Daily Business Report: Thursday, July 10, 2025
San Diego Unified Officially Has a Cell Phone Ban
By Jakob McWhinney | Voice of San Diego
After months of discussion, San Diego Unified’s board on Tuesday night voted unanimously to adopt a new policy that bans cell phone use during most of the school day.
The policy comes as districts across the country are tightening rules regulating cell phone use in schools. The crackdown itself is, at least partly, in response to a growing body of research that shows just how damaging cell phones and social media can be to kids’ mental health and their ability to learn.
During the meeting, Superintendent Fabiola Bagula said the policy helped to simplify and standardize a patchwork set of rules across the district. It was also crafted in partnership with students, parents and teachers, she added.
Fallacious: Gov. Newsom’s ‘Fastest Recovery in Debris Removal in Modern History’ after LA Fires
By Katy Grimes | California Globe
If government actually moved “at the speed of need” as Gov. Gavin Newsom claims, Pacific Palisades, Altadena and Malibu would have been thriving construction zones for the past 4-5 months. Instead, all three locals still have tons of fire debris piles on homesites, fire ravaged buildings untouched, and burned-out emptiness where houses once made up neighborhoods.
But to hear California Governor Gavin Newsom tell it in his fairytale press conference Monday, he’s Superman and the greatest world leader of time all rolled into one.
Monday, at Newsom’s press conference, the speakers, all Democrat politicians, demonstrated their high-level incompetence by barely mentioning the lack of progress, or the long-suffering residents who are still going through recovery, and used the press conference as a political platform. Politicians who spoke focused on each other, dishing out syrupy compliments and barked out meaningless political platitudes, I reported.
Cal Fire rolled out an AI chatbot. Don’t ask it about evacuation orders
By Malena Carolo | CalMatters
California government agencies are going all-in on generative artificial intelligence tools after Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2023 executive order to improve government efficiency with AI. One deployment recently touted by the governor is a chatbot from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, the primary agency tasked with coordinating the state’s wildfire response.
The chatbot, which Cal Fire says is independent of Newsom’s order, is meant to give Californians better access to “critical fire prevention resources and near-real-time emergency information,” according to a May release from Newsom’s office. But CalMatters found that it fails to accurately describe the containment of a given wildfire, doesn’t reliably provide information such as a list for evacuation supplies and can’t tell users about evacuation orders.
Newsom has announced AI applications for traffic, housing and customer service to be implemented in the coming months and years. But Cal Fire’s chatbot issues raise questions about whether agencies are following best practices.
