By Katelyn Caralle, U.S. Political Reporter For Dailymail.Com In Alpharetta, Georgia

04:14 01 Dec 2023, updated 08:02 01 Dec 2023

• DeSantis showed off an app where feces is ‘plotted’ in the California city 
• He jabbed Newsom for ‘cleaning up’ for the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping 
• Came at the end of a fiery debate between the red and blue state governors 

Ron DeSantis pulled out a map of human feces on the streets of San Francisco and tore into the homelessness and crime in the city in his fiery debate with California Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday night.

Newsom, a Democrat, claimed he had taken 68,000 people off the streets and closed 6,000 homeless camps when the Florida governor pulled out the visual aid.

‘You may be asking ‘what is that plotting?’ This is an app where they plot the human feces that are found on the streets of San Francisco,’ Republican Gov. DeSantis detailed. ‘That is what has happened in one of the previous greatest cities this country has ever had.’

He then took a jab at Newsom for cleaning it up for the visit of Chinese president Xi Jinping earlier this month as the testy showdown wrapped.

The pair went to war over COVID policies, the southern border, taxes, crime and book bans in the primetime head-to-head on Fox News .

Both governors accused each other of lying about many of their states’ policies in what was a display of two alternatives to Donald Trump and Joe Biden. 

Ron DeSantis pulled out a map of human feces in San Francisco and tore into the homelessness and crime in the city in his fiery debate with California Governor Gavin Newsom on Thursday night

The end devolved into chaos when they called each other ‘bullies’ and shouted over each other while moderator Sean Hannity tried to intervene.

Along with the feces map, DeSantis’ campaign also unveiled on its website the sale of $37 brown socks with the words: ‘Newsom’s California Walking Socks. Watch your step.’

The description reads: ‘Thinking about visiting California? You’re going to need a pair of these. Order your California walking socks before you’re dodging feces in San Francisco!’

The two specifically sparred over some noticeable changes in California and Florida since they both become governors at the start of 2019. This included homelessness, drug use and crime.

In the U.S., 30 percent of those experiencing homelessness are located in California, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Of every 10,000 people in California, 44 are homeless, while only 12 of every 10,000 people in Florida are experiencing homelessness.

DeSantis started the debate by slamming his California counterpart by pointing to his hypocrisy during COVID-19 by going out to fine-dining restaurant The French Laundry and sending his children to in-person private schools while his residents were still under lockdown.

He said California ran out of UHaul moving trucks because so many people were moving out to head to red states – including Florida. He said among the new residents in Florida is the father of Newsom’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom.

Newsom didn’t back down in the one-on-one debate in Alpharetta, Georgia on Thursday night, taking a dig at DeSantis by saying they both won’t be presidential nominees in 2024.

He also accused DeSantis of ‘trolling’ with his move to transport migrants out of border states to Democratic sanctuary cities – and said he’s trying to one-up former President Donald Trump with the antics.

‘You almost have to try to mess California up,’ DeSantis said during feisty opening remarks explaining why his state is superior. ‘That is what Gavin Newsom has done since he has been governor.’

‘He has imposed restrictions on his own people while exempting himself from those restrictions and going to the French Laundry while his people were suffering,’ the Florida governor said. ‘He led the country in school closures, blocking kids out of school while he had his own kids in private school in-person.’

Newsom has repeatedly said he has no plans to run for president in 2024 and has served as a surrogate for President Joe Biden since he launched his reelection campaign this year.

But DeSantis is among a group of Republicans who don’t take the California leader at his word, and believe he plans to launch a 2024 bid for president – especially if Biden for some reason is no longer in the race.

Newsom claimed he had taken ‘68,000 people’ off the streets and closed 6,000 homeless camps when the Florida governor pulled out the visual aid ‘You may be asking ‘what is that plotting?’ This is an app where they plot the human feces that are found on the streets of San Francisco. That is what has happened in one of the previous greatest cities this country has ever had.’ DeSantis’ website features a $37 pair of brown socks titled ‘Newsom’s California Walking Socks’, it says they are for making sure your feet are protected from feces on the city streets of San Francisco

‘I thought this was state versus state,’ moderator Sean Hannity of Fox News posed to the two men as they devolved into debate over national-level policies.

‘But it’s about the United States of America, I thought this guy was running for president of the United States,’ Newsom shot back.

‘You will not admit it,’ DeSantis said, demanding: ‘Admit that you’re running.’

DeSantis is currently in the middle of a heated primary election where he comes in distant second to former President Donald Trump. He will debate his fellow 2024 competitors on Wednesday – just six days after the one-on-one with Newsom.

The California governor claims that despite DeSantis ‘playing political games,’ he is failing at trying to be the new Trump with policies more radical than the ex-president’s.

‘You’re trolling folks and trying to find migrants to play political games to try to get some news attention to out-Trump Trump,’ Newsom alleged of the Florida governor’s actions.

‘And by the way, how’s that going for you? Down by 41 points in your own home state.’ 

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Lora Kolodny reports via CNBC: Cruise CEO and founder Kyle Vogt posted comments on Hacker News on Sunday responding to allegations that his company’s robotaxis aren’t really self-driving, but instead require frequent help from humans working in a remote operations center. First, Vogt confirmed that the General Motors-owned company does have a remote assistance team, in response to a discussion under the header, “GM’s Cruise alleged to rely on human operators to achieve ‘autonomous’ driving.” The CEO wrote, “Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations.”

Cruise recently took the drastic move of grounding all of its driverless operations following a collision that injured a pedestrian in San Francisco on October 2. The collision and Cruise’s disclosures around it led to state regulators stripping the company of its permits to operate driverless vehicles in California, unless there is a driver aboard. […] A New York Times story followed last week diving into issues within Cruise that may have led to the safety issues, and setback for Cruise’s reputation and business. The story included a stat that at Cruise, workers intervened to help the company’s cars every 2.5 to five miles. Vogt explained on Hacker News that the stat was a reference to how frequently Cruise robotaxis initiate a remote assistance session.

He wrote, “Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help. Many sessions are quick confirmation requests (it is ok to proceed?) that are resolved in seconds. There are some that take longer and involve guiding the AV through tricky situations. Again, in aggregate this is 2-4% of time in driverless mode.” CNBC asked Cruise to confirm and provide further details on Monday. The Cruise spokesperson wrote in an e-mail, that a “remote assistance” session is triggered roughly every four to five miles, not every 2.5 miles, in Cruise’s driverless fleet. […] CNBC also asked Cruise for information about typical response time for remote operations, and how remote assistance workers at Cruise are trained. “More than 98% of sessions are answered within 3 seconds,” the spokesperson said. As far as the ratio of remote assistance advisors to driverless vehicles on the road, the Cruise spokesperson said, “During driverless operations there was roughly 1 remote assistant agent for every 15-20 driverless AVs.”

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For more than a decade, struggling taxi drivers have blamed Uber and Lyft for siphoning off their customers and making a difficult living even harder.

But now traditional cab drivers and contractors who work for ride-hailing apps have united against a common enemy—taxis without any drivers at all.

By November 2022, officials granted so-called robotaxis operated by Waymo, owned by Google’s parent company, and General Motors-owned Cruise permission to serve paying passengers. These robotaxi services have continued to expand rapidly despite concerns about the safety record of driverless vehicles. Autonomous vehicles have prompted outrage by interrupting public emergencies, rolling over a fire hose during a major house fire and, in another instance, narrowly missing a light-rail car. Another killed a small dog. 

In July 2023, a cohort of activists against autonomous vehicles placed traffic cones on the hoods of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis to stop their forward progress. | Courtesy Safe Street Rebel | Source: Courtesy Safe Street Rebel

But taxi and ride-hailing app drivers say robotaxis could have another human cost that’s largely been glossed over. They’re worried that the added competition could mean human drivers could further shrink earnings that they say have been steadily dwindling from rising costs and rate changes. 

“We’re already seeing it,” said Jose Gazo, an Uber driver of seven years who added he finds himself driving longer hours to make less money. “With business going like this, we’re going to go homeless.”

This week, the California Public Utilities Commission, for the second time in a month, delayed a vote scheduled for Thursday that would have allowed autonomous vehicle companies unlimited 24/7 expansion in San Francisco. A chorus of local public safety and transit officials have called for a slowdown in their expansion plans, arguing that self-driving cars have only “met the requirements for a learner’s permit,” not a driver’s license.

Waymo responded that it has about 200 cars providing more than 10,000 rides per week with no collisions involving pedestrians or cyclists on record. A Cruise spokesperson previously touted its safety record to the Standard, noting that it “includes millions of miles driven in an extremely complex urban environment.”  

Driverless Future Overhyped?

None of that has dampened the resistance among drivers against the rise of autonomous vehicles. Taxi and app-based drivers staged a protest outside the commission last month, protesting an imminent expansion of driverless cars with questions about what it means for future work. 

Protestors stand with signs at the protest against robotaxis or self-driving taxis in San Francisco on June 29, 2023. | Jeremy Chen/The Standard

But even if Waymo and Cruise prevail over local safety concerns, experts don’t believe robotaxis will replace human drivers. For one thing, they’re expensive to build. A ride in a Cruise car is slightly cheaper for customers than taking an Uber, but the vehicles outfitted with sensors and cameras cost much more to make than ordinary cars. In response to mounting losses, Cruise told investors in March that it would focus on cutting costs. Ford and Volkswagon pulled the plug on their joint autonomous vehicle venture last fall. 

The companies are also limited by federal law, which says manufacturers are only allowed to produce 2,500 driverless cars apiece per year, though legislation to lift the cap has been proposed. 

Ken Jacobs, chairman of the University of California Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education, believes visions of a driverless future have been “grossly overhyped.” 

“The threat isn’t to the number of jobs; it’s to the quality of jobs,” Jacobs told The Standard. “The market left to its own is likely to come out with outcomes that … are bad for workers.” 

Drivers say they are spending more time on the road but are making less from rate adjustments while still covering the cost of gas and maintenance. 

The Rideshare Guy, a popular blog for gig workers, found in January that recent rate changes mean that Uber drivers are making 19%-27% less on long rides. 

On the subject of rate changes, Uber said in California, drivers make median earnings of $38 per engaged hour—not accounting for idle time or driver expenses—and as of a change instituted earlier this year, drivers can now see prospective earnings before accepting rides. Lyft did not respond regarding driver earnings by publication time. 

“We did not see a significant change in per-trip earnings, but we did see an increase in the number of driving hours, suggesting drivers appreciated the changes made,” said an Uber spokesperson of fare changes. “As drivers know, earnings on Uber vary as marketplace conditions change.”

Jason Munderloh, a part-time Lyft driver of nine years, said the company has made some improvements for drivers, like a setting to pick up rides only in the direction they are traveling, but overall, pay has dropped. The advent of autonomous vehicles has him looking at other possible careers, like bartending. 

Lyft driver Jason Munderloh poses for a portrait in his car at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, on Monday July 10, 2023. | Isaac Ceja/The Standard | Source: Isaac Ceja/The Standard

For San Francisco taxi drivers who took out loans for a $250,000 medallion under a program introduced in 2010, the year Uber first arrived on city streets, the prospect of making less money is especially terrifying. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency brought in $64 million through the program, which has since seen 301 foreclosed medallions. It still has 427 paid medallions as of last week. 

The owner of one of them, Brent Johnson, a San Francisco cab driver of 30 years, said with his current income, which he estimates at around minimum wage, he can only afford to pay off the interest on his medallion loan. He’s hoping for restitution, arguing that, since they’re functioning as taxis, autonomous vehicles should pay into the medallion system. But if his loan isn’t taken care of, he is bracing to default as retirement nears. 

“I’m hoping for the best and preparing for the worst,” Johnson said.

There are still over 2,550 drivers with a taxi permit, according to the SFMTA. Spokesperson Stephen Chun said the agency, which has urged data collection on the safety record and environmental and economic effects of autonomous vehicles, is “confident” that taxi drivers will continue to provide critical transportation, like through the paratransit program, in the long term. 

Billy Riggs, a University of San Francisco professor who studies transportation innovation, also sees a long future with a continued need for human drivers. 

“If we’re honest with ourselves, it really does relate to this bigger question of the future of work, the future of cities,” Riggs said. “Transportation, right now, just highlights this.”

Questions, comments or concerns about this article may be sent to info@sfstandard.com

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The controversial company received FDA approval to conduct human trials earlier this year and recently raised $280m.

Neuralink, the brain-implant company founded by Elon Musk, is looking for candidates to take part in a  human clinical study.

The company claims to have received approval from an ”independent institutional review board” to conduct its first human clinical trials. Nerualink is looking for people who have quadriplegia due to cervical spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to participate in the six-year study.

The initial goal is to give people the ability to control a computer cursor or keyboard using their thoughts, by surgically inserting a brain-computer interface. The trial is also being conducted to evaluate the safety of the implant – called N1 – and the company’s surgical robot, R1.

The company said this study represents an important step to create a generalised brain interface that can “restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs”.

“During the study, the R1 Robot will be used to surgically place the N1 Implant’s ultra-fine and flexible threads in a region of the brain that controls movement intention,” Neuralink said in a blogpost. “Once in place, the N1 Implant is cosmetically invisible and is intended to record and transmit brain signals wirelessly to an app that decodes movement intention.”

In May, Neuralink received approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to run clinical trials on humans, in the form of an investigational device exemption. This allows devices to be used in a clinical study in order to collect “safety and effectiveness data”.

Last month, Neuralink raised $280m in a Series D funding round led by Founders Fund, the VC firm co-founded by billionaire tech investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.

A history of controversy

Neuralink was founded in 2016 by Musk along with experts in neuroscience and robotics. The San-Francisco-headquartered company is one of many working to advance the field of brain-computer interface technology.

The company has trialled the technology with pigs and monkeys over the years, with one monkey making headlines when it was shown playing the classic video game Pong with its mind via two N1 Link chips embedded in its brain.

But like many companies associated with Musk, Neuralink has been hit with controversy in the past. The company faced federal investigation in the US for potential animal welfare violations during its trials.

A Reuters report last December based on records and sources with direct knowledge of the company’s animal-testing operations found that Neuralink had killed about 1,500 animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs and monkeys.

The investigation followed internal staff complaints around how the company was allegedly rushing its animal testing, resulting in botched experiments. Neuralink denied these claims earlier this year.

In February, the US Department of Transportation said it was investigating Neuralink for potentially moving hazardous pathogens, Reuters reported. An animal welfare group claimed implants removed from the brains of monkeys were being moved in an unsafe way and that these implants could contain infectious diseases.

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News

From Isabel Keane

May 30, 2023 | 3:54 p.m

Don’t stay where you eat…or where a dog might eat.

A San Francisco dog owner warned other local pet parents after her pooch Pockets became ill from eating marijuana and opioid-contaminated human feces in a city park — a fetid situation that her vet said was “fairly common.”

As Jackie Shepard was playing with her one-year-old Himalayan Sheepdog-Poodle mix Thursday in Fort Mason, she noticed her pup started eating something uncomfortable — poop.

“I noticed she was eating something so I ran over to see what she was eating and unfortunately it was poop,” Shepard told ABC 7 News.

Jackie Shepard said her pup Pockets ingested human feces contaminated with marijuana and opioids at a San Francisco park. KGO

Since dogs tend to eat whatever they can get their hands on, Shepard wasn’t overly concerned about Pockets — until the pup started getting sick hours later.

“Around 8 o’clock she was wiggling and her tail was pointing down. There was definitely something wrong with her,” Shepard said.

A few hours later, the young pup appeared ill. @pockets_doodle / Instagram

The Himalayan shepherd-poodle mix ate the contaminated feces at Fort Mason, near the Golden Gate Bridge. News Licensing / MEGA

Shepard took the pooch to an ambulance, who ran tests that showed Pockets showed symptoms of marijuana poisoning. There were also opioids in her body.

“Basically, the doctor that night told me that this was fairly common and that she sees it a few times a week,” Shepard said.

Luckily, Pockets didn’t ingest so much contaminated feces that she needed Narcan and quickly reverted to her playful self.

Fortunately, Pockets didn’t ingest so much contaminated feces that he became seriously ill. @pockets_doodle / Instagram

A healthcare professional said the situation was more common than one might think. @pockets_doodle / Instagram

A healthcare professional told ABC 7 that Shepard did everything right – saying Pockets could have suffered kidney or liver damage at a higher dosage.

“There are so many people with dogs who probably don’t know that this poses a threat to their dogs, so I wanted to share it to raise awareness that people can really be careful and watch out for symptoms of this type,” Shepard said.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing industries, streamlining processes, and hopefully improving the quality of life for people around the world—all very exciting news. However, with the increasing influence of AI systems, it is crucial to ensure that these technologies are developed and implemented responsibly.

Responsible AI is not just about compliance with regulations and ethics; it is the key to creating more accurate and effective AI models.

In this article, we will discuss how responsible AI leads to more powerful AI systems; explore existing and upcoming regulations related to AI compliance; and emphasize the need for software and AI solutions to address these challenges.

Why does responsible AI lead to more accurate and effective AI models?

Responsible AI defines the obligation to design, develop and deploy AI models in a safe, fair and ethical manner. By ensuring that models work as expected—and don’t produce unwanted results—responsible AI can help increase trust, protect against harm, and improve model performance.

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To be responsible, AI must be understandable. This is no longer a human problem; We need algorithms to help us understand the algorithms.

GPT-4, the latest version of OpenAI’s Large Language Model (LLM), is trained on the text and images of the web, and as we all know, the web is full of inaccuracies, ranging from minor misstatements to outright fakes. While these untruths can be dangerous in and of themselves, they inevitably also produce AI models that are less accurate and less intelligent. Responsible AI can help us solve these problems and move us towards developing better AI. Specifically, responsible AI can:

1. Reduce prejudice: Responsible AI focuses on removing biases that can be inadvertently built into AI models during development. By actively working to remove bias in data collection, training, and implementation, AI systems are becoming more accurate and delivering better outcomes for a wider range of users.
2. improve generalizability: Responsible AI encourages the development of models that work well in different environments and across different populations. By ensuring that AI systems are tested and validated against a variety of scenarios, the generalizability of these models is enhanced, resulting in more effective and adaptable solutions.
3. Ensure transparency: Responsible AI emphasizes the importance of transparency in AI systems, making it easier for users and stakeholders to understand how decisions are made and how the AI ​​works. This includes providing understandable explanations of algorithms, data sources and possible limitations. By promoting transparency, responsible AI fosters trust and accountability, empowers users to make informed decisions, and encourages effective assessment and improvement of AI models.

AI compliance and ethics regulations

In the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force in 2016 (and implemented in 2018) to enforce strict rules on data protection.

Businesses quickly realized they needed software to track where and how they were using consumer data, and then to ensure they were compliant with those regulations.

OneTrust is a company that quickly emerged to provide businesses with a platform to manage their data and processes related to privacy. OneTrust has seen incredible growth since its inception, with much of that growth driven by GDPR.

We believe that the current and near future states of the AI ​​Regulation reflect the timeframe of the Data Protection Regulation 2015/2016; The importance of responsible AI is beginning to be recognized around the world, with various regulations emerging to drive ethical development and use of AI.

1. I HAVE action
   In April 2021, the European Commission proposed new rules – the EU AI Law – to create a legal framework for AI in the European Union. The proposal includes provisions on transparency, accountability and user rights to ensure that AI systems are safe and respect fundamental rights. We believe that the EU will continue to be at the forefront of AI regulation. The EU-AEOI is expected to be adopted at the end of 2023, with the legislation coming into force in 2024/2025.

2. AI regulation and initiatives in the US
   The EU AEOI is likely to set the tone for regulation in the US and other countries. In the US, governing bodies such as the FTC are already enacting their own sets of rules, particularly in relation to AI decisions and bias; and NIST has published a risk management framework that is likely to influence US regulation.

So far, there has been little comment on the regulation of AI at the federal level, as the Biden government published the AI ​​Bill of Rights – a non-binding guide to the design and use of AI systems. However, Congress is also reviewing the Algorithm Accountability Act of 2022 to require impact assessments of AI systems to check for bias and effectiveness. But these regulations are not moving very quickly towards adoption.

Interestingly (but perhaps not surprisingly), much of the early effort to regulate AI in the US is at the state and local levels, with much of this legislation targeting HR tech and insurance. New York City already passed Local Law 144, also known as the NYC Bias Audit Mandate, effective April 2023, prohibiting companies from using automated hiring tools to hire candidates or promote employees in NYC, unless the tools have been independently verified bias.

California has proposed similar employment regulations regarding automated decision-making systems, and Illinois already has legislation in place regarding the use of AI in video interviews.

In the insurance sector, the Colorado Division of Insurance has proposed legislation known as the Algorithm and Predictive Model Governance Regulation aimed at “protecting consumers from unfair discrimination in insurance practices.”

The role of software in ensuring responsible AI

It’s pretty clear that regulators (starting in the EU and then expanding to other countries) and companies will take AI systems and associated data very seriously. There are significant fines for non-compliance and failures due to not understanding AI models – and we believe the company’s reputation is at risk.

Purpose-built software is required to track and manage compliance. Regulation will serve as an important tailwind for technology adoption. Specifically, the critical roles of software solutions in addressing the ethical and regulatory challenges associated with responsible AI include:

1. AI model tracking and inventory: Software tools can help organizations maintain an inventory of their AI models, including their purpose, data sources, and performance metrics. This allows for better monitoring and management of AI systems, ensuring they are compliant with ethical guidelines and relevant regulations.
2. AI risk assessment and monitoring: AI-powered risk assessment tools can assess the potential risks associated with AI models, such as B. prejudice, privacy concerns and ethical issues. By continuously monitoring these risks, organizations can proactively address potential issues and maintain responsible AI practices.
3. Algorithm Auditing: In the future we can expect the emergence of algorithms capable of auditing other algorithms – the holy grail! With the massive amounts of data and computational power going into these models, this is no longer a human problem. This enables automated, real-time, unbiased evaluation of AI models, ensuring they meet ethical standards and meet regulatory requirements.

These software solutions not only streamline compliance processes, but also help develop and deploy more accurate, ethical, and effective AI models. By using technology to address the challenges of responsible AI, companies can increase trust in AI systems and realize their full potential.

The importance of responsible AI

In summary, responsible AI is the foundation for developing accurate, effective, and trustworthy AI systems; By removing bias, improving generalizability, ensuring transparency, and protecting user privacy, responsible AI leads to more powerful AI models. Compliance with regulations and ethical guidelines is critical to fostering public trust and acceptance of AI technologies, and as AI continues to advance and permeate our lives, the need for software solutions that support responsible AI practices will only increase gain weight.

By facing up to this responsibility, we can ensure the successful integration of AI into society and harness its power to create a better future for everyone!

Aaron Fleishman is a partner at Tola Capital.

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I AM STANDING in the basement of 1550 Mission Street in San Francisco—a new high-rise in the city’s prime real estate location—listening to the steady hum of human grime being filtered. Above me, residents on 38 floors are showering and brushing their teeth as part of their morning routine. In front of me, a maze of pipes and tubes feeds their discarded water into a membrane bioreactor the size of a backyard hot tub. Inside, the membranes and oxygen bubbles purify the H2O and channel it back into the building instead of into sewage pipes, clean enough for flushing toilets and urinals. “We’re able to reuse about 95 percent of it,” says Aaron Tartakovsky, co-founder and CEO of Epic Cleantec, the company that designed the technology. His father, Igor, the other co-founder and the chief engineer, chimes in with a twinkle in his eye and a proud smile. “It’s kinda cool how it works.”

The really cool stuff, however, is stationed in the nearby New Market, or NEMA, building where Aaron and Igor piloted their poop-recycling operation. Unlike the 1550 Mission setup, which recovers only grey water—from everything but toilets and kitchen sinks—NEMA’s does the dirty work. Here, a silvery machine resembling a giant food processor the size of a small fridge collects people’s waste, intercepting the sewage outflow. When the machine runs, the sludge splats onto its rotating mesh belt. The liquids trickle through, but the feces stay on. A wrangler squeezes out more water, producing palm-size glops of dung that plop into a bin. 

When the pilot program was in operation in 2019 and 2020, Aaron or his coworkers would replace that 55-gallon bin weekly and drive it to the company’s nearby poo-processing facility, Epic Hub, located in a former car dealership. There, the excrement was chucked into another apparatus that thoroughly mixed it with a disinfecting chemical blend, killing pathogens. The sterilized gunk was composted into soil, which Aaron and Igor used to turn an industrial patch of land outside Epic Hub into a blooming garden. “We call it ‘Soil by San Franciscans for San Franciscans,’” Aaron says. “We’re talking to the city about using it in parks.” I share every bit of his excitement. As someone who grew up on a small farm in the former Soviet Union that my grandfather fertilized with the contents of our septic system, I believe our so-called “humanure” should nourish our crops.  

US cities use purple to mark pipes with recycled water, like the ones under 1550 Mission Street in San Francisco. Lina Zeldovich

The US produced 5,823,000 dry metric tons of biosolids—the end product of wastewater treatment plants—in 2018. In terms of its chemistry, the stuff is like your average dirt, albeit with a smell. In an ideal world, biosolids—potent fertilizers high in nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium—would be returned to vegetable and dairy farms to replenish the nutrients we’ve extracted or grow the trees we cut. Scientists call this concept circular ecology, which is key to sustainable living in the 21st century. Yet at the moment, only half of our biosolids come back to farmlands. The other half rots in landfills, releasing greenhouse gases—or, worse, is shoved into incinerators that spit smoke into the air. The reasons for these wasteful approaches span from financial to logistical to the general yuck factor. New equipment for turning sludge into pathogen-free fertilizer that meets EPA standards can be expensive. If a big metropolitan area generates a few thousand metric tons of biosolids a week and doesn’t have enough farmland nearby to absorb it, the city will have to truck it away using fossil fuels. Finally, people just don’t love wastewater facilities, which they see as epitomes of filth. 

That mindset began to change in 2011, first among tech creators and then the larger public, when the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation issued the Reinvent the Toilet Challenge, asking experts to recover valuable resources from toilet outputs, including clean water and nutrients. Originally intended to solve sanitation challenges in poorer countries, it propelled new ideas for sewage treatment in general. California’s historic drought was another big catalyst. “In 2014, our elected officials asked, ‘Why are we still using fresh water to flush toilets in San Francisco? And why can’t we reuse it?’” Aaron says. “So we really focused on solving that problem.”  

The city wanted to encourage water reuse, particularly in big new buildings, says Paula Kehoe, director of water resources at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, an agency that services 2.7 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area. “We started thinking about the on-site water treatment systems as more of resource recovery facilities,” Kehoe says. 

Aaron and Igor Tartakovsky inspect the blooming plants outside their research and development lab, Epic Hub. Thanks to the fertile soil “produced by San Franciscans,” this former industrial patch of land is thriving. Lina Zeldovich

In a time when we embrace locally grown food, it makes sense to process the remnants locally as well. The centralized treatment plants that most city municipalities rely on might have worked well in the 20th century, but many have now aged to the point where they’re no longer sustainable or economical. The typical wastewater pipe lasts 50 to 100 years; the average US one is about 45 years old, with some being more than a century old, which creates the risk of sewage spills and contamination. According to a 2019 estimate from the Report Card of America’s Infrastructure, the nation’s utilities spent more than $3 billion to replace about 4,700 miles of pipelines—only a tiny fraction of the country’s total 1,300,000-mile network. A 2017 report estimates that by 2042, 56 million more people will be using these centralized treatment systems, and some $271 billion will be needed to sustain them annually. 

On-site filtration and treatment could be a crucial alternative. “There are certainly advantages with a centralized wastewater system, as you get specialized knowledge and technical expertise in one place in case something goes wrong,” says Bill Brower, senior biosolids engineer at Brown and Caldwell, an environmental engineering and construction firm. Yet in the era of climate change and increasing droughts, purifying the precious H2O at the source has real benefits too. “I think there’s certainly a place for doing more decentralized treatment,” Brower says. But before we start shutting down the sewage lines, we need to figure out where to put the “number two.”

The grass is greener where waste gets repurposed. Andre Rucker for Popular Science

From soviet refugee to poop entrepreneur

Growing up in 1960s Odessa, Ukraine, then a part of the USSR, Igor Tartakovsky aimed to be a rocket scientist. “I wanted to build planes and spaceships—that was my childhood dream,” he says. Yet for a Jewish kid, it was a difficult path. The anti-Semitism in the Soviet empire was palpable: Igor graduated from high school with highest honors, but was turned down from his town’s engineering schools. He didn’t give up easily and was eventually accepted to study aeronautics at Electromechanical College in Novosibirsk, a snowbound Siberian city. He traded Odessa’s mild climate for endless winter in a heartbeat. 

When he applied for a summer job in engineering the next year, he filled out 15 forms, submitted more than a dozen photos of himself, and was still rejected. He let go of his aerospace dream and pivoted to studying refrigeration and air conditioning.  

The career switch didn’t help. Again, Igor graduated at the top of his class, and again, he was turned down for the jobs he applied for. He got a gig at a floating fishing factory boat that sailed in the frozen Far East for six months at a time. Besides refrigerating seafood, his engineering prowess came in handy for building a contraption to distill moonshine from fermented apple juice—a feat his crewmates loved, but Igor didn’t. He felt he was wasting his life. It was clear that he didn’t have a future in the Soviet Union, so his family decided to leave. 

The only way to emigrate from the KGB state at the time was to receive an invitation to “reunite with the family” from a relative living abroad. Any correspondence asking for such a favor could be intercepted by the government. So Igor’s kin penned a so-called “underwear letter.” They wrote their names and dates of birth down on the stretched-out waistband of a pair of boxers; when the rubber shrank down, the text wasn’t visible. A person leaving the country took their underwear missive with him, and after a year, the coveted invite came through. The KGB officer working on Igor’s case called him “an idiot” because he “clearly had bright prospects in this country,” and gave him 45 days to leave. Igor obliged. His parents and sister followed. 

In San Francisco, Igor met his future wife, got a job, and had children. Later he launched his own company, designing air-conditioning systems for apartment and office buildings in the city. He never thought he’d end up making “humanure.”

Humans vs. manure

Throughout most of human history, our relationship with our waste has been thorny. We can’t stop producing it, but we can’t live with it. The undigested nutrients in our feces—proteins, lipids, sugars—breed intestinal worms and the deadly bacteria that cause scourges like dysentery, gastroenteritis, and typhoid. To avoid spreading disease, we must distance ourselves from our metabolic output as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

The industrial Western sewage systems of the past 150 years perfected this process. As cities grew, so did their centralized sewage operations. The first wastewater treatment plants in America were developed in the 1850s. Today, more than 16,000 of them chug out sludge 24/7, processing what comes down municipal, home, and office pipes. Combined, the US has enough such tubing to wrap around our planet 52 times. Or reach to the moon and back almost thrice. About 62.5 billion gallons of wastewater flow through these lines daily. 

The father and son entrepreneur team saw an opening in wastewater recycling and sewage management and launched their tech company in 2015. Courtesy of Cleantec

To my grandfather, none of this made economic or environmental sense, especially the part about tossing dung along with trash. “You have to feed the earth the way you feed people,” he used to say as he filled up his compost pits with the brown goo from our septic tank every fall. He then closed them up and let Mother Nature do her job. When he dug them up again three years later, the pits would be full of fluffy black dirt so nutrient-rich that our plants managed to bear fruit despite the short, cold, and rainy Russian summers. 

Spending billions on purifying wastewater to release into rivers and streams, only to pump it back into water mains and clean it again for human consumption, doesn’t make sense either. “In 2015 it became a mandatory requirement for any new building in San Francisco over 250,000 square feet to install an on-site water treatment system for their toilet and irrigation needs,” says Kehoe. “And in 2021 it became a requirement for any new building over 100,000 square feet.”

For Igor and Aaron, his third and youngest son, who studied political science but ended up following in his father’s engineering footsteps, the move was a serendipitous one. They’d just gotten their toes wet in sewage and were pumped to dive in. 

An epic origin story

In 2013, a client asked Igor to find a building-wide sewage recycling system for their space in the Bay Area. He couldn’t find a single model on the market. Some months later, at a tech conference, Igor watched someone sterilize dog poop by whipping it in a food processor with potassium permanganate. He knew the chemical from his childhood: Called margantsovka, it was a common disinfectant. When his aquarium fish would start getting sick, he would add a few drops, he recalls. “The bacteria would die, and the fish would swim in a rosy water for a little while because potassium permanganate is also a colorant.” The compound (chemical formula KMnO4) causes an oxidizing reaction that kills microorganisms, including the pathogenic ones that commonly afflict humans. “It’s been widely used to wash wounds or disinfect a glass that someone drank from,” says Govind Rao, professor of biochemical engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “It’s a very powerful oxidant, but it works best when pathogen loads are low.” Disinfecting typical sewage would require tons of KMnO4, but the Tartakovskys found a workaround—just do it at the source. Most people don’t carry large amounts of dangerous pathogens in their intestines (otherwise they’d be very sick), so what they flush isn’t usually festering with germs. It is after sludge floats through the miles of pipes for days that it becomes colonized with all sorts of bugs that naturally dwell there, growing and multiplying. “When sewage swirls down the pipes for days and weeks, its pathogen load is huge,” Aaron explains. “But if you get it right after someone flushed the toilet, the pathogen load is much lower.”

Using a proprietary disinfecting mix, the “poop mixer” converts the biosolids extracted from the sewage stream at a pilot site into garden soil. Courtesy of Cleantec

Igor and Aaron started by whipping their family dogs’ droppings in a food processor, too. For better sterilization, they added other chemicals, coming up with their company’s proprietary microbe-busting mix. Now they needed to scale up, so they convinced an Italian company that built industrial-size mixers to let them try their neutralizing method on septic sludge at a wastewater treatment plant near Florence. In March 2015, they flew in for a test. As they experimented with the settings on a machine the size of a backyard grill, the reaction released too much heat. The mixer’s top blew off, painting the ceiling with sanitized yet still stinky slime—a historic incident Aaron caught on video. But that taught the father and son the parameters for an industrial processor. Once back home, they formed Epic Cleantec, a water recycling solution company, and focused on building their own mixer. 

They hired an engineering company in Minnesota to build one. Testing it in the Land of 10,000 Lakes proved messy too. Aaron was filling up a bucket of fecal goo when the pressurized slush hit the bottom so hard, it splashed him from head to toe. “I almost lost my lunch that day,” he recalls. Later, the muck partially froze in the frigid Midwestern winter, rattling around the mixer. They never considered giving up. “I learned early on that failure was not an option,” Igor says. Aaron draws his inspiration from his family history. “My grandparents were Holocaust survivors,” he says. “Considering what they went through, I can deal with sewage.”

The Minnesota exercise gave them exact mixer dimensions—length, diameter, blade size. But the final version was built by a company in Los Angeles. Driving down to give it a whirl, Aaron called every kennel in the area to ask for dog poop. Most laughed and thought it was a prank, but five dished some out. More came from the SPCA, which became Epic’s first official poop supplier. 

In their greenhouse, the Epic Cleantec team sows strawberries and other plants in the sanitized and dried experimental substrate. Courtesy of Cleantec

Igor and Aaron were also working on assembling the apparatus that managed the sewage flow, which would put sludge through the rotating mesh belt and then a wrangler to compact it into the palm-size glops that would be fed into the disinfecting mixer. Stringing the mesh belt and wrangler together was reasonably straightforward, but the father and son needed large quantities of sewage to test the process from end to end. In 2017, Epic began buying sludge from Stanford University’s Codiga Resource Recovery Center, which had a miniature sewage station, to continue calibrating their system. “It cost 40 cents per pound,” recalls Sebastien Tilmans, Codiga’s executive director.

When even that stream proved insignificant, Epic began chugging sludge by the truckload—literally. By then, Epic Hub was located in a former car dealership, so the sewage trucks that were emptying some of the Bay Area septic systems would roll in to dish out their cargo. “We would stretch a hose from the truck into our system and let it run, end to end,” Aaron says. “Some of these trucks carried sewage from a Facebook cafeteria bathroom,” he explains. “Some of our soil is Facebook-made.”

Once they tested the mixer-processor in their Epic Hub, the Tartakovskys approached the owners of NEMA (whom Igor knew) about testing it in real life. Building engineer Derwin Narvaez’s first reaction was one of sheer disgust. “You’re going to do what?” he remembers asking. Seeing the tech in action won him over. “The end product is just black dirt!”

Standing next to the custom mixer, which resembles a giant meat grinder, Aaron demonstrates how that black dirt was produced during the pilot. The glops of excrement picked up from the sludge squeezer in the NEMA basement were shaken in from the collecting bin—and the machine would chew through them with Epic’s disinfecting blends for about 20 minutes. Then Aaron would put the freshly made earth through a battery of tests, checking for pathogens and heavy metals, before letting it dry outside near the Epic Hub garden. “I always wondered what people in nearby skyscrapers thought we were doing,” he says. “But no one complained,” given there was no stink.

“My grandparents were holocaust survivors. considering what they went through, I can deal with sewage.”

—Aaron Tartakovsky

He scrapes some of the dirt residue from the mixer’s innards and offers it to me. After some hesitation, I hold the powdery black substance in my hand and give it a timid sniff. It looks and smells just like the garden dirt from my grandfather’s pits. But while his backyard-farm approach worked on a small scale, Epic’s might change how we process sewage in entire high-rises, which is crucial, because two out of every three people worldwide will likely be living in urban areas by 2050. 

Other companies are redesigning our relationship with excrement in their own unique ways. A group of pee-cyclers in Vermont founded Rich Earth Institute, a nonprofit that gathers urine from residents in containers and distributes it to farmers, but for many that manual process is a downside. Israel-based startup HomeBiogas pioneered a toilet that helps produce fertilizer and methane, the latter to be used for cooking fuel—a self-sustaining approach that works for private homes and small buildings, but not high-rises. South African company LiquidGold Africa developed a way to extract fertilizing compounds from urine, which can be collected en masse from plumbing in buildings, but it doesn’t yet recycle solids. In Portland, Oregon, a large apartment complex, Hassalo on Eighth, built an entire outdoor wastewater treatment facility, but that requires a lot of surrounding space. Australia-based company Aquacell operates several building-level water recycling systems in the Bay Area; according to Kehoe, a few more are in the works, but Aquacell doesn’t dig into the solids business. By comparison, Epic’s end-to-end tech is particularly well suited for offices and dwellings in densely populated cities, the number of which will keep growing. “This firm seems to have a solid, innovative technology,” says William Toffey, sustainability strategist at BlueTech Research, a company that specializes in water solutions. “The 1550 residence in San Francisco is its shiniest example.”

Will more skyscrapers join in? Narvaez, who is now an ardent supporter, thinks so. “Rather than rationing water, buildings should adopt this approach,” he says. “To me, it’s the future of all new buildings. The buildings will save a lot, and so will society. It’s a win-win situation.” 

In the coming years, Epic’s next-generation OneWater system will be installed in four other buildings in San Diego and San Jose, where it will function as a full-blown mini-treatment plant. The mesh belt processor will squeeze water out of the sludge. The membrane bioreactor will clean it and put it back in circulation. And the mixer will turn the gunk into garden topsoil, eventually feeding the cities’ parks, the Tartakovskys hope. “We’ll use the same motto,” Aaron says. “‘The soil by San Diegans for San Diegans.’ And so on.”

Read more PopSci+ stories.

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According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is a pension gap affecting industries dominated by hourly-paid jobs. Human Interest Inc., a small-plan 401(k) provider, believes it can help change that by offering low-fee retirement plans to franchises that employ hourly workers.

“Franchising is one of the areas that we’ve identified as a massive untapped opportunity,” said Rakesh Mahajan, chief revenue officer at San Francisco-based Human Interest. “Our mission is to help these workers so they can save for retirement. … We have the ability to help every American worker.”

Speaking to Mahajan, it’s clear that Human Interest – founded in 2015 – has big ambitions. It also operates in a crowded environment that already includes longer-term 401(k) small plan providers like Ubiquity and Betterment, as well as newer startups like Vestwell and Icon Savings Plan. However, Human Interest has some notable backers and announced a new round of funding in January, led by global investment firm BlackRock.

Part of Human Interest’s growth strategy is to integrate its 401(k) offering with payroll providers to essentially integrate its retirement plan into the installations of many companies that serve the large US service industry.

“We’ve partnered with over 400 payroll providers to be part of their weekly payroll and we’re seeing a ton of hourly workers signing up,” says Mahajan. “Now they don’t have to create a huge Excel spreadsheet, download it and manipulate it. …People in the past have shown me the screen of what to do and I said, ‘No wonder you didn’t want to manage a 401(k) plan!’”

Watch out for the gap

About 68% of workers in private industry had access to occupational pension plans in 2021, with 51% of eligible workers choosing to participate, according to the latest available data from the BLS. However, looking at the service industry, that hit rate drops to 40% and engagement to 24%.

These numbers fit with general trends showing that sectors with a high concentration of hourly workers, such as Some industries, such as services and retail, have lower access to pension plans and participation that can be half or two-thirds lower than some industries with higher coverage, according to Craig Copeland. Research director for wealth benefits at the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

According to Copeland, there is a need for more access to hourly workers’ pension plans. Automatic inclusion in pension plans for such employees could help increase coverage, he says, which was mandated by the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 and will start in 2024. Overall, however, Copeland sees state-mandated pension plans as having broader implications than federal regulation that relies on incentives.

“The state plans have the widest reach within these states because they require all employers [with exceptions] Putting money directly into a tax-deferred plan,” he says. “At the federal level, Congress hasn’t gone that far.”

According to payroll service provider ADP, there are currently 14 states that require small businesses to offer retirement plans. More than 30 states are now considering enacting some form of statutory retirement plan.

The combination of SECURE 2.0 and government mandates is a potential boon for providers of small plans like Human Interest. According to a company spokesman, the company currently has more than 11,000 customers and 200,000 plan participants.

Additional growth, Mahajan says, comes from working with organizations like Neighborly, a franchise model that has thousands of home care workers working on an hourly basis, including Molly Maid, Mosquito Joe and Glass Doctor. In a December announcement, Human Interest announced that its retirement plan would be offered to 4,400 Neighborly franchised locations across the United States

The goal of this and other partnerships is not only ease of use, but also relieving plan sponsors of administrative and fiduciary burdens. Human Interest acts as a 3(16) trustee and assists in the administration of the plan and compliance with ERISA guidelines. Another move Human Interest took was to move its recording services internally in 2020 to reduce fees that are often passed on to clients by recording administrators. The in-house option also improved timing and the experience for customers, according to the company.

can you hear me now

Mahajan admits that when he first retired about four years ago, he felt a bit embarrassed. He has had success creating growth at startups, but has never worked in the 401(k) space.

Now he says the “privilege” of wanting to help hundreds of thousands of American workers with their retirement plans has made him a firm believer in both the potential for growth in the field and the need for innovation. These include systems that allow new hires to start saving as soon as they start work, as opposed to the standard 20-day waiting period common to many legacy providers.

“We need a system for workers that says [when you start a job]”Here’s your 401(k) and you can start saving right away on day one,” he says. “That’s how it’s supposed to work, but it doesn’t.”

Mahajan equates this work to the time he spent at T-Mobile when it was a little-known wireless carrier that evolved into a cheaper option serving businesses and consumers across the country. The key, he says, is matching the right people with services that outperform existing systems and cost less.

“Partnership has always been the framework for me,” he says. “We’re speaking to payrolls, CPAs, brokers, and anyone who can help initiate a conversation with a potential plan sponsor. … The scale of the problem is vast, and the odds are in the trillions.”

That’s trillions with a “T,” not a “B,” Mahajan repeats, just to make sure the message and opportunity are clear.

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SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) – San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has filed charges against a married couple, accused of human labor trafficking, according to a press release from her office.

“Domestic workers play an important role in our economy and like all workers should be paid fairly and protected from exploitation,” Jenkins stated in a press release. “Domestic workers are particularly vulnerable to exploitation and trafficking due to their isolation within their employers’ homes. Our office stands with the victim and will do everything in our power to hold Jose Aguila and Lorraine Lim accountable and send a message that this conduct will not be tolerated.”

The San Francisco couple brought a nanny, Nicel R., to the United States from the Philippines in June 2019, the DA’s office stated in the press release.

The nanny was “was forced to work seven days a week caring for the suspects’ disabled child in addition to other forced labor in and outside of the home,” she claims, and that while she was told she’d only have to be in the US for three months, that turned into two-and-a-half years.

San Francisco legislator receives another bomb threat

“The suspects allegedly isolated Nicel R., who does not speak English, through various means, including by remaining in possession of her passport, restricting her from having friends or cell service, and controlling and monitoring her ability to leave the home/workplace, ” the press release stated. “By making her dependent on the suspects for life’s basic necessities, such as food, shelter and money, Nicel R. lacked the resources to leave her employers.”

For the first several months, Nicel R. was paid $240 a month, the DA’s office stated. Then that was reduced to $40 a month, despite the fact she was required “to be available at all times, even in the middle of the night.” Nicel R. lived in a storage room without heating and stacked with clothes and boxes, the DA’s office claimed.

“Aguila and Lim also did not provide other mandatory employee benefits such as payment for the substantial overtime hours she worked, meal and rest breaks, paid sick leave, workers’ compensation insurance, and proof of wages,” the press release stated. “Nicel R. was saved in large part because of a neighbor’s call to police. Once the neighbor realized what was happening, she alerted the San Francisco Police. The SFPD Special Victims Unit rescued Nicel R. on November 29, 2021, with support from Homeland Security Special Agents. The San Francisco District Attorney’s Office Victim Services Division supported the victim since the rescue by placing her in a safe environment and providing resources for her to build a life free from abuse.”

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Aguila and Lim surrendered on Thursday and Sunday, respectively.

“Each of the suspects posted bond on $100,000 bails set by the court,” the press release stated. “Pre-trial release conditions include electronic monitoring by the San Francisco Sherriff’s Department, surrendering passports and abiding by the terms of a Criminal Protective Order which states that they must have no contact with the victim and must stay 100 yards away from her. If convicted of all charges, they face each over 19 years in State Prison.”

Anyone with information on labor trafficking is asked to call the SFPD tips line at 1-415-575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 and begin the message with SFPD.

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PITTSBURGH, Pa. (KDKA) – A homeowner in Pennsylvania and her boyfriend made a disturbing discovery on her property that explained the many times she could smell a foul odor around her home.

Tracey Douds has lived in her mobile home for about five years.

“I’ve felt weird since I’ve been here, and I didn’t know why or is it just me,” Douds said.

Her boyfriend stumbled upon human remains underneath the home while fixing the plumbing.

At first, she thought he was trying to be funny but then confirmed there were human bones when they went to double-check.

The pair called 911 and police came to investigate.

Douds said she could sometimes smell something but thought it was just a dead animal and didn’t want to mess around with it.

State police said it is unclear how the person died.

Copyright 2022 KDKA via CNN Newsource. All rights reserved.

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