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1 month ago | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
Open AI and Google, having long trained their ravenous bots on the work of newsrooms like this one, now want to throw out long established copyright law by arguing, we kid you not, that the only way for the United States to defeat the Chinese Communist Party is for those tech giants to steal the content created with the sweat equity of America’s human journalists.
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2 months ago | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
In a court filing Wednesday, lawyers for Elon Musk said that he would withdraw his consortium’s eye-popping bid of $94.7 billion for Sam Altman’s OpenAI if its board of directors would agree to retain its status as a charity, rather than go ahead with a planned, potentially lucrative conversion to for-profit status.
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Nov 23, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
President-elect Donald Trump has tapped billionaire Elon Musk to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) with Vivek Ramaswamy, a pharmaceutical company CEO and briefly a Republican presidential candidate. DOGE’s primary goals will be to dismantle the government bureaucracy and cut wasteful spending during the second Trump administration. Ambitious goals, indeed, but can Musk and Ramaswamy’s efforts really improve the federal government’s efficiency?
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Oct 18, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
Click here for a complete list of our election recommendations. Proposition 32 would raise the minimum wage to $18 an hour over two years, about $1 more than it would be otherwise. The measure would make California’s minimum wage the highest in the nation. Current minimum wage levels were set under a compromise deal passed by state lawmakers in 2016. Yes: Day laborer employment advocate Victor Moreno says many workers are struggling to survive in California but many can’t ask for more pay.
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Oct 12, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
Click here for a complete list of our election recommendations. Proposition 5 would reduce the threshold for local government bonds for housing and roads from two-thirds to 55%. The two-thirds vote requirement for local bond measures has been part of the California Constitution since 1879. In 2000, voters approved an exception for local bonds for school construction, which have since required only 55% approval.
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Oct 10, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
Some right-leaning voters who oppose Donald Trump are thinking of voting neither for him nor Kamala Harris. I understand how they feel. In 2016, I published an article urging Never Trump conservatives to consider casting their ballot for a third-party candidate. In the election that year, I did just that. I regret writing that column. I regret casting that vote. To people like me, Trump represented a repudiation of everything that Ronald Reagan stood for.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
Click here for a complete list of our election recommendations. Proposition 4 would allow the state to borrow $10 billion by issuing bonds bonds for natural resources and climate activities. Individual proposals include efforts to ensure safe drinking water, strengthen drought, flood and water “resilience,” increase clean energy production, address sea level rise, create parks and outdoor access, provide heat mitigation or fund wildfire prevention programs.
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Oct 3, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
Here are our recommendations for the state measures on the Nov. 5 election ballot. Click on the links to read the full editorials. To read our recommendations on regional and local races and measures, click here. (If you have trouble reaching the individual articles on our mobile app, click here.)2 – State school bonds – No: Prop. 2 fails to fix broken California school bond program. The measure’s funding for construction favors local districts that already have access to money over those that don’t.
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Sep 28, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
Click here for a complete list of our election recommendations. Proposition 35 on the Nov. 5 ballot would permanently extend the tax on managed health care insurance plans to pay for Medi-Cal services. The measure would require that revenues to be used only for specified services, including primary and specialty care, emergency care, family planning, mental health and prescription drugs.
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Sep 21, 2024 | 
mercurynews.com | Christine Kilpatrick
Click here for a complete list of our election recommendations. Proposition 36 on the Nov. 5 ballot would make thefts of $950 or less a felony, punishable by up to three years in county jail or state prison, if the person has two or more past convictions for theft crimes. The measure also permits prosecutors to charge people who possess illegal hard drugs and have two prior drug convictions with a special felony that lets them choose treatment over prison. Yes: San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan says Prop.
