Google Pays $1 Billion for Huge Mountain View Business Park
November 26th, 2018“All the better to see you with, my dear.”
Via: The Mercury News:
In a head-spinning mega-deal, Google has paid $1 billion for a huge Mountain View business park, the Bay Area’s largest real estate purchase this year.
It is also the second-largest property purchase in the United States this year, eclipsed only by another Google acquisition, the $2.4 billion the company paid for Chelsea Market in Manhattan.
The newly acquired site in Mountain View, where Google has been the primary tenant, is larger than the property that accommodates the company’s Googleplex headquarters a few blocks to the west and also exceeds the size of the parcel across the street where Google is building an iconic “dome” campus that features canopies and tents.
Harvesting Battery Modules from Wrecked Tesla Model X 90D
November 26th, 2018Via: HBPowerwall:
GM to Slash Jobs and Production, Cancel Some Car Models
November 26th, 2018Via: Reuters:
General Motors Co will cut car production, stop building several low-selling car models, and slash its North American workforce, sources said on Monday, marking its biggest restructuring in North America since its bankruptcy a decade ago.
GM plans to halt production at three assembly plants in Canada, in Ohio and Michigan in the United States by not allocating new products, putting the future of those plants in doubt, the sources added.
…
GM has begun what is expected to be a long and expensive transition to a new model that embraces electrified and automated vehicles, many of which will be shared rather than owned.
World’s First Gene-Edited Babies Created in China, Claims Scientist
November 26th, 2018Via: Guardian:
A scientist in China claims to have created the world’s first genetically edited babies, in a potentially ground-breaking and controversial medical first.
If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics. This kind of gene editing is banned in most countries as the technology is still experimental and DNA changes can pass to future generations, potentially with unforeseen side-effects.
Many mainstream scientists think it is too unsafe to try, and some denounced the Chinese report as human experimentation.
The researcher, He Jiankui of Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, said he altered embryos for seven couples during fertility treatments, with one pregnancy resulting so far. He said his goal was not to cure or prevent an inherited disease, but to try to bestow a trait that few people naturally have: an ability to resist possible future infection with HIV.
He said the parents involved declined to be identified or interviewed, and he would not say where they lived or where the work was done. There is no independent confirmation of He’s claim, and it has not been published in a journal, where it would be vetted by other experts.
He revealed it on Monday in Hong Kong to one of the organisers of an international conference on gene editing that is due to begin on Tuesday, and earlier in interviews with the Associated Press.
Google Patents Reveal Plans to Monitor Our Moods, Our Movements, and Our Children’s Behavior at Home
November 25th, 2018I found myself thinking of a haiku about an imaginary situation in which my father (who died a while back) would be standing in a room, arguing with one of these “smart” speakers and eventually challenging it to a fight with his weapon of choice, a yard-long section of 2×4 lumber.
Old man stands bugeyed
Smart device suggests smooth jazz
2×4 held high
We don’t know what prompted dad to perceive that he needed to take up his combat stance, but the AI sensed danger and somehow knew that dad liked smooth jazz.
Has the AI come up with a way to survive one more encounter with dad?
We exit the scenario with the 2×4 drawn back fully into striking position…
Via: PJ Media:
Patents recently issued to Google provide a window into their development activities. While it’s no guarantee of a future product, it is a sure indication of what’s of interest to them. What we’ve given up in privacy to Google, Facebook, and others thus far is minuscule compared to what is coming if these companies get their way.
These patents tell us that Google is developing smart-home products that are capable of eavesdropping on us throughout our home in order to learn more about us and better target us with advertising. It goes much further than the current Google Home speaker that’s promoted to answer our questions and provide useful information, and the Google-owned Nest thermostat that measures environmental conditions in our home. What the patents describe are sensors and cameras mounted in every room to follow us and analyze what we’re doing throughout our home.
They describe how the cameras can even recognize the image of a movie star’s image on a resident’s t-shirt, connect it to the person’s browsing history, and send the person an ad for a new movie the star is in.
U.S. Closes Mexican Border Crossing, Repels Some Migrants with Tear Gas
November 25th, 2018Via: Reuters:
The United States closed its busiest border crossing with Mexico on Sunday after Mexican police broke up a protest of Central American migrants massed in Tijuana, scattering some demonstrators toward the border where U.S. officers hurled tear gas from the American side.
Traffic in both directions was suspended at the San Ysidro port of entry between San Diego and Tijuana, the busiest land border in the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said on Twitter.
Mexican police, some wielding shields, scattered migrants and protesters, many of whom rushed toward the U.S. border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers repelled them with a volley of canisters emitting large clouds of gas as U.S. and Mexican government helicopters clattered overhead.
The Mexican government said later on Sunday it had retaken control of the border crossing after nearly 500 migrants tried to cross the U.S. border “in a violent manner,” and vowed to immediately deport Central Americans who attempt to enter the United States illegally.
“The Greatest Manmade Disaster in History”
November 25th, 2018Via: Guardian:
A decade after the Communist party took power in 1949, promising to serve the people, the greatest manmade disaster in history stalks an already impoverished land. In an unremarkable city in central Henan province, more than a million people – one in eight – are wiped out by starvation and brutality over three short years. In one area, officials commandeer more grain than the farmers have actually grown. In barely nine months, more than 12,000 people – a third of the inhabitants – die in a single commune; a tenth of its households are wiped out. Thirteen children beg officials for food and are dragged deep into the mountains, where they die from exposure and starvation. A teenage orphan kills and eats her four-year-old brother. Forty-four of a village’s 45 inhabitants die; the last remaining resident, a woman in her 60s, goes insane. Others are tortured, beaten or buried alive for declaring realistic harvests, refusing to hand over what little food they have, stealing scraps or simply angering officials.
When the head of a production brigade dares to state the obvious – that there is no food – a leader warns him: “That’s right-deviationist thinking. You’re viewing the problem in an overly simplistic matter.”
Page after page – even in the drastically edited English translation, there are 500 of them – his book, Tombstone, piles improbability upon terrible improbability. But Yang did not imagine these scenes. Perhaps no one could. Instead, he devoted 15 years to painstakingly documenting the catastrophe that claimed at least 36 million lives across the country, including that of his father.
The Great Famine remains a taboo in China, where it is referred to euphemistically as the Three Years of Natural Disasters or the Three Years of Difficulties. Yang’s monumental account, first published in Hong Kong, is banned in his homeland.
He had little idea of what he would find when he started work: “I didn’t think it would be so serious and so brutal and so bloody. I didn’t know that there were thousands of cases of cannibalism. I didn’t know about farmers who were beaten to death.
“People died in the family and they didn’t bury the person because they could still collect their food rations; they kept the bodies in bed and covered them up and the corpses were eaten by mice. People ate corpses and fought for the bodies. In Gansu they killed outsiders; people told me strangers passed through and they killed and ate them. And they ate their own children. Terrible. Too terrible.”
South Africa: Detective Who Exposed Elite Pedophile Ring Found Dead
November 25th, 2018Minnie said the book was, “Only the beginning,” and that he would reveal more.
Via: NeonNettle:
A former police detective-turned-investigative author has been found dead, just days after publishing a book that exposed a high-level government pedophile ring.
58-year-old Mark Minne was found with a bullet to his head on August 14, but many people are refusing to believe the “official” police version – that he committed suicide at his friend’s farm near the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
Minne’s family is claiming that he would never kill himself – a point he had brought up with them – and that he feared people were after him because he was about to expose even more elite pedophilia.
The highly-respected detective authored the controversial book “The Lost Boys of Bird Island” which was published on August 5th, 2018, and exposed shocking child abuse and corruption that he had witnessed whilst working on the police force.
After leaving law enforcement, Minne devoted his post-police life to exposing the government-orchestrated child trafficking he discovered while working as a detective but was previously blocked from investigating.
Minne, along with his good friend Chris Steyn, also a former cop turned investigative journalist, authored the book together to expose high-level government officials and powerful elites who took children to Bird Island where they were abused and murdered.
Book: The Lost Boys of Bird Island by Mark Minnie
Large Riots in France Over New Fuel Taxes
November 24th, 2018Via: Daily Mail:
Huge plumes of smoke were seen on one of France’s most iconic streets today, as protesters burned large plywood sheets, chairs and other material in demonstrations against planned fuel hikes.
A water cannon and rounds of teargas were also used by riot police against thousands of French ‘Yellow Vest’ fuel protesters in Paris today as the Champs Elysee was reduced to a battlefield.
The grassroots movement is campaigning against a what is believes to be a general decline in living standards across the country, and the recent decision to raise fuel prices.
The worst violence took place on the most famous avenue in the city where a huge crowd called for President Emmanuel Macron to resign.
By 11am, clouds of tea gas covered the Champs Elysee, and especially the area close to the place de la Concorde.
Company Trying to Create 90% Efficient Solar Panel
November 24th, 2018Stories about exotic solar panels and energy storage systems come out all the time. As we all know, however, the gap between the laboratory and a product available to purchase is very large. In other words, don’t hold your breath—or delay a solar system purchase—waiting for this to happen.
That said, it’s still fun to imagine the potential of something like this.
Via: PV Magazine:
NovaSolix proposes a carbon nanotube based solar module which has the theoretical potential to reach 90% efficiency. The technology is based on a 1960s invention – the rectifying antenna (rectenna) – which is today used in radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags capture the radio waves put out by scanners and power themselves. NovaSolix aims to take that ability of converting a different portion (non-visible) of the electromagnetic spectrum, and – using carbon nanotubes tuned to the sun’s full spectrum output – collect a much broader portion of the energy in our environment.
