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All sense of survivors’ guilt was fleeting for those residents whose homes remained standing after wildfires ripped through the Los Angeles area three months ago.Many worried that smoke from the Eaton wildfire that destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed 18 people may have carried toxins, including lead, asbestos and heavy metals, into their homes. But they struggled to convince their insurers to test their properties to ensure it was safe to return.Nicole Maccalla, a data scientist, said embers burned more than half of her roof, several windows and eaves were damaged, and her house in Altadena was left filled with ash, debris, soot and damaged appliances. She said her insurance adjuster said USAA would pay for contamination testing, but after choosing a company and coming back with the results, her claim was rejected. The adjuster said the company only covered testing in homes with major damage.“Every single item is a battle,” said Maccalla. “It’s denials and appeals and denials and appeals, and you wait weeks and weeks and weeks for responses.” Crowdsourcing contamination data Maccalla and others banded together as Eaton Fire Residents Unite, sharing environmental testing data and compiling the results in an online map. Of 81 homes tested so far for lead, all show elevated levels, according to the group.“I’ve already had multiple people reach out and say: ‘Thank you for publishing this map . . . because my insurance company has changed their mind and approved testing,'” said Maccalla, who helped design the data collection to verify results and maintain privacy.Many homeowners paid privately for the testing after their insurance companies refused, revealing gaps in coverage. The group hopes the data will help residents who can’t afford it to convince their insurers to cover testing and remediation.“If I can prove my community is not fit for human habitation then maybe I can show my home won’t be,” said Jane Lawton Potelle, founder of Eaton Fire Residents Unite.It’s not easy to understand how and when it is safe to return home, Lawton Potelle said. The fine print of insurance policies can be frustrating and confusing, and the government has not stepped in to help.The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it has no plans to conduct widespread environmental testing. The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health is tracking environmental testing largely by academic researchers and a handful from government agencies, but most studies assess outdoor contamination. Toxic air and limited coverage Reports from other urban wildfires, in which building materials, appliances, cars and more burn at incredibly high temperatures, show increased levels of heavy metals including lead and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) such as benzene that are tied to negative health risks. But insurance companies haven’t standardized testing for those contaminants.Home insurance broadly covers fire damage, but there is a growing dispute over what damage must be covered when flames don’t torch the property.California Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara released a bulletin in March that put the onus on companies to properly investigate reported smoke damage, saying they cannot deny such claims without investigating thoroughly, including paying for professional testing as warranted. But many residents have been left to fight for coverage anyway.Janet Ruiz, spokesperson for the Insurance Information Institute that represents many major insurance companies, said it’s hard to compare neighbors because every claim is unique due to each home’s physical structure, actual damage and defined insurance coverage limits.“It can vary and insurance companies are sensitive to what the claim is,” Ruiz said. “You have to work with your insurance companies and be reasonable about what may have happened.”Dave Jones, director of the Climate Risk Initiative at University of California, Berkeley, and former state insurance commissioner, said testing should be covered even though some insurance companies disagree.“It’s perfectly reasonable for people to have some kind of environmental test done so that their home is safe and their property is safe,” Jones said. “We’re talking about very catastrophically high temperature fires where all sorts of materials are melted and some of them become toxic.” State plan struggles The state’s insurer of last resort, known as the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, has been scrutinized for years over how it handles smoke damage claims. A 2017 change to the FAIR Plan limited coverage to “permanent physical changes,” meaning smoke damage must be visible or detectable without lab testing for claims to be approved. State officials said that threshold was too high and illegal, and ordered a change.Dylan Schaffer, an attorney leading a class action lawsuit challenging FAIR Plan’s threshold, said he was surprised private carriers are disputing similar fire damage claims.“The damage is not due to smoke, the damage is contamination from fire,” Schaffer said. “They make it complicated because it saves them money.”Meanwhile, Altadena residents on the FAIR Plan say their claims are still being denied. Jones believes the debate will only end when lawmakers take action.FAIR Plan spokeswoman Hilary McLean declined to comment on the ongoing litigation and individual cases, but said the FAIR Plan pays all covered claims based on the adjusters’ recommendations.“Our policy, like many others, requires direct physical loss for there to be coverage,” McLean said. Worries over kids’ safety Lawton Potelle said the first inkling that her house might be toxic came after meeting with her AAA insurance adjuster in the days after the fire. Even though she had worn a mask, her chest still ached and her voice rasped, and she wondered whether her home was safe for her 11-year-old.Stephanie Wilcox said her toddler’s pediatrician recommended testing their home. Her Farmers Insurance policy includes coverage for lead and asbestos in addition to her wildfire coverage, but after multiple denials, she paid out of pocket.“After the initial inspection, (Farmers) had told us remediation would cost about $12,000 and that it would be habitable, like we could move back in tomorrow,” she said. “But now there’s no way.”She plans to ask for a new estimate including lead abatement and other costs, citing the results.Similarly, Zach Bailey asked in late January for contamination testing. The house he shares with his wife and toddler sits in an island of largely spared homes among blocks wiped out by the fire. After months of denials, State Farm agreed to pay for lead and asbestos testing because the remediation company cited federal worker safety regulations.It shouldn’t have been that hard, he said.“It feels like the insurance companies should have a playbook at this point,” he said. “They should have a process to keep people safe because this isn’t the first disaster like this.” Claudia Lauer and Sally Ho, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
President Donald Trump may have paused the reciprocal tariffs that crashed the worlds stock marketsand still threaten to cause a global recessionbut his original aim remains: He believes that he can restart the American manufacturing engine by penalizing imports from China, Mexico, Canada, Vietnam, the European Union, and penguins. His logic is that tariffs will make products like iPhones and Air Jordans (made in and imported from countries like China and Vietnam) too expensive for American consumers to buy. If companies want to keep selling their products, they will be forced to build new factories in the U.S., Trump claims. These factories will employ millions of 100% pure Usonians, he says, thus ushering the country into a new era of prosperity in which everyone is happily earning a living wage manufacturing smartphones and sports shoes. It sounds good until you really think about it. While the administration touts the measures as a path to economic renaissance, the fact is that many Americans are bracing for a future of higher prices and economic uncertainty. Many economists will tell you in detail why this is a very bad idea for everyone. The explanation is complex and, in the past, the argument would have been confined to op-eds by experts and TV interviews with political pundits. This time, things are a bit different: https://t.co/nT8L9losRl— Linus Ekenstam eu/acc (@LinusEkenstam) April 9, 2025 Everyday people are using generative AI to create pictures and videos to make the case in the most powerful, easy-to-understand way. These are made with Sora, Linus Ekenstam, a European self-defined AI evangelist and optimist, tells me via X. He wasnt alone in his visual critique. Meanwhile, others visualized Trumps dream of America as a 1950s industrial wonderland, imagining the ultimate consequences of such an idea today. Chinese social media users have taken to dunking on the U.S., holding a mirror up to Trump’s policies with the help of AI-generated images that depict a not-so-glamorous future. Leaving aside the fact that any future factories will probably be heavily robotized, does anyone in the U.S. really want to be exploited for low pay and long hours, like overseas workers are now, to satisfy our consumerist hunger? @axiang67 Make america great again#tariff #america – Ben Lau Raw power Thanks to tools like Kling, Sora, Runway, and Luma, ordinary people are able to create striking images and videos that encapsulate their visions, fears, and frustrations more or less instantaneously. Their pixels bypass intellectual circuits and connect directly to human nature. If the images are rich and engaginglike that video of the factorythey leave a lasting effect on our emotional state. Research in neuroscience has shown the primal power of visuals in shaping beliefs and emotions again and again. Images activate regions of the brain tied to emotion and memory more effectively than text and words, a well studied phenomenon known as the picture-superiority effect. Visual stimuli reach us 60,000 times faster than text and leave a more lasting impression than verbal information. According to Lynell Burmark, PhD associate at the Thornburg Center for Professional Development and expert in visual literacy, unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about 7 bits of information. . . . Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched.” — Glaucous (@glaucousness.bsky.social) 2025-04-08T13:19:27.785Z Images also bypass cognitive resistanceour brain trying to avoid discomfortand just make you feel in 13 milliseconds. This explains why AI-generated imagery is so potent. It doesnt just inform, it evokes. Theres no way around that. We are visual creatures, shaped by biological evolution since eyes first developed in the Tree of Life 544 million years ago. Resistance is futile. Democratizing political commentary The power of AI-generated tariff memes lies in neuroscience but also in their ability to eliminate the need for imagination. When confronted with an abstract concept like economic inflation, many people struggle to imagine its impact. But show them an image of a $20 loaf of bread, empty shelves in a store, or tired, sad workers in a factory, and the message becomes visceral. This is where AI memes shinebridging the gap between abstract policy and visible consequences. In the past, creating such impactful images required tools, specialized skills, and access to a limited platform like a newspaper or TV channel. Now, for just a few bucks a month, anyone can transform their thoughts into compelling visual narratives and put them in front of the eyes of millions. Anyone with a smartphone is now a political cartoonist or filmmaker. A lot of what people make will be worthless, sure, but there will also be some gems. "Be cool! Everything is going to work out well" pic.twitter.com/WxPfEBCdem— Wu Tang is for the Children (@WUTangKids) April 9, 2025 Nothing about this is new. We have seen AI being used for political commentary before. Remember the viral images of Trump getting arrested? Those were just early examples of how generative AI could be used for political commentary and shaping public perception. These new memes are next-level, though, visualizing complex policies like tariffs in ways that resonate universally. This use of AI as a tool to democratize powerful visual commentary is perhaps one of the few silver linings of a technology that, until now, mostly consumed computing cycles to make absurdly surreal clips. As Trumps tariffs sink the world’s economy, its good to know that people can use AI to fight back against the White Houses policy mayhem one prompt at a time.
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E-Commerce
Many people have been waking up over the last 24 hours to find that they have received a payment of around $40 from Facebook. The first question people have is whether the payment is legitimate. And the good news is: yes, it is. Heres what you need to know about the Facebook payment you may have received since yesterday. Why did I get a payment from Facebook? Starting yesterday, people began posting on social media that they had received a payment of around $40 from Facebook. That payment is actually part of a class action lawsuit settlement Facebook agreed to back in 2022. At the center of the class action suit was the allegation that between April 22, 2010, and September 26, 2011, Facebook improperly tracked its users around the web using its then-newish Like button that was displayed on non-Facebook websites. Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, denied wrongdoing but ultimately decided to settle the class action lawsuit instead of fighting it in court. As part of that settlement, Facebook agreed to pay $90 million, which would be distributed to its users in the United States who were covered under the settlement (after attorney fees and other associated costs were deducted). The individual user’s payments from that settlement are now being distributed, which is why you may have received one since yesterday. How much is the Facebook internet settlement payment? Users on social media are reporting that they have begun receiving a settlement payment of around $40. On this Reddit thread here, multiple users say their payment was for exactly $40.67. Some users on X are likewise reporting that amount. The payments are showing up as coming from “Facebook Internet Tracking Settlement Administrator,” users are reporting. The effective date of the settlement was February 24, 2025, according to the settlement website. The terms of the settlement mandated that Facebook begin sending out the payments within 45 days of the effective date, which meant that the funds would start being distributed on April 10, 2025. Given the social media reports, that is the same date that people began reporting receiving payments from Facebook. How are people being paid? Claimants could choose how they wanted to receive their settlement payment when they submitted a claim, according to ClaimDepot. Claimants reportedly could select from one of five options: PayPal Venmo Virtual Prepaid Card Zelle Check mailed to an address the claimant provided Can I still submit a claim? No. All claims needed to be submitted by September 22, 2022. If you did not submit a claim by then, you are not eligible for a payment.
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E-Commerce
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