‘Unprecedented’ Problems with Bank of America’s Web Site
October 6th, 2011Customers closing accounts after the announcement of the $5 per month EFT card fee?
There’s a bit of a movement underway to let Bank of America know how customers feel about that $5 fee. People are either emptying their accounts of funds, or closing their accounts completely. I’m very happy to say that my balance is now $26. haha.
Via: ComputerWorld:
The six days of online brownouts and slowdowns that have plagued Bank of America’s website are “unprecedented,” a leading Internet and mobile cloud monitoring service said today.
“I don’t think we’ve seen as significant and as long an outage with any bank. And I’ve been with Keynote for 16 years now,” said Shawn White, vice president of operations for web monitoring service Keynote Systems. “It’s particularly shocking precisely because these banks know how critical it is for their online customers to be able to access their bank account. It’s so personal and dear to them.”
Bank of America (BofA) said its Web and mobile services have not been hit by hacking or denial-of-service attacks. But the nation’s largest bank would not disclose what’s causing its online problems.
The bank also said it has substituted its standard homepage with an alternate one to help in user navigation.
“I just want to be really clear. Every indication [is that] recent performance issues have not been the result of hacking, malware or denial of service,” said BofA spokeswoman Tara Burke. “We’ve had some intermittent or sporadic slowness. We don’t break out the root cause.”
It’s Man vs. Machine and Man Is Losing
October 6th, 2011More machines, fewer workers.
Via: Wall Street Journal:
In the man-versus-machine competition, machine is winning. And it’s not just Watson beating humans on “Jeopardy.”
Since the recession ended, businesses had increased their real spending on equipment and software by a strong 26%, while they have added almost nothing to their payrolls.
Against the Institution: A Warning for ‘Occupy Wall Street’
October 6th, 2011Via: Andrew Gavin Marshall:
While I fully endorse the efforts and actions of the Occupy Wall Street protests, now emerging internationally, there are concerns which need to be addressed and kept in mind as the movement moves forward.
The process through which a potentially powerful movement may be co-opted and controlled is slight and subtle. If Occupy Wall Street hopes to strive for the 99%, it must not submit to the 1%, in any capacity.
The Occupy movement must prevent what happened to the Tea Party movement to happen to it. Whatever ideological stance you may have, the Tea Party movement started as a grass roots movement, largely a result of anti-Federal Reserve protests. They were quickly co-opted with philanthropic money and political party endorsements.
For the Occupy Movement to build up and become a true force for change, it must avoid and reject the organizational and financial ‘contributions’ of institutions: be they political parties, non-profits, or philanthropic foundations. The efforts are subtle, but effective: they seek to organize, professionalize, and institutionalize a movement, push forward the issues they desire, which render the movement useless for true liberation, as these are among the very institutions the movement should be geared against.
This is not simply about “Wall Street,” this is about POWER. Those who have power, and those who don’t. When those who have power offer a hand in your struggle, their other hand holds a dagger. Remain grassroots, remain decentralized, remain outside and away from party politics, remain away from financial dependence. Freedom is not merely in the aim, it’s in the action.
The true struggle is not left versus right, democrat versus republican, liberal versus conservative, or libertarian versus socialist. The true struggle is that of people against the institution: the State, the banks, the central banking system, the corporation, the international financial institutions, the military, the political parties, the mainstream media, philanthropic foundations, think tanks, university, education, psychiatry, the legal system, the church, et. al.
The transfer of power from one institution to another does not solve the crisis of our ‘institutional society,’ whereby a few have come to dominate so much, to concentrate so much power at the expense of everyone else having so little. True liberation will result only from opposition to ‘the institution’ as an entity. Placating power from one institution to another renders resistance ineffective. The power structures must be discredited, and power must be distributed to the people, through voluntary associations, communal groupings, and people-powered (and people-funded!) initiatives.
In order to survive as a movement, money will become a necessity. Do not turn to the non-profits and philanthropic foundations for support. The philanthropies, which fund and created the non-profits and NGOs, were themselves created to engage in ‘social engineering’: to ‘manufacture consent’ among the governed, and create consensus among the governors. The philanthropies (particularly those of Carnegie, Ford, and Rockefeller) fund social movements and protest organizations so as to steer them into directions which are safe for the elites. The philanthropies are themselves run by the elite, founded by bankers and industrialists striving to preserve their place at the top of the social structure in the midst of potentially revolutionary upheaval. As the president of the Ford Foundation once said, “Everything the foundation does is to make the world safe for capitalism.”
Money from philanthropies will organize the movement into a more professionalized entity, will direct its efforts around the promotion of legalistic reform, making slight changes to the system’s symptoms, promoting particular legislation, rallying around very specific issues removed from their global historical context. The effect is to turn anti-system revolutionaries into legalistic reformers. With such funding, movement organizers are drawn into the world of NGOs, international conferences, international institutions, aid agencies, and mainstream political participation. The leaders of the movement become professionalized and successful, both in prestige and finances. Thus, their own personal position becomes dependent upon promoting reform, not revolution; on maintaining the system (with minor changes to the aesthetic), not moving against it. The movement itself, then, would be institutionalized.
Flashback: Citigroup Plutonomy Memos
October 6th, 2011I was pretty sure that I’d posted these long ago, but I’m not finding them in my archives. In short: The rich are getting richer, so Citi advised buying a basket of stocks of companies that cater to very wealthy people.
Via: Monkeyfister:
…the rich are the dominant source of income, wealth and demand in plutonomy countries such as the UK, US, Canada and Australia, countries that have an economically liberal approach to wealth creation. We believe that the actions of the rich and the proportion of rich people in an economy helps explain many of the nasty conundrums and fears that have vexed our equity clients recently, such as global imbalances or why high oil prices haven’t destroyed consumer demand. Plutonomy, we think explains these problems away, and tells us not to worry about them. If we shouldn’t worry, the risk premia on equity markets may be too high.
Secondly, we believe that the rich are going to keep getting richer in coming years, as capitalists (the rich) get an even bigger share of GDP as a result, principally, of globalization. We expect the global pool of labor in developing economies to keep wage inflation in check, and profit margins rising – good for the wealth of capitalists, relatively bad for developed market unskilled/outsource-able labor. This bodes well for companies selling to or servicing the rich. We expect our Plutonomy basket of stocks – which has performed well relative to the S&P 500 index over the last 20 years – to continue performing well in future.
Research Credit: skippy the bush kangaroo
Geek Fight Club
October 5th, 2011Uppercut from California is a place. on Vimeo.
‘Sesame Street’ Unveils Muppet to Teach Kids About Hunger
October 5th, 2011Via: Entertainment Weekly:
Sesame Street has a new muppet who is hungry for more than just cookies.
The iconic kids show is set to unveil a new impoverished puppet named Lily, whose family faces an ongoing struggle with hunger issues. Lily will be revealed in a one-hour Sesame Street primetime special, Growing Hope Against Hunger, which is being sponsored by Walmart. The special will star country singer Brad Paisley and his wife Kimberly Williams Paisley, as well as the Sesame Street Muppets.
…
The special will share the stories of real-life families to raise awareness of hunger issues in the United States, as well as strategies that have helped these families find food. The United States Department of Agriculture estimates that 17 million American children — nearly 1 in 4 — have limited or uncertain access to affordable and nutritious food.
Italy Downgraded Three Notches
October 5th, 2011Via: Guardian:
Italy’s sovereign debt rating has been cut for the second time in as many weeks, with ratings agency Moody’s citing “sustained and non-cyclical erosion of confidence” as it slashed its forecast for the country.
In a report released after US stock markets closed on Tuesday, Moody’s downgraded Italy’s government bond ratings from Aa2 to A2 with a “negative outlook”, suggesting further cuts could be to come. The move threatens to increase Italy’s cost of borrowing, and will add yet more pressure to European finance ministers now wrestling with a financial crisis that has spread across the continent.
Introducing Siri: DARPA’s Ghost in Apple’s Machine
October 5th, 2011So their eyes are growing hazy
cos they want to turn it on
so their minds are soft and lazy, well…
give em what they want
—10,000 Maniacs – Candy Everybody Wants
One of the stocks that I used to kick around in the 1990s was that of a now long dead company called General Magic. Back then, I looked into the company and learned that it was, in essence, divested from Apple in 1990. It was made up of former Apple employees and Apple held 10% of the company.
Apple has been thinking about the post PC era (that we’re actually entering now, according to them) since the 1980s. Here’s Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept from 1987:
This wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so they spun it off into General Magic.
If you’ve seen Apple’s Siri in action, that’s the type of thing that General Magic wanted to do back in the 1990s. With the old Portico system, users called into the service, rather than the service running on the phone, as is the case with Siri. Here’s an almost unwatchable promo for General Magic’s Portico product (circa 1997):
If you’re interested in Siri, definitely read Wired’s, Bill and Andy’s Excellent Adventure II from 1994. The point is that Apple and Apple alumni have been beating around this bush for a very long time.
Flash forward to what Apple unveiled yesterday:
Now, what’s in a name?
Look closely at the name: Siri. What letters stand out?
See it yet?
S i R I.
SRI = Stanford Research Institute.
It turns out that Apple’s Siri used to be SRI’s Siri, and SRI’s Siri is… Are you ready? A spinoff of DARPA’s PAL (Perceptive Assistant that Learns) program, which SRI called CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes).
This is SRI’s CALO information page:
SRI International is leading the development of new software that could revolutionize how computers support decision-makers.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under its Perceptive Assistant that Learns (PAL) program, has awarded SRI the first two phases of a five-year contract to develop an enduring personalized cognitive assistant. DARPA expects the PAL program to generate innovative ideas that result in new science, new and fundamental approaches to current problems, and new algorithms and tools, and to yield new technology of significant value to the military.
SRI has dubbed its new project CALO, for Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes. The name was inspired by the Latin word “calonis”, which means “soldier’s servant”. The goal of the project is to create cognitive software systems, that is, systems that can reason, learn from experience, be told what to do, explain what they are doing, reflect on their experience, and respond robustly to surprise.
The software, which will learn by interacting with and being advised by its users, will handle a broad range of interrelated decision-making tasks that have in the past been resistant to automation. It will have the capability to engage in and lead routine tasks, and to assist when the unexpected happens. To focus the research on real problems and to ensure the software meets requirements such as privacy, security, and trust, the CALO project researchers will themselves use the technology during its development.
SRI is leading the multidisciplinary CALO project team, and, beyond participating in the research program, is also responsible for overall project direction and management and the development of prototypes.
Here’s more from Venture Beat, Shadowy Government Project Spins Off Siri to Help Direct Your Affairs:
Conspiracy theorists will love this one: A computerized assistant that can help you manage your day to day life, built atop an artificial intelligence platform developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the United States’ internal military research group. Siri, the startup building the assistant, is today announcing $8.5 million in venture funding.
As befits its spookish origins, Siri isn’t saying a great deal yet about what it will do. Co-founder Dag Kittlaus, who licensed technology from DARPA’s CALO (Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes) project, calls it “a smarter, more personal interaction paradigm for the Internet.” Unfortunately, that’s about as specific as calling Google “a thing that finds stuff.” Those who want a sneak peek at Siri will instead have to look to CALO.
So here’s what we know about CALO: It’s a concerted effort to take the first real step toward artificial intelligence, with five years of work and $200 million in funding to date. Rather than being immediately useful, it learns about the user over time, much like a real personal assistant would. As it learns, it becomes capable of making logical associations and initiating its own actions.
Siri, Apple's Implementation of DARPA Sponsored Artificial Intelligence Technology
People are going to pay a lot of money to have their asses tracked to within a couple of meters by a device running a civilian version of DARPA’s soldier’s servant software.
The most disturbing aspect of this is not what the iPhone 4s is going to be phoning home to Apple (which is unknown), or the invasion of The Complex into most aspects of our lives, but the fact that, in general, people would think that you were nuts for having these reservations at all. I mean, what could possibly be wrong with re-purposed DoD AI software running on a mass market consumer device that persistently reveals the user’s location to the state?
Ah well, give em what they want.
Denmark Introduces ‘Fat Tax’ on Foods High in Saturated Fat
October 4th, 2011Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig
Via: ABC:
Denmark has introduced what’s believed to be the world’s first fat food tax, applying a surcharge to foods with more than 2.3 percent saturated fats, in an effort to combat obesity and heart disease.
Danes hoarded food before the tax went into effect Saturday, emptying grocery store shelves. Some butter lovers may even resort to stocking up during trips abroad.
The new tax of 16 kroner ($2.90) per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of saturated fat in a product will be levied on foods like butter, milk, cheese, pizza, oils and meat.
Japan to Remove Some Restrictions on Fukushima Evacuation Zone
October 4th, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
Japan’s government may lift restrictions this week on some areas outside the exclusion zone around the crippled Fukushima nuclear where residents had been told to prepare for evacuation.
The so-called Emergency Evacuation Preparation Zone was set up in April for areas 10 kilometers beyond the 20 kilometer (12.6 mile) no-go zone. The area includes five cities, towns and villages where residents were allowed to stay after the nuclear accident on the condition they were prepared to evacuate at any time if radiation levels spiked.
…
“The government may be easing restrictions because concern about reactor explosions has diminished,” Tetsuji Imanaka, professor of nuclear engineering in Kyoto University, said by phone today. “Radiation contamination of the land hasn’t decreased so far.”
