We have had a strong week of expansion in the last two weeks. We will be working with DeKalb County in Georgia, Rio Grand Valley in Texas, and adding another state - Louisiana!
This is an elaborate story about the inside of Facebook from top AI director Joaquin Quiñonero Candela. Great investigative journalism by Karen Hao. One of my favorite quotes from the article:
“When you’re in the business of maximizing engagement, you’re not interested in truth. You’re not interested in harm, divisiveness, conspiracy. In fact, those are your friends,” says Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who collaborates with Facebook to understand image- and video-based misinformation on the platform.
IRS Failed to Collect $2.4 Billion in Taxes From Millionaires đź’°
According to a Treasury Department watchdog report, the Internal Revenue Service has failed to collect more than $2.4 billion dollars from wealthy individuals who owe the federal government back taxes.
Auditors could only recoup about 39% of the more than $4 billion in unpaid taxes owed by a group of rich taxpayers with an average annual income of nearly $1.6 million, the report found. The findings suggest that the IRS should emphasize a taxpayer’s income when determining whether to pursue an audit case, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said in the report released Monday.
Republicans doing everything in their power to make it hard for people to exercise their right to vote. đź—ł
Proven voter fraud is vanishingly rare, constituting an estimated 0.0025% of all votes cast. Nevertheless, in Texas and almost every other state, Republican legislators have introduced 253 bills this year to tighten voting rules with the aim of eliminating fraud.
There are more real-estate agents than homes for sale in the U.S. đźŹ
At the end of January, there were 1.04 million homes for sale. That is down 26% from a year earlier and the lowest on record going back to 1982, according to the National Association of Realtors. Also in January, the NAR had 1.45 million members, up 4.8% from a year earlier.
Based on Airbnb data 2021 is the Year of Domestic Travel. 🧳
Market-research firm AirDNA, which tracks business on Airbnb Inc. and rival home-rental site Vrbo, said bookings made in the U.S. in February reached their highest monthly level since it began tracking the industry in 2015. Those figures included reservations for future stays.
People are spending more time combing through airline and hotel websites, executives say. Traffic on Spirit Airlines Inc.’s website, for example, has roughly doubled since the holidays, Chief Executive Officer Ted Christie said.
Canadian Pacific agreed to acquire Kansas City Southern in a transaction valued at about $25 billion that would create the first freight-rail network linking Mexico, the U.S., and Canada.
Former US president Donald Trump will soon return to social media with “his own platform”, one of his senior advisers has said, following Twitter’s permanent ban of his account. Jason Miller, Trump’s senior adviser, told Fox News that Trump would be “returning to social media in probably about two or three months here, with his own platform”. “I think this will be the hottest ticket in social media, it’s going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly president Trump does, but it will be his own platform,” Miller said.
