news.herich.cloud

Mercor mapped existing AI benchmarks onto the 923 O*NET occupations and found only 208 have even one task with five or more benchmark prompts; six of 22 job families have none. Coverage follows the biggest wage bills: lawyers' tasks are heavily benchmarked, while equally AI-exposed legal secretaries and court clerks barely appear.

The fiscal 2026 deficit rose $217 billion to $1.99 trillion, about 6.2% of GDP and the third-largest on record. Interest on the $40 trillion debt rose 12% to a record $1.36 trillion, now behind only Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid combined, and $145 billion in court-ordered tariff refunds cut net tariff revenue 11%.

The Energy Department is lending up to $4.4 billion to restart Palisades in Michigan, the Crane Clean Energy Center at Three Mile Island, and Duane Arnold in Iowa, together about 2.25 GW. No commercial reactor is known to have come back after starting decommissioning. All three closed early because their power cost too much, and two now have contracts with Big Tech buyers paying a premium for carbon-free power for data centers.