The Red Folder

Archived from March 25th, 2024

Key stories for the week, brought to you by the distinguished newsman Sasha Morel.

Reading for the sake of reading sucks. Telling yourself to read to win a round is nice but ineffective. This condensed news brief helps you understand current domestic and international issues, analyze the news, and gives you opportunities to read more.

Domestic Stories

3 key domestic stories for the week:

1) Border Showdown: Biden v Abbott Daniel Song

Everything is bigger in Texas, even the political brawls. This current legal and political conflict is between the Biden administration and Texas GOP Governor Greg Abbott over Texas Senate Bill 4, which empowers state and local police officers to arrest people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally. It would also allow judges to order deportations of migrants back to Mexico regardless of their country of origin.

However, President Biden’s administration sued Texas to block the law. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Senate Bill 4 to go into effect, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit blocked the bill a few hours later.

This lawsuit is the latest development in the legal saga involving the Biden administration and Republican-led states over immigration law and border security. In Fiscal Year 2023, U.S. Border Patrol encountered 2.5 million migrants at the US-Mexico border, a historic high. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump and Biden administrations expelled almost 3 million migrants by using Title 42, a law that allows the government to expel migrants immediately from the U.S. based on health and disease transmission concerns. Since the use of Title 42 ended in May 2023, border crossings have reached record highs; however, the most recent data shows that migrant encounters dropped from 249,000 in December 2023 to 124,220 in January 2024.

This decrease is most likely due to a combination of factors: Mexico’s increased migrant interceptions, U.S. pressure on Central American countries to prevent immigrants from crossing into Mexico, and bad weather near the border.

Further complicating the situation, the demographics of unauthorized immigration have changed in recent years. Dr. William Galston, a political scientist at Brookings, explains that border crossers have shifted from primarily young Mexican men to families from Central America and beyond. These new groups of migrants face political persecution, gangs, crime, poverty, lack of economic mobility, and other dangers. However, asylum claims must be determined individually, and the asylum system has been quickly overwhelmed.

The border has quickly become a politically potent topic for the 2024 elections. Polling from Pew Research from February 2024 finds that 78% of Americans say the large number of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border is either a crisis or a significant problem, and 80% say the U.S. government is doing a poor job in handling border crossings. In his reelection campaign, President Biden trails former president Donald Trump by 5 points, with immigration being the top reason voters disapproved of Biden. Trump has used immigration to attack Biden, rallying congressional Republicans to successfully reject a bipartisan immigration bill that would have increased border patrol funding by $4.5 billion and boosted funding for asylum processing and refugee assistance programs.

Biden and Trump have had contrasting approaches to immigration. In the absence of legislative action, Biden is likely to issue several executive actions aimed at increasing border enforcement along the Southern border. To respond to increased migration from Central America, the Biden administration has worked with several Central American countries to open Safe Mobility Offices where qualified migrants can receive the legal authorization needed to enter the US.

In contrast, Trump has advocated for reinstating his administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, and building a border wall with Mexico. Trump has also promised to launch massive deportation programs. With the 2024 presidential and congressional elections approaching, it remains to be seen whether the US will finally enact immigration reform.

Read more here:

2) Artificial Intelligence: The Modern Gold Rush Rohan Dash

You’ve probably recently heard of NVIDIA, the technology company that’s been making headlines recently. And for good reason too, because according to The Motley Fool, investing $1000 in Nvidia back in 1999 would have returned $3,499,386 this month. Since its founding in 1993, the company has quickly grown to become a modern day tech giant, specializing in designing GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) to handle the large volumes of data AI utilizes.

But why is NVIDIA making so much money off of the AI market? It turns out that now, more than ever, AI is becoming a valued tool being applied in a variety of industries, from real estate to manufacturing to even fashion.

However, the growth of AI is nothing new. Indeed, the “boom” took place as soon as the early 2010s, when researchers were able to create efficient deep learning models, capable of performing better than humans in tasks such as vision, or in other words, the ability to identify and classify certain objects in an image. In 2012, the AI market was valued at about three billion USD. Since then, the market only grew

exponentially, with widely used programs such as DALL-E, ChatGPT (GPT-3), and Bard (now known as Gemini) all being released to the public within the last three years, and breakthrough discoveries in the field being made on a day to day basis.

The usability of these models has caused a large demand, and as such one can observe the market behaving in a similar way. Not only are companies in the sector absolutely booming, but governments are taking a step towards the new technology. For example, Saudi Arabia is investing upwards of forty billion USD, in a move to establish themselves as a global technology power, with proposals to build an AI “activity hub”. Similarly, China has also made tremendous movements, including being home to the highest output of AI scientific papers.

Through this, we can directly observe that companies, individuals, and governments are all attempting to cash in on what seems to be the invention of the century. In this frontier, everyone is hoping to "strike gold", similar to Tesla with its development of self-driving technology that can identify other vehicles and objects in the road, or even Google who has integrated Gemini into Google Search, Assistant, and Photos, cashing in on millions of users worldwide.

But despite the excitement, one question remains: how will artificial intelligence be regulated? While AI has its own benefits, it can do more harm than good, with the ability to replace jobs and spread misinformation. One of the most common examples can be seen in SAG-AFTRA's strike, where production companies wanted to utilize AI to replicate the likeness of an actor, effectively replacing their job.

For one, the White House has taken steps to create a blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, with goals of protecting private data, preventing discrimination, and ensuring transparency, among others. Similarly, the United Nations has adopted the first AI global resolution to ensure safe and effective development of AI across the globe. And, in further efforts, senators and representatives have been debating the No Robot Bosses Act, ensuring that employers cannot use AI to make employment decisions, as well as making sure algorithms are not abused or misused by employers.

We’ll have to wait and watch to see how artificial intelligence continues to grow, and see methods used by governments to prevent misuse. But for now, consider buying NVIDIA stock or investing in AI.

Read more here:

3) The DOJ bites (an) Apple Daniel Song

Just last year, Apple became the world’s first company to be worth $3 trillion. Now, Microsoft has overtaken Apple as the world’s most valuable company. The biggest bite to Apple’s shine came this week as the U.S. Department of Justice sued Apple in federal court for violating antitrust laws. One of the world’s most valuable companies, Apple has faced scrutiny in the past but avoided the antitrust lawsuits that its technology peers Google, and Microsoft have faced. U.S. antitrust laws, known as the Sherman Acts, were originally passed by President Theodore Roosevelt to break up large “trust” corporations. These laws aim to prohibit the concentration of economic power such as when a company monopolizes the market for a product or unfairly targets competitors.

Apple’s business model relies on the “Apple ecosystem,” which describes how all of Apple’s products from the iPhone to the Macbook are tightly integrated. The Department of Justice (DOJ), supported by a bipartisan group of 16 state attorneys general, argues that the Apple ecosystem is designed in a way that keeps customers reliant on Apple products and makes it very difficult to switch to non-Apple devices.

Attorney General Merrick Garland has frontlined the legal battle against Apple Inc.

More than 100 million Americans use an iPhone, and many of these users have other Apple products such as an iPad, Macbook, Airpods, or Apple Watch. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland alleges that Apple violated US antitrust law by weaponizing the iPhone’s market dominance to unfairly exclude non-Apple developed innovative apps and technology services that would benefit consumers but reduce dependence on Apple’s ecosystem.

Attorney General Garland explains that the iPhone’s share of the US smartphone market is over 65%, and Apple has protected the iPhone’s market dominance by making non-Apple features worse on iPhones, thus encouraging users to switch to iPhone. For example, Apple imposes a 30% commission tax on the price of any app or in-app purchase from the App store. Also, if an iPhone user messages a non-iPhone user in Apple Messages, the text’s features are limited: the conversation is not encrypted, videos are lower quality; and messages cannot be edited.

However, Apple has a track record of winning antitrust cases. Most recently in 2023, federal courts ruled in favor of Apple in its legal battle against Epic Games because cours found that Apple did not monopolize the App Store when it banned competitors’ app marketplaces in the App Store.

Some legal experts have also cast doubt on the DOJ’s odds of success. Herb Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert and University of Pennsylvania law professor, believes that the DOJ’s case against Apple targets the unique features of Apple products that distinguish it from other smartphone markers, which is a weak basis for the lawsuit. Daniel Francis, a professor at NYU School of Law agreed, explaining the DOJ’s argument that Apple must incorporate rival software in the iPhone is often unsuccessful in court.

If the Department of Justice wins the case, Apple could be forced to end its “ecosystem” and Apple-exclusive features. The DOJ could even request that Apple be broken up into smaller companies. There is historical precedent for this, as the Standard Oil Company was broken up into 34 smaller companies in the early 1900s and Microsoft was almost broken up in 2000.