7-Eleven Tests Cashierless Store At North Texas Headquarters
February 6th, 2020Via: CBS:
A new 700-square foot 7-Eleven store has opened in Texas, but this one doesn’t have a human cashier.
The pilot store, at 7-Eleven headquarters in Irving, uses a mixture of algorithms and predictive technology to separate individual customers and their purchases from others in the store.
The concept location offers some of the most popular products sold at traditional 7-Eleven stores, including drinks, snacks, groceries, and non-food items.
Related: Japanese Robot Could Call Last Orders on Human Bartenders
Texas: Homeless Camp the Size of Three Football Fields Catches Fire
February 6th, 2020Via: Fox:
A fire broke out at a large homeless camp below the eastbound frontage road of Anderson Lane, between IH-35 and Cameron Road Monday morning.
“We come down here for medical calls a lot. We always feared there being a fire — well there was a fire. Upon arrival there were no residents of the camp that we had to deal with and rescue.” explained Battalion Chief Matthew Cox, of the Austin Fire Department.
Cox, said firefighters were worried about spaces, small fires — and possibly, people they could not reach in the catacomb like camp.
“It is definitely a very unsafe situation for our firefighters as they’re gonna have to dig through this stuff for hours.” he said.
The camp spans roughly three football fields. Cox described, “couches, tv’s, propane tanks, padlocked areas, mattresses, trash and literally hundreds of needles.”
It is an entire system of underground homes. Many, containing stove tops, refrigerators, bunk beds — all built into the overpass.
Jeffrey Epstein’s Mystery Bank Came Alive After His Death
February 5th, 2020Via: The New York Times:
In the years after Jeffrey Epstein registered as a sex offender, he closed his money management firm and started a business to develop algorithms and mine DNA and financial databases.
Then he set up a bank.
In a banking license application reviewed by The New York Times, Mr. Epstein described himself as one of the investing world’s “pioneers” and said he wanted to pursue the “dynamic discipline of international banking.”
Officials in the Virgin Islands, the United States territory where Mr. Epstein set up most of his businesses, approved a license for him in 2014 to run one of the territory’s first international banking entities, a specialized bank that can do business only with offshore clients. The approval was unusual, given Mr. Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender.
The bank, Southern Country International, renewed its license for each of the next five years, but it’s unclear whether it conducted any business or had any customers. Mr. Epstein, who died while in federal custody last summer following his arrest on sex trafficking charges, does not appear to have done any marketing for the bank or hired much staff.
The bank was created under a territorial law that lacked many of the oversight requirements banks are usually subject to, and its regulatory file is largely empty. A lawyer for Mr. Epstein told officials in the Virgin Islands in 2018 that Southern Country had not commenced operations. And regulators in the territory said they did not exercise oversight of the bank because it did not appear to be doing any business.
And yet, after Mr. Epstein’s death, his estate transferred more than $12 million to Southern Country, according to court documents.
SriLankan Airlines Pilots & Cabin Crew Who Flew Sri Lankan Students Out of Wuhan, China
February 5th, 2020Compare the SriLankan Airlines employees’ protective gear to the drivers of the four “Horseman” buses in Britain.
SriLankan Airlines profoundly thanks its patriotic pilots & cabin crew who braved risk of Coronavirus & volunteered for mercy flight to bring back Sri Lankan students from Wuhan, China, supported by staff of many departments, on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s instruction. pic.twitter.com/vl5Qq1lRnW
— SriLankan Airlines (@flysrilankan) February 1, 2020
Trump 2020 State of the Union Speech: “America’s Manifest Destiny in the Stars”
February 5th, 2020I listened to this State of the Union speech the same way I’ve listened to others; teetering between yawning inattention and eye-rolling.
It’s difficult to turn off my internal monologue:
“Oh for fuck’s sake, how do people put up with this?”
“This is giving me a lobotomy.”
“Is that witch Pelosi going to have a grand mal seizure?”
“We deserve the zombie apocalypse we’re in.”
Etc. etc.
So, as the nonsense spewed out as usual, I heard Trump utter the following phrase, “America’s manifest destiny in the stars.”
Via: Time:
In reaffirming our heritage as a free Nation, we must remember that America has always been a frontier nation. Now we must embrace the next frontier, America’s manifest destiny in the stars. I am asking the Congress to fully fund the Artemis program to ensure that the next man and the first woman on the moon will be American astronauts — using this as a launching pad to ensure that America is the first nation to plant its flag on Mars.
Related: What the Hell Is China Doing on the Dark Side of the Moon?
Francis Boyle: Wuhan Coronavirus is an Offensive Biological Warfare Weapon
February 4th, 2020Via: Guadalajara Geopolitics Institute:
Dr. Francis Boyle discusses the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China and the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory (BSL-4) from which he believes the infectious disease escaped. He believes the virus is potentially lethal and an offensive biological warfare weapon or dual-use biowarfare weapons agent genetically modified with gain of function properties, which is why the Chinese government originally tried to cover it up and is now taking drastic measures to contain it. The Wuhan BSL-4 lab is also a specially designated World Health Organization (WHO) research lab and Dr. Boyle contends that the WHO knows full well what is occurring.
Florida Prosecutors Release Trove of Jeffrey Epstein Files
February 3rd, 2020State of Florida v. Jeffrey Epstein, Case Numbers 06CF009454AMB and 08CF009381AMB
Via: New York Post:
Florida prosecutors released their entire Jeffrey Epstein case file from when the serial pedophile was first investigated more than a decade ago and posted it online so the public can easily access it.
The trove of records is from the Palm Beach state attorney’s fumbled 2008 investigation into Epstein in which the mogul managed to walk away with a low-level charge of solicitation of a minor after he was accused of abusing dozens of minors.
pShuttle Gene and Wuhan Coronavirus: Request for Expert Help with Sanity Check
February 3rd, 2020If you are one of the many university professors in the life sciences reading Cryptogon, I would appreciate your opinion on these articles:
James Lyons Weiler: On the Origins of the 2019-nCoV Virus, Wuhan, China:
A database search by the first team to study and publish the whole genome sequence for the origins of the inserted sequence turned up no hits (Ji et al., 2020). They conducted a codon-bias analysis which led them to speculate that perhaps there had been a recombination event between a coronavirus in snakes with a coronavirus from bats (Ji et al., 2020).
This led to criticism on Wired(3) with quote dismissing the snake origin hypothesis as lacking evidence. There is, however, clear evidence that the novel sequence, which I will refer to henceforth as INS1378, is from a laboratory-induced recombination event.
And:
…the genetic sequences now identified in the coronavirus strain are, without question, proof that human engineers have been tinkering with the strain.
Please email me from your university account. I will not reveal your name, unless you want me to. I’m asking to know who is responding to this because the this coronavirus situation is attracting PSYOP from multiple state and nonstate actors, both U.S. and Chinese.
Astra: Space Launch Startup Emerges from Stealth Mode
February 3rd, 2020Via: Bloomberg:
The company’s founders say they want to be the FedEx Corp. of space. They’re aiming to create small, cheap rockets that can be mass-produced to facilitate daily spaceflights, delivering satellites into low-Earth orbit for as little as $1 million per launch.
…
Kemp says that Rocket Lab’s going launch rate of about $7.5 million a pop is too high and that the company’s Electron rocket has been overengineered. Instead of using carbon fiber for the rocket body and fancy 3D-printed parts as Rocket Lab does, Astra has stuck with aluminum and simplified engines built with common tools. London’s team has tried to make the Astra radios, igniters, and even the rocket transport vehicle low-cost, high-performing, and easy to re-create.
San Francisco: A Dystopian Nightmare of Addiction, Homelessness and Criminality
February 2nd, 2020They have been showing it to us for several decades in novels and on screens: Cyberpunk: High Tech, Low Life:
Via: Daily Mail:
‘San Francisco has always had hobos but we’ve never seen anything like this. It’s become a vision of some kind of strange dystopian future,’ says Joel Kotkin, a widely respected professor in urban studies.
He can reel off damning statistics to back his claim that San Francisco symbolises the Golden State’s descent into ‘high-tech feudalism’ including America’s highest poverty levels, its worst rates of property crime and its biggest gap between top and middle incomes.
But one statistic stands out: almost half of homeless people in the United States are in California, according to a recent White House study.
And San Francisco, a comparatively small city that is home to tech giants such as Twitter, Uber and Airbnb, has the highest rate of ‘unsheltered’ citizens – at ten times the national level.
