Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Robots Fight Weeds in Challenge to Agrochemical Giants
May 22nd, 2018Via: Reuters: In a field of sugar beet in Switzerland, a solar-powered robot that looks like a table on wheels scans the rows of crops with its camera, identifies weeds and zaps them with jets of blue liquid from its mechanical tentacles. Undergoing final tests before the liquid is replaced with weedkiller, the Swiss robot […]
New Zealand: Northlanders Living in Cars as Housing Crisis Hits Hard
May 21st, 2018We had a couple with five children turn up to Playcentre. They’re living in tents. They fled Wellington with a plan to build some sort of shack on a small piece of land that they bought a couple of valleys over from us. Until that happens: Tents. Both mum and dad had been in the […]
Recovery: 51 Million U.S. Households Can’t Afford Basics
May 18th, 2018Via: United Way: There are 50.8 million U.S. households that can’t afford a basic monthly budget including housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to new data released by the United Way ALICE Project. This calculation includes the 16.1 million households in poverty as well as another 34.7 million families […]
Google: Behavioral Sequencing
May 18th, 2018Via: The Verge: Google has built a multibillion-dollar business out of knowing everything about its users. Now, a video produced within Google and obtained by The Verge offers a stunningly ambitious and unsettling look at how some at the company envision using that information in the future. The video was made in late 2016 by […]
U.S. Birth Rate Hits All-Time Low
May 17th, 2018Via: LiveScience: The number of babies being born in the United States continues to fall, with the birth rate reaching a new record low in 2017, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last year, about 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S., which is 2 percent lower […]
Tesla Moves Toward Opening Manufacturing Facility in China
May 14th, 2018Gigafactory 2 announcement soon? Via: Reuters: Tesla Inc has registered a new electric car firm in Shanghai, as China prepares to scrap rules on capping foreign ownership of new-energy vehicle (NEV) ventures. The new company, Tesla (Shanghai) Co Ltd, was registered on May 10, according to a filing with the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity […]
Tesla’s Giant Battery in Australia Reduced Grid Service Cost by 90%
May 11th, 2018Via: Electrek: Tesla’s giant Powerpack battery in Australia has been in operation for about 6 months now and we are just starting to discover the magnitude of its impact on the local energy market. A new report now shows that it reduced the cost of the grid service that it performs by 90% and it […]
Australia Weighs the Cost of Resisting China’s Meddling
May 11th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: When Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited Australia in March 2017, he had a clear message for policy makers: There’s no need to pick sides between Washington and Beijing. More than a year later, that’s becoming ever harder for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. A slew of recent media reports showed that China’s Communist Party […]
Plans Moving Forward for Miami-Dade Mega Mall: The American Dream
May 9th, 2018Ski slopes in gator country… I wish Hunter S. Thompson was here to tackle this one. Via: CBS: A mega mall and entertainment complex in Northwest Miami-Dade that would dwarf any other appears to be on course for approval, but not without controversy. It’s called the American Dream. It would be the largest mall in […]
How Silicon Valley Elite Store Billions of Dollars Worth of Bitcoin
May 9th, 2018Via: Bloomberg: Behind the guards, the blast doors and down corridors of reinforced concrete, sit the encrypted computer servers — connected to nothing — that hold keys to a vast digital fortune. Argentine entrepreneur Wences Casares has spent the past several years persuading Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires that Bitcoin is the global currency of […]
