Senator Joe Manchin doubts stimulus checks price $ 2,000

Senator Joe Manchin, DW. Va., Visited in the Russell Building on Thursday, July 30, 2020.

Tom Williams | CQ Appeal, Inc. | Getty Images

Democratic Senator Joe Manchin signaled on Friday that he could speak out against direct payments of US $ 2,000, thereby jeopardizing one of his party’s priorities if it takes unified control of the White House and Congress.

The Washington Post initially quoted West Virginia lawmakers as saying they would “absolutely” disapprove of another coronavirus relief check on Americans. He later explained his comment in a tweet statement, saying, “When the next round of stimulus checks expires, they should be aimed at those who need them.”

Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, questioned the cost of the proposal. The bipartisan Joint Tax Committee previously said an increase in payments in the State Aid Act passed last month from $ 600 to $ 2,000 would cost $ 463 billion.

His stance casts doubt on what kind of direct deposit plan could get through the Senate when the Democrats have a wafer-thin majority. The party will have control of a 50:50 chamber for the coming weeks following the January 20 inauguration and the swearing-in of Democratic-elected Senators Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff of Georgia.

Manchin’s comments appeared to be causing a temporary decline in major stock indices on Friday.

President-elect Joe Biden and Democratic Congress leaders have called for trillions of dollars more in pandemic rescue spending as Americans struggle to pay bills and rent during an ongoing virus outbreak. Biden called the $ 900 billion relief plan approved last month a “down payment.” The urge for more assistance comes when the Labor Department reported the US lost 140,000 jobs in December.

Biden, Warnock and Ossoff said the Democratic election in Georgia would mean the Senate could write $ 2,000 checks.

Republicans can ensure that most laws take 60 votes to pass. However, it is expected that Democrats will have three options to use the budget vote process, which will allow certain measures related to spending to be passed by majority vote.

Some people must not doom the passage of payments to failure. At least one Republican – Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri – backed $ 2,000 checks last month when President Donald Trump urged them. It is unclear whether or how the president’s departure or the pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol this week will affect GOP payments-related policies.

The House passed a bill last month to increase the checks in the relief bill from $ 600 to $ 2,000. Individuals earning up to $ 75,000 in 2019 would receive the full amount and gradually expire until a cap of $ 115,000 is reached.

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The WHO warns of an uneven distribution of vaccines in order that Covid can flourish

Becky Board, General Manager of Covid Recovery, prepares to deliver the first Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine in London to 90-year-old patient George Dyer at Croydon University Hospital at the start of the largest vaccination program in UK history on December 8, 2020 in London, United Kingdom.

Dan Charity | Getty Images

The coronavirus is mutating and doing everything it can to survive. It will continue to thrive unless there is a more equitable distribution of vaccines around the world, the head of the World Health Organization said on Friday.

There are 42 countries currently introducing their starting doses of Covid-19 vaccines and most of them are high income countries, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference in Geneva. Only six of these countries are considered low-income, while no low-income countries have started their vaccination programs, he said.

“There is a clear problem that low and middle income countries are not yet receiving the vaccine,” Tedros said.

The unjust use of life-saving drugs comes as the globe faces the deadliest part of the pandemic to date, the WHO warned. Covid-19 deaths have risen to record highs in the past few days as people violated public health recommendations in a number of countries, Tedros said.

Globally, more than 88.3 million people are infected with the coronavirus, and at least 1.9 million people have died, according to Johns Hopkins University. For the first time since the pandemic began, the U.S. reported more than 4,000 deaths from Covid-19 in one day alone on Thursday.

There are also new and more contagious varieties of the virus, such as those identified in the UK and South Africa, that have led some countries to reinstate lockdown measures to control further spread.

Viruses are constantly mutating and are expected to develop over time as the peaks on their surfaces change, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A variant first identified in the UK, known as B.1.1.7, “emerged with an unusually large number of mutations” which made it easier and faster to spread.

Global health experts have said the changes won’t make the existing Covid-19 vaccines any less effective or cause more serious illness. While mutations are normal for any virus, including Covid-19, its rapid spread makes vaccinating the globe equally important, Tedros said. Otherwise, “let’s help it thrive,” he said.

“The current variants show that the virus is doing its best to better suit the ongoing cycle in the human population,” Tedros said.

A handful of nations, including the US, UK, Canada, members of the European Union and others, have supply agreements with companies like Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca claiming the first million doses of their vaccines upon approval.

COVAX, the global alliance aimed at providing coronavirus vaccines to poor nations and jointly led by WHO, has made its own agreements for at least 2 billion doses. Allianz has announced that it hopes to distribute these shots in the first quarter of this year when the drugs are approved.

However, some of the countries participating in COVAX are doing their own bilateral deals, which could raise the prices of the drugs, Tedros said.

“Vaccine nationalism hurts us all and is self-defeating,” said Tedros. “But on the flip side, vaccination fairly saves lives, stabilizes health systems and would lead to a truly global economic recovery that stimulates job creation.”

OpenAI supported by Elon Musk reveals the Dall-E picture generator in accordance with GPT-3

SpaceX founder Elon Musk attends a post-launch press conference after the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on an unscrewed test flight to the International Space Station on the Crew Dragon spacecraft on March 2, 2019 .

Mike Blake | Reuters

Armchairs in the shape of avocados and baby daikon radishes with tutus are among the quirky images created with new software from OpenAI, an Elon Musk-supported artificial intelligence laboratory in San Francisco.

OpenAI trained the software known as Dall-E to generate images from short text captions. Specifically, it used a data set of 12 billion images and their captions found on the Internet.

The lab said Dall-E – a portmanteau by Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali and Wall-E, a small animated robot from the Pixar movie of the same name – learned to create images for a variety of concepts.

OpenAI showed some of the results in a blog post published on Tuesday. “We found that [Dall-E] has a number of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, plausibly combining unrelated concepts, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images, “the company wrote.

Dall-E is based on a neural network, a computer system vaguely inspired by the human brain that can recognize patterns and identify relationships between huge amounts of data.

While neural networks have previously generated images and videos, Dall-E is unusual in that it relies on text input while the others don’t.

Synthetic videos and images have become more complex in recent years as it has become difficult for humans to distinguish between the real and the computer generated. For example, General Adversarial Networks (GANs), which use two neural networks, have been used to create fake videos of politicians.

OpenAI acknowledged that Dall-E has “the potential for significant broad societal impacts” and plans to analyze how models such as Dall-E “relate to societal issues such as economic impact on certain work processes and occupations, and the potential for bias the model results and the longer term ethical challenges this technology poses. “

GPT-3 successor

Dall-E comes just a few months after OpenAI announced that they have built a text generator called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-Training), which is also supported by a neural network.

The speech generation tool is able to produce human-like text if necessary. It became relatively famous for an AI program when people realized it could write its own poems, news articles, and short stories.

“Dall-E is a Text2Image system that is based on GPT-3, but is trained on text and images,” said Mark Riedl, associate professor at Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, told CNBC.

“Text2image isn’t new, but the Dall-E demo is remarkable for producing illustrations that are much more coherent than other Text2Image systems I’ve seen over the years.”

OpenAI has competed with companies like DeepMind and the Facebook AI Research Group to develop general-purpose algorithms that can perform a wide range of tasks at the human level and beyond.

Researchers have developed AIs that can play complex games like chess and the Chinese board game Go, translate one human language into another, and detect tumors on a mammogram. However, getting an AI system to show real “creativity” is a major challenge in the industry.

Riedl said the Dall-E results showed it had learned to mix concepts coherently, adding that “the ability to mix concepts coherently is seen as a key form of creativity in humans”.

“From a creativity standpoint, this is a big step forward,” added Riedl. “While there isn’t much agreement on what it means for an AI system to ‘understand’ something, the ability to use concepts in new ways is an important part of creativity and intelligence.”

Neil Lawrence, former director of machine learning at Amazon Cambridge, told CNBC that Dall-E looks “very impressive.”

Lawrence, who is now a professor of machine learning at Cambridge University, described it as “an inspiring demonstration of the ability of these models to store and generalize information about our world in ways that people find very natural”.

He said, “I assume there will be all kinds of uses of this type of technology that I can’t even imagine. But it’s also interesting to be another pretty mind-blowing technology that solves the problems that we have have not resolved. ” I even know that we actually had it. “

“Doesn’t improve the state of the AI”

Not everyone is that impressed with Dall-E, however.

Gary Marcus, an entrepreneur who sold a machine learning start-up to Uber for an undisclosed sum in 2016, told CNBC that it was interesting but “didn’t advance the state of AI.”

He also pointed out that it is not from open sources and the company has not yet published any paper on the research.

Marcus previously questioned whether some of the research published in recent years by the competitor’s DeepMind lab should be classified as “breakthroughs”.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a $ 1 billion commitment by a group of founders including Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. In February 2018, Musk left the OpenAI board, but continues to donate and advise the organization.

OpenAI turned for-profit in 2019, raising an additional $ 1 billion from Microsoft to fund its research. GPT-3 will be OpenAI’s first commercial product and Reddit signed up as one of the first customers.

The December job report will increase the probability of recent stimulus checks

The December unemployment results could revive the “bad news is good news” sentiment on Wall Street and increase the possibility of further government incentives, CNBC’s Jim Cramer said Friday.

According to the Labor Department on Friday, the number of non-farm workers fell for the first time since April last month as coronavirus transmission rates remain high.

“Every disappointing job number like this makes it more likely that we will get another round of government business reviews to cushion the blow,” said the Mad Money host.

While economists polled by Dow Jones predicted that the US economy would create 50,000 jobs, the results suggest that 140,000 jobs would be lost. Despite the negative slowdown in the economic recovery, stocks ended the day at record highs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained almost 57 points to close at 31,097.97, an increase of 0.2%. The S&P 500 rose 0.6% to 3,824.68. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite outperformed both, gaining 1% to 13,201.98.

The blue-chip and broad market indexes both ended four-day winning streaks.

While the pandemic continued to rage during the holiday month, some state and local governments took steps to shut down some non-essential businesses or impose new restrictions to mitigate the spread. Meanwhile, the country continues to face challenges with introducing Covid-19 vaccines.

The greatest pain in the labor report was found in the leisure and hospitality sectors, where 498,000 jobs were lost.

President-elect Joe Biden, due to take office on Jan. 20, said Friday that he wanted to pass another stimulus package that “will be in the trillions of dollars.” Biden and Democrats, who failed to push through another billion dollar bailout prior to the November election, have a much higher chance of meeting their priorities after the party’s Tuesday runoff victories in Georgia got a Trifecta in Washington.

The Biden team plans to release more details on Thursday. Many Democrats are calling for the last payouts sent to many Americans to be increased from $ 600 to $ 2,000.

Cramer found that the housing and raw materials economy is strong. The construction industry, which is still 226,000 below its pre-pandemic level, posted a net gain of 51,000 jobs.

The unemployment rate is 6.7%.

“That means the Federal Reserve has to keep interest rates down to drive the hiring process,” Cramer said.

“When you combine the slower economy with a cautious Fed, you get a situation where stocks … are definitely the only game in town versus bonds. That means you get some longer moves up like the incredible run in Tesla. “

The electric car maker’s shares rose nearly 8% to a new closing high of $ 880.02.

The stock is experiencing an 11-day profit streak and is up 37% from its pre-Christmas level.

The 10 Tastiest Celeb Visitor Stars from Bob’s Burgers

It’s been a decade since we first tried Bob’s Burgers.

And in that time spent with the Belcher family after their Fox debut on January 9, 2011, we fell in love with Bob and his brood – thanks in large part to the truly exquisite vocal work of the Regulars series. With H. Jon Benjamin, John Roberts, Dan Mintz, Eugene Mirman, and Kristen Schaal and Larry Murphy They’ve regularly recorded together as rushed diner owner Bob, wife Linda, children Tina, Gene, Louise and dedicated customer Teddy, proving that the industry standard of separate admission is not always the best. This show is based on a successful chemistry that is only able to face each other.

And that doubles as the series brings in guest stars to populate its charmingly wacky (and still unnamed) coastal community. Over the years, the Belchers have crossed paths with countless characters, many of whom were played by celebrities whose voices we would recognize anywhere. While some have practically become serial regulars themselves, like Sarah Silverman (as Ollie) and Jenny Slate (as Tammy), some made us hungry for more.

In response to the CEO, Micron is within the “candy spot” of market traits for reminiscence chips

Memory and storage are an integral part of the digital transformation that will act as the key business driver for Micron Technology through 2022, Sanjay Mehrotra, CEO of the memory chip maker, told CNBC on Friday.

While the adoption of digital technologies in businesses has been accelerated by job relocations due to the coronavirus pandemic, Mehrotra believes the need for faster computing will be critical to the future expansion of the global economy.

“We are absolutely in a sweet spot of market trends and we are very well positioned to address them,” he said in a Mad Money interview with Jim Cramer.

The comments come a day after the Boise, Idaho-based company posted better-than-expected results in the first quarter of fiscal 2021. Micron’s earnings were 78 cents per share, 7 cents above estimates, on sales of $ 5.77 billion, up 12% year over year. Analysts forecast sales of $ 5.66 billion for the quarter ended December 3.

Micron also cited the state of the dynamic random access memory (DRAM) market as the source of its optimistic forecast for the current quarter. The DRAM business, which supplies chips for storing data in a memory cell, grew by almost 17%.

At a time when the demand for artificial intelligence, 5G and the cloud, all of which require more data processing, is high, the storage industry is tense in areas of the DRAM market, according to Mehrotra.

According to FactSet, Micron Arrow Electronics, HP, Apple and Huawei are among its customers.

“For the first time in the company’s history, Micron is a leader in DRAM technology and NAND technology,” Mehrotra said in an interview on Friday. “We are absolutely excited about 2021 and after Covid. The synchronized expansion of the global economy will continue until 2022.”

Micron’s shares fell 2% to $ 77.42 after trading at high levels not seen since 2000. The stock gained almost 40% in 2020.

Alex Trebek’s final “Hazard!” Episode candidate in regards to the tenacity of the host

What is “perseverance”? A word that the beloved “Jeopardy!” Hosts Alex Trebek and James Gilligan, a candidate on Trebek’s last episode.

Gilligan is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at San Francisco State University who has tried to be a candidate on the iconic show for 30 years.

“I’ve tried it since I was sophomore,” Gilligan said during a Friday night interview about The News with Shepard Smith.

Trebek’s final episode airs Friday night. He hosted the show from 1984 for 37 seasons. He was near the end of his nearly two-year battle with pancreatic cancer when Gilligan taped the episode. Gilligan praised Trebek’s tenacity.

“It was pretty obvious he’d lost a step, but when the cameras started rolling he was the absolute pro,” said Gilligan. “This guy was a titan in the industry and never gave less than 100%. It was just amazing to see a level of performance he was able to achieve despite the struggle he was fighting.”

Trebek died on November 8, 2020 at the age of 80. A new, permanent host for “Jeopardy!” has not yet been named.

“Alex always insisted that he wasn’t the star of the show, that it was the game itself and that the entrants were the real draw and draw,” said Gilligan. “I think whoever hosts after him must have the same attitude.”

R. Kelly celebrates jail birthday with a clip of recent music (audio)

R. Kelly may be behind bars, but he still sends messages to his fans. On Friday when R.Kelly was celebrating his birthday behind bars, he posted a message that contained a clip of new music with the heading “Thank you God for my life!”

In the song, the R&B pop singer expressed how his career has been damaged, and although people hate him, he is still loved.

He sings: “A tsunami almost came to wipe my career away. After 22 years of blessed career, I lay in a hospital bed crying with tears. “The song continues,” Just as I hate a lot of people, I’ve had so many people who loved me. Let’s not forget the hood that covered me.

Then Kelly went on, “Everyone who calls me, tells me what they say about me, brings me all these negative things, everyone I don’t fuck with.”

As previously reported, a journalist covering the R. Kelly case reported that Judge Leinenweber has set a trial date for R. Kelly and his co-defendants for September 13, 2021.

“Kelly’s attorney, Steve Greenberg, sounds skeptical about what’s going on, but agrees to fix the date until it’s set in stone,” said Jason Meisner. R. Kelly’s legal team have tried multiple times to arrest the singer, including using COVID-19 as a reason, but they have been unsuccessful.

Even when he was attacked in prison, the judge denied his commitment. One of R. Kelly’s attorneys, Nicole Blank Becker, exclusively told the Chicago Sun Times that he lived in fear and was “petrified and paranoid” after the attack. She went on to say that he “cannot sleep and is now afraid to leave his prison cell during the two hours he is allowed to leave each day. His insomnia is serious. “

“Robert is scared for his life … he’s been scared every day since he was beaten in his prison cell by his fellow MCC inmate Jeremiah Shane Farmer a month ago,” Becker said.

For the time being, R. Kelly remains behind bars until his trial date.

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Prosecutors allege Theranos scams fueled Elizabeth Holmes’ way of life

Billionaire Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of Theranos Inc., and Christian Holmes come to a state dinner hosted by US President Barack Obama and US First Lady Michelle Obama in honor of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at the White House in Washington, DC, USA, on Tuesday April 28th, 2015.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Prosecutors paint a picture of what the public saw: a billionaire entrepreneur who donned designer labels with her black turtlenecks and rubbed shoulders with world leaders.

But like the Hall of Mirrors at Carnival, everything was just an illusion, according to the government.

Elizabeth Holmes intended to use Theranos “as an instrument to improve her personal situation,” the prosecutor wrote in a request to the court on Friday evening.

“The causal link between the defendant’s fraud and the benefits in question is strong,” the government said.

Holmes and her COO, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, face a dozen fraud charges each. If convicted, they can spend up to 20 years in prison.

As Theranos CEO, prosecutors said Holmes led an extravagant lifestyle that included “traveling by private jets, staying at luxury hotels and having access to multiple assistants.”

“Although the defendant’s assistant was an employee of the company, she did a variety of non-business tasks for the defendant, including shopping for personal clothing and jewelry, decorating homes, buying groceries and groceries, and other items,” said the government in one file.

The government’s motion was in response to efforts by Holmes’ attorneys to prevent the jury from finding out details about their jet setting lifestyle.

The government intends to produce evidence that the alleged fraud at Theranos is directly related to the money and fame Holmes has gained as the CEO of Theranos.

Prosecutors wrote that Holmes was “the object of admiration in the local and national business community and has appeared in numerous publications and on television. She has been associated with influential figures such as politicians and business leaders. The evidence in the trial will show these benefits for.” mattered to the defendants, who watched the daily news closely to maintain their image. “

Holmes was a Silicon Valley favorite, attracting more than $ 700 million in investor money.

“In addition to the specific benefits she received from her fraud, she has also benefited from a great deal of positive attention from the media, business leaders and dignitaries,” the prosecutor wrote.

The motion comes the same night that Holmes’ lawyers claim their failed firm is no different from any other Silicon Valley start-up trying to make a name for itself.

The government “is calling for an order preventing the defense from focusing on the Silicon Valley start-up culture, arguing that founders in this area often use exaggeration and dramatic promises to get the attention they need for their businesses generate and attract capital, “the court said of Holmes lawyers.

Her lawyers argue that evidence related to the culture of Silicon Valley startups may be relevant to the case: “For example, the government intends to produce evidence of certain practices that the government claims they have in Theranos A culture of ‘secrecy’ created to show that Ms. Holmes was hiding alleged fraud. “

“While Ms. Holmes has tried to rule out such evidence, Ms. Holmes, if admitted, could certainly provide evidence that other Silicon Valley startups have used similar practices and that people at Theranos were aware of these practices.”

Holmes will face their fate in July. When she appeared on Zoom, she sometimes looked grumpy, a sharp contrast to the image she had once projected onto the world.

US “fly blind” in the case of new Covid variant, says Doktor

Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, warned The News with Shepard Smith that the US is “flying blind” and “guessing” when it comes to a highly transmissible new variant of coronavirus in the country.

“We don’t know because we don’t do genomic sequencing of the virus the way we do in the UK and other countries,” Jha said. “We have a lot of capacity for sequencing, it’s not that we can’t. We just don’t have it and we have to pull ourselves together and start so we know if there is another variant around.” our country.”

The CDC issued a statement saying that unlike variants in the UK and South Africa, no highly contagious new US variant of the coronavirus had emerged. However, it has been found that there are likely many variants around the world.

Jha’s statements follow reports from the White House coronavirus task force. According to a document received from NBC News, there could be a new variant of Covid that has evolved within the US, is 50% more transferable, and is driving proliferation.

The US recorded 4,085 deaths on Wednesday, the first time the country topped 4,000, according to CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data. Jha told host Shepard Smith it was “mind-boggling” why the US had not done large-scale genome sequencing of people infected with Covid, but noted that he was not “surprised” by the White House leadership.

“A White House that is not engaging, not interested and not really helpful really hampers the national response,” Jha said in an interview on Friday evening. “Some states are starting to fill the void, but it turns out to be a pandemic that having the federal government is really useful.”

President-elect Joe Biden announced a significant shift in the country’s fight against Covid in a new call to free almost all vaccine supplies after he took office.

In a statement to NBC News, a spokesman for President Biden’s transition wrote, “The president-elect believes we need to speed up vaccine distribution … and believes the government should stop holding back vaccine supplies so we can get more shots can.” now in the arms of the Americans. “

It’s a strategy reversal. Under the Trump administration, the federal government stocked up cans to ensure people could get a second shot. The Pfizer vaccine requires two shots 21 days apart and the Moderna vaccine requires two shots 28 days apart.

To date, states have received more than 22 million doses, but about 70% of those doses are on shelves, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jha said he “fully supports the move by the Biden team” to release the Covid vaccine doses.

“We are in the middle of a terrible crisis,” said Jha. “We have to get people vaccinated, and it’s important that the first shot is shot in people’s arms and then making sure the second shot comes relatively soon after that I think is doable.”