Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Self-Flying Planes May Arrive Sooner Than You Think
October 12th, 2017Via: NBC: “What the industry is telling me is that they would like to remove one of the pilots fairly soon, and re-design the cockpit around a single pilot,” says Stephen Rice, a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida. That would involve at least a modest cockpit redesign, so that a single […]
Will Automation Put an End to the American Trucker?
October 12th, 2017Via: Guardian: Finn Murphy, author of The Long Haul, the story of his life as a long-distance truck driver, says the days of the truck driver as we know him are coming to an end. Trucking is a $700bn industry, in which a third of costs go to compensating drivers, and, he says, if the […]
Fentanyl Maker Donates Big to Campaign Opposing Pot Legalization
October 10th, 2017Via: U.S. News and World Report: An embattled pharmaceutical company that sells the powerful painkiller fentanyl has donated $500,000 toward defeating a ballot initiative that would make recreational use of marijuana legal under Arizona law. It’s hard to imagine a more sinister donor than Insys Therapeutics Inc. in the eyes of pot legalization proponents, who […]
Robotic Farm Completes 1st Fully Autonomous Harvest
October 8th, 2017Via: LiveScience: It’s harvest season in many parts of the world, but on one farm in the United Kingdom, robots — not humans — are doing all the heavy lifting. At Hands Free Hectare, an experimental farm run by researchers from Harper Adams University, in the village of Edgmond in the U.K., about 5 tons […]
Our Minds Can Be Hijacked: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia
October 6th, 2017Via: Guardian: There is growing concern that as well as addicting users, technology is contributing toward so-called “continuous partial attention”, severely limiting people’s ability to focus, and possibly lowering IQ. One recent study showed that the mere presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity – even when the device is turned off. “Everyone is distracted,” Rosenstein […]
Zucktown, USA
October 4th, 2017Via: The Baffler: Facebook, Amazon, and Google are reviving the ill-fated “company towns” of the Gilded Age.
With Widespread Power Failures, Puerto Rico Is Cash Only
October 1st, 2017Via: New York Times: Juan Jimenez squinted into the dark lobby of his bank early Friday, thinking about the paycheck sitting in his account, just behind the locked doors. If only he could get to it. With power failures and communications outages still widespread nine days after Hurricane Maria, much of Puerto Rico has become […]
Chaos and Hackers Stalk Investors on Cryptocurrency Exchanges
September 29th, 2017Cryptocurrency exchanges have always been a nightmare. I’ve never left any Bitcoins or cash in an exchange for any longer than it took to trade them. Then I’d immediately pull my money out. I always try to keep my overnight balance as close to zero as possible on Bitcoin exchanges. I just assume the thing […]
First Look at Shell’s New Electric Car Charging Stations Being Deployed at Its Gas Stations
September 27th, 2017Via: Electrek: Earlier this year, oil giant Shell announced that they would start deploying electric car charging stations in Britain and the Netherlands. Today, we get our first look at the custom charging stations that they are deploying and they look just like gas pumps.
Tesla Powerwall 2 Installations Finally Start to Accelerate
September 27th, 2017Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand. — As someone in the industry, it was immediately clear to me, from the moment the Powerwall 2 was announced, that it had no competition: As far as I can tell, this authoritatively blows away all other residential energy storage options… This is a bit disturbing […]
