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Memorial Day Weekend is upon us, marking the unofficial start of the summer vacation season in America. Yet, a recent Bankrate survey from late April found that only 46% of Americans plan to travel domestically or internationally this summer, with costs cited as the primary concern. Dwindling U.S. consumer confidence may lead some individuals to reconsider spending their precious discretionary dollars on travel. Still, you may have more travel options within your budget than you thought. For those determined to get away, theres an excellent Google Flights hack that reveals options within a certain budget. Some Google Flights aficionados know this as the anywhere hack. Heres how to use it. The Google Flights anywhere hack Google Flights is one of the best aggregators out there for finding airline tickets between any two cities on Earth. It works very simply: visit www.google.com/travel/flights, enter your departure and destination cities along with your desired departure and return dates, and click the search button. Google Flights will then reveal the best options for your selected destination across numerous airlines. However, if youre trying to stay within a certain budget, this traditional method of using Google Flights can be exhausting, because you have to check individual cities manually. For example, if your airline ticket budget is $1200, it can be tedious to enter cities one by one on Google Flights (So Paulo, then Paris, then Osaka) only to find that tickets dont fit within your budget anyway. Sticking to this method may also mean you completely overlook interesting destinations youd never considered before. Thats where the excellent Google Flights anywhere hack comes in. Its perfect for people who are more flexible in terms of their destination and put a greater priority on staying within a certain budget. Heres how it works: Go to Google Flights as normal and enter your departure city in the Where from? field. Fill out your departure and return dates, as well, in the respective fields. But then, instead of entering a specific destination in the Where to? field, type in anywhere and click the search button. Now, on the results screen, you will see a global map displaying all the options available to you from your departure city to destinations around the world for the selected dates. By default, these options will cover all price ranges. However, you can narrow the results to show only tickets that fit within your budget by clicking the price filter dropdown menu and dragging the slider to your maximum preferred price. The results will then show you where in the world you can fly while staying within your budget. And keep in mind that the Google Flights results map is as interactive as regular Google Mapsso be sure to zoom in and pan around on the map, and youll see additional flight options appear. Click on any one of them to get more details about the selected itinerary. Find even more options with the flexible date hack The anywhere Google Flights hack can help you quickly discover destinations you can travel to within your budget. But another simple hack may reveal even more destinations you can afford. Thats because you may actually be able to discover more locations within your budget if your dates are flexible, too. Route prices arent set in stone, and they vary wildly depending on the date you want to fly. To reveal these potential new options, click on the date field from the search results screen. In the drop-down menu that appears, click on the Flexible Dates tab, select any one or all of the next six months, and indicate how long you want your trip to be: for the weekend, or for one or two weeks. Google Flights will then scour the internet to find you the destinations you can go to within your budget and across the periods you selected. This flexible date hack frequently yields even more results than the anywhere hack alone because there are often significant savings to be had on routes flown during periods of lower travel demand. Just one final thing to keep in mind: While you may be able to find new destinations you can afford to explore using these Google Flights hacks, remember that once you arrive, Google Maps may not actually be the best way to navigateso be sure to pack your phone with the apps that are.
Category:
E-Commerce
Republican lawmakers have been battling over a bill that includes massive tax and spending cuts. Much of their disagreement has been over provisions intended to reduce the cost of Medicaid. The popular health insurance program, which is funded by both the federal and state governments, covers about 78.5 million low-income and disabled peoplemore than 1 in 5 Americans. On May 22, 2025, the House of Representatives narrowly approved the tax, spending, and immigration bill. The legislation, which passed without any support from Democrats, is designed to reduce federal Medicaid spending by requiring anyone enrolled in the program who appears to be able to get a job to either satisfy work requirements or lose their coverage. Its still unclear, however, whether Senate Republicans would support that provision. Although there are few precedents for such a mandate for Medicaid, other safety net programs have been enforcing similar rules for nearly three decades. Im a political scientist who has extensively studied the work requirements of another safety net program: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). As I explain in my book, Living Off the Government? Race, Gender, and the Politics of Welfare, work requirements place extra burdens on low-income families but do little to lift them out of poverty. Work requirements for TANF TANF gives families with very low incomes some cash they can spend on housing, food, clothing, or whatever they need most. The Clinton administration launched it as a replacement for a similar program, Aid to Families With Dependent Children, in 1996. At the time, both political parties were eager to end a welfare system they believed was riddled with abuse. A big goal with TANF was ending the dependence of people getting cash benefits on the government by moving them from welfare to work. Many people were removed from the welfare rolls, but not because work requirements led to economic prosperity. Instead, they had trouble navigating the bureaucratic demands. TANF is administered by the states. They can set many rules of their own, but they must comply with an important federal requirement: Adult recipients have to work or engage in an authorized alternative activity for at least 30 hours per week. The number of weekly hours is only 20 if the recipient is caring for a child under the age of 6. The dozen activities or so that can count toward this quota range from participating in job training programs to engaging in community service. Some adults enrolled in TANF are exempt from work requirements, depending on their states own policies. The most common exemptions are for people who are ill, have a disability, or are over age 60. To qualify for TANF, families must have dependent children; in some states pregnant women also qualify. Income limits are set by the state and range from $307 a month for a family of three in Alabama to $2,935 a month for a family of three in Minnesota. Adult TANF recipients face a federal five-year lifetime limit on benefits. States can adopt shorter time limits; Arizonas is 12 months. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}}))}(); An administrative burden Complying with these work requirements generally means proving that youre working or making the case that you should be exempt from this mandate. This places whats known as an administrative burden on the people who get cash assistance. It often requires lots of documentation and time. If you have an unpredictable work schedule, inconsistent access to child care, or obligations to care for an older relative, this paperwork is hard to deal with. What counts as work, how many hours must be completed, and who is exempt from these requirements often comes down to a caseworkers discretion. Social science research shows that this discretion is not equally applied and is often informed by stereotypes. The number of people getting cash assistance has fallen sharply since TANF replaced Aid to Families With Dependent Children. In some states caseloads have dropped by more than 50% despite significant population growth. Some of this decline happened because recipients got jobs that paid them too much to qualify. The Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan office that provides economic research to Congress, attributes, at least in part, an increase in employment among less-educted single mothers in the 1990s to work requirements. Not everyone who stopped getting cash benefits through TANF wound up employed, however. Other recipients who did not meet requirements fell into deep poverty. Regardless of why people leave the program, when fewer low-income Americans get TANF benefits, the government spends less money on cash assistance. Federal funding has remained flat at $16.5 billion since 1996. Taking inflation into account, the program receives half as much funding as when it was created. In addition, states have used the flexibility granted them to direct most of their TANF funds to priorities other than cash benefits, such as pre-K education. Many Americans who get help paying for groceries through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are also subject to work requirements. People the government calls able-bodied adults without dependents can only receive SNAP benefits for three months within a three-year period if they are not employed. A failed experiment in Arkansas Lawmakers in Congress and in statehouses have debated whether to add work requirements for Medicaid before. More than a dozen states have applied for waivers that would let them give it a try. When Arkansas instituted Medicaid work requirements in 2018, during the first Trump administration, it was largely seen as a failure. Some 18,000 people lost their health care coverage, but employment rates did not increase. After a court order stopped the policy in 2019, most people regained their coverage. Georgia is currently the only state with Medicaid work requirements in effect, after implementing a waiver in July 2023. The program has experienced technical difficulties and has had trouble verifying work activities. Other states, including Idaho, Indiana, and Kentucky, are already asking the federal government to let them enforce Medicaid work requirements. What this may mean for Medicaid The multitrillion-dollar bill the House passed by a vote of 215-214 would introduce Medicaid work requirements nationwide by late 2026 for childless adults ages 19 to 64, with some exemptions. But most people covered by Medicaid in that age range are already working, and those who are not would likely be eligible for work requirement waivers. An analysis by KFFa nonprofit that informs the public about health issuesshows that in 2023, 44% of Medicaid recipients were working full time and another 20% were working part time. In 2023, that was more than 16 million Americans. About 20% of the American adults under 65 who are covered by Medicaid are not working due to illness or disability, or because of caregiving responsibilities, according to KFF. This includes both people caring for young children and those taking care of relatives with an illness or disability. In my own research, I read testimony from families seeking work exemptions because caregiving, including for children with disabilities, was a full-time job. The rest of the adults under 65 with Medicaid coverage are not working because they are in school, are retired, cannot find work, or have some other reason. Its approximately 3.9 million Americans. Depending on what counts as work, they may be meeting any requirements that could be added to the program. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that introducing Medicaid work requirements would save around $300 billion over a decade. Given past experience with work requirements, it is unlikely those savings would come from Americans finding jobs. My research suggests its more likely that the government would trim spending by taking away the health insurance of people eligible for Medicaid coverage who get tangled up in red tape. This article was updated on May 22, 2025, with details about the House of Representatives passage of the budget bill. Anne Whitesell is an assistant professor of political science at Miami University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
A computer science student is behind a new AI tool designed to track down Redditors showing signs of radicalization and deploy bots to deradicalize them through conversation. First reported by 404 Media, PrismX was built by Sairaj Balaji, a computer science student at SRMIST in Chennai, India. The tool works by analyzing posts for specific keywords and patterns associated with extreme views, giving those users a radical score. High scorers are then targeted by AI bots programmed to attempt deradicalization through engaging the user in conversation. According to the federal government, the primary terror threat to the U.S. now is individuals radicalized to violence online through social media. At the same time, fears around surveillance technology and artificial intelligence infiltrating online communities pose an ethical minefield. Responding to concerns, Balaji clarified in a Linkedin post that the conversation part of the tool has not been tested on real Reddit users without consent. Instead, the scoring and conversation elements were used in simulated environments for research-purposes only. The tool was designed to provoke discussion, not controversy, he explained in the post. Were at a point in history where rogue actors and nation-states are already deploying weaponized AI. If a college student can build something like PrismX, it raises urgent questions: Whos watching the watchers? While Balaji doesnt claim to be an expert in deradicalization, as an engineer, he is interested in the ethical implications of surveillance technology. Discomfort sparks debate. Debate leads to oversight. And oversight is how we prevent the misuse of emerging technologies, he continued. This isnt the first time Redditors have been used as guinea pigs in recent months. Just last month, researchers from the University of Zurich faced intense backlash after experimenting on an unsuspecting subreddit. The research involved deploying AI-powered bots into the r/ChangeMyView subreddit, which positions itself as a place to post an opinion you accept may be flawed, in an experiment to see if AI could be used to change peoples minds. When Redditors, and Reddit itself, found out they were being experimented on without their knowledge, they werent impressed. Reddits chief legal officer, Ben Lee, wrote in a post that neither Reddit nor the r/changemyview mods knew about the experiment ahead of time. What this University of Zurich team did is deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level, Lee wrote. It violates academic research and human rights norms, and is prohibited by Reddits user agreement and rules, in addition to the subreddit rules. While PrismX is not currently being tested on real unconsenting users, it piles on the ever-growing question of the role of artificial intelligence in human spaces.
Category:
E-Commerce
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