Life seemed grim for Liliana Bernal in March 2020 as the pandemic spread across the country. One month earlier, Bernal had founded her small business Balanced Diversity — a Sacramento-based recruiting and workforce consulting company.

“The first couple of months were a struggle,” Bernal said.

But while waves of small businesses ...Read more

Remember all that money you were going to save by canceling your cable TV subscription?

Cord-cutters are again dealing with the reality of rising programming costs after YouTube TV told subscribers Thursday that their monthly fee will go up by 14% to $82.99 starting in January.

Needless to say, many dissatisfied customers took to social media ...Read more

Landmark regulations intended to encourage insurers to write more policies in risky wildfire neighborhoods through the use of complex computer models were released Friday by the state.

Under new rules intended to stabilize California's troubled home insurance market, insurers will be able to set rates by drawing on a wide swath of ...Read more

Writers Guild of America this week sent a letter to major Hollywood studios asking them to take action against tech companies that are using writers' work to train AI tools without their permission.

"The studios, as copyright holders of works written by WGA members, have done nothing to stop this theft," the guild's leadership said in a letter...Read more

SAN FRANCISCO — A former OpenAI researcher known for whistleblowing the blockbuster artificial intelligence company facing a swell of lawsuits over its business model has died, authorities confirmed this week.

Suchir Balaji, 26, was found dead inside his Buchanan Street apartment on Nov. 26, San Francisco police and the Office of the Chief ...Read more

Supremacy in the race to self-drive an electrified auto industry is harder than the masters of Detroit and Silicon Valley figured, proving that what players do is far more important than what they say.

General Motors Co. showed as much this week with confirmation it’s quitting Cruise LLC's robotaxi program after pumping $10 billion into it ...Read more

The inside stories of messy marriage breakups have been an entertainment staple since even before Tolstoy observed that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So let's thank the supermarket giants Kroger and Albertsons, whose $24.6 billion merger has collapsed amid mutual recriminations, for their outstanding contribution to the genre...Read more

LOS ANGELES — “Love Is Blind” became a swift breakout hit for Netflix in 2020 by testing whether true love can form between two people without seeing each other. But just as quickly, the show has become a striking test case for the the growing movement to establish labor protections in reality TV.

The National Labor Relations Board issued...Read more

Wells Fargo employees who review customer complaints and workplace issues have voted to unionize.

The move is the latest in a campaign to organize workers at the San Francisco-based bank, which is notable in an industry that historically has had low rates of unionization.

After a legal back-and-forth over the vote, in which the bank contested ...Read more

With the ink dry on the County of Los Angeles' $200-million purchase of the Gas Company Tower office building downtown, a fight is brewing over what to do with the 1960s-vintage headquarters it plans to leave behind.

Supervisor Janice Hahn and preservationists are pushing back against a plan to move workers into the newly purchased skyscraper ...Read more

Feast your eyes on the only new full-size coupe offered for sale in America, the 2024 Dodge Charger Daytona. Its bodyshell will be offered with four doors next year. Until then, it will only have two. But here’s the thing. While the 2024 Charger Daytona replaces the 2023 Charger and Challenger in Dodge showrooms, it comes purely as a battery ...Read more

It is just past 10 p.m. and Aaliyah Arnold, the 20-year-old founder of BossUp Cosmetics, is selling to the TikTok universe.

As she livestreams from a Culver City, California, filming location, about 750 people around the world watch her announce a flash sale for a mystery box containing six to eight BossUp products. Typically priced at $101.96,...Read more

The 2025 RAM Rebel has hit the market and this truck is large and in charge. With a base price exceeding $64K, the RAM Rebel 1500 Crew Cab 4×4 is job-site ready, off-road ready — heck, its ready for anything!

It's powered by the 2025 3.0-liter Hurricane Straight-Six Turbo (SST) standard output engine, which provides 420 horsepower to the ...Read more

PHOENIX — Jaguar introduced its first electric vehicle with an ad featuring an elevator-full of gender-bending models. Dodge’s first EV ad boasted loud engine noises, tire smoke and a taunt.

“We’re building electric vehicles to save our planet ... FROM ALL THOSE LAME, SLEEK-LOOKING, SELF-DRIVING SLEEP-PODS EVERYONE ELSE KEEPS POLLUTING ...Read more

Raises for many Starbucks Corp. baristas will shrink in light of the company’s worst financial results since the pandemic.

Pay increases will generally range from 2% to 3% depending on seniority, with some exceptions, according to a document seen by Bloomberg News. A year ago, the company announced retail workers would be getting raises of at...Read more

OpenAI said it has identified and fixed an issue that left millions of global users unable to access ChatGPT and the recently released AI video generator Sora.

“We’re experiencing an outage right now. We have identified the issue and are working to roll out a fix,” the AI giant posted on X shortly after 6 p.m. ET. “Sorry and we’ll ...Read more

"If the law is against you, talk about the evidence. If the evidence is against you, talk about the law, and, ... if the law and the evidence are both against you, then pound on the table and yell like hell."

Thus the poet Carl Sandburg's version of an ancient lawyer's adage in his epic poem, "The People, Yes." It isn't his fault that his ...Read more

As Hollywood grapples with worries about the threat of artificial intelligence, the union that represents animators is facing dissent over its latest deal with major studios.

Three Animation Guild negotiations committee members said they will vote "no" on a tentative contract the guild reached with their employers, saying the AI protections ...Read more

If your bank account regularly flirts with negative balances, or you're just bad at keeping track of your debit card swipes, you've probably felt the sting of one of the banking industry's favorite charges: overdraft fees.

Thanks to a rule finalized Thursday by the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, those fees could drop sharply next...Read more