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It was a reunion of sorts for the Dodgers on Tuesday.

For about a week, Robinson’s fracture has been shrouded in mystery and intrigue.

Adonai Mitchell did not have much time to get acclimated to the Jets last season before he started catching passes. That's not the case this year.

Maybe this is Bill Belichick's way of motivating his team to get to a championship level.

Sudeikis and Wilde broke up in November 2020 after an engagement of more than seven years.

Sudeikis and Wilde broke up in November 2020 after an engagement of more than seven years.

Alabama's new map will give Republicans an advantage in one of the state's two Democrat-controlled congressional districts.

Iowa state Rep. Josh Turek took down lefty foe Zach Wahls and claimed the Democratic nod to take on Rep. Ashley Hinson for Senate in what is expected to be a competitive race.

Much has been written about the “Islamization” of Europe and the UK. Is it now California’s turn? Two major books — “Londonistan” by Melanie Phillips, and “Submission,” a novel from France’s Michel Houellebecq — have pictured an old continent that is increasingly at the mercy of often violent Islamists. Although the Muslim population in Europe...

"The Value Didn't Arrive": Bain Finds Cost-Savings From AI Are Falling Far Short Of Projections

Now that attention within the AI revolution has one again firmly turned toward the cost-benefit equation (i..e., ROI) of tokens (see "From Singularity To Tokenomics: The AI Narrative Just Hit A Serious Snag") in particular, and the trillions behind the AI spending rollout in general, and we say once again because every few months we get some iteration of the following report from Goldman published almost two years ago today...

... we have more bad news: according to a global survey by Bain, cost savings from automation are broadly falling short of projections. Which means that those expecting big savings from their investments in artificial intelligence, which is most companies, will be disappointed. 

The missed targets “should be making executives uncomfortable,” since many of them are approving increased spending for artificial intelligence on the basis of expected savings, the consulting firm said in a report shared exclusively with Bloomberg News. The problem is there are little actual savings to speak of. 

The survey, completed in April, was based on responses from executives at 951 companies with more than $100 million in revenue, across nine sectors: retail, technology, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, consumer products, energy, financial services, telecom/media/entertainment and insurance.

It found that among companies measuring their AI cost savings, the largest share (40%) realized reductions of 10% or less. Predictably, most had been expecting to see far more meaningful improvement, especially since they spent far more than that on the new technology. 

Here’s the part that Bain found the most troubling: 44% of large companies that are funding their next wave of AI spending are basing those investments on the last round of savings - savings that haven’t yet materialized. 

“The prior wave underdelivered. The savings pool is smaller than assumed,” Bain warned. “And the investment case for the current wave was sized against projections rather than actuals.” Kinda like the bubble in AI forward earnings: based on projections - which as any intern can tell you can flip on a dime - rather than actuals. 

“Self-funding the next wave from past returns sounds like discipline. In reality, it is a circular bet with a structural leak,” the firm cautioned, and concluded that "The technology worked. The value didn’t arrive."

Whether driven by hope or FOMO or a blend of both, the AI boom is exposing divides between promise and reality. An MIT research report last year showed that 95% of corporate AI pilots fall flat and concluded that the “primary factor keeping organizations on the wrong side of the GenAI Divide is the learning gap, tools that don't learn, integrate poorly, or match workflows.” 

So Bain’s latest survey wasn’t the first evidence of AI underdelivering so far on expectations. And it’s not likely the last either.

But the Bain report isolated a different problem: “Despite a decade of investments in data modernization running well into hundreds of billions of dollars globally, the No. 1 reason AI programs underperform is that companies cannot reliably get access to their own data,” Bain said.

“Companies that don’t validate their reinvestment math against what automation actually returned, rather than what it was supposed to return, are compounding risk rather than managing it” the Bain report concluded, confirming what many have already sensed: virtually nobody has done effective ROI analysis amid a technological rollout that has already soaked up more than $1 trillion in capital, the return on which appears to be modest at best. 

Bain's prescription: Instead of waiting to structure all of their data to make it ingestible by AI, companies should start with what’s available to feed into the models, and then use AI to help sort out how to structure the rest.

Meanwhile, companies that were meeting their savings targets reported running into barriers with data structure and accessibility at even higher rates than those missing their targets, but they were less likely to report organizational challenges such as insufficient budgets or competing priorities.

Adding fuel to the fire, a comparable report from Gartner found that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls. 

“Most agentic AI projects right now are early stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied,” said Anushree Verma, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner. “This can blind organizations to the real cost and complexity of deploying AI agents at scale, stalling projects from moving into production. They need to cut through the hype to make careful, strategic decisions about where and how they apply this emerging technology.”

As such, Gartner recommends agentic AI only be pursued where it delivers clear value or ROI, noting that "Integrating agents into legacy systems can be technically complex, often disrupting workflows and requiring costly modifications. In many cases, rethinking workflows with agentic AI from the ground up is the ideal path to successful implementation."

“To get real value from agentic AI, organizations must focus on enterprise productivity, rather than just individual task augmentation,” said Verma. “They can start by using AI agents when decisions are needed, automation for routine workflows and assistants for simple retrieval. It’s about driving business value through cost, quality, speed and scale.” 

The problem, it now appears, is that virtually nobody has done an actual ROI analysis. But with token costs now soaring...

... the time has finally arrived, and as enterprises pull back in horror from the "great promise" of the agentic black hole, one can easily understand why both OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are extrapolating their burst in agentic revenue in perpetuity, are rushing to go public before the market once again does the ROI math.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/02/2026 - 21:50

Pelley, a fixture at CBS News for nearly four decades, had become the most vocal internal critic of Weiss’s overhaul of the network.

Hamawy’s 1994 internship with the Benevolence International Foundation in Bosnia, and his association with the infamous “Blind Sheikh,”  have drawn scrutiny.

Do We Really Believe In Freedom?

Authored by Mollie Engelhart via The Epoch Times,

Do we really believe in freedom?

Or do we only believe in freedom when it applies to people who agree with us?

Do we trust people we fundamentally disagree with to remain free citizens?

Or do we believe they must be controlled through laws, censorship, surveillance, or social pressure because they are too dangerous to be trusted with liberty?

That question sits at the center of what I am most interested in during this moment in history, the 250th year of the American experiment.

Because when I look around, it increasingly feels like both sides are drifting in the same direction while packaging it differently.

Each side frames the other as dangerous, radical, and incapable of self-governance. People on the left often believe the right is racist, authoritarian, anti-science, and driven by extremism. Many people on the right believe the left is hostile to faith, hostile to biology, hostile to free speech, and willing to use institutions to socially engineer society.

If you genuinely believe those things about your political opponents, then freedom starts to feel dangerous.

And once freedom feels dangerous, control starts to feel justified.

For me, the COVID-19 pandemic broke the illusion.

I suddenly realized I could no longer clearly see what the political left still offered someone like me. I watched censorship expand rapidly. I watched speech become conditional. I watched people lose jobs and platforms for asking questions. I watched mandates imposed alongside liability protections and dissent treated as danger.

I watched mandates destroy livelihoods.

I watched small businesses close while major corporations consolidated wealth and power. I watched people who had spent decades building restaurants, gyms, farms, salons, and family businesses suddenly deemed “nonessential.”

I wasn’t reading about these policies. I was living under them.

At the same time, I was living in a state that increasingly felt hostile to the practical realities of my life. Everything started feeling harder. More permits. More taxes. More hoops. More social pressure. It felt harder to make a living, harder to farm, harder to build, harder to protect my family, and harder to simply live outside institutional approval.

Socially, it also became harder to honestly say what I believed without risking professional or personal consequences.

This week, I heard arguments celebrating the fact that Democrats overwhelmingly voted against liability protections for chemical companies accused of poisoning Americans. Many people presented that as evidence that one side cares about ordinary people while the other protects corporations from accountability.

But that moral high ground becomes more complicated when you remember that many of those same political voices supported mandating a vaccine under an emergency authorization, with liability protections already built into the system. At the same time, dissent around those policies was aggressively silenced.

And the reality is that we are still learning about the long-term effects, trade-offs, and consequences years later.

That is not a conspiracy theory.

That is simply how medicine and biology work. Scientific understanding evolves over time.

The George Floyd era accelerated another version of this same instinct.

Suddenly, institutions across America were pressured to publicly demonstrate ideological “purity” around race, gender, identity, and social justice. Diversity, equity, Indigenous representation, and LGBTQ+ inclusion became not just social values but institutional litmus tests in many professional environments.

In some cases, executives, journalists, professors, and employees lost their positions not because they had committed crimes or acts of hatred, but because they failed to meet ideological expectations during a moment of intense cultural pressure.

And once again, people became afraid to say the wrong thing out loud.

But now I watch similar instincts emerge from the political right under different circumstances.

There are increasingly subjects people feel afraid to discuss openly because they fear losing jobs, reputations, platforms, or financial access. Concerns about extremism, hate speech, anti-Semitism, immigration, terrorism, and national security are all increasingly used to justify expanded speech restrictions and surveillance powers.

And to be fair, some of those fears are real.

But history shows that societies rarely surrender freedom all at once. Usually, it happens piece by piece, each side justifying control because they believe the other side is simply too dangerous to remain fully free.

Many people argued I should have stayed and fought politically where I was. But I didn’t.

I moved to Central Texas. Honestly, I needed to breathe a little.

And yet, even now, as I watch the country continue to fracture, I try very hard not to become tribal myself. I try to zoom out and see the bigger picture.

At the core of it, I still believe in freedom.

But that realization leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion: If I truly believe in freedom, then I have to believe the people around me deserve freedom, too—even when I deeply disagree with them.

Otherwise, what I’m actually asking for is not freedom, but power for my side and restriction for theirs.

Maybe the real test of a free society is not whether we support freedom for people we agree with.

Maybe the real test is whether we still support it when we don’t agree with each other.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Tue, 06/02/2026 - 21:45

Wilson faced Hubbard's wrath minutes into the second part of the reunion.

Wilson faced Hubbard's wrath minutes into the second part of the reunion.

Aaron Donald's potential return to the Los Angeles Rams is fueling NFL speculation. Sean McVay left the door open, while Myles Garrett's reaction spoke volumes as rumors of a blockbuster comeback continue to grow.

If the Devil couldn’t manage to convince the world he didn’t exist, his next best bet would be to pitch himself to its inhabitants as a relatable rogue.

Wholesale Fireworks Corp. and American Fireworks Wholesale LLC will pay $4 million, while Pink or Blue Gender Team Inc. adds $500,000 for damages.

A high end southern California fish restaurant and market admitted it lied to customers about the seafood on the menu being being “traceable, sustainable and lawfully sourced.”

Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, John Cena, and Zoey Deutch lead the way in movies, specials, and live events streaming on Netflix in June, so be sure to see them thrive in the terrific titles dropping throughout the month.