Archive for the 'Economy' Category
Delivery Robots: A Revolutionary Step or Sidewalk-Clogging Nightmare?
April 12th, 2017Via: Guardian: Sharing a sidewalk with one of DoorDash’s delivery robots is a bit like getting stuck behind someone playing Pokémon Go on his smartphone. The robot moves a little bit slower than you want to; every few meters it pauses, jerking to the left or right, perhaps turning around, then turning again before continuing […]
Chinese Firm Halves Worker Costs by Hiring Army of Robots to Sort Out 200,000 Packages a Day
April 11th, 2017Via: South China Morning Post: A viral video showing an army of little orange robots sorting out packages in a warehouse in eastern China is the latest example of how machines are increasingly taking over menial factory work on the mainland. The behind-the-scenes footage of the self-charging robot army in a sorting centre of Chinese […]
‘An Estimated $3 Trillion in Daily Commerce Flows Through COBOL Systems’
April 10th, 2017Via: Reuters: The Common Business-Oriented Language was developed nearly 60 years ago and has been gradually replaced by newer, more versatile languages such as Java, C and Python. Although few universities still offer COBOL courses, the language remains crucial to businesses and institutions around the world. In the United States, the financial sector, major corporations […]
Donald Trump Warns That Attacking Syria Could Start World War III
April 8th, 2017Via: The Dollar Vigilante:
Florida’s Money Laundering Suburb
April 5th, 2017Via: USA Today: In a community known mostly as a getaway from the urban problems of Miami, the flood of drug money has confounded law enforcement agencies. “We always thought we would get to it at some point,” said Charlie Blau, a former federal prosecutor who oversaw the first money laundering sting in Miami. “We […]
Amazon’s Robot War Is Spreading
April 5th, 2017Via: Bloomberg: It was Amazon that drove America’s warehouse operators into the robot business. Quiet Logistics, which ships apparel out of its Devens, Mass., warehouse, had been using robots made by a company called Kiva Systems. When Amazon bought Kiva in 2012, Quiet hired scientists. In 2015 it spun out a new company called Locus […]
Tesla’s Market Cap Surpasses Ford’s
April 3rd, 2017Via: Bloomberg: Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk poked fun at short sellers as his electric-car maker’s stock surged to a record, vaulting its market value past century-old rival Ford Motor Co. “Stormy weather in Shortville…” the chief executive officer tweeted Monday, as Tesla shares climbed as much as 5.8 percent. The maker of Model S sedans […]
Cyborgs at Work: Employees Getting Implanted with Microchips
April 3rd, 2017Like many of you out there, I first heard about this technology in the 1990s. Decades later, a passive microchip implant seems like a practically innocuous fairy tale compared to the privacy hell that has metastasized all around us. In terms of technologies of political control, think of a chip implant as something like a […]
A World Without Retirement
April 2nd, 2017Via: Guardian: We are entering the age of no retirement. The journey into that chilling reality is not a long one: the first generation who will experience it are now in their 40s and 50s. They grew up assuming they could expect the kind of retirement their parents enjoyed – stopping work in their mid-60s […]
Britain Begins Historic Exit of European Union
March 29th, 2017Via: CNBC: Wednesday marked a historic day as British Prime Minister Theresa May announced that Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty had been signed, commencing the formal process for Britain to withdraw from the European Union. Britain is the first country in the EU in more than 60 years to seek a divorce from the […]
