Blog, YouTube & Content Monetization

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is rejecting Democratic demands on health care as unserious but says a government shutdown is still “avoidable” despite sharp divisions ahead of Wednesday’s funding deadline. “I’m a big believer that there’s always a way out,” the South Dakota Republican said in an interview with The Associated Press on Thursday. “And I think there are off-ramps here, but I don’t think that the negotiating position, at least at the moment, that the Democrats are trying to exert here is going to get you there.” Thune said Democrats are going to have to “dial back” their demands, which include immediately extending health insurance subsidies and reversing…

Wholesale Produce Supply, a food supplier based in Minneapolis, has recalled more than two dozen varieties of its fresh cut and processed cantaloupe products due to a risk of contamination with Listeria monocytogenes, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced. According to a notice posted by the FDA on Monday, September 29, no illnesses have been reported to date, but Listeria has the potential to cause serious infections. Here’s what to know: Which products are affected by the recall? Wholesale Produce Supply fresh cut cantaloupe was sold to distributors in Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wisconsin, who may have distributed the product to other states.…

TikTok is a one-stop-shop for recipe inspo, viral dance trends, tin-foil-hat conspiracies, and, increasingly, political commentary. Now, it’s also where one in five Americans are getting their news. That’s according to a Pew Research Center analysis published last week, which has tracked a dramatic uptick in news consumption on the platform, up from just 3% in 2020. “During that span, no social media platform we’ve studied has experienced faster growth in news consumption,” Pew noted. In Pew’s survey, 43% of adults under 30 said they regularly get their news on TikTok, up from 9% five years ago. But it’s not just younger people. A quarter of adults between the …

Last week, two Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) LP decks leaked to Newcomer. As far as I (and Google and ChatGPT) can tell, this is only the second time ever that internal Andreessen Horowitz documents have leaked. The firm is notoriously secretive. I am much too humble and my fund is much too insignificant to seriously believe that my Substack from September 3—“Andreessen Horowitz is not a Venture Capital Fund”—and its subsequent republishing on Fast Company could possibly have annoyed the Sand Hill Road behemoth so much that it decided to leak its own LP deck for the first time in history. But you gotta love the timing. 😜 Regardless of why the decks were leaked o…

“Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high . . . take a look, it’s in a book“: Reading Rainbow, PBS’ iconic kids show, is back after 20 years off the air. This time around, it’s hosted by beloved TikTok librarian Mychal Threets. But you don’t have to take my word for it. The news was announced on September 29 through an Instagram post shared by Threets, the official Reading Rainbow account, and Buffalo Toronto Public Media. Episodes of the new series will premiere at 10 a.m. ET every Saturday during October on the KidZuko, a kids’ YouTube channel from Sony Pictures Television, as well as on Reading Rainbow’s website. Reading Rainbow was first launched in 1983 a…

It’s not just Hollywood that’s been grappling with how to deal with AI-generated characters. Wikipedia editors are figuring all this out as they go along, too. Following reports this week that an AI “actress” named Tilly Norwood is attracting interest from talent agents and rattling real-life performers who make their living in movies and on TV, Wikipedia editors moved quickly to create a page for the character—and almost immediately began arguing over how to describe it. Is it a synthetic actress? Is it even a she? Can Tilly Norwood, despite having 45,000 followers on Instagram, be accurately described as doing anything? These are the types of questions tha…

Tesla’s Cybertrucks might be the most polarizing vehicle on the market. And due to their electronic door-open mechanism, they’re far from the safest. A new lawsuit underscores this, alleging that 19-year-old college student Krysta Tsukahara died during a fiery crash because the truck’s electric doors shut down, preventing the door from opening on either side, as the New York Times first reported. Tsukahara’s family is suing Tesla in Alameda County Superior Court. In Cybertrucks, a passenger has to click a button for the door to open. The only “manual” mechanism to open a rear door is to pull a cable—but reaching said cable involves removing “the rubber mat …

Former Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers learned all about technology’s volatile highs and lows as a veteran of the internet’s early boom days during the late 1990s and the ensuing meltdown that followed the mania. And now he is seeing potential signs of the cycle repeating with another transformative technology as a whirlwind of investments and excitement about artificial intelligence has propelled the stock market to new highs. Chambers took a similarly meteoric ride in his early days running Cisco, which had a market value of about $15 billion in 1995, when networking equipment suddenly became must-have components for the buildup of the internet. The feverish dem…

The list of retailers that have yanked pasta products from their shelves continues to grow in the wake of a deadly Listeria outbreak. On October 4, grocery retailer Kroger Co voluntarily recalled deli pasta salads sold at Kroger-owned locations including Ralphs, Smith’s, and Fred Meyer, in addition to Kroger stores. The products were recalled due to a risk of contamination with Listeria monocytogenes. The recall notice was published to the website of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Saturday. To date, no illnesses have been reported in connection with this recall. However, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the USDA’s Food Safety and …

Deloitte Australia will partially refund the 440,000 Australian dollars ($290,000) paid by the Australian government for a report that was littered with apparent AI-generated errors, including a fabricated quote from a federal court judgment and references to nonexistent academic research papers. The financial services firm’s report to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations was originally published on the department’s website in July. A revised version was published Friday after Chris Rudge, a Sydney University researcher of health and welfare law, said he alerted the media that the report was “full of fabricated references.” Deloitte had reviewed th…

Kentucky’s attorney general claimed Tuesday that the online gaming platform Roblox has become a “playground for predators” as he announced a lawsuit accusing the company of lax child safety measures. The Kentucky suit, filed by his office Monday in a state court, is the latest action alleging that the wildly popular site isn’t doing enough to protect children on its gaming services. To bolster safeguards for children and teenagers flocking to the site, the company needs to install effective age verifications and content filters, Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said. Added parental notifications also are needed, he said. Courtney Norris, a Kentucky mother of t…

If you’re a frequent flier, chances are you’ve been seized by the fear that your carry-on bag is too big for the overhead compartments. Now, for American Airlines passengers, it’s even more important to make sure that your bag is within the size limit before boarding. This week, the airline announced that it’s getting rid of its bag-sizers at gates. American Airlines told the news station KTLA that it started removing the metal sizers, which typically allow customers and gate agents to decide if luggage will fit in the airplanes’ overhead bins, on October 6. According to the airline, the move is intended to simplify the boarding process—bypassing the bottlene…