Fla. law affects transgender adults, robots on farms: 5 Things podcast

Sep 01, 2023

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: New Florida law limits transgender adults' access to health care. Plus, USA TODAY White House Correspondent Joey Garrison looks at concerns that the debt ceiling crisis could set a worrying precedent in Washington, an investigation reveals the cause of a devastating train crash in India, USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise says robots are coming to farms, and Saudi Arabia will reduce how much oil it sends to the global economy.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Monday, the 5th of June 2023. Today, how a new law affects transgender healthcare in Florida. Plus why some are worried that the debt ceiling crisis set a new precedent in Washington, and we're learning more about the devastating train crash in India.

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A new law that presidential candidate and Governor Ron DeSantis signed last month in Florida has made it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for transgender adults to receive gender-affirming healthcare in the state. A law that bans gender-affirming care for minors also mandates that adult patients seeking trans healthcare sign an informed consent form, and it requires a physician to oversee any healthcare related to transitioning and get people to see that doctor in person. Another new law allows doctors and pharmacists to refuse to treat transgender people. One Orlando area resident told the AP he lost access to his treatment when the clinic that prescribed him hormone replacement therapy stopped providing gender-affirming care altogether. The laws have made some trans Floridians rethink their futures in the state. Florida has the second largest population of transgender adults in the US according to the Williams Institute at UCLA Law. That number is estimated at around 95,000 people.

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The debt ceiling crisis is over for now. President Joe Biden signed legislation on Saturday to lift the nation's debt ceiling and avoid a potentially catastrophic default, but not before weeks of wrangling from both sides of the political aisle and a number of concessions that neither side was thrilled with. And the chaos raised concerns that this could become a new Washington norm. USA TODAY White House Correspondent Joey Garrison explains. Joey, back again. Thanks for hopping on the podcast.

Joey Garrison:

Yeah, thanks for having me, Taylor.

Taylor Wilson:

Democratic lawmakers, legal scholars and others are worried that debt ceiling standoffs could become the norm to set partisan policy. Joey, what are their specific concerns?

Joey Garrison:

Well, I think there's a general consensus among many out there, and especially on the Democratic side, that this just isn't a good way to govern. This isn't a good way to pass policies that wouldn't normally be able to pass Congress in a divided government. And by that, I mean Republican backed policies - the spending cuts, the expanded work requirements, the expedited drilling reform for oil and gas projects - none of those would've normally been able to pass the House and Senate. But they passed this time because of the threat of a default that was hanging over their heads. And President Biden at the beginning said he wasn't going to negotiate over the debt ceiling. He effectively did by negotiating in parallel talks about budget priorities. And I think many questioned whether this is a good precedent to set going forward, that debt ceiling under this deal that averted the default, kicks the can down the road in terms of raising the debt ceiling through the end into 2024. So the question is, are we going to be in a repeat scenario here in 2025 where we're looking at this same sort of situation that I think, yeah, most people don't think it was really great for the country.

Taylor Wilson:

And yeah, you mentioned 2025. How likely are we to see another standoff on this in a couple of years time? Or does this just all depend on the elections of a few months before that?

Joey Garrison:

Well, yeah, you hit it right there. I mean, so what they did is they, and this wasn't by accident here, this gets kicked down past the presidential election. So let's suppose for the sake of kind of exploring this exercise that we have the same signup right now of Biden in the White House and a Republican House and Democratic Senate, McCarthy proved he could use this situation to squeeze out certain concessions from the president here. So I think that they would probably try to do that again. Flipping this, the coin, and let's suppose down the road you have a Republican president and a Democratic House. Could Democrats use this as a lesson? Maybe we need to play hardball when it comes to the next debt ceiling moment to raise it and say, hey, we're going to use this period to push rolling back the Trump tax cuts of 2017, for example. That can be a policy item. Again, that normally wouldn't pass on a up and down vote through a divided Congress. But with this debt ceiling issue, and again, the party out of control of the White House has the leverage here, because the president is the one who takes the bigger political hit here. Democrats are pushing. They would like to eliminate it all together legislatively, but they don't have the votes to do that in Congress. But really, a lot of people who follow politics don't think, and even a lot of Republicans, I don't think, think that this is the healthiest way to pass partisan policy.

Taylor Wilson:

Joey, President Joe Biden mentioned the 14th Amendment a lot during this last debt ceiling fight. He said he even wants to take it to court. What's the latest on that and what do legal experts say about that strategy?

Joey Garrison:

President Biden at one point said he thinks, flatly said that he believes that gives him the authority to prevent a default unilaterally, by arguing that the 14th Amendment means that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. And basically the legal theorists who point to this as an argument, there's a clause in the 14th Amendment that says "The validity of the public debt of the US shall not be questioned." Ultimately, Biden reached a deal with House Republicans and McCarthy. But still on multiple occasions, he said he wants to explore taking that 14th Amendment argument to court before the next time the debt ceiling, the debt limit, is maxed out by the end of 2024. But talking to experts on this, it would perhaps be problematic. They don't see really a legal mechanism for him to do that without the threat of a default right now. I mean, you have to have legal grounds, you have to have standing to bring the case. And without that immediate threat of going to default, where's the case essentially? And so Biden has confused many who follow this closely in terms of what he actually means in terms of taking a look at this months down the road.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, Joey Garrison, thanks as always.

Joey Garrison:

Hey, thanks a lot.

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Taylor Wilson:

A preliminary investigation into Friday's devastating train crash in India found that the tragedy stemmed from an error in the country's electronic signaling system. Senior railway official Jaya Verma Sinha said the tragedy began when a signal was initially given to the high speed express train to run on the main track line. But the signal changed, sending it into a loop line where it slammed into a freight train carrying iron ore. 275 people were killed in the crash. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's administration has been working to modernize and improve safety in India's rail network, which is the largest under one management in the world. Still several hundred accidents occur every year on the country's railways.

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Robots are coming to farms, and in some cases they're already here. I spoke with USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise on how new technology is changing agriculture and what that means for farmers. Welcome back to 5 Things, Beth.

Elizabeth Weise:

Thanks so much.

Taylor Wilson:

You wrote that robots are coming to America's farms. What kind of technology are we talking about here, Beth?

Elizabeth Weise:

So they're already on the farms a little bit, but a lot more are coming. This really ranges in the Midwest. I mean, we've already got super smart, expensive tractors that basically can drive themselves. If you sit in the cab, you run the combine or the tiller through your field and it follows the line of the row. I was just down in Salinas and Watsonville in California and got to see these amazing machines that basically, they've got lidar and these very precise cameras. And they use strobe lights so they can look down in the field at each individual plant, figure out where the plant is, and then they've got little, they look like Edward Scissorhands really. They've got these little scissors that dig in the dirt everywhere but where the plant is. So they're getting all the weeds around the plant while they're leaving the plant by itself. So it's this whole gamut.

And then I was just talking to a guy this week at USDA, and they're building an image repository of every weed species in the species in the United States, and they're going to put it out there so that companies can then go pour that into their machines so that their machines suddenly can recognize, oh, that's a weed. Like there's not a lot of that, and it's only in northern Idaho. But now I can use this robot wheat cutter in Northern Idaho because it can see that.

Taylor Wilson:

And Beth, we hear this concept of machine learning a lot these days, thinking of chatbots, some other AI technologies, what exactly does that mean in the context of agriculture?

Elizabeth Weise:

So for Ag, and the USDA has this huge project on it, basically machine learning is you have to look at a whole bunch of different - for visual systems, which is what these are - you have to look at tens of thousands of pictures of something so that the computer can start to develop models so we can distinguish between them. And so I can't just show this AI program, okay, here's a corn plant and here's a dandelion. Now go out into the field and kill all the dandelions and don't hurt the corn. I need to show it 10,000 pictures of corn when it's just sprouted and corn when it's a little higher in corn when it's knee-high to a grasshopper. And I need corn that grows in Maryland and corn that grows in Kansas, and I need dent corn, and I need sweet corn.

You need enormous image libraries, and that's what USDA, the Department of Agriculture, is busy building up for US agriculture. So they've got this army of scientists who have spread out across 26 states, and they're taking pictures of all of these plants and weeds at different stages of their lives. That's what machine learning takes, and that's, we've got it for people because of course, we've got so many uploaded images on the web that are tagged. They also have to be tagged. You can't just upload a picture of corn. You have to say, "This is dent corn that is six weeks old, that is growing in northwestern Kansas."

Taylor Wilson:

And one of the biggest concerns we hear about robots and AI, and this goes back years into science fiction, is that this could obliterate jobs and actually mean bad news for humans. Is that the case with agriculture, Beth? Or can this technology really coexist alongside farmers instead of replacing them?

Elizabeth Weise:

So that was my first question, and actually before I even embarked on this story, I called the United Farm Workers because I wanted to know what they thought. These are the jobs they depend on. And it was interesting because on the one hand, they said, "Yeah, we don't think it's going to happen anytime soon," but on the other hand, they said, "Yeah, we're fine with it because we are a very long ways away from anybody being able to run a farm with no employees entirely off of an iPad. You may have three robots out in the field, but you got to have somebody in that field with an iPad looking at it, making sure that everything is going fine."

What farmers say and what the unions say is those jobs which are much less backbreaking and require more education and will be better paid than are more highly skilled, those are the jobs everybody wants. And when I was in the fields down in Salinas, the farmers kept saying, "Our workforce is aging out. But if you make it a more technological and less backbreaking job, then we'll be able to hire people." So it's going to be fewer people, hopefully better paid and less physically taxing and more interesting.

Taylor Wilson:

All right, Elizabeth Weise, thanks as always.

Elizabeth Weise:

You're so welcome.

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Taylor Wilson:

Saudi Arabia will cut back on how much oil it sends overseas. The step will hike the sagging price of crude oil after two previous cuts to supply by major producing countries in the OPEC+Alliance failed to push oil higher. The latest move is expected to slightly inch prices higher in the United States, though the full extent isn't yet clear. That Saudi Arabia thought another cut was necessary undermines the uncertain outlook for demand for fuel in the months ahead. There are concerns about economic weakness in the US and Europe while China's rebound from COVID-19 restrictions has been less robust than many had hoped.

And before I go, today is World Environment Day. The UN initiative encourages awareness and action to help protect our environment.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. If you like the show, please subscribe and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And if you have any comments, you can reach us at [email protected]. I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.