Amazon Wants to Launch Thousands of Satellites for Broadband Internet Service
April 4th, 2019Via: CNBC:
Amazon is planning to build a network of more than 3,000 satellites federal filings reveal, in an ambitious attempt to provide global internet access.
Known as Project Kuiper, the move represents the latest space ambition from Jeff Bezos. Amazon has previously announced its cloud business will build a network of satellite facilities on Earth and Bezos’ space venture Blue Origin continues to move closer to launching space tourists.
“Project Kuiper is a new initiative to launch a constellation of low Earth orbit satellites that will provide low-latency, high-speed broadband connectivity to unserved and underserved communities around the world,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC in an emailed statement.
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A race among several major players is underway to build a next-generation broadband network in space, as companies lay out plans to use a so-called constellation of hundreds or even thousands of small satellites. Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched two test satellites for its “Starlink” network last year, the first step toward its goal of a constellation of 4,425 satellites. Additionally, last month Softbank-backed OneWeb launched the first six satellites of its network, which plans to begin with a constellation of 650 interconnected satellites.
Boeing and Canadian operator Telesat have also revealed plans for high speed internet constellations.
Drugmakers Pay $123 Million to Resolve U.S. Charity Kickback Probe
April 4th, 2019Via: Reuters:
Three drugmakers will pay $122.6 million to resolve claims they used charities that help cover Medicare patients’ out-of-pocket drug costs as a way to pay kickbacks aimed at encouraging the use of their medications, including some expensive ones.
The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday said Jazz Pharmaceuticals Plc, Lundbeck and Alexion Pharmaceuticals Inc had become the latest companies to settle claims stemming from an industry-wide probe of drugmakers’ financial support of patient assistance charities.
The government has alleged in earlier settlements that drugmakers used such charities as a means to improperly pay the copay obligations of Medicare patients using their drugs in violation of the Anti-Kickback Statute.
The investigation came amid growing attention to skyrocketing U.S. drug prices. Copays are meant to serve in part as a check on healthcare expenses by exposing patients to some of a drug’s cost and make them price-sensitive.
The United States of Incarceration
April 4th, 2019Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world.
Via: Prison Policy:
The U.S. incarcerates 716 people for every 100,000 residents, more than any other country. In fact, our rate of incarceration is more than five times higher than most of the countries in the world. Although our level of crime is comparable to those of other stable, internally secure, industrialized nations, the United States has an incarceration rate far higher than any other country.
Nearly all of the countries with relatively high incarceration rates share the experience of recent large-scale internal conflict. But the United States, which has enjoyed a long history of political stability and hasn’t had a civil war in nearly a century and a half, tops the list.
If we compare the incarceration rates of individual U.S. states and territories with that of other nations, for example, we see that 36 states and the District of Columbia have incarceration rates higher than that of Cuba, which is the nation with the second highest incarceration rate in the world.
Bitcoin Soars 20 Percent, Mystery Buyer Seen as Catalyst
April 2nd, 2019Via: Reuters:
Bitcoin burst to its highest level in almost five months on Tuesday, sending smaller cryptocurrencies up, with analysts ascribing the move to a major order by an anonymous buyer that triggered a frenzy of computer-driven trading.
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Oliver von Landsberg-Sadie, chief executive of London-based cryptocurrency firm BCB Group, said the move was likely triggered by an algorithmic order worth about $100 million spread across major exchanges – U.S.-based Coinbase and Kraken, and Luxembourg-based Bitstamp.
“There has been a single order that has been algorithmically-managed across these three venues, of around 20,000 BTC,” he said.
“If you look at the volumes on each of those three exchanges – there were in-concert, synchronized, units of volume of around 7,000 BTC in an hour”.
The Measles Couldn’t Kill the Brady Bunch
April 1st, 2019Via: YouTube:
Trump Cuts Aid to Central American Countries as Migrant Crisis Deepens
March 31st, 2019Trump should have used the military to shut the border on the day he became President. Over two years later, the situation is worse than ever.
Via: Reuters:
The U.S. government cut aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras on Saturday after President Donald Trump blasted the Central American countries for sending migrants to the United States and threatened to shutter the U.S.-Mexico border.
A surge of asylum seekers from the three countries have sought to enter the United States across the southern border in recent days. On Friday, Trump accused the nations of having “set up” migrant caravans and sent them north.
Trump said there was a “very good likelihood” he would close the border this week if Mexico did not stop immigrants from reaching the United States. Frequent crossers of the border, including workers and students, worried about the disruption to their lives the president’s threatened shutdown could cause.
Apple Developing an Electric Car, Hires Tesla’s Former Head of Electric Powertrains
March 31st, 2019I wonder if it will be made in China by Foxconn…
Via: Electrek:
There has long been a debate about Apple’s secretive automotive project being only about a self-driving system for vehicles rather than a full electric autonomous vehicle. It now looks clear that the latter is the case as Apple hires Tesla’s head of electric powertrains.
U.S. Government Finances Still Deteriorating
March 30th, 2019Via: Truth in Accounting:
The federal government released the annual report of the U.S. Government for fiscal 2018 this afternoon. The government’s finances deteriorated significantly, and more recent reports suggest the trend is only getting worse in 2019.
Our measure of the unfunded federal debt rose from $101 trillion in 2017 to $105 trillion at fiscal year-end 2018. Extending that figure to end-of-March 2019 leads to a current estimate of $107 trillion, or about $707,000 per taxpayer (based on individual income tax filings).
The number of times the word “unsustainable” appears in this report has been on a significant long-term uptrend, from zero times in 1998 to 15 times in 2017. It rose again to 16 times in 2018. The introductory “Results in Brief” section of the report had a new subsection this year, titled “An Unsustainable Fiscal Path.” In other words, the topic of sustainability of federal government finances is not only growing as a matter of discussion, but it is now explicitly emphasized, right up front.
The federal government’s estimate of the “Fiscal Gap” – the combination of spending cuts and/or tax increases needed to keep the government debt / GDP ratio from rising in the future – doubled in 2018. This figure is expressed as a percent of GDP. The government began reporting this calculation back in 2010. A high or rising fiscal gap represents deteriorating finances.
U.S. Border: “This Is a System-Wide Collapse”
March 30th, 2019Via: USA Today:
Under a bridge connecting the U.S. with Mexico, dozens of migrant families cram into a makeshift camp set up by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The families are there because permanent processing facilities have run out of room.
Seven hundred miles east, busload after busload of weary, bedraggled migrants crowd into the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, Texas. Organizers there are used to handling 200 to 300 migrants a day. Lately, the migrants have been arriving at a clip of around 800 a day, overflowing the respite center and straining city resources.
“It’s staggering,” McAllen City Manager Roy Rodriguez said. “Really, we’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Prison Labor: Inmates in Finland Are Training AI
March 29th, 2019Via: The Verge:
“Prison labor” is usually associated with physical work, but inmates at two prisons in Finland are doing a new type of labor: classifying data to train artificial intelligence algorithms for a startup. Though the startup in question, Vainu, sees the partnership as a kind of prison reform that teaches valuable skills, other experts say it plays into the exploitative economics of prisoners being required to work for very low wages.
Vainu is building a comprehensive database of companies around the world that helps businesses find contractors to work with, says co-founder Tuomas Rasila. For this to work, people need to read through hundreds of thousands of business articles scraped from the internet and label whether, for example, an article is about Apple the tech company or a fruit company that has “apple” in the name. (This labeled data is then used to train an algorithm that manages the database.)
