Things To Do In SW Florida

By BERNARD CONDON

NEW YORK (AP) — Tesla reported a fourth straight decline in quarterly profit even as sales rose, triggering a drop in its shares in after-hours trading.

Related Articles

• 
  Prince Harry, Meghan join Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck in call for ban on development of AI ‘superintelligence’

• 
  North Korea has stolen billions in cryptocurrency and tech firm salaries, report says

• 
  Meta cutting 600 AI jobs even as it continues to hire more for its superintelligence lab

• 
  Beyond Meat shares briefly sizzle on Walmart deal and meme stock interest

• 
  There’s ‘going to be suffering’: Florida TSA workers brace for hardship from working without pay

The car company run by Elon Musk reported third-quarter earnings plunged 37% to $1.4 billion, or 39 cents a share, from $2.2 billion, or 62 cents a share, a year earlier. That marked the fourth quarter in a row that profit dropped. And even the revenue rise, a welcome relief from a sales plunge earlier in the year due to anti-Musk boycotts, came with significant caveat: Customers rushed to take advantage of a $7,500 federal EV tax credit before it expired on Oct. 1, possibly stealing sales from the current quarter. read more

WEST PALM BEACH — Transportation Security Administration employees on Wednesday described in detail their financial hardships — bracing for not getting their much-needed paychecks by the end of this workweek.

They shared their stories as congressional leaders in Palm Beach County called for the end of the federal government shutdown.

U.S. Reps. Lois Frankel and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, South Florida Democrats, joined members of the American Federation of Government Employees — a federal employee union — on Wednesday for a news conference aimed at urging federal lawmakers, particularly Republicans, to negotiate an end to the shutdown.

The shutdown began on Oct. 1 after Republican and Democrat lawmakers failed to agree on a short-term budget, with one of the primary contentions being whether tax subsidies should remain for those who get their health insurance through the Affordable Care Act.

Frankel and Cherfilus-McCormick are among the Democrats who want to preserve the subsidies, fearing skyrocketing premiums if the subsidies were to vanish. “Democrats have taken the position that we will not vote for a budget that cuts millions of people out of health care,” Frankel said at the news conference outside of Palm Beach International Airport. read more

By MATT O’BRIEN, Associated Press

Social media platform Reddit sued the artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI and three other entities on Wednesday, alleging their involvement in an “industrial-scale, unlawful” economy to “scrape” the comments of millions of Reddit users for commercial gain.

Reddit’s lawsuit in a New York federal court takes aim at San Francisco-based Perplexity, maker of an AI chatbot and “answer engine” that competes with Google, ChatGPT and others in online search.

Also named in the lawsuit are Lithuanian data-scraping company Oxylabs UAB, a web domain called AWMProxy that Reddit describes as a “former Russian botnet,” and Texas-based startup SerpApi.

It’s the second such lawsuit from Reddit since it sued another major AI company, Anthropic, in June.

But the lawsuit filed Wednesday is different in the way that it confronts not just an AI company but the lesser-known services the AI industry relies on to acquire online writings needed to train AI chatbots. read more

Wendy Lee and Caroline Petrow-Cohen, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — Inside a historic aircraft hangar in Playa Vista, crowds of people gathered on Thursday to browse the latest fashions from handbags to clothing and shoes as they prepared for the holiday shopping season.

Related Articles

• 
  Prince Harry, Meghan join Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck in call for ban on development of AI ‘superintelligence’

• 
  North Korea has stolen billions in cryptocurrency and tech firm salaries, report says

• 
  Meta cutting 600 AI jobs even as it continues to hire more for its superintelligence lab

• 
  Beyond Meat shares briefly sizzle on Walmart deal and meme stock interest

• 
  Profits at Musk’s car company plunged again last quarter even as it sold more vehicles

These weren’t shoppers or retailer buyers searching for the latest products. Instead, they were YouTube video creators who were being courted by brands from Lowe’s to Shark Beauty to encourage online audiences to buy their products. read more

Progressive, one of the nation’s top auto insurance companies, plans to return nearly $1 billion to Florida policyholders, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Wednesday.

Policyholders will receive an average of $300, DeSantis said. “It might be a check,” he said, “It might be a credit on your bill.”

A Progressive spokesman said later Wednesday that policyholders will receive “a credit” in 2026.

DeSantis credited insurance reforms enacted by Florida’s Legislature in 2022 and 2023 with reducing auto insurers’ losses and making it possible for the state’s top five companies to request a combined 6.5% rate reduction in 2025, down from +4.3% in 2024 and +32.7% in 2023.

The reforms, he said, reduced insurance litigation by making it more difficult for plaintiffs attorneys to recover steep legal fees. The reforms followed years of rate increases resulting from claims disputes that saw legal fees far exceeding what was recovered for policyholders, he said.

“The dispute would be over, like, $50,000, and then the lawyer ends up getting like $350,000. Well, why would we want a system that encourages that?” he said. read more