BG Reads 7.29.2024

🗞️ Bingham Group Reads - July 29, 2024

July 29, 2024

Bingham Group Reads

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July 29, 2024

Today's BG Reads include:

🟣 Joe Biden’s trip to Austin is filled with subplots for the lame-duck president (Dallas Morning News)

🟣 Audit finds gender disparities in city hiring (Austin Monitor)

🟣 Trump makes clear that unity is over (New York Times)

Read On!

[BINGHAM GROUP]

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[AUSTIN METRO NEWS]

Joe Biden’s trip to Austin is filled with subplots for the lame-duck president (Dallas Morning News)

When Air Force One lands in Austin on Monday, President Joe Biden will be in the hometown of a fellow Democrat who played a key role in unraveling his reelection bid, speaking at the library of a predecessor who also abruptly ended his campaign for another White House term.

Biden had been scheduled to be in Austin on July 15 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act, but his speech at the LBJ Presidential Library was postponed after the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump two days earlier. What a difference two weeks make. While Republicans rallied around Trump at their four-day convention in Milwaukee, Biden faced growing pressure from within his party to end his campaign, including U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Austin, the first Democrat in Congress to call for his withdrawal.

André Treiber, chairman of the Democratic National Committee’s Youth Council, said he was inundated with calls from concerned Democrats after Biden’s halting debate performance, fielding more inquiries in the three and a half weeks before Biden dropped out than during his entire four years with the DNC. “It was something that a lot of folks were talking about among the grass roots,” said Treiber, a convention delegate from Travis County.

“The same kind of conversations that we were seeing play out in opinion pieces or morning shows or whatnot really were happening among Texas delegates, everyday volunteers, folks like that. It was just a very serious issue. It was something that our party needed to confront and discuss, and now we’re here today.” Doggett told The Dallas Morning News he and his wife plan to attend the event after receiving an invitation from the White House.

“Though the circumstances may differ, like President [Lyndon B.] Johnson, he has put country over ego,” Doggett said in a written statement. “His selfless decision to protect our democracy from an authoritarian takeover has cemented his legacy as a true statesman and patriot while offering renewed hope to all of us.” Johnson withdrew from the 1968 campaign that March in a surprise statement during a televised speech on the Vietnam War, announcing that he would focus only on “the awesome duties of this office.” Biden similarly said he would “focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”

The president will end his White House tenure having served with Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, and Harris, the first Black, South Asian and female to serve as vice president. Biden’s decision to bow out could usher in another historic first: a female president... (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Audit finds gender disparities in city hiring (Austin Monitor)

A report released earlier this month by the Office of the City Auditor found that women are still underrepresented in the city workforce as city agencies work to improve their gender gap in hiring.

A 2021 audit said that Austin “needs to be more deliberate in its pursuit of a diverse workforce,” but since the audit was released, the city’s workforce has become more male-dominated. The 2021 audit found that men made up 61 percent of the workforce. That number is now 66 percent, according to the new report.

Women make up half of the population of the Austin metro area but only 34 percent of the city workforce. When comparing the racial demographics of those in management and nonmanagement positions, the report found that “a higher percentage of management positions are held by white individuals and men.”

The largest gender gap is among the civil service workforce – which includes public safety agencies – where women make up only 13 percent of that workforce. Among regular employees, the gender gap is less skewed, with women accounting for 40 percent… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Samsung supplier wins incentives to build Taylor plant that could be a $575M investment (Austin Business Journal)

A key South Korean supplier to Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. has moved a step closer to building a $575 million phosphoric acid plant on 85 acres it purchased at the RCR Taylor Logistics Park last year.

Soulbrain Holdings Co. Ltd. won approval on July 25 for incentives from the Taylor City Council. The company previously received approval for incentives by the Taylor Economic Development Corp.

Soulbrain committed to a minimum capital investment of $175 million — but officials noted it potentially will undertake a second, $400 million construction phase, according to a July 25 announcement. Soulbrain also plans to create 50 jobs, make an annual civic donation of $25,000, create an internship for local high school students and join the Taylor Chamber of Commerce… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[TEXAS NEWS]

Biden and Harris to visit Houston this week to pay respects to Sheila Jackson Lee (Texas Tribune)

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, will each travel to Houston this week to pay their respects to former U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, according to statements from the White House.

Jackson Lee died at age 74 on July 19 amid a battle with pancreatic cancer. The Houston Democrat was one of the longest serving members of Texas’ congressional delegation, known as a staunch advocate for progressive causes.

Harris called Jackson Lee a “dear friend” in a statement following the Congresswoman’s passing and lauded her work on disaster relief following Hurricane Harvey, and as an advocate for women’s rights. Harris and Jackson Lee were both members of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, a historically Black sorority, and worked together on legislation, including the law that made Juneteenth a national holiday.

“Sheila Jackson Lee was, first and foremost, a leader dedicated to serving the people of her beloved city,” Harris said in a statement. “No task was too small as long as it was the right thing to do.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Texas A-F school grades expected to worsen under higher standards; lawsuit looms (San Antonio Express-News)

The Texas Education Agency plans to release A-F accountability ratings for the 2023-24 school year on Aug. 15, the first official look at grades under the state’s highly contested, raised performance standards, an agency spokesperson said this week. Lackluster performance on revamped state testing has school districts across Texas anticipating worse grades and lost ground on pandemic recovery efforts under the new system.

Similar expectations prompted a lawsuit a year ago that halted the release of the 2022-2023 rankings. Nick Maddox, the lawyer who pushed that case on behalf of more than 100 school districts, said this week that another such suit probably will be filed within weeks in a bid to prevent the latest TEA grades from being released, based largely on objections to the latest standardized tests administered in the spring.

School officials agreed that the TEA ratings will show a broad drop in grades and expressed a familiar mix of indifference, annoyance or pushback against the renewed state effort to toughen how they are calculated. “I would be really surprised if you saw any district increase (its state ranking this year), given not only the changes in testing but the changes in the accountability metrics of how they are determining campus and district ratings,” said Janis Jordan, the Northside Independent School District’s deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction.

The Texas accountability system “has always been a moving target,” making year-to-year comparisons difficult, Jordan said, so Northside ISD regularly monitors student progress instead of waiting for standardized test scores to spot deficiencies. The TEA typically assigns scores to each public school district and campus every year based on standardized test performance, student growth and progress on closing racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps, although it has not done so for all schools since 2019… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[US and World News]

‘Maybe I’ve gotten worse’: Trump makes clear that unity is over (New York Times)

Early in his speech in Minnesota on Saturday night, former President Donald J. Trump made clear just how quickly he has jettisoned the appeal for national unity that he made after he survived an assassination attempt in Pennsylvania two weeks ago. “I want to be nice,” Mr. Trump said. “They all say, ‘I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed since two weeks ago. Something affected him.’” But to a cheering crowd of thousands, Mr. Trump quickly conceded the point.

“No, I haven’t changed,” he said. “Maybe I’ve gotten worse. Because I get angry at the incompetence that I witness every single day.” Propelled by the upheaval in the presidential race caused by President Biden’s decision to end his campaign six days ago, Mr. Trump on Saturday once more escalated his attacks against Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee.

During a speech lasting roughly 90 minutes, Mr. Trump called Ms. Harris “evil,” “unhinged” and “sick.” He lied about her views on abortion in an effort to paint her as extreme, and he mocked her laugh and her demeanor. “We have a brand-new victim,” Mr. Trump told thousands of people inside the Herb Brooks National Hockey Center in St. Cloud, Minn. “And, honestly, she’s a radical left lunatic.”

Mr. Trump spent considerable time attacking Ms. Harris’s views on public safety, taking aim at her efforts to portray herself as a “rule of law” prosecutor who contrasts starkly with Mr. Trump’s two impeachments, four criminal indictments and 34 felony convictions. As he rallied some 60 miles from Minneapolis, where the killing of George Floyd in 2020 prompted a movement for criminal justice reform, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Harris of backing soft-on-crime policies, including a push to defund the police.

Ms. Harris told The New York Times in 2020 that she supported the “defund the police” movement’s idea of rethinking “what public safety looks like” and the size of police budgets. “But, no, we’re not going to get rid of the police,” she said. “We all have to be practical.”… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

Generative AI requires massive amounts of power and water, and the aging U.S. grid can’t handle the load (CNBC)

Thanks to the artificial intelligence boom, new data centers are springing up as quickly as companies can build them. This has translated into huge demand for power to run and cool the servers inside. Now concerns are mounting about whether the U.S. can generate enough electricity for the widespread adoption of AI, and whether our aging grid will be able to handle the load.

“If we don’t start thinking about this power problem differently now, we’re never going to see this dream we have,” said Dipti Vachani, head of automotive at Arm. The chip company’s low-power processors have become increasingly popular with hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft , Oracle and Amazon — precisely because they can reduce power use by up to 15% in data centers. Nvidia’s latest AI chip, Grace Blackwell, incorporates Arm-based CPUs it says can run generative AI models on 25 times less power than the previous generation.

“Saving every last bit of power is going to be a fundamentally different design than when you’re trying to maximize the performance,” Vachani said. This strategy of reducing power use by improving compute efficiency, often referred to as “more work per watt,” is one answer to the AI ??energy crisis. But it’s not nearly enough. One ChatGPT query uses nearly 10 times as much energy as a typical Google search, according to a report by Goldman Sachs. Generating an AI image can use as much power as charging your smartphone.

This problem isn’t new. Estimates in 2019 found training one large language model produced as much CO2 as the entire lifetime of five gas-powered cars. The hyperscalers building data centers to accommodate this massive power draw are also seeing emissions soar. Google’s latest environmental report showed greenhouse gas emissions rose nearly 50% from 2019 to 2023 in part because of data center energy consumption, although it also said its data centers are 1.8 times as energy efficient as a typical data center. Microsoft’s emissions rose nearly 30% from 2020 to 2024, also due in part to data centers… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

In win for Uber and Lyft, California Court upholds gig-worker proposition (New York Times)

The California Supreme Court ruled on Thursday to uphold a four-year-old ballot measure that classifies Uber and Lyft drivers as independent contractors rather than as employees.

In a win for ride-hailing companies, the decision ends a yearslong legal dispute that could have reshaped California’s gig economy if the ruling had been overturned.

The ballot measure, Proposition 22, was first passed by state voters in 2020. 

It was overturned in 2021 by a California Superior Court judge, only to be upheld by three appeals court judges last year. The ruling means that Uber and Lyft can continue to operate in the state as usual, and the hundreds of thousands of drivers who work for both services will continue to be classified as independent contractors.

Opponents of Proposition 22 argued that it was unconstitutional because it would limit the state legislature’s ability to oversee workers’ compensation. Gig companies spent $200 million supporting the measure, which maintained the contractor classification for drivers while conceding some benefits like health care stipends and accident insurance… (LINK TO FULL STORY)

[2024 Austin City Council Race Watch]

This fall will see elections for the following Council Districts 2, 4, 6, 7, 10, and Mayor.

Declared candidates so far are:

Mayor

District 2

District 4

District 6

District 7 (Open seat)

District 10 (Open seat)

_________________________

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