Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Retailers Are Tracking Where You Shop – and Where You Sleep
April 27th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: Retailers are following the trail of electronic bread crumbs left by millions of customers. And it’s helping them at a time when the industry is suffering. They’re buying mobile-phone data that can track where and for how long people shop, eat, see movies — and where they go before and after. It allows […]
Trump: Get the Vaccines
April 26th, 2019Mmm hmm. Via: NBC: President Donald Trump on Friday urged parents to get their children vaccinated after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced this week that measles cases had reached a record high since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000. “They have to get the shot. The vaccinations are so important,” Trump […]
Lettuce-Farming Robots Might Grow Your Next Salad
April 26th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: Your next salad might include leafy greens grown by robots in California greenhouses. About 75 percent of the lettuce farmed in the U.S. comes from that state’s Central Coast and San Joaquin Valley. Cultivating it requires warm temperatures, not too much rain, and lots of time and labor. Startups such as Iron Ox, […]
Walmart Experiments with AI to Monitor Stores in Real Time
April 25th, 2019Enable face recognition so the system can tempt Bubba with three cents off his next bag of Doritos with alerts on his phone as he’s standing in front of the chips. Via: AP: Inside one of Walmart’s busiest Neighborhood Market grocery stores, high resolution cameras suspended from the ceiling point to a table of bananas. […]
$220,000 For Every Man, Woman And Child – America Is Now 72 Trillion Dollars In Debt
April 25th, 2019Via: Economic Collapse: Are you ready to cough up $220,000 to pay your share? One of the reasons why a day of reckoning for the U.S. economy is inevitable is because we are in way too much debt. The 22 trillion dollar debt that the federal government has accumulated gets most of the attention, but […]
Amazon Automatically Tracks and Fires Warehouse Workers for ‘Productivity’
April 25th, 2019Via: The Verge: The documents also show a deeply automated tracking and termination process. “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” according to the letter, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.” (Amazon says supervisors are able to override the process.)
Facebook Expects to be Fined Up to $5 Billion Over Privacy Scandals
April 25th, 2019In other news: Facebook’s new chief lawyer helped write the Patriot Act. Via: MIT Technology Review: To most of us (and to the FTC), $3 billion to $5 billion is a whopping sum of money. But Facebook, which earns $56 billion in revenue every year, can potentially just write it off as a cost of […]
Ford Motor to Put $500 Million Into Electric Vehicle Startup Rivian
April 24th, 2019Panic: With Ford, who wants to increasingly focus on milking truck profits, it could get ugly over there in a couple of years when Rivian and Tesla enter the pickup truck market. Ford only has a hybrid F-150 planned for 2020. Via: Reuters: Ford Motor Co said on Wednesday it will invest $500 million in […]
A ‘Blockchain Bandit’ Is Guessing Private Keys and Scoring Millions
April 24th, 2019Via: Wired: In the process, and as detailed in a paper they published Tuesday, the researchers not only found that cryptocurrency users have in the last few years stored their crypto treasure with hundreds of easily guessable private keys, but also uncovered what they call a “blockchain bandit.” A single Ethereum account seems to have […]
On South America’s Largest Solar Farm, Chinese Power Radiates
April 23rd, 2019Via: Reuters: At a time when Trump is doubling down on fossil fuels and withdrawing the United States from global partnerships, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s sprawling “Belt and Road” initiative aims to put Chinese companies and innovation at the center of infrastructure development worldwide, including next-generation power sources. “It is a way of expanding China’s […]
