Archive for the 'Outsourced' Category
Not a Typo: Chinese Company Pays NZ$526 for 146 Million Litres of Water a Year… In a Drought Zone
April 27th, 2016I like to think of NZ as a sort of remote, limited bandwidth version of a Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong franchise: Via: Radio NZ: A veritable drop in the ocean. No, we’re talking about fresh water. Forget it, Nick. This is Chinatown. Pardon? Nothing.
The Driverless Truck Is Coming, and It’s Going to Automate Millions of Jobs
April 26th, 2016Via: Tech Crunch: A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. No technology will automate away more jobs — or drive more economic efficiency — than the driverless truck. Shipping a full truckload from L.A. to New York costs around $4,500 today, with labor representing 75 percent […]
Robot Longshoremen
April 26th, 2016Via: Bloomberg: On one end of a dock at America’s busiest port, tractor-trailers haul containers through dense, stop-and-go traffic. Sometimes they collide. Sometimes the drivers must wait, diesel engines idling, as piles are unstacked to find the specific container they need. A few hundred yards away, advanced algorithms select the most efficient pathway for autonomous […]
Foreign ‘Dirty Bomb’ Responders Will Start Training in Nevada
April 25th, 2016Via: Las Vegas Review Journal: In today’s world it could be called the University for Dirty Bomb Studies. Founded in 1998, it was a niche at what was then the Nevada Test Site for emergency responders to learn how to deal with disasters caused by weapons of mass destruction. Since then, about 180,000 firefighters, police […]
UC Davis Spent At Least $175,000 on PR Related to Pepper-Spraying of Students
April 14th, 2016Via: Sacramento Bee: UC Davis contracted with consultants for at least $175,000 to scrub the Internet of negative online postings following the November 2011 pepper-spraying of students and to improve the reputations of both the university and Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi, newly released documents show. The payments were made as the university was trying to […]
The Panama Papers: Massive Leak About Shell Companies Operated Through Law Firm Mossack Fonseca
April 3rd, 2016The media organizations involved with this story want to present it as an endless drip of information for as long as possible. Here are a few portals to begin with: Süddeutsche Zeitung Guardian The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists If you want a single story summary of what this is, see, What Are the Panama […]
In Syria, Militias Armed by the Pentagon Fight Those Armed by the CIA
March 29th, 2016Via: Los Angeles Times: Syrian militias armed by different parts of the U.S. war machine have begun to fight each other on the plains between the besieged city of Aleppo and the Turkish border, highlighting how little control U.S. intelligence officers and military planners have over the groups they have financed and trained in the […]
PSYOP: Public Perception of Autonomous Machines
March 26th, 2016The vast majority of robotics research is funded by the military industrial complex. There is a lot of dancing around that fact, but the reality is that it’s governments’ desire for more, cheaper and deadlier killing machines that’s at the root of this. Sure, the corporate drive to shrink payrolls is a large factor, but […]
Apple’s Recycling Robot May Help Build iPhones, Too
March 23rd, 2016Via: MIT Technology Review: Apple now makes robots. What’s more, the company’s new recycling robot, called Liam, may be evidence of a push to automate the production of the iPhone. At Apple’s slightly humdrum event on Monday, the company showed a video of Liam carefully pulling iPhones apart for recycling. The cutesy clip showed the […]
Former Israeli Intel Operatives Run Security at Brussels Airport
March 23rd, 2016But wait, there’s more. Via: sott.net: The aviation and general security services firm ICTS handles security operations at Brussels airport, the scene of a bomb attack yesterday morning. … This will not, however, be the first time that ICTS has come under scrutiny for possible security lapses leading to a ‘Muslim terror attack’. As the […]
