Even Oil Companies Say Electric Car Boom Is Coming; Oil Demand Peaks in 2020s or 2030s
May 3rd, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
Electric cars are coming fast — and that’s not just the opinion of carmakers anymore. Total SA, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, is now saying EVs may constitute almost a third of new-car sales by the end of the next decade.
The surge in battery powered vehicles will cause demand for oil-based fuels to peak in the 2030s, Total Chief Energy Economist Joel Couse said at Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s conference in New York on Tuesday. EVs will make up 15 percent to 30 percent of new vehicles by 2030, after which fuel “demand will flatten out,” Couse said. “Maybe even decline.”
Couse’s projection for electric cars is the highest yet by a major oil company and exceeds BNEF’s own forecast, said Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
“That’s big,” McKerracher said. “That’s by far the most aggressive we’ve seen by any of the majors.”
Other oil companies have been trimming their long-term forecasts for oil demand. Royal Dutch Shell Plc Chief Executive Officer Ben van Beurden said in March that oil demand may peak in the late 2020s. It set up a business unit to identify the clean technologies where it could be most profitable.
UN Using Ethereum Blockchain and Iris Scanning Technologies to Distribute Funds to Refugees
May 1st, 2017Via: CoinDesk:
Starting today, the United Nations (UN) will begin distributing funds to thousands of people in Jordan as part of a trial using the ethereum blockchain.
For the next month, cryptographically unique coupons representing an undisclosed number of Jordanian dinars will be sent to dozens of shops in five refugee camps across the nation. Then, instead of using a smartphone or a paper wallet to access to the funds, recipients will rely on yet another emerging technology.
Eye-scanning hardware made by London-based IrisGuard, already in place to verify the identity of some of the 500,000 recipients currently receiving traditional aid, is being repurposed to grant access to coupons.
Multiple cashiers at each of the shops will then use technology co-developed by the UN Innovation Accelerator, ethereum development startup Parity Technologies and blockchain big data firm Datarella to redeem the entitlements at the point of checkout.
From the ground up, the solution was designed to scale, not just within Jordan, but beyond its borders to some of the 80 other countries served by the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP).
Research Credit: RB
Facebook Conducted Research to Target Emotionally Vulnerable and Insecure Youth
May 1st, 2017Via: news.com.au:
FACEBOOK has come under fire over revelations it is targeting potentially vulnerable youths who “need a confidence boost” to facilitate predatory advertising practices.
The allegation was revealed this morning by The Australian which obtained internal documents from the social media giant which reportedly show how Facebook can exploit the moods and insecurities of teenagers using the platform for the potential benefit of advertisers.
The confidential document dated this year detailed how by monitoring posts, comments and interactions on the site, Facebook can figure out when people as young as 14 feel “defeated”, “overwhelmed”, “stressed”, “anxious”, “nervous”, “stupid”, “silly”, “useless”, and a “failure”.
Such information gathered through a system dubbed sentiment analysis could be used by advertisers to target young Facebook users when they are potentially more vulnerable.
While Google is the king of the online advertising world, Facebook is the other major player which dominates the industry worth about $80 billion last year.
But Facebook is not one to rest on its laurels. The leaked document shows it has been honing the covert tools its uses to gain useful psychological insights on young Australian and New Zealanders in high school and tertiary education.
Trump-Epstein Links
April 30th, 2017Via: Corbett Report:
Nonsupported Windows Operating Systems Running on Pentagon Computers
April 30th, 2017Via: DefenseOne:
Building and electrical systems, HVAC equipment and other critical infrastructure laden with internet-connected sensors often run on operating systems unsupported by vendors. Even as the Pentagon pushes to upgrade its information systems to Windows 10 by this year, its critical infrastructure remains woefully behind.
“About 75 percent of the devices that are control systems are on Windows XP or other nonsupported operating systems,” said Daryl Haegley, program manager for the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations and Environment.
Haegley, speaking Thursday at an event hosted by OSIsoft, said the assessment was based on visits to 15 military sites. Microsoft stopped providing support for Windows XP in 2014. Haegley, however, said some of the systems that run DOD facilities are far older.
“A lot of these systems are still Windows 95 or 98, and that’s OK—if they’re not connected to the internet,” Haegley added.
Increasingly, though, sensors in these kinds of systems do connect to the internet, or at least newer components of them do.
Why Deutsche Bundesbank Had to Promise to Leave 1200 Tons of Gold in New York
April 30th, 2017Via: Norbert Häring:
With big fanfare, Deutsche Bundesbank announced on February 9 that ahead of plan they had repatriated 300 tons of gold from New York. This put a positive spin on a rather disturbing fact –1236 tons of gold that is supposed to be part of Germany’s currency reserve will continue to be kept outside of German control in New York – indefinitely.
The German gold in question is being kept in storage at the New York Fed, an institution that is owned and controlled by Wall-Street-banks, in a country, whose current president considers it an imposition that the law and so-called judges tell him what he is allowed to do and not allowed to do.
I am not criticizing the Bundesbank for storing 37 percent of Germany’s official gold in in a place there it has no control over it. It seems clear that they negotiated hard with the US and acted rather shrewdly. Their negotiation position was much enhanced in 2012 by the leakage of a report of the German Court of Auditors, which was very critical of the conditions under which German gold was being held in New York. This created public and political pressure on the Bundesbank to renegotiate and to get that gold out of New York. At the same time, the US-side could hardly afford to snub this demand, because there was lots of speculation, even in the US, that something was amiss with the gold reserves of the US and the rest of the world that were stored in the country. The way in which the official gold of the US, and the gold held in custody for other countries, is guarded against public scrutiny and shielded from its owners, gives fodder to any number of conspiracy theories. Had the New York Fed refused to let a foreign central bank, which was under such obvious pressure, retrieve some of their gold, these conspiracy theories around official gold might very well have become intense enough to damage trust in the dollar.
Musk: Level 5 Autonomy About Two Years Away
April 29th, 2017Via: Electrek:
The best timeline he mentioned was based on a coast-to-coast demo drive from California to New York without the driver touching the wheel.
During his TED talk yesterday, Musk reiterated that this demo drive is still planned for 2017:
“November or December of this year, we should be able to go from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York, no controls touched at any point during the entire journey.”
But Musk also said that while the driver wouldn’t have to touch the controls, he doesn’t think that it would be at a level where someone could just fall asleep at the wheel. When asked when he thinks that will be, he said about 2 years away.
Banished for Bleeding
April 28th, 2017Do you ever wonder if this planet exists to serve as form of sick entertainment for someone or something?
You know, is someone or something leaning back on a couch and tuning in to The Planet Earth Show on the Cosmic Schadenfreude Channel?
Via: BBC:
After four days in the hut, the village women bathe in a stream an hour’s walk away and are “purified” with cow urine.
Only then can they return to normal life.
“Cashless Society Getting Closer”
April 27th, 2017Via: Reuters:
More than a third of Europeans and Americans would be happy to go without cash and rely on electronic forms of payment if they could, and at least 20 percent already pretty much do so, a study showed on Wednesday.
The study, which was conducted in 13 European countries, the United States and Australia, also found that in many places where cash is most used, people are among the keenest to ditch it.
Overall, 34 percent of respondents in Europe and 38 percent in the United States said they would be willing to go cash-free, according to the survey conducted by Ipsos for the ING bank website eZonomics.
Twenty-one percent and 34 percent in Europe and the United States, respectively, said they already rarely use cash.
Amazon Launches Surveillance System, Calls it “A Hands-Free Camera and Style Assistant”
April 27th, 2017
Hey all you dumbshits who expose SMB to the Internet on unpatched Windows boxes: Your new, “hands-free camera and style assistant” is here. *wink* *wink*
Via: The Verge:
Amazon today announced a new device for the Echo family: the Echo Look, a “style assistant” camera that helps catalog your outfits and rates your look based on “machine learning algorithms with advice from fashion specialists.” Imagine it as a smart mirror of sorts — you can talk to the Echo Look to take full-length photos or short videos to check out your outfit from seldom-seen angles.
The Echo Look first leaked as a “security camera” back in March, and the photo matches exactly with what Amazon has announced today. The device comes with a built-in LED light, a microphone, and a base mount for you to attach it to the wall or leave it freestanding. It will also work with a companion app that has a Style Check feature to compare two outfits and rate which is better. As an aside, the Amazon iOS app offers a similar feature under the Programs and Features menu, if you don’t want to buy the Echo Look. The Echo version of the feature gives you a percentage rating of outfits based on a mix of algorithm and stylist opinions, while Outfit Compare on the Amazon app picks which outfit of the two it likes better.
Like the original Echo speaker, you can ask Alexa on the Echo Look to read you news, play music, or get traffic estimates. Amazon says it will continue to add Alexa skills for the Echo Look as well.
…
And while it’s not designed to be a security camera, it does seem like it has enough components to double as one that could periodically snap photos while you’re away from home. We’ll check out the hardware on this more when we are able to snag a review unit. For now, if you do decide to buy it, it’s probably best to not get dressed in front of it.
