Airbnb is the target of a lawsuit with five tenants who were evicted to rent their homes through the company's website; Kaiser Permanente plans to bring a new school of medicine to Southern California by 2019; Restaurant chains like Pizza Hut plan to sacrifice quality for convenience and Elon Musk, launched OpenAI - a billion-dollar, non-profit focused on sharing advances in artificial intelligence.
Tenants sue over Airbnb conversion in LA
Home-sharing giant Airbnb is the target of a lawsuit brought by five tenants who say they were kicked out of their Fairfax District apartments so their landlords could rent the units on the company's website for more money.
The lawsuit alleges Airbnb is liable for facilitating the rental of these rent-stabilized units by acting as an intermediary between the landlord and renter.
Read the story here
Complaint of Former Tenants Against Airbnb
Guest:
Randy Renick, a partner with Hadsell Stormer & Renick LLP, in Pasadena. He is representing the plaintiffs in the lawsuit
Robert St. Genis, Director of Operations at The Los Angeles Short Term Rental Alliance, which advocates for Angelenos renting out properties
Kaiser Permanente to build a medical school in Southern California
Kaiser Permanente plans to establish its first medical school in Southern California.
The school’s first cohort is expected to accommodate 48 students in 2019, with curriculum focusing on primary care and research. Further information such as the prospective location has yet to be disclosed.
Bernard J. Tyson, Kaiser’s CEO, is confident that the company has a vision that will better serve the future physicians on 21st century medicine. As the first U.S. insurer to open its own medical school, it will face skepticism and competition.
How do you see this affecting the future of medicine? Will it make it difficult for graduates of other medical schools to secure employment at Kaiser?
Guest:
Dr. John Prescott, chief academic officer for the Association of American Medical College
Branding experts on restaurant chains sacrificing quality for convenience
It’s 2015 and you can get the cuisine of your choice delivered to your door with a few taps on your smartphone screen. But how much does quality matter to you when compared to convenience?
Pizza Hut is banking on many of their customers to answer that question with “not much.” The Yum! Brands chain has recently taken its focus off the quality of its product and put it on convenience instead. Companies like Uber and Amazon are often praised for their success because they’re easy for customers.
Pizza Hut wants to take a page out of their books. It’s unclear whether this means the quality of Pizza Hut will visibly suffer, but Pizza Hut and Yum! figure that customers will sacrifice meticulous attention to detail if it means getting your pie faster and easier.
What do you think of Pizza Hut’s ‘convenience over quality’ philosophy? Does it hold water when applied to other industries? Can a company survive in 2015 focusing on convenience over quality?
Guest:
Chris Muller, Professor of the Practice in the School of Hospitality Administration at Boston University and an expert on chain restaurant management and branding
The etymology of the word du jour, ‘radical’
The word “radical” is in the zeitgeist.
The word has been used to describe the political ideas of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, as well as the religious beliefs of Colorado Planned Parenthood shooter Robert Lewis Dear and the San Bernardino attackers Tashfeen Malik and her husband, Syed Rizwan Farook.
In the past, the adjective had also been deployed to describe everyone from political activists to civil rights leaders.
The FBI today uses the word carefully, and sees the use of violence implicit in the process of “radicalization”. While the U.S. Homeland Security Department shies away from the use of the word altogether, preferring the term “violent extremist” and “violent extremism.”
What does “radical” mean? How has the term’s meaning changed over the years? What does becoming “radicalized” mean?
Guests:
Timothy McCarthy, core faculty and program director at the Carr Center for human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He’s a historian of social movements, whose books include “The Radical Reader: A Documentary History of the American Radical Tradition” (The New Press, 2011). He tweets from
David A. Snow, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine who focuses on collective behavior and social movements
Serial world-changer Elon Musk sets sight on AI
This week, a handful of Silicon Valley leaders, including Elon Musk, launched OpenAI - a billion-dollar, non-profit focused on sharing advances in artificial intelligence.
The founders of OpenAI have expressed fears about the technology getting out of control and say this new venture aims to ensure AI does more good than harm.
Wired magazine's Cade Metz's analysis surmises, "In the shorter term, OpenAI can directly benefit Musk and Altman and their companies (Y Combinator backed such unicorns as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe). After luring top AI researchers from companies like Google and setting them up at OpenAI, the two entrepreneurs can access ideas they couldn’t get their hands on before. And in pooling online data from their respective companies as they’ve promised to, they’ll have the means to realize those ideas. Nowadays, one key to advancing AI is engineering talent, and the other is data."
What are the implications of sharing artificial intelligence technology?
Guest:
Sam Altman, OpenAI Co-Chair and President, Y Combinator - a Silicon Valley seed-stage
Should you let your child beat you at board games?
When adults play games with kids, conventional wisdom would suggest that the outcome of the game is largely in the hands of the adult.
Whether you’re talking physical competition like backyard sports or something more strategy-based like chess, adults often have the advantage of being bigger, stronger, smarter, and more experienced than young kids, simply because of the age and development gaps.
But what about the idea of letting your kids win?
A recent Wall Street Journal article explores this idea through the lens of playing Monopoly. There are differing schools of thought on this. Some might argue that a child who always wins never learns to deal with failure, and no one likes a sore loser.
Life can be tough, and learning to deal with and overcome failure at an early age is important to a child’s development. Young kids can still tell when you’re not giving your all, and might view your lack of effort as having given up on them. But if you always use your full adult ability when competing with your kids, you’ll risk driving your child away from playing with you and them developing a sense of what psychologists call ‘learned helplessness,’ the feeling that you can’t overcome a challenge regardless of the odds.
What’s your policy when it comes to playing games with your kids? Do you let them win or do you play your hardest, no matter what? Is there a middle ground that can be found as a parent, where you’re still trying to compete but also teaching your child values beyond winning?
Guest:
Stephanie Marcy, Ph.D., licensed psychologist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles