For Millions Of Americans In The Middle Of The Country, It Feels Like An Economic Depression Right Now
November 11th, 2019Via: The Economic Collapse Blog:
What do you do when you have lost all hope that things will ever turn around? It may still feel like “the economy is booming” for those at the top end of the economic food chain in big coastal cities such as New York and San Francisco, but for millions of hard working Americans in the middle of the country, talk of a “coming recession” is absolutely ludicrous because it already feels like a severe economic depression is happening right now. In America’s heartland, bankruptcies are surging, debt burdens are becoming overwhelming, and suicide rates are spiking to unprecedented levels.
Iran Discovers New Oil Field with Over 50 Billion Barrels
November 11th, 2019Via: AP – Miami Herald:
Iran has discovered a new oil field in the country’s south with over 50 billion barrels of crude, its president said Sunday, a find that could boost the country’s proven reserves by a third as it struggles to sell energy abroad over U.S. sanctions.
The announcement by Hassan Rouhani comes as Iran faces crushing American sanctions after the U.S. pulled out of its nuclear deal with world powers last year.
Inside Amazon’s Plan for Alexa to Run Your Entire Life
November 11th, 2019Comedy Gold on Cryptogon this morning.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
The creator of the famous voice assistant dreams of a world where Alexa is everywhere, anticipating your every need.
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The crux of the plan is for the voice assistant to move from passive to proactive interactions. Rather than wait for and respond to requests, Alexa will anticipate what the user might want. The idea is to turn Alexa into an omnipresent companion that actively shapes and orchestrates your life. This will require Alexa to get to know you better than ever before.
Fleeing Californians Face Increasing Hostility in Idaho
November 11th, 2019Via: Los Angeles Times:
California bashing is a cyclical sport with a long history in the heart of Idaho’s Treasure Valley. Growth spurts have more than doubled Boise’s population since the 1980 census. Four months before federal counters hit the streets here that year, a Washington Post headline crowed, “To Most Idahoans, A Plague of Locusts Is Californians.”
Richest 1% of Americans Close to Surpassing Wealth of Middle Class
November 10th, 2019Via: Bloomberg:
The U.S.’s historic economic expansion has so enriched one-percenters they now hold almost as much wealth as the middle- and upper-middle classes combined.
The top 1% of American households have enjoyed huge returns in the stock market in the past decade, to the point that they now control more than half of the equity in U.S. public and private companies, according to data from the Federal Reserve. Those fat portfolios have America’s elite gobbling up an ever-bigger piece of the pie.
The very richest had assets of about $35.4 trillion in the second quarter, or just shy of the $36.9 trillion held by the tens of millions of people who make up the 50th percentile to the 90th percentile of Americans — much of the middle and upper-middle classes.
Microsoft: Project Silica Stores Warner Bros. ‘Superman’ Movie on Quartz Glass
November 9th, 2019Via: Microsoft:
Microsoft and Warner Bros. have collaborated to successfully store and retrieve the entire 1978 iconic “Superman” movie on a piece of glass roughly the size of a drink coaster, 75 by 75 by 2 millimeters thick.
It was the first proof of concept test for Project Silica, a Microsoft Research project that uses recent discoveries in ultrafast laser optics and artificial intelligence to store data in quartz glass. A laser encodes data in glass by creating layers of three-dimensional nanoscale gratings and deformations at various depths and angles. Machine learning algorithms read the data back by decoding images and patterns that are created as polarized light shines through the glass.
The hard silica glass can withstand being boiled in hot water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, demagnetized and other environmental threats that can destroy priceless historic archives or cultural treasures if things go wrong.
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Warner Bros., which approached Microsoft after learning of the research, is always on the hunt for new technologies to safeguard its vast asset library: historic treasures like “Casablanca,” 1940s radio shows, animated shorts, digitally shot theatrical films, television sitcoms, dailies from film sets. For years, they had searched for a storage technology that could last hundreds of years, withstand floods or solar flares and that doesn’t require being kept at a certain temperature or need constant refreshing.
“That had always been our beacon of hope for what we believed would be possible one day, so when we learned that Microsoft had developed this glass-based technology, we wanted to prove it out,” said Warner Bros. Chief Technology Officer Vicky Colf.
Somewhat Related: Memory of Mankind
Ireland: AI System to Search “Near Infinite Combinations” of Materials to Improve Hydrogen Production Through Electrolysis
November 8th, 2019Via: PhysOrg:
The team aims to now use artificial intelligence to put a large number of earth-abundant metals and ligands (which glue them together to generate the catalysts) in a melting pot before assessing which of the near-infinite combinations yield the greatest promise.
In combination, what once looked like an empty canvas now looks more like a paint-by-numbers as the team has established fundamental principles for the design of ideal catalysts.
Professor Max García-Melchor added: “Given the increasingly pressing need to find green energy solutions it is no surprise that scientists have, for some time, been hunting for a magical catalyst that would allow us to split water electrochemically in a cost-effective, reliable way. However, it is no exaggeration to say that before now such a hunt was akin to looking for a needle in a haystack. We are not over the finishing line yet, but we have significantly reduced the size of the haystack and we are convinced that artificial intelligence will help us hoover up plenty of the remaining hay.”
Blackouts, Fires, High Gas Prices: Who Wants to Live in California Today?
November 8th, 2019Via: Wall Street Journal:
One crisis rolls into another in parts of Golden State; ‘If I wasn’t as old as I am, I would pack up and get the hell out’
Chinese Surveillance Goods Illegally Sold to U.S. Military
November 8th, 2019Via: AP:
A Long Island firm sold tens of millions of dollars in Chinese-made surveillance and other sensitive security equipment to customers, including the U.S. military to use on aircraft carriers, by falsely claiming the goods were manufactured in America, federal prosecutors said Thursday.
The fraud that prosecutors allege by Aventura Technologies Inc. raised “a grave concern” over cyber security, U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said.
Though there was no allegation of breaches involving the Chinese government, emails and other evidence from the investigation showed “individuals in China were well aware of what was going on,” Donoghue said.
The equipment made in China and sold by Aventura “as purportedly U.S.-made has been installed on dozens of Army, Navy and Air Force bases, Department of Energy facilities and, among other places, on Navy aircraft carriers,” prosecutors said in the criminal complaint.
Google Wants More Pentagon Work
November 7th, 2019Via: DefenseOne:
The company’s senior vice president for global affairs said Tuesday that the search giant has Pentagon contracts to work on cybersecurity, business automation, and deepfake detection — and is looking for more.
“It’s been frustrating,” said Google’s Kent Walker, referring to rising public perceptions that the company is opposed to doing national security work — and to the narrative pushed by some Google rivals, such as Palantir’s Peter Thiel and their allies in Congress, such as Rep. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri.
Speaking at the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence conference, Walker said that Google is “fully engaged in a wide variety of work with different agencies” within the Defense Department. Its work with the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center includes cybersecurity, healthcare, and business automation. It is working with DARPA to “ensure the robustness of AI” and “progress the operation of hardware” beyond the expiration of Moore’s Law.
“As we take on those kind of things, we are eager to do more, [and are] pursuing actively additional certifications” to provide cloud services for classified data and other services, he said.
