 |
|
|
|||||
The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the agency created to serve as a watchdog for American consumers against predatory business practices, said on Thursday it planned to dismiss as much as 90% of its remaining workforce, resuming mass firings less than a week after a federal court ruling granted the Trump administration leeway in setting staff levels. Multiple agency sources said staff members had begun receiving formal notices on Thursday afternoon. A CFPB spokesperson confirmed the agency was moving to fire roughly 1,500 people across core divisions, including enforcement and supervision, leaving only 200 staff. Fox Business had earlier reported those numbers. The workforce action comes in the middle of legal action brought by an employee union and consumer advocates working to prevent what they said was the agency’s illegal destruction. In an emergency motion filed Thursday evening, lawyers for an employee union and consumer advocates told a federal judge the CFPB was flouting court orders requiring a “particularized assessment” prior to any such workforce reductions and that the agency retain enough staff to perform functions required by law. “It is unfathomable that cutting the Bureau’s staff by 90 percent in just 24 hours, with no notice to people to prepare for that elimination, would not ‘interfere with the performance’ of its statutory duties,” they said in the motion. According to one official notice seen by Reuters, the agency said the recipient’s dismissal would take effect in 60 days but that access to internal email systems and IT systems would be cut off on Friday evening. President Donald Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk called earlier this year for the CFPB’s elimination, accusing it of politicized enforcement, and with a court hearing showing the administration’s initial goal was to shut the agency down entirely. However, administration officials subsequently said the CFPB would continue to exist in some form, noting that Trump has nominated a new director. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Created after the 2008 financial crisis, the CFPB is the sole federal agency with power to enforce consumer financial laws at nonbank institutions such as mortgage originators and payment services. The agency, long criticized by conservatives, has been facing an onslaught of firings and changes under President Donald Trump. An appeals court last week partially reversed a decision handed down by a district court that ordered the administration to halt efforts to fire workers, scrap contracts and close offices. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, who championed the creation of the CFPB, earlier this year said no one other than Congress could dismantle the agency and criticized Republican attempts to weaken the agency that has paid $21 billion in financial restitution to thousands of Americans. In a statement, Warren called the mass firings “yet another assault on consumers and our democracy by this lawless Administration.” (Additional reporting and writing by Pete Schroeder) Douglas Gillison and Tim Reid, Reuters
Category:
E-Commerce
Friday, April 18, 2025, is Good Friday. But when it comes to what places are open and closed on Good Friday, things can be a bit tricky. Thats because Good Friday is not a federal holiday but a religious one. It’s the Friday before Easter, which is always celebrated on a Sunday. Yet Good Friday is also a state holiday in select states. This means that public institutions may be closed in one state but open in another on Good Friday. Heres what you need to know about whats open and closed on Good Friday 2025. Is Good Friday a federal holiday? No. Good Friday is not one of the officially recognized federal holidays. Of the 12 federal holidays in 2025, the last one was Washingtons Birthday on February 17, and the next one will be Memorial Day on May 26. Is Good Friday a state holiday? Yesin some states, anyway. According to the Federal Times, Good Friday is a recognized state holiday in 12 states: Connecticut Delaware Florida Hawaii Indiana Kentucky Louisiana New Jersey North Carolina North Dakota Texas Tennessee In most of these states, public offices will likely be closed on Good Friday. Are banks open on Good Friday? Yes, most major banks should be operating as normal on Good Friday. This includes banks like Chase, Citibank, PNC, and more. Online banking services will be available via the banks website and smartphone apps, in addition to physical bank branches being open. Are ATMs open on Good Friday? Yes. ATMs will be open on Good Friday. However, as it is the start of a holiday weekend for many people, ATMs may get picked over sooner than usual. Is the post office open on Good Friday? Yes, as the United States Postal Service (USPS) is a federal organization, it will be open and operating as normal on Good Friday. This includes both at USPS branches and at home mail delivery. Is mail delivered on Good Friday? Yes. The USPS will deliver mail as normal on Good Friday. Are FedEx and UPS operating on Good Friday? According to FedExs holiday schedule, some FedEx delivery services will have a modified schedule on Good Friday, including its FedEx and FedEx Freight services. FedEx Office, FedEx Custom Critical, and FedEx Logistics will be open as normal. UPS says it will be operating pickup or delivery services on Good Friday. It also notes that UPS Store locations will be open. Is the stock market open on Good Friday? No. Major U.S. stock markets will be closed on Good Friday. This includes the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq. Are schools open on Good Friday? Many schools should be closed on Good Friday, but its best to check with your school. Despite not being a federal holiday, many public schools choose to be closed on Good Friday. Most private, religious schools will also be closed. Are restaurants open on Good Friday? Most restaurants should be open on Good Friday. This includes well-known chains like McDonalds, Subway, Burger King, Arby’s, and Chipotle, which should be open. However, note that some franchise locations could be closed, as Chick-fil-A points out. Likewise, many sit-down restaurants should remain open, but you should call ahead first to make sure. Are retail stores open on Good Friday? A majority of big-box retail stores will be open on Good Friday. This includes major chains like Target, Costco, Best Buy, and Walmart. Are pharmacies open on Good Friday? You can expect most pharmacies to be open on Good Friday, including those found in Walgreens. However, pharmacies may have adjusted hours on Good Friday. Its best to check with your preferred pharmacy to confirm their hours on Good Friday. Are grocery stores open on Good Friday? Many regional grocery store chains should be open on Good Friday. However, they may have reduced hours. Its best to check with your grocery store directly to see what their operating hours are on Good Friday.
Category:
E-Commerce
Hello! Next Thursday, April 24, Ill be moderating two fireside chatswith Runway cofounder Alejandro Matamala Ortiz and F-35 pilot Justin Hasard Leeat Artist and the Machines AI & Creativity Summit in Brooklyn. The event promises to be an invigorating exploration of the intersection of technology and art from multiple perspectives, and I hope to see some of you there. Sam Altman wants to build a social network. Given the OpenAI CEOs unbridled ambitionand the potential to turn 400 million ChatGPT users into some semblance of a communityit would be weird if he didnt. And the timing makes sense: On Tuesday, The Verges Kylie Robison and Alex Heath reported that OpenAI is looking to capitalize on the new ChatGPT image-generating features that have already been going viral on other networks since arriving late last month. Whether the company plans to fold social aspects into ChatGPT itself or create a new app remains to be seen. The news of Altmans interest in bootstrapping an OpenAI social network around ChatGPT came less than three weeks after Elon Musk announced that his AI company, xAI, had acquired his social network, Twitter X for $45 billion. Its still unclear whether this move amounts to more than the worlds richest man shuffling assets around the way you or I might rearrange our shelf of Funko figures; after all, xAIs Grok chatbot already occupied prime real estate inside the X app. But xAI, whose wellspring of AI technology and talent is, by all accounts, formidable, now owns a decent-size (if reputationally challenged) online community. That gives it access to hundreds of millions of potential customers, plus a vast, endlessly replenished stream of content it can use to train its algorithms. The potential to do interesting things is there, if Musk can divert his attention from dismantling civic institutions for a moment or two. Even if its obvious why OpenAI and xAI might want to meld their respective generative AI engines with social platforms, it wont be easy. Consider whats going on at Meta, which has more social-network users than any other company and owns a top-tier LLM, Llama. So far, AIs impact on Facebook has been to junk up feeds with spam posts about imaginary people and pointless interjections from the Meta AI bot. If theres a way for the technology to make itself welcome in a communal setting, it probably doesnt look anything like this. For all the ways generative AI is astoundingit recently coded my dream app for mesocial networking may be one of the tougher assignments for it to crack productively. The technology excels at churning out lowest-common-denominator content, but online gathering places need less of that, not more. Nor does its uncanny glibness mean its ready to join conversations the way humans do. Using machine vision, for example, the Meta AI bot can suss out the gist of a posted image, but that has little to do with whether it can say anything interesting about it. In my encounters, the conversation starters its generated have been stultifyingly synthetic. Still, when I heard about OpenAIs social aspirations, my instinct was to be intrigued rather than repelled. For one thing, many of us have spent the last few years obsessing over the companys tools and sharing our creations: I started tweeting DALL-E 2 oddities in August 2022, months before there was a ChatGPT. The company should be able to facilitate that discussion by building some community infrastructure of its own, such as ways to post items for public consumption and comment. Ive been disappointed by its failure to do much with the store for custom GPT applets it launched in January 2024, which could have been a springboard for features that let ChatGPT users talk to each other. The vitality of its newest image-generation technology is an even better such opportunity. More socially aware AI products might also help counteract the AIs tendency to suck users down rabbit holes of solitude. Recent research conducted by OpenAI itself suggests that heavy ChatGPT users tend to be lonely, though its unclear whether thats because the chatbot fosters loneliness or simply a sign that lonely people are drawn to it. Either way, I find my own jags with AI chatbots to be both addictive and isolating in a way that doesnt feel entirely healthyat least when I discover Im still at it an hour or two after I meant to go to bed. Anything that nudged AI devotees back toward engaging with society couldnt hurt. Part of my measured willingness to believe OpenAI could construct a worthwhile social networkmaybe, in theory, if were luckystems from the fact that the company has shown it can create software thats pleasant to use. Any community it built would be a fresh start, which is not true of xAI/X and Meta, both of which are cobbling together AI experiences atop social platforms that are well into middle age, and showing it. That guarantees nothing: Google+ was also quite pleasant but couldnt overcome Facebooks deeply entrenched place in peoples lives, particularly at that time. But an OpenAI social network wouldnt have to displace Facebook to have value. In fact, the less Facebook-like it was, the better the argument for it existing at all. If OpenAIs project turns out to be a soon-abandoned lark rather than a top priority, somebody else might give AI a measure of social grace. For instance, Microsoft consumer AI chief Mustafa Suleyman recently told me that the company is working on priming its Copilot companion to participate in conversations with multiple humans at once, with a sensitivity to their varying interests and attitudes. Or maybe a company that doesnt even exist yet will do the jobwhich would make sense, since every social network that has ever mattered has been the brainchild of a tiny startup. The one scenario that seems implausible is that tomorrows social experiences wont have a far heavier element of generative AI than anything that exists today. We already know what can go wrong when they get smooshed together. Fingers crossed well get to see what can go right. You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fas Company‘s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to youor if you’re reading it on FastCompany.comyou can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard. More top tech stories from Fast Company Facebook Groups are fueling a black market for Uber and DoorDash accounts, says a new reportA TTP report finds Meta’s group features are enabling fraud at scaleallowing unvetted drivers to bypass safety protocols on Uber and DoorDash. Read More ‘I would get way more views if I didn’t help thousands of people’: MrBeast defends his philanthropyascontent strategyThe world’s biggest YouTuber posted stats showing his charity videos rank lowest among recent uploads. Read More How to clean up Google Photos to save spaceand moneyOne of the top photo sites starts free but can get expensive as your collection of pictures and videos balloons. Read More GM just made an EV Corvette concept car. Could it be a new American icon?The Corvette was once a symbol of American progress and industrial might. In the EV age, the car is ripe for reinvention. Read More TikTok starts testing Footnotes, a new feature that looks a lot like X’s Community NotesTikTok said it will open access to start contributing to Footnotes in the coming months. Read More This smart Reddit answer engine puts Google Search to shameReady to get crowdsourced intelligence with next to no effort? Read More
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||