Meet CGI Federal, the Company Behind the Botched Launch of HealthCare.gov
October 23rd, 2013Via: Washington Post:
Over the past few weeks, if you’ve been paying attention at all to the unfolding disaster of people trying and failing to sign up for Obamacare online, one name keeps coming up: CGI Federal, the IT contractor that has orchestrated most of the Healthcare.gov Web site. By most accounts, it’s been a complete train wreck, for reasons both technical and bureaucratic.
Research Credit: ottilie
The Sixth Stage of Collapse
October 23rd, 2013Dmitry We’re-Fucked-No-Matter-What Orlov outlines how the light at the end of the civilization tunnel is the train.
Via: Club Orlov:
A solution for avoiding the sixth stage must be found, but I don’t know what that solution would look like. I do find it unsafe to blithely assume that collapse will simply take care of the problem for us. Some people may find this subject matter so depressing that it makes them want to lie down (in a comfortable position, on something warm and soft) and die.
Research Credit: cgroove69
U.S. Dollar Tanks
October 22nd, 2013Via: Reuters:
The dollar slid to a two-year low against the euro and a measure of global equity markets rose for a fifth session in a row on Tuesday after weak U.S. jobs data reinforced expectations the Federal Reserve will keep its easy-money policy intact into 2014.
The Rise of Geoengineering
October 22nd, 2013Via: Independent:
Geoengineering technologies are the stuff of Hollywood disaster movies. Researchers have suggested sending a giant glass sunshade into space to reflect light; the eruption of artificial volcanoes, or spraying of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere; dissolving mountains and putting remains in the sea; and, least dramatically, perhaps, filing the ocean with iron filings to stimulate algae blooms.
Fructose: The Poison Index
October 21st, 2013Via: Guardian:
The battle over the compound fructose now reaches new levels of obfuscation. The food industry is a strong – and loud, and rich – proponent, hard to ignore. The European Food and Safety Agency has just weighed in, in favour of the substitution of sucrose (table sugar: a disaccharide composed of the monosaccharides glucose and fructose) with fructose alone, the sweeter of the two – even to the point of allowing health claims for fructose on the packaging of processed foods.
And yet the scientific data on fructose says it is one of the most egregious components of the western diet, directly contributing to heart disease and diabetes, and associated with cancer and dementia. Nature magazine has just published a scathing indictment of fructose by Dr Lewis Cantley, one of the US’s leading cancer researchers. But the EFSA says it sees no harm, justifying its stance on the basis that fructose has a lower glycaemic index than glucose.
How to Lose $172,222 a Second for 45 Minutes
October 21st, 2013Via: python sweetness:
This is probably the most painful bug report I’ve ever read, describing in glorious technicolor the steps leading to Knight Capital’s $465m trading loss due to a software bug that struck late last year, effectively bankrupting the company.
The tale has all the hallmarks of technical debt in a huge, unmaintained, bitrotten codebase (the bug itself due to code that hadn’t been used for 8 years), and a really poor, undisciplined devops story.
NSA Intercepts Millions of Telephone Calls… In France
October 21st, 2013Via: AFP:
France and Mexico have angrily demanded prompt explanations from the United States following “shocking” new spying allegations leaked by former US security contractor Edward Snowden.
The reports published in French daily Le Monde and German weekly Der Spiegel reveal that the US National Security Agency secretly monitored tens of millions of phone calls in France and hacked into former Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s email account.
Outsourcing Chicken Processing to China
October 21st, 2013[???]
Via: Bloomberg:
Food-safety advocates are raising alarms over a decision by the Obama administration to permit chicken processed in China to be sold in the U.S. even after several high-profile incidents of food contamination.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in addressing a decade-long trade dispute over farm imports, said it will allow poultry slaughtered in the U.S. and Canada to be processed in China and returned to the U.S. for consumption. Critics are vowing to fight the decision, which they say puts consumers at risk due to lax Chinese factory oversight.
…
Poultry producers say almost all the chicken eaten in the U.S. will still be produced and processed domestically. The U.S. government currently allows Canada, Chile, France and Israel to export processed poultry to the U.S.
“Ninety-nine percent of the chicken we consume here is hatched, raised and processed in the U.S.,” Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, a Washington-based industry group, said in an e-mail. “We don’t expect that to change any time soon.”
Officials from the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t respond to e-mail or phone requests for comment.
China: Smog Emergency Shuts City of 11 Million People
October 20th, 2013Via: Reuters:
Choking smog all but shut down one of northeastern China’s largest cities on Monday, forcing schools to suspended classes, snarling traffic and closing the airport, in the country’s first major air pollution crisis of the winter.
An index measuring PM2.5, or particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5), reached a reading of 1,000 in some parts of Harbin, the gritty capital of northeastern Heilongjiang province and home to some 11 million people.
A level above 300 is considered hazardous, while the World Health Organisation recommends a daily level of no more than 20.
The smog not only forced all primary and middle schools to suspend classes, but shut the airport and some public bus routes, the official Xinhua news agency reported, blaming the emergency on the first day of the heating being turned on in the city for winter. Visibility was reportedly reduced to 10 meters.
Related: Beijing Pollution So Bad That International Schools Build Filtered Air Domes for Children
Japan: Celibacy Syndrome
October 20th, 2013Via: Guardian:
45% of Japanese women aged 16-24 are ‘not interested in or despise sexual contact’. More than a quarter of men feel the same way.
…
Japan’s under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren’t even dating, and increasing numbers can’t be bothered with sex. For their government, “celibacy syndrome” is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world’s lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060.
