Los Angeles Is Spending Over $1 Billion To House the Homeless. It’s Failing.
December 7th, 2019Via: Reason:
The city initially ballparked the permanent units at a median cost of $350,000 a piece. Three years later, the estimated cost rose to more than half a million per unit. Some units are approaching $700,000 each.
Andy Bales says he saw it coming.
“I was a critic 10 years ago of this plan even before it came about,” he says. “A very expensive way of spending all the resources on a few and leaving the many out in the cold.”
In Los Angeles, three out of four homeless people live unsheltered on the street. Bales had wanted the city to allocate a portion of the money to nonprofits and churches like his to provide temporary relief but says critics dismissed and even laughed at him.
“There’s this group that is so dogmatic about permanent supportive housing as the solution,” he says. “And they think the only solution is the perfect rather than good.”
Bales says that, given the current emergency, the city should reconsider its heavy focus on finding a long term solution.
Union Rescue Mission just opened what’s called a Sprung structure, a relatively inexpensive but sturdy and weather-resistant tent with 120 beds. He encourages the city to invest more in Sprung structures and other cheap, easily constructed solutions like mobile homes, container homes, or even 3-D printed concrete houses.
“We cannot spend $600,000 per person per unit and ever get it done,” says Bales. “We’ve got to think innovatively or we’re going to have a bigger disaster on our hands.”
Chinese Scientists Create Monkey-Pig Chimeras
December 7th, 2019Via: New Scientist:
Pig-primate chimeras have been born live for the first time but died within a week. The two piglets, created by a team in China, looked normal although a small proportion of their cells were derived from cynomolgus monkeys.
“This is the first report of full-term pig-monkey chimeras,” says Tang Hai at the State Key Laboratory of Stem Cell and Reproductive Biology in Beijing.
The ultimate aim of the work is to grow human organs in animals for transplantation. But the results show there is still a long way to go to achieve this, the team says.
Pentagon Says, “Neither AATIP Nor AAWSAP Were UAP Related”
December 7th, 2019You spin me right ’round, baby
Right ’round like a record, baby
Right ’round, ’round, ’round
Via: The Black Vault:
Claiming they want to correct the record and clear up some inaccuracies, the Pentagon now says AATIP was not a UFO or UAP program.
“Neither AATIP nor AAWSAP were UAP related,” said Pentagon spokesperson Susan Gough in an e-mail to The Black Vault. “The purpose of AATIP was to investigate foreign advanced aerospace weapons system applications with future technology projections over the next 40 years, and to create a center of expertise on advanced aerospace technologies.”
Since 2017, details have been scarce. However, the DoD’s latest position that AATIP wasn’t a UFO program, seems to represent one of their most dramatic about-faces on the issue since the program was first revealed.
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The Pentagon’s new stance conflicts with former Department of Defense (DOD) employee, Luis Elizondo. According to Elizondo he was the director of AATIP, and since coming forward in October of 2017, he’s consistantly maintained AATIP did research UFOs / UAPs. “AATIP itself spent its entire time on UFOs,” said Elizondo in March of 2019 at the first annual Anomalous Aerospace Phenomena (AAP) conference put on by the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU). “AATIP was a 100% UFO program, period. It was not looking at airplanes.”
In an already confusing saga,the Pentagon continues to deny Elizondo’s role and participation in the AATIP. According to Gough, Elizondo was, “not the director of the AATIP,” and reiterated he had “no assigned responsibilities” within the program.
In the Age of AI
December 7th, 2019Here’s one line from the film that sums up the situation:
“I’m pretty confident that we are never again going to have this large, stable, prosperous middle class doing routine work.”
Via: Frontline PBS:
A documentary exploring how artificial intelligence is changing life as we know it — from jobs to privacy to a growing rivalry between the U.S. and China.
FRONTLINE investigates the promise and perils of AI and automation, tracing a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our world, and allow the emergence of a surveillance society.
Cloud Kitchens: Facilities That Prepare Food Only for Delivery
December 6th, 2019Via: Food Corridor:
Introducing cloud kitchens, commercial facilities purpose-built to produce food specifically for delivery. These commissary kitchens are sometimes also known as ghost kitchens, shared kitchens, or virtual kitchens with the delivery-only food brands operating within them called virtual restaurants.
Maybe you’re thinking: “this is nothing new” and in a way, you are right. Chinese restaurants have been making the most of delivery for decades. And the pizza industry has practically built its business around optimizing for delivery. But moving to a delivery-only model has been made possible recently by advances in technology and changes in consumer habits. It offers certain advantages over offering delivery from a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant.
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Cloud kitchens are centralized licensed commercial food production facilities where anywhere from one or two to dozens of restaurants rent space to prepare delivery-optimized menu items. One restaurant may run multiple brands, or virtual restaurants, all operating under one roof, or the kitchen may be run like an incubator, shared by different purveyors. Picture a large warehouse with numerous stations (mini-restaurants) of stainless steel prep tables, hood vents, stoves, ovens, and sinks, each with its own orders coming in direct from customers.
Uranium-Contaminated Site Collapses Into Detroit River
December 6th, 2019Via: Detroit Free Press:
A Detroit property contaminated with uranium and other dangerous chemicals partially collapsed into the Detroit River on Nov. 26, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy has confirmed.
Located next to Historic Fort Wayne and leased by Detroit Bulk Storage, the site known as the Detroit Dock allegedly collapsed under the weight of large aggregate piles that were stored at the site during Thanksgiving weekend.
The property has been listed by the U.S. Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency as a contaminated site due to its use of uranium and other dangerous chemicals during manufacturing dating to the 1940s, according to the Windsor Star, which first reported the incident.
GM and LG in Joint Venture to Build Massive Electric Vehicle Battery Factory in Ohio
December 5th, 2019Via: CNBC:
General Motors and LG Chem will invest up to $2.3 billion by 2023 to form a joint venture for production of battery cells for electric vehicles in Ohio.
The companies plan to build a battery cell factory in the Lordstown-area of northeast Ohio. Construction of the plant, which is expected to be among the largest in the world, is expected to begin in mid-2020.
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The plant’s annual capacity is expected to be more than 30 gigawatt hours “with flexibility for expansion,” according to GM.
China Gene-Edited Baby Experiment ‘May Have Created Unintended Mutations’
December 5th, 2019Via: Guardian:
The gene editing performed on Chinese twins to immunise them against HIV may have failed and created unintended mutations, scientists have said after the original research was made public for the first time.
Excerpts from the manuscript were released by the MIT Technology Review to show how Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui ignored ethical and scientific norms in creating the twins Lula and Nana, whose birth in late 2018 sent shockwaves through the scientific world.
He made expansive claims of a medical breakthrough that could “control the HIV epidemic”, but it was not clear whether it had even been successful in its intended purpose – immunising the babies against the virus – because the team did not in fact reproduce the gene mutation that confers this resistance.
A small percentage of people are born with immunity because of a mutation in a gene called CCR5 and it was this gene that He had claimed to have targeted using a powerful editing tool known as Crispr which has revolutionised the field since 2012.
Fyodor Urnov, a genome-editing scientist at the University of California, Berkeley told the MIT Technology Review: “The claim they have reproduced the prevalent CCR5 variant is a blatant misrepresentation of the actual data and can only be described by one term: a deliberate falsehood.
The H&K MP5 Comes Back to the USA as the SP5
December 5th, 2019$2800. That’s pretty nuts. I remember HK94s for $650-$750 around 1985. Plug $750 in 1985 into the inflation calculator and that’s $1793 in 2019.
HK is definitely milking it.
A U.S. Marine Flew Guns to Haiti so He Could Teach the Army How to Shoot, and Then ‘Become President’
December 5th, 2019This is a weird one.
Via: National Post:
Jacques Yves Sebastien Duroseau had a plan.
The U.S. Marine would fly to Haiti with trunks full of weapons, armour and ammunition, train Haiti’s newest soldiers how to shoot, and as a result make the country more stable. In the end, court documents allege, the plan was that he himself would rule the island nation.
Now, federal prosecutors in Raleigh, North Carolina have charged him with gun smuggling, the Miami Herald reports, after he arrived at Toussaint Louverture International Airport in Port-au-Prince with his own personal arsenal on Nov. 12. His luggage included suitcases and plastic boxes containing weaponry, and court filings indicate he was in active service when detained.
