New York: Dumpster Bomb Rocks Chelsea, Injuring 29; Second Device Found Nearby
September 18th, 2016Via: New York Post:
A “deafening’’ explosion rocked Chelsea Saturday night, injuring 29 people, blowing out scores of windows and forcing the evacuation of at least two buildings.
The blast went off in a 4-by-4-by-3-foot construction Dumpster outside the Townhouse Inn of Chelsea at 131 W. 23d St.
Mayor de Blasio called the explosion an “intentional act,’’ but not believed to be connected to terrorism.
But tensions only rose when, three hours after the blast, a second device was found four blocks away — a pressure cooker that an early investigation found was likely also a bomb.
“The bomb squad believes it’s real,” a police source with knowledge of the investigation told The Post of that second device, found at 27th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues. The cooker was safely removed from the scene by NYPD.
The strength of the W. 23rd St. blast sent the Dumpster flying from the north side of the street to the south sidewalk, and it landed without hitting anyone or anything, police sources told The Post.
One of the injuries “may be considered serious,” de Blasio said. That victim suffered a puncture wound. The vast majority of those injured, however, suffered scrapes and abrasions from flying debris.
‘The Going Rate for Self-Driving Talent Is $10 Million Per Person’
September 17th, 2016The business of eliminating millions of jobs is today’s version of the moonshot or the Manhattan Project.
Via: Recode:
“Uber has just bought a half-a-year-old company [Otto] with 70 employees for almost $700 million,” Thrun said. “If you look at GM, they spent $1 billion on its acquisition of Cruise. These are mostly talent acquisitions. The going rate for talent these days is $10 million.”
Thrun means per person, a lofty number which is likely to be getting even larger with time and even more demand.
Related: Self Driving Trucks Will Wipe Out Millions of Jobs
The U.S. War on Terror Has Cost $5 Trillion and Increased Terrorism by 6,500%
September 16th, 2016Via: Antimedia:
According to a report released by Dr. Neta Crawford, professor of political science at Brown University, spending by the United States Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Veteran Affairs since 9/11 is now close to $5 trillion USD. Before we have the chance to ask how a country that has racked up over $19.3 trillion USD in debt can spend $5 trillion USD on war, the focus of this article is to ask: What has all of this spending achieved?
Tesla Wins Massive Contract to Help Power the California Grid
September 16th, 2016Via: Bloomberg:
Tesla just won a bid to supply grid-scale power in Southern California to help prevent electricity shortages following the biggest natural gas leak in U.S. history. The Powerpacks, worth tens of millions of dollars, will be operational in record time—by the end of this year.
Tesla Motors Inc. will supply 20 megawatts (80 megawatt-hours) of energy storage to Southern California Edison as part of a wider effort to prevent blackouts by replacing fossil-fuel electricity generation with lithium-ion batteries. Tesla’s contribution is enough to power about 2,500 homes for a full day, the company said in a blog post on Thursday. But the real significance of the deal is the speed with which lithium-ion battery packs are being deployed.
“The storage is being procured in a record time frame,” months instead of years, said Yayoi Sekine, a battery analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “It highlights the maturity of advanced technologies like energy storage to be contracted as a reliable resource in an emergency situation.”
…
In total megawatt hours, the Tesla batteries will make up the biggest lithium-ion battery project in the world, though it will soon be surpassed by others under contract, according to data compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
More: Addressing Peak Energy Demand with the Tesla Powerpack
Ford to Move All Small-Car Production to Mexico from U.S.
September 15th, 2016Via: CNBC:
Ford Motor Co Chief Executive Officer Mark Fields said on Wednesday that all of the company’s small-car production would be leaving U.S. plants and heading to lower-cost Mexico, drawing another rebuke from Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
“We will have migrated all of our small-car production to Mexico and out of the United States,” over the next two to three years, Fields told Wall Street analysts at an investor conference hosted by the automaker.
Facebook Censored Live Stream Video Posted by Dakota Pipeline Protesters
September 15th, 2016Via: The Verge:
Facebook has admitted to censoring a video posted by activists protesting the Dakota Access pipeline, with the social network blaming the removal on its automated spam filter. The live stream video, published on Tuesday by the media collective Unicorn Riot, showed police arresting around two dozen protesters at a Dakota pipeline site. Unicorn Riot published a link to the live stream on its Facebook page, but the URL was blocked and other users were unable to share it. The link has since been restored, and a Facebook spokesperson apologized for the removal in a statement to Motherboard.
In a statement to Antimedia, a member of Unicorn Riot said that the video was censored “shortly before two of our journalists were arrested onsite,” adding that posts and comments that contained the URL “triggered popup security alerts.” According to the collective, Facebook’s debugger said that the link violated the site’s “community standards.”
U.S. Among Most Depressed Countries in the World
September 15th, 2016Via: U.S. News and World Report:
The U.S. is one of the most depressed countries in the world, according to the World Health Organization.
In terms of quality years of life lost due to disability or death – a widely adopted public health metric that measures the overall burden of disease – the U.S. ranked third for unipolar depressive disorders, just after India and China.
Pittsburgh: Fears of Uber’s Human Drivers Become a Reality
September 14th, 2016Obviously, the mass deployment of this technology is still at least a few years out, but I’d be very surprised if it didn’t happen within a decade in major cities.
I think LIDAR will have to be used. Currently, LIDAR is very expensive and cumbersome. Once the MIT/DARPA LIDAR-on-a-chip gadget emerges in bulk, watch out.
I don’t yet see how the George Hotz thing could possibly be a reality by the end of the year, but watch this space…
Via: Recode:
It turns out, with all apologies to Philip K. Dick, robot cars have no need to dream of electric sheep and can drive all night long. And this sci-fi-to-reality moment that many Uber drivers have feared was coming is now here:
The ride-hailing juggernaut’s customers can now hail a self-driving Uber in Pittsburgh.
But the debut of robot cars should not come as a surprise either, since Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick predicted in 2014 in an interview at the Code conference that the end of human drivers was eventually nigh.
HUD Video of Auto-GCAS Saving Unconscious F-16 Pilot
September 13th, 2016Via: Aviation Week:
This newly declassified video footage from the head-up-display of a U.S. Air Force Arizona Air National Guard F-16 records the dramatic moment when its unconscious pilot is saved from certain death by the aircraft’s Automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System (Auto-GCAS).
Lawmaker Issues Subpoena to FBI for Clinton Probe Records
September 13th, 2016Via: The Olympian:
A senior House Republican on Monday escalated the GOP’s battle with the FBI over its decision not to recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email system, serving a top FBI official with a subpoena for the investigation’s full case file.
The move during a congressional hearing by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, underscores mounting frustration within the GOP over what Republicans see as stonewalling by the FBI over the Clinton probe. Chaffetz and other Republicans on the panel said the bureau has withheld summaries of interviews with witnesses and unnecessarily blacked out material from documents sent last month.
