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The one-bedroom cottage with a woodsy vibe reminded Heather McAlpine of the home she lost to the brutal Los Angeles-area wildfires. But only two hours after seeing the listing, the rental was snapped up.She is one of tens of thousands of people displaced by the fires who is now competing for housing in a region that is among the most expensive and competitive in the country, partly due to lack of supply.McAlpine, had lived in her Altadena house for four years and is now staying with her boyfriend. She isn’t surprised by spiking rents.“I know they’re expensive, and it sucks,” she said.Tenants who were just getting by before the fires now face a daunting housing search after the January fires leveled entire neighborhoods. The L.A. fires destroyed more than 16,000 homes, businesses and other structures in upscale Pacific Palisades and working-class Altadena, where the U.S. Census reports 22% of homes were occupied by renters.It’s hard to quantify exactly how the wildfires are affecting the rental market, but L.A. rents rose faster than prices nationwide in January compared to the previous month, according to housing platform Zillow.The added competition from residents displaced by the fires is likely to worsen housing affordability, increase overcrowding and contribute to homelessness, says Sarah Karlinsky, research director at the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. Already, more than half of all renter householdsor a little over one million householdsin L.A. County spend 30% or more of their income on rent.Shane Phillips, housing initiative project manager at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, expects prices to increase significantly for months, if not a few years.“There’s only so many people moving at any given time, and suddenly adding another 20,000 households to that amount is just an extraordinary pressure,” he said.Rental pageviews in L.A. County on the real estate platform Redfin are up 50% from a year ago, said Daryl Fairweather, the company’s chief economist.She said people will feel the impact of “shorter supply, more fierce competition for rentals.”Egregious rents cropped up soon after the fires broke out, prompting an ad-hoc group of tenant organizers, web programmers and others to crowdsource examples. The Rent Brigade found more than 1,300 examples of illegal rent increases advertised between January 7 and January 18. Many have since been removed or relisted at lower prices.California Attorney General Rob Bonta has warned repeatedly of the state’s anti-gouging laws, which limits price increases to no more than 10% from whatever the price was before the emergency. His office has so far filed three misdemeanor criminal price-gouging charges.A 10% cap is still too high for Wendy Dlakic. She was paying about $3,000 a month for a now uninhabitable two-bedroom condo in Altadena, a community she loved. She’s searched rental websites, but for now is staying with friends, family and at Airbnbs.“It was already expensive,” said Dlakic, an educator who moved to Southern California two years ago. “It’s tough to be in L.A. on one income. You’re right on the edge, you know?”The “typical rent” in the U.S. was $1,968 as of January 31up 0.2% from the previous month, according to Zillow. But in the L.A. metro area, the typical rent was up 0.8% to $2,954. Zillow calculates the typical rent figure by averaging the middle 30% of rents.Daniel Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, says fears of rent-gouging have been overblown by tenant advocates and he’s angry that Bonta has filed criminal charges.“Some mistakes were unknowingly made,” he said. “If these infractions were pointed out to these few owners, corrections would have surely been made immediately.”McAlpine, the displaced tenant, realized the Eaton Fire was coming for her in-law unit while she was helping to evacuate neighbors as a Altadena Mountain Rescue Team volunteer. She scooped up her cat, ski gear and camera equipment and fled the 300-square-foot (28-square-meter) cottage.She’s grateful for donations through GoFundMe, which will help with essentials, but is worried about finding a standalone unit close to nature and within her monthly budget of $1,800 for rent and utilities.The cottage that McAlpine, a photographer, and her boyfriend wanted was listed for $2,750 a month. Even though they have a bigger budget together, the hunt has been dispiriting.“I’m quickly looking for the photos. ‘Oh, does this look sketchy or not?’ Or, ‘you know, is this the right price?'” she said. “It’s just very different from how I would normally look for a place to live.” Janie Har and Damian Dovarganes, Associated Press
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The termination letters that ended the careers of thousands of U.S. Forest Service employees mean fewer people and less resources will be available to help prevent and fight wildfires, raising the specter of even more destructive blazes across the American West, fired workers and officials said.The Forest Service firingson the heels of deadly blazes that ripped through Los Angeles last monthare part of a wave of federal worker layoffs, as President Donald Trump’s cost-cutting measures reverberate nationwide.Workers who maintained trails, removed combustible debris from forests, supported firefighters and secured funds for wildfire mitigation say staffing cuts threaten public safety, especially in the West, where drier and hotter conditions linked to climate change have increased the intensity of wildfires.“I’m terrified of that,” said Tanya Torst, who was fired from her position as a U.S. Forest Service partnership coordinator in Chico, California, on February 14. Torst, whose probationary period was set to end in March, worked with groups to bring in nearly $12 million for removing dead trees and other fuels in the Mendocino National Forest.“This is 100% a safety thing,” she said of her concerns, recalling the deadly Paradise blaze that killed 85 people east of Chico in 2018. “That’s why I’m speaking out.”The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said in a statement that Secretary Brooke Rollins supports Trump’s directive to fire about 2,000 “probationary, non-firefighting employees,” which he said was for efficiency’s sake. Rollins is committed to “preserving essential safety positions and will ensure that critical services remain uninterrupted,” the statement said.The statement didn’t address the fired workers who were responsible for removing combustible fuels and other projects aiming to lower a wildfire’s intensity.The Trump administration has frozen funds for wildfire prevention programs supported by legislation championed by former President Joe Biden, the Associated Press reported. Programs not funded by that legislation can continue, an Interior Department statement said.U.S. Rep. Kim Schrier, a Washington state Democrat, said on the social platform X that the Forest Service layoffs are already hurting the state, “and it is only going to get worse. Fire season is coming.”The Washington state Department of Natural Resources said the firings forced them to develop contingency plans to deal with a “degraded federal force this coming fire season.”Melanie Mattox Green, who was fired from her land management and environmental planning job at the Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana, said their fire-prevention efforts prioritized areas where towns border forest lands. Staffing cuts put those towns at risk, she said.“If a fire breaks out now without these projects occurring, that fire is going to be far more dangerous to our local communities,” she said.The cuts also mean fewer people will keep trails free of fallen trees and other debris, she said. Maintaining trails is critical in remote areas that firefighters access by foot.“Without those trails being cleared, it means that now firefighters cannot easily and more effectively get to these fires to fight them,” she said.Many Forest Service workers who don’t occupy official firefighter positions still have firefighting certifications, known as a “red card,” that must be renewed annually. Josh Vega, who maintained 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometers) of trails as a forestry technician in the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana before being fired, said his crew was the first to arrive at a wildfire that broke out in 2023.For about two days, Vega’s crew monitored the blaze before firefighters arrived. “We spent the next few days keeping an eye on the fire, making sure that the trailheads were all closed and that the public knew what was happening so that they wouldn’t find themselves in a predicament.”Many Forest Service operations involve supporting firefighters beyond fire season, including surveying areas for prescribed burns or ensuring trail access, said Luke Tobin, who was fired from his forestry technician role in Idaho’s Nez Perce National Forest.“Everybody helps with fire in some aspect, some way, shape or form,” he said.Gregg Bafundo, who was fired last week from his post as a wilderness ranger and wildland firefighter at the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest, said the staffing cuts came at a critical time.“This is the time of year when they hire everybody,” he said during a press conference organized by Washington Sen. Patty Murray. “It’s the time of year when firefighters renew their red cards and practice redeploying their fire shelters. This is when they train to be ready to fight next summer’s fires.“We can’t train while the fire is burning over the hill.” Martha Bellisle and Claire Rush, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
While having lunch with a few fellow business owners recently, our conversation turned to the topic on every entrepreneurs mindartificial intelligence. It turns out that AI tools have quietly woven themselves into our daily routines, whether we’re brainstorming, researching, or synthesizing data, were also using it in slightly different ways. Tools like ChatGPT are like Swiss Army Knives for productivity and creativity. Its no surprise that in the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 65% of organizations reported regularly using AIthe technology is here to stay. That said, leaning too heavily on AI can go awry. If you delegate content creation to ChatGPT, for example, it runs the risk of plagiarizing. The generative AI tool is also a notorious liar. In 2023, one startup found that ChatGPT made things up about 3% of the time. That same year, a Google chatbots false claim caused the companys market value to tumble by around $100 billion. The key is strategic integration with safeguards in place. If youre curious about how to integrate AI smartly into your business, here are some friendly tips to get you started while keeping things safe and effective. Use AIs strengthswithout losing your own ChatGPT can supercharge your creativity. Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch pitted the large language model (LLM) against humans to determine which group could generate better business ideas. (Spoiler alert: The robots came out victorious.) Commenting on his findings, Terwiesch said that everybody should be using ChatGPT to help them generate ideasif nothing else, your idea pool will improve. He called it a no-brainer. I like to use ChatGPT to get the ball rolling on creative brainstorming. Using simple prompts, you can ask ChatGPT to help you generate ideas and then choose and refine the best ones. ChatGPT can also summarize dense, lengthy information in seconds. It can break down concepts in as simple terms as youd likejust begin your prompt with something like, Pretend you are explaining this to [a 12-year-old, a college kid, etc.]. Importantly, the best practices with ChatGPT entail using the LLM as a jumping-off point, without delegating your creativity entirely. To me, the idea is to assign ChatGPT the rote or manual parts of your work to make more time and space for wide swaths of impactful, deeply creative workthe work that leads to innovation and breakthroughs. In sum, use ChatGPT for tasks like summarizing information and generating ideas, not as a replacement for your own critical thinking and expertise. Always verify information from AI Fact-checking is a practice that we sometimes take for granted. The New Yorker, known for its historically rigorous fact-checking department, employs around 30 people to verify the facts in every single story. As one former fact-checker explained, Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized. ChatGPT, however, has no fail-safe in place. Thats why leaders must be skeptical of anything presented as a fact, verify information with sources, and encourage employees to do the same. If ChatGPT generates a summary of somethingfor example, the latest news on DeepSeekthe summary will include the names of sources hyperlinked to the corresponding web addresses. I recommend checking each one, as ChatGPT has a tendency to link to a source that does not contain the relevant information. In short, never take information from ChatGPT at face value. Be clear about how AI should be used Finally, its critical for leaders to be transparent about how employees can use generative AI tools. For starters, this signals to employees that they should leverage LLMsif theyre not, the company’s competitors and their colleagues will. I regularly encourage Jotform employees to seek out new ways to automate their busywork, including using generative AI tools, to make more time for tasks that feel personally meaningful, motivating, and inspiring. Failing to communicate corporate policies surrounding AI creates a risk that employees will misuse itfor example, handing over the reins for their creative work, or essentially copying and pasting other peoples work product based on the LLMs results. Without clear guidance, employees may encounter problems with data security, ethical concerns, and regulatory compliance issues. Theres no shortage of fear and anxiety surrounding AI, especially regarding its potential to take human jobs. Transparency can help employees understand AIs role as a productivity and creativity booster, rather than a threat, fostering innovation and meaningful productivity. By setting clear expectations, leaders create a culture where AI enhances work and advances individuals on their career paths, rather than disrupting them.
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