Author: IQ TIMES MEDIA
When Jessica Chamberlain went to sign up for health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for 2026, she not prepared for the sticker shock.Last year, Chamberlain was paying $59.67 in monthly premiums. This year, she would be paying nearly $100.The 43-year-old mother of two from Illinois said she was floored to see her monthly premiums were nearly doubling.1.4 million fewer people enrolled in ACA plans as premiums spike, tax credits expire”I can’t afford that as a single mom with two kids,” she told ABC News.After carefully weighing her options, Chamberlain decide to forego health insurance and is currently…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ganesh Karthik Sankar, a 29-year-old UX designer at Google who previously worked at Amazon as a product designer. He lives in Seattle. The following has been edited for length and clarity.During my last job search, I had the opportunity to interview with all five MAANG companies — Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google.By April 2025, I’d accepted an offer from Amazon and moved to Seattle. I was genuinely excited about the role — especially the opportunity to work on projects at a much larger scale. The compensation was also a significant…
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Akshat Prakash, the 27-year-old CTO of Camb.ai, based in Mountain View and Dubai. It’s been edited for length and clarity.I was born in a small village near New Delhi into a family of doctors who prioritized education. My father and I traveled to many different places, even when I was young.We moved from India to Ireland when I was in the second grade, and five years later, we moved back to India. I came to the US in 2016 for my undergraduate degree.10 years later, I split my time between California…
Tooth decay can begin very early in a child’s life. If five states ban fluoride in drinking water, the costs to Medicaid for a significant increase in kids with cavities could top $40 million within three years, a new analysis finds.CareQuest Institute for Oral Health, a nonprofit which advocates for fluoridation, used Medicaid claims data and survey responses to predict the outcomes if the five states — Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri and Oklahoma — stopped adding fluoride to water systems. Florida has already banned it; the other states have legislation in the works to ban it or make it optional.Within…
With private company defaults running at upwards of 9.2% — the highest rate in years — VC firm Lux Capital recently advised companies relying on AI to get their compute capacity commitments confirmed in writing. With financial instability rippling through the AI supply chain, Lux warned, a handshake agreement isn’t enough. But there’s another option entirely, which is to stop relying on external compute infrastructure altogether. Smaller AI models that run directly on a user’s own device — no data center, no cloud provider, no counterparty risk — are getting good enough to be worth considering. And Multiverse Computing is…
The way millions of Amazon packages move across the country could shift dramatically.Amazon said on Wednesday in a statement that a key partnership with the United States Postal Service unraveled late last year after months of negotiations.The e-commerce giant said that its goal was to expand the volume of packages it routes through the federal carrier. However, it said that after spending more than a year working toward a renewed long-term agreement with USPS, talks suddenly collapsed in December, with the agency exiting discussions at the “eleventh hour.”The Wall Street Journal first reported on Wednesday that Amazon is preparing to…
An AI agent went rogue at Meta, exposing sensitive company and user data to employees who did not have permission to access it. Per an incident report, which was viewed and reported on by The Information, a Meta employee posted on an internal forum asking for help with a technical question — which is a standard action. However, another engineer asked an AI agent to help analyze the question, and the agent ended up posting a response without asking the engineer for permission to share it. Meta confirmed the incident to The Information. As it turns out, the AI agent…
If you need a cathartic release from the news that Amazon laid off 16,000 workers, Block chopped nearly half its workforce, Atlassian pared back 10% of staffers, and Meta is reportedly considering another massive round of layoffs, all in the name of AI, then we invite you to browse the responses to a recent Sam Altman post on X. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, shared this on Tuesday: “I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this…
A protein bar that boasts ample amounts of the macronutrient while still being low-calorie — and tasting halfway decent? That’s a miracle. Or… is it not exactly as it seems? That’s the crux of the current controversy surrounding David Protein. A class action lawsuit alleges that David Protein — which sells gold-foil-wrapped, protein-packed bars that come in flavors like Red Velvet, Peanut Butter and Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough — incorrectly labeled the calorie and fat counts on these bars, and that customers are eating much more than they were led to believe.David Protein — which uses a blend of milk protein…
The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday withdrew a proposed rule that would have barred all Americans under age 18 from using tanning beds.Dozens of states — including California, Delaware, Illinois, Kansas and Minnesota — as well as Washington, D.C., already ban the use of tanning beds for minors. Other states have restrictions that allow teens to use tanning beds with parental consent.The federal rule, first proposed in 2015, aimed to prevent minors from using indoor sunlamps or tanning beds, and required anyone over 18 who uses a tanning salon to sign a waiver acknowledging the risks, including skin cancer…