“The legislation addresses various issues tied to last year’s fatal Washington air disaster, including advanced location-tracking technology on aircraft. But the ROTOR Act has met stiff resistance from the chair of the House Transportation Committee.
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The Senate passed the bill, S. 2503, from Cruz and Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), via unanimous consent in December.
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Transportation Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) has objected to the bill, saying he wants big changes to it.
In a series of recent interviews, Graves has cited concerns over impacts to general aviation, the small-scale flights that range from recreational trips on single-engine planes to crop dusting.
On Tuesday, the top Democrat on the House transportation panel, Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington, said in an interview he was mulling two options: either adjusting the ROTOR Act or crafting new legislation after the National Transportation Safety Board last week issued 50 recommendations related to the catastrophe, which killed 67 people.
In a separate interview Tuesday, Graves said his committee will have a bipartisan response to the midair collision.
Victims’ families and the chair of the NTSB have backed the ROTOR Act.
One of the NTSB’s recommendations mirrors a key component of the Senate bill: a mandate of an advanced location-receiving technology — called Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast In, or ADS-B In — on planes and helicopters flying in busy airspace.
Graves, an avid pilot and longtime general aviation booster, doesn’t support the ROTOR Act’s ADS-B In requirement, as written.”
Korea’s labor laws make firing employees very difficult. These strict laws drew out of the horrible working conditions during Korea’s economic rise under a dictatorship. Making it that hard to fire employees leads to: bad employees lowering companies’ efficiency, companies hiring fewer employees, companies keeping workers as contract employees or independent contractors and the employees therefore not getting basic benefits, brain drain as good employees can more easily move up the ranks and make more money in other countries, and discourages foreign companies from investing in Korea.
“instituting a “duty of care” for AI developers to “prevent and mitigate foreseeable harm to users” (per Blackburn’s summary of the bill). This duty would be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
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“It’s basically just an invitation for lawyers to sue any time anything bad happens and someone involved in the bad thing that happened somehow used an AI tool at some point.
And then you have to go through a big expensive legal process to explain “no, this thing was not because of AI” or whatever. It’s just a massive invitation to sue everyone, meaning that in the end you have just a few giant companies providing AI because they’ll be the only ones who can afford the lawsuits.”
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Section 11 of Blackburn’s bill is promoted as combating “the consistent pattern of bias against conservative figures demonstrated by Big Tech and AI systems.” But, in practice, it could require AI systems to have a pro-conservative slant—at least as long as President Donald Trump or other Republicans are in power.
The bill would set up “audits of high-risk AI systems to undergo regular bias evaluations to prevent discrimination based on protected characteristics, including political affiliation.”
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“Right now, 230 lets platforms get frivolous lawsuits dismissed quickly at the motion to dismiss stage. This change would force every platform to go through lengthy, expensive litigation to prove they weren’t “facilitating” (an incredibly vague term) or “soliciting” third-party content that violates federal criminal law.
That’s gutting the main reason Section 230 exists. Instead of quick dismissals, you get discovery, depositions, and trials, all while someone argues that because your algorithm showed someone a post, you were “facilitating” whatever criminal content they claim to find.””
“Regulation isn’t just an annoyance—it’s a prosperity killer. At the end of 2024, the MetLife & U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index found that “51% of small businesses say navigating regulatory compliance requirements is negatively impacting their growth” and that “almost as many (47%) say their business spends too much time fulfilling regulatory compliance requirements.”
With the affordability of housing a major concern, the National Association of Home Builders warns that “regulations account for nearly 25% of the cost of a single-family home.”
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“The real test ahead is whether deregulation will be made durable by Congress or be left to the whims of the executive officeholder,” Crews emphasizes. “Unfortunately for the Trump project, meaningful reform requires more than freezes and ratios. Congress needs to make the ‘Unrules project’ permanent, and to end the laundering of regulation by means other than the conventional rules featured in this roundup.””
Taiwanese chip manufacturer TSMC is building a subsidized plant in Arizona, but is having trouble dealing with: thousands of pages of regulation, unions who want Americans to get the jobs, cultural clashes, and homeowners who don’t want plants nearby.
This event shows that the US can be a tough place to do business. We should consider reform.
“The first giant leap backward has been a dangerous weakening of public data, the raw material required to train AI models. The federal government collects troves of data that families and businesses use every day — traffic patterns and census information, nutritional assessments and air quality reports, soil data and economic measures.
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the administration has spent months ordering agency after agency to delete or hide data that’s politically inconvenient, and indiscriminately firing employees including those who manage valuable datasets.
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Initial research shows the eye-popping potential for AI weather forecasts that could be precise down to a city block or accurate as far ahead as a month. But that’s only possible with the sensor data that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collects and curates from weather stations, ships, balloons, aircraft, satellites and buoys. The Trump administration has reduced weather balloon launches and removed hundreds of agency staff. It plans to cut back on NOAA satellites and shutter more than a dozen facilities that gather and curate data.
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The Trump administration has also disrupted the collection of important health data. One example is data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gathered for nearly four decades from a representative sample of volunteers to understand risks in pregnancy. That valuable data now remains scattered and hard to access, because the CDC first shuttered the database to avoid collecting data on race and ethnicity in line with the administration’s executive order against “DEI,” and then placed the staff on administrative leave. That makes it harder to learn why Black maternal mortality is more than twice the national average, or how to protect all mothers and newborns. Data on vaccine safety, farm labor, hunger, greenhouse gas reporting and international development have also been deleted or degraded.
For AI to be effective against these immensely complex challenges, the smarter move would have been to expand data collection and support the agency staff who make sure datasets are robust and accessible.
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With steady support from Congress over successive administrations, eight decades of federal research funding made it possible to start new industries, prevent and cure diseases, deter potential adversaries, understand and start to manage environmental risks and expand the boundaries of human knowledge. This research base is where AI itself came from, and to harness AI for the next generation of advances, federal support is essential.
Instead, the Trump administration has frozen grants, attacked leading research universities, curtailed high-talent immigration, ousted thousands of research agency staff and proposed a $44 billion reduction in federally funded research and development — the largest single-year cut in history.
While some take solace in the administration’s cuts sparing specific budget lines for AI research and the new executive order for Energy Department research using AI, that’s like buying more tractors while you kill off your crops. AI is a tool, not the goal itself. The federal government needs to fund not just AI researchers, but researchers in the full range of promising fields that need AI to advance”
One reason housing is so expensive is because we don’t have enough houses. One reason we have fewer houses is because local regulations make building more expensive. Until local politicians get serious about limiting regulations, or the federal government withholds funds to localities that do not do so, these politicians are not serious about housing affordability.
“the FTC must prove Meta continues to wield monopoly power “whether or not Meta enjoyed [such] power in the past.” Citing Heraclitus’ philosophy of universal flux, Boasberg says, “while it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down.”
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Meta’s victory over the FTC shows that markets evolve faster than antitrust litigation moves. In this case, antitrust enforcers assumed that Meta was immune to competition and that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp would foreclose the social networking market to newcomers. In reality, social networking and social media have become so intertwined that, if Meta hadn’t acquired Instagram and pivoted to focus on short-form video content, it could have gotten its lunch eaten by TikTok and YouTube.”