A Hidden Amazon Fortune: Bezos Parents May Be Worth Billions
August 1st, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
It may be the most successful venture investment of all time.
In 1995, Jackie and Mike Bezos plowed $245,573 into their son’s fledgling e-commerce website, according to a prospectus two years later. It was a big gamble, Mike Bezos, the stepfather of Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, recalled onstage during a 2015 event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.
“I want you to know how risky this is,” the son told his parents, “because I want to come home at dinner for Thanksgiving and I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
He’s probably welcome to extra helpings of turkey — and all the gravy. One IPO and three stock splits later, his parents’ stake could be worth almost $30 billion today. That would make them wealthier than Microsoft Corp. co-founder Paul Allen, the 30th-richest person on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
People Who Don’t Drink Any Alcohol More Likely to Develop Dementia [???]
August 1st, 2018Via: Independent:
People who are teetotal in middle age are at greater risk of developing dementia than those who drink moderate amounts, with benefits particularly apparent in wine drinkers, a new study has found.
Researchers found abstinence was associated with a 45 per cent increase in the chances of getting dementia by early old age, compared to those who drank within recommended limits – up to a bottle and a half of wine a week.
People who drank above the 14 unit guideline were also at increased risk, the team from University College London and French institute for health, Inserm, found. Their risk of developing dementia increased incrementally the more alcohol they were consuming.
“We show that both long term alcohol abstinence and excessive alcohol consumption may increase the risk of dementia,” the authors of the study, published in the British Medical Journal, wrote. “Given the number of people living with dementia is expected to triple by 2050 and the absence of a cure, prevention is key.”
Among abstainers, the study also found increased risks of diabetes and cardiovascular disease. These are both conditions which could contribute to dementia, a collective term for the loss of memory, thinking and other cognitive functions, and the leading cause of death in the UK.
Moderate alcohol consumption has previously been shown to help protect against these conditions, by reducing cholesterol and blood pressure levels, and it may be this which is responsible for the dementia protecting benefit.
Google Plans to Launch Censored Search Engine in China
August 1st, 2018Via: The Intercept:
Google is planning to launch a censored version of its search engine in China that will blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest, The Intercept can reveal.
The project – code-named Dragonfly – has been underway since spring of last year, and accelerated following a December 2017 meeting between Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and a top Chinese government official, according to internal Google documents and people familiar with the plans.
Teams of programmers and engineers at Google have created a custom Android app, different versions of which have been named “Maotai” and “Longfei.” The app has already been demonstrated to the Chinese government; the finalized version could be launched in the next six to nine months, pending approval from Chinese officials.
San Juan: The Venezuelan City Where Nothing Works Anymore
August 1st, 2018Via: AFP:
Power blackouts are daily fare, running water comes only once a month, cash machines are empty and waiting for a bus can take hours. Welcome to San Juan de los Morros in Venezuela, where nothing works.
“They send (running) water once a month. The rest of the time we have to buy it,” moaned Florimar Nieves, a 39-year-old primary school teacher.
“There have been times where we’ve had no electricity for 24 hours.”
This is not some sort of remote village outpost but a city of 160,000 inhabitants, 150 kilometers (90 miles) southwest of the capital Caracas.
Yet every corner reeks of the stench of Venezuela’s acute economic and political crises.
Related: Venezuela’s President Admits Economy Has Failed
Defcon Hackers Find It’s Very Easy to Break Voting Machines
July 31st, 2018Just in case you haven’t known this for decades…
Via: cnet:
“The exposure of those devices to the people who do bug bounties or actually look at these kind of devices has been fairly limited,” said Brian Knopf, an internet of things security researcher for Neustar, a security analysis company. “And so Defcon is a great opportunity for those of us who hack hardware and firmware to look to these kind of devices and really answer that question, ‘Are they hackable?'”
After just about an hour and a half, the answer was an emphatic “yes.”
Dying Alone in Japan: The Industry Devoted to What’s Left Behind
July 30th, 2018Via: Bloomberg:
Han is director of Tail Project, a six-year-old company based near Tokyo that specializes in cleaning out and disposing of the property accumulated by the deceased, a service that’s increasingly in demand as Japan’s population ages and shrinks. For Han, today’s job is relatively simple. She and her crew of three started at 9 a.m., and the small truck waiting on the street below will be full and gone by 1 p.m. Time permitting, Han plans to accompany it to a trading company that buys spent belongings, packs them in overseas shipping containers, and exports them to buyers in the Philippines.
Companies such as Tail Project are increasingly necessary in a country where each year more people die with no one to mourn them. In 2017 there were 946,060 births and 1,340,433 deaths in Japan, marking a seventh consecutive year of population decline. By some estimates, Japan’s population could shrink by a third over the next 50 years, and there’s little chance the trend will reverse. The roots of the problem reach back to the country’s post-World War II boom years, which produced levels of consumption unprecedented in historically conservative Japan. But that lifestyle burst with Japan’s asset bubble in the early 1990s. The resulting economic insecurity is leading young Japanese people to put off marriage and children—or skip them altogether. What’s left is one of the world’s oldest societies, millions of junk-filled homes, and a dearth of heirs.
The World’s Only Homemade Spacesuit Is About To Get Its First Life-or-Death Test
July 29th, 2018Via: Medium:
Cameron Smith has never been to space, but this autumn he’ll get close.
In a few months, Smith and the small team of volunteers that comprise Pacific Spaceflight will travel to an undisclosed location on the West Coast where Smith will don a homemade spacesuit and attempt to pilot a hot air balloon to over 60,000 feet. Beyond this altitude?—?known as the Armstrong Limit?—?pressurized enclosures are necessary to prevent exposed body fluids, such as the moisture on your eyes or tongue, from literally boiling away. Direct exposure to the atmosphere above the Armstrong Limit results in a quick and painful death.
Smith’s flight to altitude will be his pressure suit’s first survival test. It’s the culmination of a nearly decade-long endeavor to design and build a functioning, low-cost spacesuit.
This is the story of Pacific Spaceflight, a volunteer-driven organization hellbent on making a spacesuit for the rest of us.
The $3 Billion Plan to Turn Hoover Dam Into a Giant Battery
July 29th, 2018Via: New York Times:
Hoover Dam helped transform the American West, harnessing the force of the Colorado River — along with millions of cubic feet of concrete and tens of millions of pounds of steel — to power millions of homes and businesses. It was one of the great engineering feats of the 20th century.
Now it is the focus of a distinctly 21st-century challenge: turning the dam into a vast reservoir of excess electricity, fed by the solar farms and wind turbines that represent the power sources of the future.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, an original operator of the dam when it was erected in the 1930s, wants to equip it with a $3 billion pipeline and a pump station powered by solar and wind energy. The pump station, downstream, would help regulate the water flow through the dam’s generators, sending water back to the top to help manage electricity at times of peak demand.
The net result would be a kind of energy storage — performing much the same function as the giant lithium-ion batteries being developed to absorb and release power.
Ford Starts Up $4B Autonomous Vehicle Unit
July 29th, 2018Via: Oilprice.com:
While Ford has been emphasizing trucks and SUVs over passenger cars, that may soon be changing over to a new business model.
On Tuesday, the Detroit automaker launched Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC to accelerate the growth of its autonomous vehicle business and to capitalize on market opportunities. The new subsidiary will receive a $4 billion investment to oversee all its AV research and the self-driving car network the automaker plans to launch in 2021.
In April, Ford’s new CEO, Jim Hackett, announced the company would be focusing on big sellers like the Ford F-Series pickups and would pretty much be abandoning the car business. Low gasoline prices and strong sales of trucks and SUVs helped drive the decision.
Now the global automaker is adding another move — to become a leader in electrified, autonomous ride services targeted to become its own profitable business. The company aims to be competitive in the newly emerging mobility industry, which is expected to dominate the auto industry in decades to come.
George H.W. Bush’s Former Doctor Possibly Murdered by Trained Killer
July 29th, 2018Via: Live5 News:
It’s been a week since the fatal bicycle-to-bicycle drive-by shooting of Dr. Mark Hausknecht, a renowned cardiologist who treated former President George H.W. Bush.
The Houston Police chief says his death was likely a targeted murder.
The shooting happened near a Houston construction site; a worker there said crews had been using nail guns on the day of the shooting, which someone with sinister plans may have used to their advantage.
“They used gunpowder in a shell to fire the nails into steel, so that sound itself would sound like a gun firing. Is it coincidental? I don’t know,” said Dennis Franks, a private investigator and retired FBI agent.
Then there’s the precision of the shooting. Hausknecht was shot in the torso, the upper left extremity and the head while riding his bicycle, according to the Harris County medical examiner.
The shooter was also reportedly riding a bicycle while committing the murder.
It suggests to Franks that the suspect had training.
“When the target is moving also, that takes skill,” Franks said. “It could be that just the shooter has a certain amount of training, but that’s typically a tactical training. That’s tactical, either law enforcement or military training. Two shots to the chest, one to the head. That’s usually the training when you come out – ‘boom boom’ to the chest; ‘boom,’ one to the head, in that order.”
