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Seasons greetings arent as cheery when its a season of layoffs. November marked the eighth time this year that job cuts were up over the same period the year before, according to research from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. To make matters worse, hiring in November was down 35% from 2024, marking the lowest year-to-date total since 2010. News about the current labor market can be unnervingeven more so when layoffs are hitting your company. Being prepared can help make it less so. And one group of people knows more about that than most. A page out of the prepper book The word prepper may bring to mind images of shows like Doomsday Preppers, in which people stockpile food, water, weapons, and supplies in anticipation of apocalyptic events. However, most preppers are simply people who want to have some basic essentials or plan in place just in case. In fact, the last Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) National Preparedness Report found that more than half of U.S. adults (55%) had taken 3 or more of the 12 preparedness steps, like making a plan, gathering supplies, and securing documents. It’s not that different from preparing for a layoff, says organizational psychologist Melissa Doman. Going through an unexpected layoff is a form of a temporary doomsday for some people. They didnt expect it, they cant control it, and they dont know how long its going to last, she says. If youre worried about an impending layoff, try preparing like a prepper. Know what you have When layoff rumors start circulating, if you start making plans as soon as the whispers begin, or before if possible, youll be in a much better position, says Michael McAuliffe, president and CEO of Family Credit Management, a nonprofit credit counseling agency.Personal finance expert LaChelle Johnson agrees, advising, Figure out exactly what you have in terms of cash on hand, liquid assets, and even funds you may have access to in an emergency that you can withdraw from, like retirement accounts or investment accounts. Maximize income and benefits In 2018, Michelle Arellano Martin had what she thought was her dream job. Then, she got a surprise. I had just completed a huge projectgarnered some incredible awards for my workand then my position was eliminated, she says. If she had it to do over again, she says she would have applied for unemployment benefits immediately, because the first payment took several weeks to arrive. She also advises negotiating for the best severance package you can. After her second layoff, she was able to negotiate an additional three months of severance pay. This, in part, helped her launch her business, sustainable travel site Travara. Talent strategist Brittany Dolin, CEO of the Pocketbook Agency recruitment firm, advises reviewing an expected severance package and how benefits like health insurance last after a layoff. You may also look for benefits that can give you immediate value, such as flexible spending account balances available to you.Johnson also suggests looking for items that you might be able to sell if necessaryeverything from future concert tickets to that bread maker you always wanted to use but never opened. She also advises thinking about side hustles (but be sure you understand their impact on unemployment benefits). Slash spending When Johnson was laid off years ago, she and her husband had car loans, private school bills, credit card balances, and a big mortgage. The couple decided to make serious changes, like moving in with his parents for a year, to protect what they had and get out of debt. I just felt like we were maxed out from wall to wall, she recalls. Johnson advises taking a close look at spending and eliminating what you dont need: Cut subscriptions. Pause gym memberships. Plan meals, and eat at home. Look for cheaper housing options. Follow frugal living communities on Reddit or other social media for more ideas on cutting expenses. You may pick up some good habits and find room in your budget to beef up your emergency fund over time, she says. Get your support team lined up Three of the 12 disaster preparation actions FEMA recommends involve identifying people you need for help and communication during emergencies. Similarly, Doman says you need to identify your support team if you suspect youre facing something as stressful as a layoff. Dont just default to your best friend or a family member. Instead, she says, think about the people who are going to let you feel your emotions and, when youre ready, devise an action plan if the layoff comes to pass.You dont want someone whos just going to brush off your emotions or give you a lot of toxic positivity, she says. In fact, she adds, You may need more than one person.Reach out to these trusted individuals and let them know whats going on so they can support youand perhaps even help you network to find a new job. Keep a schedule If the layoff does come to pass, you may need to wallow a bit. Doman says its okay to take a duvet day to lie in bed and watch television if you need it. But dont do that for too long, she adds. Keep structure in your dayget up at a set time, work on some tasks to find a new job, get some fresh air, talk to a friend, she says. Dolin agrees. Fear can be paralyzing, and if a layoff is pending or just happened, its time to buckle down and do your best to stay employable in an unpredictable market, she says. Preparation does not equal panic.
Category:
E-Commerce
Its rare that your esoteric, impossible-to-pronounce, decade-long research project becomes a technology so crucial to national security that the President of the United States calls it out from the White House. But thats exactly what happened to Dr. Eric Wengrowski, the CEO of Steg AI. Wengrowski spent nearly a decade of his life advancing steganography, a deeply-technical method for tracking images as they travel through the machinery of the modern Internet, as the focus of his PHD at Rutgers University. After earning his degree, Wengrowki and a team of co-founders rolled his tech into a small startup. For several years, the company grew, but mostly toiled away in relative obscurity. Then, AI image generators exploded into the publics consciousness. And for Wengrowki and Stegs team, everything blew up. Durable Marks I met Wengrowski during the pandemic, when we both volunteered to help a media industry trade group rapidly pivot its yearly in-person conference to a Zoom format. For years, I only knew Wengrowski as a cheerful, highly-intelligent floating head in my video chat window. I even interviewed him for my YouTube channel from the COVID-safe confines of our respective home offices. When I finally met him in person in San Francisco in 2023, I discovered that hes actually a towering 6 feet 3 inches tall. It was one of those iconic pandemic professional meet-cute moments people joke about, where you find that someone youve virtually known for years looks totally different in person. What wasnt different about Wengrowski in real life was his intense interest and passion for his chosen field. Steganography (pronounced STEG-an-ography, like the Steg in stegasaurus) is a technique for embedding an invisible code into the pixels of an image. Basically, a complex algorithm subtly changes selected pixels in a way thats invisible to human perception. Images look no different after being marked with a steganographic watermark than they did before. Yet, when special software looks at the marked image, the unique code embedded in its pixels comes through clearly to the softwares computerized eyes. The presence of that code lets companies like Steg track a marked image back to its source with extremely high accuracy. Crucially, because the code is embedded directly into the images pixels, its also nearly impossible to remove. Bad actors can easily crop out a physical watermark from an images pixels, or use a tool like Photoshop to scrub data from the images IPTC or EXIF metadata fields. In contrast, because steganographic watermarks live directly in the visual part of the image itself, they travel with the image no matter where it goes. And they survive the most common image-related funny business that nefarious people might try to use to remove them. All steganographic watermarks can survive things that amateur image thieves might try, like aggressive cropping, or even the common practice of taking a screenshot of an image in order to stealthily steal it. But Stegs tech goes even further, Wengrowski told me in an interview. If for example you load an image watermarked by the companys tech on your computer screen, take out your phone, and photograph the physical screen, the companys watermarks will survive in the new image on your phone. Your nefarious copy will remain traceable to the original with Stegs tech. AI Explodes Everything When Wengrowski originally developed Stegs technology, he knew it was cool. And he had a hunch that it was useful for something. But exactly what that something might involve wasnt originally clear. In the early days, Steg slowly grew by helping companies with legal compliance and image protection. Steg would embed its watermarks in copyrighted images, for example, and then trace where those images ended up. If someone stole and used a copyrighted image without permission, Stegs embedded watermarks could be used to prove the theft and could help lead to a legal settlement. The company also worked to safeguard things like pre-release images of a new product. If a company sent top-secret images of a new phone (marked with Stegs tech) to a supplier, for example, and those photos suddenly ended up as a leak in TechCrunch, the company could trace the embedded watermark and know who to blame. That was enough for Steg to grow slowly and steadily improve its tech. Then, in 2022, everything changed. All at once, OpenAI released its Davinci image generation model (remember the avocado chairs?), Midjourney rolled out its then world-beating image generation tech, and Google leaned into image generation within its Bard and later Gemini AI models. Almost overnight, the world was awash in AI images. And very quickly, they became so realistic that everyday people had trouble knowing what was real and what was AI generated. This presented a huge problem for AI companies. They wanted to release their tech far and wide. But they fretted about the potential societal (and legal) consequences if their images were used for deepfakes to deceive people, or even to sway elections. And more broadly, anyone with an interest in the veracity of images suddenly had a huge problem knowing what was real and what was AI-generated. Everything from news reporting to war crimes tribunals rely on imagery as evidence. What happens when that imagery can be quickly and cheaply spun up by an AI algorithm? Yes, AI companies can physically watermark their images (such as by adding a little Gemini star in the lower right), or embed Generated by AI markers in their images metadata. But again, removing those markers is childs play for even the least sophisticated scammers. With AI image generators storming the world, the origins and veracity of every image online was suddenly called into question. Thank You, Mr. President That led to a bizarre situation for any deeply technical person pursuing their random, highly-specific passion in relative obscurity. On October 30, 2023, Wengrowki woke to find that then-president Joe Biden had issued an executive order specifically calling out AI watermarking tech, highlighting it as a crucial factor in national security, and ordering all Federal agencies to use it. Specifically, Bidens order mandated embedding information that is dificult to remove, into outputs created by AI including into outputs such as photos, videos, audio clips, or text for the purposes of verifying the authenticity of the output or the identity or characteristics of its provenance, modifications, or conveyance. The order also specifically called for the rapid development of science-back standards and techniques forlabeling synthetic content, such as using watermarking. Biden framed this as mission criticalthe term national security appears 36 times in his executive order. Basically, Biden was mandating the use of tech like steganography, and specifically calling it out from the White House. When that happened, Wengrowski told me, everything went crazy. Since the orderand the corresponding growth of AI imagery more broadlyStegs revenue has increased 500%. Moreover, protecting the integrity of images appears bipartisanWengrowski told me that AI watermarking has been embraced by both the Biden and Trump administrations. In an extremely tight AI job market where top researchers can command eight-figure salaries, Steg now employs five machine learning PHDs devoted to improving its technologies. Although Wengrowski couldnt share his customer list on the record, I can vouch for the fact that its wildly impressive. While keeping its legal compliance and image tracing side alive, Steg has expanded aggressively into the world of cybersecurity and AI image watermarking. For AI companies that want to ply their trade without ruining humanitys trust in visual media, Stegs tech is a lifeline. Companies can embed a steganographic watermark directly into AI images the moment theyre generated. For the life of an image, the code travels with it, even if its reposted, edited or altered. If that image is used as a deepfake or used to manipulate or harass people, the company that created it can quickly read the embedded steganographic watermark in its pixels, definitively label it as a fake, and quickly dispel any damage the image might cause. If youve created an AI image in the last year, youve almost certainly used steganography without even knowing it. Most major AI image generation companies now use the tech. Many use Stegs. And in a world where AI images are so good that they easily fool most detectors (and even trained forensic image analysts), many companies see steganography as the only bulwark against AIs total destruction of any truth still left in the visual world. A Wild Ride For Steg and for Wengrowski personally, its been a wild ride. Right as Biden issued his order, Wengrowski became a father, and now juggles the everyday struggles and joys of a young parent with the rigors of such things as constant travel and testifying in state legislatures. The rise of AI imagery has also revealed some counterintuitive challenges. When Steg first launched, Wengrowski told me, he expected that people would yearn for a technology that could prove whether an image was real or fake. In reality, he was surprised by how little people care. Many people are fine with seeing AI generated content, as long as its funny, informative or otherwise engaging. Whether or not its properly labeled as AI matters very little to them. More pointedly, it matters very little to the social media platforms that disseminate the content, too. Again, though, for the companies who create that contentand who face legal and reputational risk if their tech runs awryit matters an awful lot. Wengrowski tells me that Steg is continuing to improve its tech, making its watermarks even harder to beat. The company is also entering the emerging field of poisoning. New software that Wengrowki showed me invisibly alters images in ways that trip up common deepfake algorithms. If someone tries to turn the poisoned image into a deepfake, it comes out garbled and illegible. The tech works both when images are used for training deepfake models, and when a bad actor tries to create a deepfake of a specific person. The idea is that an influencer, for example, could upload poisoned images of themselves to their social media. The images would look normal to human users. But if someone tried to deepfake the influencer, the poisoned images would thwart them. Wengrowki told me hes especially excited to use the tech to help protect young influencers and teens in general, who are often targeted in abhorrent cyberbullying attacks involving explicit deepfakes. More broadly, though, Wengrowskis story is an inspiring one for anyone grinding away on an as-yet unproven technology, convinced of its value but unsure whether the world will ever see their work. Reflecting on Stegs success, Wengrowski acknowledged that Its probably best to start a business with a clear plan and an understanding of product/market fit. But in his words, Theres also something to be said for knowing a technology is cool, continually improving it even if you have no idea where that will lead, and just trusting that eventually it will have some value for the world. In Stegs case, thats indeed been a winning formula.
Category:
E-Commerce
Many Americans are likely to see massive changes to their taxes in 2026, especially seniors. That’s largely due to President Donald Trumps so-called big, beautiful bill, a massive 940-page bill signed into law over the summer that includes an array of new tax write-offs but also fails to renew some previous deductions from the Biden administration. One change is a $6,000 deduction for seniors. Here’s what to know. Who qualifies for the new senior tax deduction? Trumps tax and spending law introduced a $6,000 deduction for qualifying seniors ages 65 and older, on top of the current additional standard deduction for seniors under existing law. Taxpayers must attain age 65 on or before the last day of the taxable year to be eligible. The $6,000 senior deduction (or $12,000 for a married couple where both spouses qualify) applies to an eligible individual earning up to $75,000 in modified adjusted gross income, or up to $150,000 for joint filers. It is available for both itemizing and non-itemizing taxpayers. Taxpayers must include the Social Security number of the qualifying individual(s) on the return, and file jointly if married, to claim the deduction. How does the deduction impact Social Security? The deduction is meant to offset upcoming federal taxes on Social Security payments. Older taxpayers could be taxed up to 85% based on their combined income, which is calculated based on a taxpayer’s adjusted gross income plus half of their Social Security benefits, according to CNBC. Anything else to know? According to the IRS, the deduction expires at the end of 2028, right before Trump leaves office, making this a temporary deduction effective for tax years 2025 through 2028.
Category:
E-Commerce
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