Yanfeng International in November will close its plant in Riverside, Mo., around the same time GM plans to end Chevrolet Malibu production at a nearby assembly plant, according to a recently posted layoff notice.
When guests arrive at Disney Springs and eat at one of the entertainment complex’s restaurants, they might assume that all the employees serving them with smiles work for Walt Disney World.
But the magic most people associate with Disney doesn’t exist for some Disney Springs’ employees, say union officials. They argue there is a “second class” of workers at the complex who deserve better wages and benefits.
“We’ve discovered that there is a second class of workers at Walt Disney World, those workers are the subcontracted employees of restaurants that are not operated by Disney,” said Jeremy Haicken, president of the UNITE HERE Local 737, which represents Disney employees. “These are restaurants that are operated by subcontractors at Disney Springs.”
More than 50 food and beverage locations at Disney Springs operate using subcontracted workers, including Gideon’s Bakehouse, Rainforest Café and STK Steakhouse, among others.
Many of these employees do not receive the same level of benefits, such as paid vacation and sick days, provided to employees of restaurants operated by Disney, Haicken said.
Michael Hiltzik | (TNS) Los Angeles Times
Of all the technologies that have created buzz over the last few years, by far the buzziest is what’s known as artificial intelligence — AI for short.
It’s buzzy because the chatbots and data crunchers it has produced have startled users with their human-like dialogues and test-taking skills, and also because its critics, and even some of its proponents, have raised the specter of devices that can take over human endeavors and threaten human existence.
That’s what makes a new book by Bloomberg columnist Parmy Olson so exquisitely timely. “Supremacy: AI, Chat GPT, and the Race That Will Change the World” covers the corporate maneuvering underlying the development of AI in its current iteration, which is chiefly a battle between Google, the owner of the laboratory DeepMind, and Microsoft, a key investor in OpenAI, a prominent merchandiser of the technology.
Olson deserves praise for the remarkable journalistic accomplishment of chronicling a business battle while it is still taking place — indeed, still in its infancy. For all the timeliness of “Supremacy,” the question may be whether it has arrived too soon. How the battle will shake out is unknown, as is whether the current iterations of AI are genuinely world-changing, as her subtitle asserts, or destined to fizzle out.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said the Legislature would step in before the end of the year to help condominium owners facing financial turmoil as a result of new building safety regulations that go into effect Jan. 1.
“At some point over the next three and a half months, something will be done,” he said at a roundtable meeting with local condo owners in Pinellas Park on Thursday.
Still, the governor would not commit to calling a special session himself. And last month, Republican leaders rejected calls to reconvene the Legislature early to tackle the condo issue.
The new rules, passed in the wake of the deadly Surfside building collapse, require certain condo associations to inspect their buildings and come up with plans to pay for necessary repairs.
Though legislators hoped this would prevent future engineering failures, condo owners say in the short term it has led to unwieldy special assessments that threaten to price out low-income and senior residents.
Earle Cooper, a Bellaire condo owner who spoke at the roundtable, said his building needs around $3.69 million in repairs. That could cost individual residents anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000.
TALLAHASSEE — Hurricane Debby caused up to $263.2 million in estimated losses to crops and farm animals when the Category 1 rainmaker swept through North Florida last month.
Preliminary findings by the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, known as UF/IFAS, could mean the agricultural damages from Debby were close to losses from Hurricane Idalia, a Category 3 storm that roared across the same rural region nearly a year earlier.
“There always are impacts to agriculture of these types of events,” Christa Court, UF/IFAS economic impact analysis program director, said Thursday during a call with reporters. “Hurricane Debby was not quite as intense as Hurricane Idalia, which might still be somewhat fresh on people’s minds. But it’s still a reminder that there’s a lot of production of agriculture out in Florida.”
UF/IFAS found Debby affected more than 2.2 million acres of agricultural land in the state, with two-thirds of the land used for livestock grazing. It resulted in an estimated $93.7 million to $263.2 million in losses, with the loss amount expected to be narrowed in the coming months.