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During a House Judiciary Committee hearing attacking the Southern Poverty Law Center, Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas had no time for the GOP’s ridiculous claims of “reverse racism.” She first went after the right’s efforts to whitewash the racist legacy of the late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, reading quotes of his to Democratic witness and executive director of the…

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GM is developing an entirely new sodium-ion battery chemistry for use in everything from data centers to its own factories.

A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Why Trump keeps appointing temporary flunkies…

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I'm desperate for a personal AI assistant, but do I really want to become the kind of person who can't function without the friendly robot voice in my phone?

If your phone is too compelling, your sex life might not be. American birth rates have been declining for nearly two decades now, and researchers believe they’ve identified a potential new culprit: The iPhone. That’s right: A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper examines AT&T mobile broadband coverage from the iPhone’s 2007 launch until the company lost carrier exclusivity in 2011. Comparing birth rates across counties and controlling for confounding factors, the authors concluded that access to the iPhone reduced births, particularly among younger women. The data, Middlebury College Economics professor and NBER researcher Caitlin Myers and Middlebury graduate Ezekiel Hooper wrote in their paper, suggests that iPhone access caused significant birth rate decreases across age groups. The authors found that women aged 15–19 in counties with access to the iPhone through AT&T saw birth rates fall by as much as 8 percent during the study period, while those aged 20–24 experienced declines of up to 6.6 percent. Older age groups also showed "statistically significant but smaller declines," according to the paper. Myers argues the findings point to more than a simple correlation. “It’s pretty much undeniable that births fell faster in places with AT&T coverage,” Myers told The Register in an email. “As a scientist, I’m loath to ever say causality is ‘proven’ … but I would say that we’ve identified a compelling natural experiment and that it strongly points to a large and causal relationship between iPhones and fertility.” Compared to counties with dominant Verizon and Sprint coverage, which only began to receive Android devices in 2009 per the paper, there was no effect on fertility related to the iPhone release. Myers told us that they did see some evidence that those control areas started to show some similar declines when Android phones became widely available, but smaller sample sizes and limited data make those findings a bit less precise. “Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women,” the paper explained, adding that the release of the iPhone can be attributed to as much as 52 percent of the decline in general US fertility rates over the period. Again, controlling for factors like income, race, education level, and more didn’t eliminate the iDecline in birth rates. How the iPhone killed sex Writing on LinkedIn, Hooper said that people he’s spoken to about the paper were entirely unsurprised. “Some counties got a working iPhone; nearby ones didn't,” Hooper noted. “We find that teen and early adult births fell much faster where the iPhone worked. And the counties stuck on Verizon? No effect. Hard to explain that timing with anything but the iPhone.” The study’s data doesn’t include anything about the reasons the iPhone’s introduction caused a birth rate decline, but Myers and Hooper point to other research - and a bit of common sense - to suggest three possibilities. First there’s the fact that smartphones are a substitute for in-person interactions, meaning people aren’t in physical proximity, and thus less likely to be having sex. Combine that with one of the other factors they identified - instant, easy access to online porn - and people remaining at home instead of going out to socialize are more likely to just take care of business on their own. Third, the iPhone gave people easy access to information about contraception and abortion access, so even those bucking the don’t-leave-the-house trend are less likely to have a kid they don’t want. “iPhone is the always-available alternative to in-person time; its social-media apps are engineered to sustain attention; both features displace the peer time that produces sexual encounters,” the pair wrote. Then again, iPhone owners still get more action than Android users, at least according to a 16-year-old OkCupid study, so Apple aficionados can at least count themselves lucky in that regard. “We do not claim that the iPhone is the sole cause of the post-2007 decline,” the duo concludes in their paper. Research looking at more recent effects of connected tech on fertility rates closer to the present has similarly found that, while the iPhone may have been the canary in the coal mine, internet connectivity, social media, and ubiquitous pornography are still having an effect. The fertility decline that began in 2007 has become a cause for concern around the world, not just with weird billionaires, and Myers and Hooper conclude their paper with a look at government programs in various countries that have been offering economic incentives to encourage their citizens to have kids. Those programs, they say, are targeting the wrong problems, even if the cost of raising a child is too high for many. “Our estimates imply that the introduction of the modern smartphone played a sizable role in the decline in US births,” the paper concludes. If they’re correct, cash incentives and other economic relief isn’t necessarily going to change things. “The policy instruments to which governments have committed the largest sums … do not, on their own, address the behavioral shift our estimates suggest is at work,” the pair wrote. The solution, like so many other social issues of the modern age, may be better solved by people just putting down their damn phones and ditching FaceTime for some actual face-to-face time. ®

Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 is going to be a big hit with the web's vibe coders.

⚡ Quick Take

• The second popcorn bucket for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a Trojan Horse whose belly opens and spills out buttery goodness.

The elaborate popcorn bucket is now a staple of the moviegoing experience. Every big movie has them, even if some of them are decidedly unimaginative. Remember the Melania popcorn bucket? How many landfills are those ones filling up already? Well, the latest big blockbuster with a fancy popcorn bucket is none other than Christopher Nolan’s highly anticipated mythological epic, The Odyssey. And appropriately enough, the popcorn bucket for said film is the legendary Trojan Horse. But instead of an army hiding inside, it’s yummy buttery popcorn kernels. You can check out what The Odyssey popcorn bucket looks like in the post below:

The Trojan Horse Popcorn Bucket has arrived. Experience The Odyssey in theaters 07.17.26: https://t.co/sk8jwTAKih pic.twitter.com/FPS8ZwJNGs

— The Odyssey Movie (@odysseymovie) June 9, 2026

We have to admit, this popcorn bucket is reminding us of two things. First, that one horse statue Bobby Brady broke with his basketball on The Brady Bunch (and in The Brady Bunch Movie). And second, the way its belly opens up is giving us “Han Solo slices the tauntaun open to stuff Luke inside” from The Empire Strikes Back. We can’t be the only ones who think this, right? It doesn’t, we hasten to add, remind us of the Trojan Horse.

This isn’t the only popcorn bucket for The Odyssey, however. There’s also one of an IMAX camera, which feels like the most Nolan-esque, film nerd thing ever. Although it’s somewhat less off-putting, we’d say. So there are options.

Universal Pictures

We’re fairly certain this is the first Christopher Nolan movie with a popcorn bucket attached to promote it. Nolan’s Batman movies came before this current popcorn bucket craze, or they would have surely had some. You just know there would have been fifty Heath Ledger Joker heads out there to collect. We surely can’t imagine what an Oppenheimer popcorn bucket would have looked like, or Dunkirk, at least ones that were not in terrible taste.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Anne Hathaway, Jon Bernthal, and a metric ton of other names, arrives in theaters on July 17.

The post THE ODYSSEY Trojan Horse Popcorn Bucket Is Really Odd appeared first on Nerdist.

After President Donald Trump lobbed a racist insult at him, ESPN analyst Stephen A. Smith mocked the sleepy soon-to-be 80-year-old for not being able to stay awake during an NBA game Monday night. While interviewed after leaving the game—where he was loudly booed—Trump was asked about Smith saying that he would blame Trump if the New York Knicks lost to the San Antonio Spurs…

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⚡ Quick Take

• The latest comedy video from Auralnauts has that weird box on Darth Vader’s chest work as an actual cassette player that plays music.

It’s the question Star Wars fans have been asking since 1977. What the heck is that box on Darth Vader’s chest that looks like an old cassette player? Of course, we now know that it’s Vader’s life support control panel, to keep the big guy breathing and functional. But back then, to most people watching A New Hope, it was just a doohickey with big buttons that looked like something you got from Radio Shack. Well, this video from the YouTube channel Auralnauts (via Laughing Squid) has fun with this idea, presenting Vader walking around the Death Star with an actual tape player attached to him and playing music with it. You can watch Cassette Deck Vader – Episode 1 below:

We can’t help but chuckle when our favorite Sith Lord (sorry, Maul) plays his own theme music when walking around Princess Leia’s ship. Look, if John Williams had given us a kickass theme like “The Imperial March,” we’d probably do the exact same thing when we entered a room. Vader playing a different music as he chokes out that one Imperial Admiral whose lack of faith he finds disturbing? That also put a smile on our faces. Grand Moff Tarkin still had no time for this Sith foolishness, though. Not when there’s a strategy meeting to get to.

Lucasfilm

Another hilarious part has Darth wandering around the halls of the Death Star playing the Bee Gees’ “Staying Alive.” That thing on his chest is keeping him alive after all, so using that particular song does track. Besides, Saturday Night Fever also came out in 1977, just like George Lucas’ original Star Wars, so it fits. The folks at Auralnauts have been making comedic Star Wars edits for years. They were the ones responsible for the Ahsoka ’80s sitcom-style video, and Zack Snyder’s Star Wars. (The intentionally funny one, not Rebel Moon.) For more of their wackiness, be sure to head on over to their YouTube channel for more.

The post What If That Box on Vader Was an Actual Cassette Player? appeared first on Nerdist.

A few years ago, we heard that Kingdom Hearts IV was on the way. And, right after that announcement, it seemed like things went almost radio silent about this next installment. Sure, there was a trailer back then but there was no firm release date or much else to chew on. Fast forward to June 2026, and Square Enix finally gave us a gameplay trailer for Kingdom Hearts IV.

Now, we still don’t have a release date for it yet. But Kingdom Hearts I-III will come to Nintendo Switch 2 on October 8. We can’t imagine this release would be too far behind that, especially after being in the works for so many years.

Nintendo/Square Enix

And, the franchise’s 25th anniversary is coming up in March 2027, so that could be a target release date for Kingdom Hearts IV, which has fans buzzing right now with that trailer. 

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KINGDOM HEARTS 4 Is Happening, First-Look Footage Revealed

In it, we go to Quadratum, complete with rain-soaked streets, high rise buildings, and Heartless. Sora swings from building to building with a Keyblade for a lot of straight up action. One foe even looks very kaiju in nature. Overall it’s a taste of what you can expect in this next installment that will hopefully be available before you know it.

The post KINGDOM HEARTS IV Unveils Epic Gameplay Trailer appeared first on Nerdist.

What countries have you visited, and where was your favorite place?

The UC Santa Cruz community is celebrating 2,921 undergraduates and 350 graduate students who are set to walk the stage during commencement ceremonies Friday through Sunday. 

The school’s commencement is organized into individual ceremonies for each of its 10 residential colleges, a graduate division ceremony, and two celebrations: the Baskin School of Engineering and Chicane Latiné Year-End Celebration. 

The majority of the ceremonies last 90 minutes, while the Baskin celebration and the ceremonies that host two residential colleges will last 120 minutes. UCSC officials request that guests and graduates arrive at the campus an hour before the start of their ceremony. The processional walk starts 15 minutes before the ceremony start time. 

Commencement parking will be at the East Remote Parking – Lot 104 – and permits obtained beforehand are required to park. Graduating students will check in inside the gates of the East Athletics and Recreational Facility, adjacent to the Upper East Field. Guests can check in at the venue’s main entrance on the Upper East Field. 

UCSC officials prohibit a range of items including but not limited to weapons of any kind, signs and banners, large flags, noisemakers and alcohol. 

Santa Cruz Metro buses will be providing fare-free travel from downtown Santa Cruz to campus for the commencement weekend on routes 11, 18, 19, and 20. 

For information on Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant access, click on this fact sheet. 

The school advised the campus community to expect traffic delays on campus Friday through Sunday during the commencement ceremonies and encouraged staff to work from home when possible. 

Graduation ceremony schedule at Upper East Field Friday, June 12

9 a.m. – Stevenson
1 p.m. – Cowell
5 p.m. – Crown & Merrill

Saturday, June 13

9 a.m. – Porter
1 p.m. – Kresge
5 p.m. – College Nine & John R. Lewis 

Sunday, June 14

9 a.m. – Oakes
1 p.m. – Rachel Carson
5 p.m. – Chicane Latiné Year-End Celebration

Monday, June 15

9 a.m. – Graduate Division
1 p.m. – Baskin School of Engineering Celebration

Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.

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The post Four days of UC Santa Cruz graduation ceremonies kick off Friday appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

It's here. Anthropic's Mythos model, supposedly too dangerous for public release in April, is now available to wreak havoc or tackle other tasks for a hefty price and with some new guardrails in place. Just make sure you don't mind having Anthropic keep some of your data for a while. The AI biz on Tuesday announced public availability of Claude Fable 5, a Mythos-class model, and private availability of Claude Mythos 5 for Glasswing partners. Both are distinct from Mythos Preview, the model family's elder sibling. Mythos-class models are said to be a tier above Claude Opus in terms of benchmark performance. "Fable 5’s capabilities exceed those of any model we’ve ever made generally available," the company said. "It is state-of-the-art on nearly all tested benchmarks of AI capability, showing exceptional performance in software engineering, knowledge work, vision, scientific research, and many other areas." As if to suggest that the current technocracy still has room for humanities scholars, Anthropic notes that the name Fable comes from the Latin fabula, "that which is told," similar to the Greek mythos. "The safeguards are what distinguish the two models (Fable and Mythos) and are why we’ve given them different names," the company said. Anthropic considers Fable capable of causing serious damage without safeguards. So part of its protocol is to failover to Opus 4.8 for certain types of queries – prompts related to cybersecurity, biology and chemistry, or distillation. Fable 5 ships with a new set of classifiers, which are separate AI models that look for misuse. The AI biz is also instituting a new data retention policy – it's retaining log data to have a record in the event of misuse. This applies specifically to organizations with zero data retention policies – which now technically are not zero data retention. "Prompts submitted to, and outputs generated by, Mythos-class models are retained for 30 days for trust and safety purposes, on every platform where these models are offered," the company explains on its updated support page. Consumer plans (Claude Free, Pro, and Max) are unaffected – because Anthropic already has a data retention policy in place for those tiers. "This change only applies to organizations that have set up workspaces with zero data retention (ZDR) in Claude Console, use Claude Code with ZDR in Claude Enterprise, or access Claude through AWS Bedrock, Google Cloud Agent Platform, or Microsoft Foundry with ZDR," Anthropic's documentation explains. Temporarily retaining prompts and outputs is necessary to prevent misuse, Anthropic insists, adding that it won't use this data for training new models. In terms of benchmarks, the two models significantly outperform Anthropic's own Opus 4.8, Anthropic's Codex 5.5, and Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro on the chosen test suite. Not listed is Google's more recent Gemini 3.5 Flash [PDF]. Fable 5 is said to excel at software engineering. Anthropic claims that Stripe used the model to migrate its 50-million line Ruby codebase in just one day. That project, Anthropic claims, would have taken a Stripe team two months without AI help. Fable 5 is also supposedly more token efficient than than its predecessors, which might somewhat mitigate the higher token cost. Fable 5 and Mythos 5 both charge $10 per million input tokens and $50 per million output tokens, which is less than half the price of Claude Mythos Preview ($25/m input, $125/m output). Mythos 5 delivers the strongest results yet for resisting prompt injection attacks, which saw a success rate of 4.8 percent over 100 attempts, per the model safety card [PDF]. That's comparable to Claude Opus 4.8. As of today, until June 22, Fable 5 is available through Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost. After that, Fable 5 will no longer be available through those plans and will require usage credits. At some point thereafter, "if capacity allows," Anthropic intends to restore Fable 5 access in subscription plans. ®

House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin’s full opening statement was surprisingly aired in its entirety on Fox News on Tuesday. Addressing the GOP’s efforts to persecute and intimidate the civil rights nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center for fraud, Raskin treated Fox viewers to a history lesson on what “fraud” actually looks like. “Consider a fraud called Trump…

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This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for its newsletters

For the first time since California insurance commissioner became an elected position, two Democrats will vie for the job in November.

The top two vote-getters in the June primary were former San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Jane Kim and state Sen. Ben Allen, who received about 27% and 20% of the vote, respectively. One of them will succeed Ricardo Lara, the former Democratic lawmaker who has served two terms as insurance commissioner. Lara has presided over the Insurance Department in the past eight years, during which the state saw its deadliest and most devastating fires. 

Kim or Allen will be taking on complicated, enormous challenges that have implications for local communities, people’s ability to buy homes and start businesses, and the state’s economy. 

In the past few years, insurance companies stopped writing new policies or renewing old ones, especially in high-risk areas, citing increasing wildfire risk from climate change and inflation that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. This caused homeowners to turn to the last-resort FAIR Plan, which is mandated by law to provide fire insurance. The plan, run by an alliance of insurers, has grown to more than 684,000 policies in force as of March, an increase of 152% since September 2022. It has warned about its ability to keep paying claims after major disasters.

Proposition 103, a law approved by voters in 1988, means that among many other things, the elected commissioner has the power to approve rate increases. It has kept the state’s rates from rising too much over the years — Californians’ homeowners insurance premiums have hovered around the middle of the pack nationwide — but that could change. Last year, the commissioner put in place regulations that include new factors insurers can use when setting their premiums, such as catastrophe modeling and reinsurance costs. Some companies have applied for and received approval to raise their rates, so they’re starting to write policies again.

Keeping insurance available but affordable will be the most pressing issue for either Kim or Allen, whose responsibilities will also include regulating auto, pet and some aspects of health insurance, plus workers’ compensation. 

Another problem that will need plenty of attention: making sure insurance companies pay their claims in a timely manner that helps communities to rebuild. The Los Angeles-area fires shed a light on insurer practices that delay and deny claims, as well as underinsurance and the lack of standards for smoke damage, which have held up recovery. Pending legislation — such as those authored by Allen, whose district was hit by the fires last year — and lawsuits will address some of those issues. Well-organized fire survivors who called for Lara’s resignation over his department’s response to their concerns will surely keep up the pressure on his successor.

Here’s a look at each candidate’s record and how she or he would approach the job, based on their interviews with CalMatters and what they have said publicly, including at candidate forums.

Jane Kim

Kim’s proposal to create “natural disaster insurance for all,” inspired by a program in New Zealand, has gotten a lot of attention. She plans to fund such a system with a portion of policyholder premiums that insurance companies would collect and divert to the state. The state would then guarantee fire and flood coverage, while insurance companies would continue to cover other risks.

Naysayers, including consumer advocates, wonder why she hasn’t released any specifics about how much capital such a fund would require. Kim told CalMatters that it would need to be studied, but that at its core her proposal would generate revenue. 

Opponents of her proposal also say it’s a bad idea to shift catastrophic burden onto the state, pointing to what they say is the failure of splitting off earthquake insurance from homeowner insurance — most California homeowners now have no insurance coverage.

“We [taxpayers] already are on the hook,” Kim said. “When insurers and utilities refuse to pay, they just pass it on to us anyway. Sharing the risk is important.” 

Kim also told CalMatters that an idea Merritt Farren, a Republican candidate for commissioner, proposed — that the state create a reinsurance authority to encourage insurers to write policies in the state — “may turn out to be a more efficient model.” 

Among Kim’s shorter-term priorities if she wins: 

• Create public dashboards to show how insurance companies are spending policyholder premiums, and that show their record on claims.
• Expand eligibility for a program that provides low-cost insurance to drivers who make less than $38,000 a year. 
• Tie a company’s ability to sell auto insurance in the state to its willingness to write homeowner policies.
• Make the FAIR Plan more transparent by requiring that its list of board members be public, and that its board meetings be public.
• Freeze rates when policyholders file claims.

The former San Francisco elected official, an attorney, touts among her accomplishments free community college for the city’s residents; the first $15 minimum wage ordinance in the state; and a tenant-protection ordinance to avoid unjust evictions. She worked as the California director for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2020 U.S. presidential campaign and most recently as California Director for the Working Families Party.

Kim has a long list of endorsers, including many unions such as SEIU California. Besides Sanders, another U.S. lawmaker, Rep. Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley, has also endorsed her.

Ben Allen

The state senator, who will be termed out of the Legislature, wants to bring together the state, insurers, builders, local governments and firefighters to work on risk-reduction strategies.

“I think that’s ultimately going to be the way that we get ourselves out of this mess,” he told CalMatters.

What he calls a comprehensive approach includes thinking about where people live and build: “We shouldn’t be building new construction that is irresponsible in high-risk areas. We should be looking for ways to carefully and sensitively encourage people to pull back from high-risk areas.”

If he wins, Allen’s other plans include:

• Create a consumer advocate position within the insurance department, and increase staff to handle customer service. 
• Require insurers to explain claim denials and provide real-time reports of delays and outstanding claims after a disaster.
• Increase oversight of the FAIR Plan and make sure it complies with commissioner orders.
• Ban the insurance commissioner and staff from working for the industry immediately after they leave the department.

Allen has played up his experience as a legislator, including writing and passing bills related to holding insurance companies accountable. For example, a law he wrote now requires insurers to pay 60% of policyholders’ contents coverage without a detailed inventory, and gives consumers more time to provide that inventory. He also touts writing Proposition 4, the bond measure approved by the state’s voters in 2024 “for safe drinking water, wildfire prevention and protecting communities and natural lands from climate risks.”

Other pending bills authored by him include one that would require insurers to give homeowners 90 days’ notice before they intend not to renew their policies, along with a clear explanation. Another would penalize insurance companies that fail to correct their practices after the insurance department finds that they have violated laws and regulations.

Allen also has many endorsements, including the two leaders of the state Legislature, Senate Pro Tem Monique Limon and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas. U.S. Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, both from California, unions and the Consumer Federation of California also endorse him.

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The post California insurance commissioner race is set: Jane Kim vs. Ben Allen appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

The Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors is expected to approve the county budget for Fiscal Year 2026-2027 by September. (Marcello Hutchinson-Trujillo — Santa Cruz Local file)

Santa Cruz County Budget Hearings

• 9 a.m. Wednesday, June 10 at 500 Westridge Drive in Watsonville, and on Zoom. Includes budgets for the Health Services Agency, Human Services Department, and Office of the Public Defender. To comment ahead of time, email BoardOfSupervisors@santacruzcountyca.gov by 5 p.m. Tuesday.
• 9 a.m. Thursday, June 11 at 701 Ocean St., Room 525 in Santa Cruz, and on Zoom. Includes budgets for the Probation Department, Sheriff’s Office, Parks Department, and Community Development and Infrastructure.To comment ahead of time, email BoardOfSupervisors@santacruzcountyca.gov by 5 p.m. Wednesday.
• Meetings are also streamed on the county website and on Facebook.

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY >> This week, county leaders will consider a $1.29 trillion budget for the fiscal year starting July 1. The General Fund, which can be used for any purpose, accounts for about $844 million of the spending. The rest of the budget includes state and federal grants and other money restricted for specific uses.

County staff developed the budget “under one of the most challenging fiscal conditions that I’ve ever faced,” said County Executive Officer Nicole Coburn when the draft budget was first presented at a May 5 meeting of the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors. The challenges include rising salary costs and federal funding changes following H.R. 1, the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” The federal budget bill adopted in July 2025 decimated funding for health care, food assistance and other social safety net services — to maintain the programs, local municipalities must now pick up the tab.

To cut costs, the county budget would eliminate the equivalent of close to 60 full-time positions, most of them vacant. It does not include any layoffs. The budget maintains funding for the equivalent of about 2,680 full-time positions.

After the board of supervisors’ budget hearings this week, staff will return with a revised draft budget for approval on June 24. The final budget is expected to be adopted on Sept. 29.

Detailed information about the budget is available on the county’s website and transparency portal. Santa Cruz Local compiled five takeaways on aspects of the budget most relevant to residents.

(function() { window.mc4wp = window.mc4wp || { listeners: [], forms: { on: function(evt, cb) { window.mc4wp.listeners.push( { event : evt, callback: cb } ); } } } })(); Stay informed on Santa Cruz County’s biggest issues. Santa Cruz Local’s newsletter breaks down complex local topics and shows residents how to get involved. Email address:
mc4wp.forms.on('subscribed', function(form) { // gtag.js if(form.id == '6954') { gtag('event', 'subscribe', {'event_category': 'newsletter_prompt', 'event_label':'top_of_story'}); } }); Leave this field empty if you're human: Dipping into reserves

The budget balances costs and expenses with $30.8 million in General Fund reserves. That drains the reserves, which serve as a savings account for unexpected costs, to 10.4% from 12.5% of the General Fund budget. The county’s target is 15%.

The reserve spending includes:

• $17.1 million for the Health Services Agency to cover salary increases and rising demand for health clinics and mental health services.
• $4.3 million for the Human Services Department, largely to offset increased costs of administering CalFresh and MediCal following H.R. 1. Those costs are expected to compound in coming years, county staff wrote in a report ahead of the budget hearings. 

The dip into reserves is a temporary measure, and moving forward the county will either have to cut costs or raise more money, staff wrote. Coburn called the budget a “stopgap” in her budget message.

Sheriff spending

The General Fund reserve spending includes $6 million for the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office to cover salary increases and avoid layoffs. “A large number” of employees have been on extended leaves from work, Coburn said. The county is trying to determine how to bring people back or see if they would permanently leave employment. Two sheriff’s positions to be added for the DNA laboratory are covered by dedicated funding outside of the General Fund. 

Ahead of the meeting, some advocates with the group Care not Cages have signed on to a letter urging county leaders to prioritize social services spending over sheriff, probation and jails. The group aims to decrease incarceration, particularly for people with mental illness and substance use disorders. 

Public safety “actually looks like being healthy, having access to medical services, having food on the table, having a job to go to,” said Bernie Gomez, who has worked with Care not Cages. Gomez is a programs and leadership coordinator at the MILPA Collective, a Chicano-Indigenous community support and advocacy group.  

The sheriff’s department is one of the county’s largest General Fund expenditures. Although more county money goes towards social services, a larger portion of sheriff funding comes from local sources, rather than state and federal grants.

“To provide additional rainy day funds” to the department is “unacceptable during this time of uncertainty,” Gomez said.

Road repair struggles

The county has planned $66 million in spending on roads, including repairs, maintenance and repaving. Most of that money comes from state and federal funds, plus county fees. Measure K sales tax funds contribute $2 million annually. 

Last year, the county dipped into the General Fund to allocate a further $1.9 million to road maintenance, meant to make progress on a hefty backlog of deteriorating roads. This year’s budget didn’t include that contribution. However, total spending on road maintenance, including state and federal funds, is set to increase by $2.2 million. 

Supervisor Manu Koenig said he was concerned by the lack of General Fund investment in road maintenance. “Anything that we can do for preventative maintenance now, while it’s dry, is ultimately going to save us a lot of money in the long term,” he said at the May 5 meeting.

The county is anticipating an El Niño weather pattern this year, “which gives me heart palpitations,” said Coburn, “because I’m anticipating that it could be very wet, and we could see mudslides, flip-outs, flooding, all the rest of it.”

Climate scientists are predicting a potential “super” El Niño this year that is more intense due to human-fueled climate change. That could mean lots of rain locally.

Storm repairs have been hampered for years by delays in federal disaster money. The county is waiting on $50 million in reimbursements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Coburn said. Fifty-seven repair projects are on hold because the county cannot afford the local match required to receive federal funds.

Paid parking pilot

The proposed parks budget includes plans for a paid parking pilot program at some county parks to fill budget gaps. Multiple county supervisors spoke against the idea. “Everybody is so strapped for cash these days, and that would be one more cost to providing access to open spaces,” said Supervisor Felipe Hernandez at the May 5 meeting.

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Apparently “because of woke,” disparaging a whole community of people based on their nationality and using that sentiment to justify extensive fraud investigations that lead to cutting social services and occupying cities with federal agents is racist.

“You’re not allowed to complain about Somalians because that’s racist,” President Donald Trump’s administrator for Medicare and Medicaid, Dr. Mehmet Oz, complained on Tuesday on Fox News. “And the worst thing you can be in Minnesota is a racist.”

He added that the state’s supposed response “was ironic because the people you’re hurting are often Somalians and other folks that look different than you.”

In other words, a guy who is implementing racist policies is decrying racism.

Just before, Oz claimed that investigators told him they were “ostracized” and “walked out of the building” when they tried to speak to Minnesota officials about alleged fraud in social programs. 

Dr Oz: "You're not allowed to complain about Somalians, because that's racist. And the worst thing you can be in Minnesota is a racist."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-09T13:43:31.348Z

Two things here: One, the Trump administration is hurting Somalians and “other folks that look different than you” the most, as several of my colleagues and I have reported amid the federal raids in Minnesota. Second, there seems to be an acknowledgement that the people who have the authority to hold others accountable all look the same.

And that idea is a significant part of why we are where we are.

Democrats are criticizing House Speaker Mike Johnson after he announced plans to make cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid following this year’s midterm elections. Johnson revealed his plans for the popular social safety net programs during a radio interview on Monday. “The reason we’re in trouble is because over 74% of the federal spending is on autopilot…

Source

If those same AI workloads can be handled by cheaper models without affecting quality, it would mean a massive shift in the economics of AI.

⚡ Quick Take

• Sony and PlayStation are looking for a new Helldivers star after Jason Momoa unexpectedly dropped out of the movie adaptation for unknown reasons.

You might say Sony’s plans to bring a live-action Helldivers movie to theaters have…gone to Hell. But yeah, maybe don’t say that if you work for Sony. Director Justin Lin’s planned adaptation is probably a pretty sore subject at both the studio and PlayStation headquarters at the moment. Jason Momoa has unexpectedly dropped out of the film for unknown reasons. But his departure won’t mark the end of the project. The Helldivers movie is now seeking a new star to keep Super Earth super safe.

Warner Bros.

Deadline reports Jason Momoa will no longer headline Sony’s big screen take on the best-selling video game franchise. As of now it’s unclear why the Supergirl and Dune: Part Three star stepped away from the film. Needless to say this poses a big time crunch on the movie. We only learned he would star in the intergalactic war film earlier this year. It’s supposed to premiere on November 10, 2027.

Regardless of when it comes out now, it’s coming out eventually. Or at least it is once Sony Pictures and PlayStation Productions can find a new big name to take over its suddenly abandoned leading role. Deadline says they have already begun looking.

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Since Momoa leaves both literal and metaphorical big shoes to fill, that will be easier said than done. But live-action video game adaptations have never been hotter (because they’ve never been better), so it’s no surprise Sony and PlayStation are eager to make a Helldivers movie. The video game’s two installments have been a huge success with gamers. Helldivers 2 alone has sold more than 12 million copies since its release in 2024.

PlayStation

As for why Momoa left, it could be as simple as not having the time or even the old “creative differences.” But “why” is not the concern for Justin Lin and the studio now. It’s “who,” as in who is going to replace him.

With the game’s built-in audience, though, we don’t actually think it will be hell to replace Momoa. Someone is going to be super excited to keep Super Earth safe.

The post Jason Momoa Leaving Justin Lin’s HELLDIVERS Movie appeared first on Nerdist.