Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Chefs and Truck Drivers Beware: AI Is Coming for Your Jobs
January 24th, 2019Via: Newsweek / AP: Robots aren’t replacing everyone, but a quarter of U.S. jobs will be severely disrupted as artificial intelligence accelerates the automation of existing work, according to a new Brookings Institution report. The report, published Thursday, says roughly 36 million Americans hold jobs with “high exposure” to automation — meaning at least 70 […]
Amazon Starts Testing ‘Scout’ Delivery Robots Near Seattle
January 24th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: Amazon.com Inc. will use robots to deliver packages in the suburbs north of Seattle, its latest experiment to automate the last-mile of delivery that’s a labor-intensive and costly component of buying products online. The e-commerce giant on Wednesday announced a trial of “Amazon Scout,” autonomous delivery devices the size of a cooler that […]
South Koreans Pamper Pets Instead of Having Kids
January 23rd, 2019Via: Reuters: Kang Sung-il buys Sancho, his Pomeranian, a toy every business trip and this Lunar New Year holiday will dress him up in a new $50 suit to visit ‘grandma’, Kang’s mother. Kang and his wife say children are too expensive and bring too much pressure. Instead they have opted to shower Sancho with […]
Google Will Limit Ad Blockers on Chrome
January 23rd, 2019For safety. *snort* Via: Register: Google engineers have proposed changes to the open-source Chromium browser that will break content-blocking extensions, including various ad blockers. Adblock Plus will most likely not be affected, though similar third-party plugins will, for reasons we will explain. The drafted changes will also limit the capabilities available to extension developers, ostensibly […]
Prescription Eyewear Scam
January 22nd, 2019Via: Los Angeles Times: Prescription eyewear represents perhaps the single biggest mass-market consumer ripoff to be found.
$1.2 Trillion in Risky Corporate Debt Ready to Blow
January 22nd, 2019Via: Los Angeles Times: Indebted borrowers increasingly take out high-interest, adjustable-rate loans that are packaged into securities and sold to investors eager for a better rate of return. Everything’s fine while the economy is growing. But when it slows, those borrowers could default, causing problems to cascade through the financial system. If this all sounds […]
Toyota and Panasonic to Build Electric Car Batteries Together
January 22nd, 2019Via: Nikkei: Toyota Motor and Panasonic plan to set up a joint venture in 2020 to manufacture batteries for electric vehicles, joining forces to compete more effectively on cost and scale with rising Chinese players in a key area for the future of the auto industry, Nikkei has learned. The venture, in which Toyota is […]
Petro Canada Starts Deploying Its Own Electric Vehicle Chargers at Gas Stations
January 22nd, 2019Via: Electrek: Petro Canada, formerly a state-owned oil company in Canada but now part of Suncor, becomes the latest oil company to get involved in electric vehicle charging. … Shell is arguably leading the charge through its involvement in the new Ionity charging network in Europe. The company is building its own chargers at its […]
‘The Goal Is to Automate Us’: Welcome to the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
January 20th, 2019Via: Guardian: The headline story is that it’s not so much about the nature of digital technology as about a new mutant form of capitalism that has found a way to use tech for its purposes. The name Zuboff has given to the new variant is “surveillance capitalism”. It works by providing free services that […]
Drug Maker Payments to Doctors Are Linked to Higher Opioid Overdose Deaths
January 19th, 2019Via: Stat: As efforts intensify to blunt the ongoing opioid crisis, a new study finds that increased marketing of the addictive painkillers to physicians was associated with more prescribing and, subsequently, more deaths from overdose. Interestingly, industry influence over physicians was greater based on the number of interactions, not the amount of money paid for […]
