the quality of the debate we are having on this issue is absolute trash. This is not really because of Fox News and Republicans, who can be expected to mischaracterize the entire thing and turn it into a wild smear, but instead because of the mainstream political media, which has completely acquiesced to using a crude caricature of ​“defund the police” as its go-to version. This happens because the political media exists not to cover the substance of issues, but to cover politics as sports. At its core, our mass media is able only to talk about which side is winning in the political arena. The actual wisdom of policy choices is considered a second-order question that is not the business of the media to answer. The smear version of the real issue, therefore, has more utility to the political media than the more honest version, because the smear version is what is being wielded in the political fight.

As drivers struggle to make ends meet, companies are eager to take advantage of the situation

Rudy Giuliani's law license in New York state was suspended on Thursday, as a state appeals court found he had lied in arguing that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from his client, former U.S. President Donald Trump.

Earlier this year, when Echelon Insights released its way-too-early poll of voters’ preferences for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, political wonks could be forgiven for having to Google the name at the bottom of the list next to Sen. Josh Hawley: somebody called “Portnoy,” polling at zero percent. As founder of the self-consciously lowbrow Barstool Sports digital media empire, Dave Portnoy has, over the past decade, parlayed an outsized, aggressively macho social-media presence into a status as a right-leaning populist champion. He threatened — via Twitter, almost certainly illegally — to fire any Barstool employees who might attempt to unionize. He went viral with his impassioned rants against Covid-19 lockdowns. He feuded with Elon Musk on the behalf of meme-stocking, little-guy day traders. (He also heads an online outlet that has shamelessly stolen content and engaged in flagrant racism and misogyny, leading harassment campaigns against anyone who would dare call them out.)

Idling trucks ahead of protests in April drained half of Streets and Sanitation’s overtime budget for the year.

AI has been filling in the gaps for illustrators and photographers for years now — literally, it intelligently fills gaps with visual content. But the latest tools are aimed at letting an AI give artists a hand from the earliest, blank-canvas stages of a piece. Nvidia’s new Canvas tool lets the creator rough in a landscape like paint-by-numbers blobs, then fills it in with convincingly photorealistic (if not quite gallery-ready) content. Each distinct color represents a different type of feature: mountains, water, grass, ruins, etc. When colors are blobbed onto the canvas, the crude sketch is passed to a generative adversarial network. GANs essentially pass content back and forth between a creator AI that tries to make (in this case) a realistic image and a detector AI that evaluates how realistic that image is. These work together to make what they think is a fairly realistic depiction of what’s been suggested. It’s pretty much a more user-friendly version of the prototype GauGAN (get it?) shown at CVPR in 2019. This one is much smoother around the edges, produces better imagery, and can run on any Windows computer with a decent Nvidia graphics card. This method has been used to create very realistic faces, animals and landscapes, though there’s usually some kind of “tell” that a human can spot. But the Canvas app isn’t trying to make something indistinguishable from reality — as concept artist Jama Jurabaev explains in the video below, it’s more about being able to experiment freely with imagery more detailed than a doodle.

It was a simple enough video. Just two guys on a beach in Salisbury, N.B., wondering if anyone wanted to hang out. They weren't prepared for what happened next.

The mayor of Miami-Dade said Thursday that half of the units in Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, have collapsed. “A massive search and rescue is underway and we know we are going to do everything we can possibly to identify and rescue those who have been trapped in the rubble,” Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told reporters Thursday. The mayor said the building is 12 stories and has more than 130 units.

A recent press event for Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts 2 highlighted just how casual American culture is about violence towards Arab people.

A hacker found that smart meters could determine what infrastructure may have been protected from blackouts during the Texas snowstorm.

Megan Thee Stallion's 'Thot Shit' is very instructive.

Prof Beth Biller at Edinburgh University’s Institute for Astronomy, who was not involved in the Nature study, said the work could change how scientists approach Seti, the search for extraterrestrial life. “What was striking to me was how few of the stars within 100 parsecs could have viewed a transiting Earth,” she said.

Diamond Valley Lake, an "inland ocean," is Southern California's prime defense against drought.

Doctors need mental health support. Here’s why many aren’t getting it.

A Saskatchewan First Nation says it has made the “horrific and shocking discovery” of hundreds of unmarked graves — many believed to be children — near a former residential school, with a total expected to be over three times higher than the 215 discovered recently in Kamloops, B.C., according to a source briefed on the file. Leaders of the Cowessess First Nation, a roughly two hour drive east of Regina, are expected to reveal details of the macabre discovery near what was once the Marieval Indian Residential School during a press conference Thursday morning, as well as the latest count of newly-identified remains.

A Georgia start-up aims to become the Airbnb for temporary shared housing. It calls it a solution to the housing crisis. Former tenants tell a different story. Kathleen SayVon had spent weeks hunting for a new place to live in 2018, sleeping in her car and showering at the gym, when she finally caught a break. As she scrolled her phone in her car one evening, an ad for affordable rooms in the Atlanta area appeared on her Facebook feed. The price—$130 a week, with utilities included—was a rare find she could afford on the wages from two temp jobs she was working while attempting to finish her bachelor’s degree. SayVon thought she’d hit the jackpot. “You’re like, ecstatic, you know?” she said. A phone call and a $35 application fee later, SayVon, 59, had a new place to live—along with five roommates in their thirties who she had never met before, plus a pitbull. Some of the troubles SayVon soon ran into were standard roommate stuff: noise from other rooms that often kept her awake, disputes over cleaning the bathroom. Other parts of her new living situation were new to her, and more unsettling: No one seemed to know exactly who owned the house they lived in, only what happened if you missed a weekly rent payment: “They just locked them out of the house,” SayVon said, an eviction that could happen in an instant with the keycodes tenants had been given to access the property being changed remotely. SayVon, in her search for cheap rent, had stumbled across PadSplit, a buzzy startup that aims to “disrupt” the affordable housing industry with a cross between boarding houses and Airbnb. Like the vacation rental app, PadSplit doesn’t directly own or manage properties. Instead, the “mission-driven marketplace” offers its own value proposition to owners and investors in single-family homes: By renovating properties to double or triple the number of bedrooms, owners can double their rental income. PadSplit then advertises, books, and processes weekly payments for rooms through its website, in exchange for a 12 percent cut from property owners. While other “co-living” startups like Common and WeLive target upper-middle-class professionals, PadSplit says the annual median income of its users is $22,000. Depending on the location and amenities offered, like a private bathroom, most rooms currently available on the site are listed at between $130 and $190 a week. Compare that to the average monthly rent of a one-bedroom—$1,020 in the Atlanta metro area, per the 2019 American Community Housing Survey, and increasing quickly—and you can understand the appeal.

A herd of cows at least 34 cows ended up stampeding through a neighborhood in Los Angeles after somehow managing to escape from a slaughterhouse in the area.

The software magnate reportedly died just hours after a Spanish court approved his extradition to the United States.

Thousands of people gathered last week to hold “America’s wildest and craziest country party” in a Kentucky town so small it doesn’t even have a stoplight. Days of disorder resulted in four dozen people criminally charged and left others with gruesome injuries. Blue Holler Offroad Park in Edmonson County played host to “Redneck Rave,” a five-day country party that organizers promised would feature “mud, music and mayhem.” The event was organized by a country rapper known as “Justin Time.” The Edmonson County sheriff’s office was tasked with policing twice its usual population as some Redneck Rave participants allegedly committed assaults, severed fingers, got impaled and became so intoxicated they were ill. The organizer relished the negative attention the event’s outcomes produced Wednesday.

The leader of the Vlog Squad built an empire on goofy pranks and wild stunts. Now he’s under fire for turning trauma into content. Can he make a comeback in a culture driven by clicks?