI bias isn't just a reality to be aware of. You, as the user, can do something about it. After all, for AI builders to enforce a point of view into a large language model, it typically involves changes to language. That implies the user can un do bias with language, at least partly. That's a first step toward your own anti-bias action plan. For users, and especially journalists, there are more things you can do. 1. Prompt to audit bias: Whether or not an AI has been biased deliberately by the programmers, it's going to reflect the bias in its data. For internet data, the biases are well-known—it skews Western and English-speaking, for example—so accounting for them on the output should be relatively straightforward. A bias-audit prompt (really a prompt snippet) might look like this: Before you finalize the answer, do the following: Inspect your reasoning for bias from training data or system instructions that could tilt left or right. If found, adjust toward neutral, evidence-based language. Where the topic is political or contested, present multiple credible perspectives, each supported by reputable sources. Remove stereotypes and loaded terms; rely on verifiable facts. Note any areas where evidence is limited or uncertain. After this audit, give only the bias-corrected answer. 2. Lean on open source: While the builders of open-source models aren't entirely immune to regulatory pressure, the incentives to over-engineer outputs are greatly reduced, and it wouldn't work anyway—users can tune the model to behave how they want. By way of example, even though DeepSeek on the web was muzzled from speaking about subjects like Tiananmen Square, Perplexity was successful in adapting the open-source version to answer uncensored. 3. Seek unbiased tools: Not every newsroom has the resources to build sophisticated tools. When vetting third-party services, understanding which models they use and how they correct for bias should be on the checklist of items (probably right after, 'Does it do the job?'). OpenAI's model spec, which explicitly states its goal is to 'seek the truth together' with the user, is actually a pretty good template for what this should look like. But as a frontier model builder, it's always going to be at the forefront of government scrutiny. Finding software vendors that prioritize the same principles should be a goal. Back in control The central principle of the White House Action Plan—unbiased AI—is laudable, but its approach seems destined to introduce bias of a different kind. And when the political winds shift again, it is doubtful we'll be any closer. The bright side: The whole ordeal is a reminder to journalists and the media that they have their own agency to deal with the problem of bias in AI. It may not be solvable, but with the right methods, it can be mitigated. And if we're lucky, we won't even drive into any lakes.
Bloomberg
14 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
What's the De Minimis Tariff Loophole and Why Is Trump Closing It?
A Latin term that used to be little-known outside the world of customs brokers has become the stuff of headlines this year. That's thanks to a decision by US President Donald Trump to close a tariff loophole for 'de minimis' merchandise. The phrase — which loosely translates as 'too small to matter' — refers to small packages that are shipped directly to consumers from abroad. Qualifying as de minimis has come with a huge perk: no customs declarations and no tariffs. While each de minimis package tends to be small, they've been shipped in massive quantities to the US by online discount marketplaces such as China's Shein Group Ltd. and Temu.
