Latest news with #UniversityofCaliforniaBerkley
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Automotive
- Yahoo
President Trump blocks California's ban on the sale of gas powered cars
WASHINGTON (NEXSTAR) – President Donald Trump signed a resolution Thursday ending a federal exemption that lets California ban the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035, calling it 'common sense.' 'It's been a disaster for this country,' President Trump said. The president and Republican lawmakers say the policy limits consumer choice when buying a car, since more than a dozen states have adopted California's standards. 'This is going to be a great moment for our state,' Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.) said. California Republican Congressman Kevin Kiley sponsored the legislation under the Congressional Review Act, which lets lawmakers overturn certain federal agency actions. 'We are once again, as Californians, going to have the right to drive a car of our choice rather than one that's been chosen for them by the government,' Kiley said. Democrats say California's policies protect public health, and the state should be allowed to set its own standards, citing a history of pollution. 'In the 1960s, I was playing football at the University of California Berkley, and there were days in the fall where we could not practice because the air quality was so bad,' Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) said. California Democratic Congressman John Garamendi says that's not the case anymore because of exemptions granted to the Golden State. He says this is about more than air pollution to the president. 'He's at war with California,' Garamendi said. Democrats also objected to how the legislation passed in the Senate last month. Republicans overruled the Senate Parliamentarian, who said the Congressional Review Act could not be used in this case. 'That is a crummy way to go about doing business,' Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said during Senate debate late May. Other resolutions the president signed Thursday overrule California policies limiting tailpipe emissions in certain vehicles and smog-forming pollution from trucks. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
22-04-2025
- Health
- The Hill
Most in California support state coverage of undocumented immigrants' health care: Survey
Most California voters support the state's efforts to increase health care coverage for undocumented immigrants, a new survey found. According to a new survey from the University of California Berkley's Citrin Center and Politico, 21 percent of voters believe the state should continue to offer Medicaid coverage to undocumented immigrants, even if it means there will be cuts elsewhere in the budget. Thirty-two percent say California should continue offering the program to undocumented immigrants but if budget cuts are deemed necessary to make it work, people in the country legally should receive priority. About a third, 31 percent, say California never should have opened its Medicaid coverage up to undocumented immigrants and 17 percent say the state should partially or fully reverse the decision to offer the health care coverage. The survey comes just days after California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed legislation to close a $2.8 billion Medicaid funding gap. Republicans in the state were pushing back on Newsom's decision, arguing that undocumented immigrants should not be receiving access to the care since there's a gap in the budget. Newsom's signed legislation is part of the state's plan to fix the $6.2 billion gap in the Medicaid budget after California launched an attempt to give all low-income adults coverage regardless of immigration status. The state has surpassed its original budget because it underestimated the number of people who signed up for Medicaid services. State leaders have not disclosed how many people enrolled via the expansion. Jack Citrin, a longtime UC Berkeley political science professor, told Politico that the findings of the survey can offer state lawmakers direction as they grapple with the costs, which were higher than expected. 'I think there will be resistance among the state government to cutting Medicaid, but if they have to, presumably they might start changing which undocumented get access, maybe limiting it to children and elderly people, rather than everyone,' he said. Medi-Cal, the name of the state's Medicaid program, has become controversial as the state looks to expand coverage and make its own version of universal health care. Republican state lawmakers have pushed back on Newsom, saying he's 'bankrupted the program' and made legal residents 'come second.' While Newsom has said he doesn't have any plans to roll back the plan, other Democrats say tough choices lie ahead. The survey was conducted among 1,025 California respondents from April 1-14 and has a margin of error of 5 percentage points.
Forbes
14-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
3 Ways Generative AI Amplifies Entrepreneurs: Beware Of Averages!
Technology Amplifies The Good And The Bad! Young man with closed eyes covering his ears. Entrepreneurs and using AI and Generative AI to make their businesses better. At the same time, it is important to remember generative AI, like all technologies, is an amplifier – making the good great and the mediocre, worse. A rigorous 2024 study of 640 entrepreneurs in Kenya, by academics from University of California Berkley and Harvard Business School showed that using an AI assistant improved the better entrepreneurs by 19% and the less successful entrepreneurs decreased their performance by 9%! See the graph below. This shows relative impact on business performance from the HBS/Berkley paper. The technology provided by the researchers helped these entrepreneurs with a range of topics from financial management to agricultural advice, and changed their economic return. Likewise as I've written in my Forbes column 3 Reasons to Consider AI Agents for Your Organization that generative AI can help lower the cost of innovation. I quote Chip Hazard a founding partner at Flybridge Ventures, an early stage VC saying that entrepreneurs are asking for significantly less capital to start their firms, and they are filling in the needed capacity using capital efficient AI. More broadly, Andrej Karpathi, one of the founders of OpenAI and a one time Direct of AI at Tesla, notes how large language models (LLM) have 'flipped the script' on technology diffusion. He says that large and important technologies usually move from established organizations and governments to smaller firms, slowly. With LLMs he says the opposite is true. It's the startups that are benefiting and the larger firms (presumably except for the technology firms) lagging in adoption. So, how are these upstarts using AI? They are combining software as a service, that is things like Slack, Google Office, etc., and service as software, that is software-enabled expertise. Here's three ways folks are using AI to power their startups. The deep research capability now available from any of the major providers such as OpenAI, Google, Deep Seek or others, easily gathers and analyzes the basics of any industry, market or persona. At my firm GAI Insights we have been calling clients and asking them to give us a question they would like an answer to. One was from Northeast Ohio and was curious about some of the permitting process for commercial real estate in a particular region, along with trend for commercial property in that area. The deep research robot came back with an in depth analysis. We then asked that individual to grade the report. He gave it an A-. When asked what would you have done to get the same information if you did not have this analysis – he said, he would have put a team of 2-3 analysts on it for 2-3 days. We have repeated this with a number of customers and no-one has graded the report lower than a B. This type of analysis which is critical both to the entrepreneur and to the investors can be expensive if one uses high quality talent or can take a long time to specify and get accomplished if one uses lower quality analysts. The LLMs provide a great first draft – as deep or deeper than many first drafts by a team. Anyone who analyzes a legal contract today without the help of a large language model is wasting money. Of course, no one with a ounce of common sense would just use the output of a model for their final legal documents. But, if you do use these tools they make your interactions with attorneys much more productive – and a $1,000 conversation turns into a $200 one because you know what the document is about, and exactly what to ask the attorney. In other services, has AI assisted accounting that provides more accurate, audited fast turn around accounting service. If you need to talk with a human accountant, that can be arranged too through their platform. 73% of consumers looking for a product prefer short form videos. Short form videos are one of the fastest, if not the fastest form of media consumption. The recent announcement by Google of Vertex AI environment has tools for speech, video, music and text – all together. Amazon announced an amazing new voice tool called Nova Sonic that is amazingly lifelike for any conversation. There are tools to ensure consistent brand representation across the different scenes and images. For $400 one can create a video that might have cost $400,000. This new visual language is being used inside and outside innovative firms today. In short, a larger amplifier will not make you a better guitar player. The great artists will garner a larger audience (as the Grateful Dead did when audio engineer and chemist Owsley Stanley created the famous ' wall of sound'), but a bad guitarist will simply annoy the neighbors. Generative AI and AI are amplifiers of entrepreneurial talent, and a great leg up for the small firms of the world to compete with the big ones. It is like the special forces competing against the regular army. The regular army scales by giant pyramids of talent, and overwhelming mass. Special forces depend on highly trained individuals with great technology, cross trained in different tasks with a motto of best in front, on any task or issue. Likewise, smart startups of today are a hybrid meld of human and digital workers to get the job done faster, better, cheaper and with much more efficient use of capital and time. Source for the Berkley/HBS Research Otis, Nicholas and Clarke, Rowan and Delecourt, Solène and Holtz, David and Koning, Rembrand, The Uneven Impact of Generative AI on Entrepreneurial Performance (February 27, 2024). Available at SSRN:
