Archive for April, 2019
Walmart Experiments with AI to Monitor Stores in Real Time
April 25th, 2019Enable face recognition so the system can tempt Bubba with three cents off his next bag of Doritos with alerts on his phone as he’s standing in front of the chips. Via: AP: Inside one of Walmart’s busiest Neighborhood Market grocery stores, high resolution cameras suspended from the ceiling point to a table of bananas. […]
$220,000 For Every Man, Woman And Child – America Is Now 72 Trillion Dollars In Debt
April 25th, 2019Via: Economic Collapse: Are you ready to cough up $220,000 to pay your share? One of the reasons why a day of reckoning for the U.S. economy is inevitable is because we are in way too much debt. The 22 trillion dollar debt that the federal government has accumulated gets most of the attention, but […]
Amazon Automatically Tracks and Fires Warehouse Workers for ‘Productivity’
April 25th, 2019Via: The Verge: The documents also show a deeply automated tracking and termination process. “Amazon’s system tracks the rates of each individual associate’s productivity,” according to the letter, “and automatically generates any warnings or terminations regarding quality or productivity without input from supervisors.” (Amazon says supervisors are able to override the process.)
Facebook Expects to be Fined Up to $5 Billion Over Privacy Scandals
April 25th, 2019In other news: Facebook’s new chief lawyer helped write the Patriot Act. Via: MIT Technology Review: To most of us (and to the FTC), $3 billion to $5 billion is a whopping sum of money. But Facebook, which earns $56 billion in revenue every year, can potentially just write it off as a cost of […]
Stainless Steel Insulated Coffee Mug 20 oz
April 24th, 2019I was so thrilled to find this, I thought I’d share it with you folks. Normal-sized coffee cups feel like thimbles to me. I’ve found a couple of larger mugs to use over the years, but my children have broken them all. I went looking for a large, double walled, stainless steel mug. Ahhh, my […]
Ford Motor to Put $500 Million Into Electric Vehicle Startup Rivian
April 24th, 2019Panic: With Ford, who wants to increasingly focus on milking truck profits, it could get ugly over there in a couple of years when Rivian and Tesla enter the pickup truck market. Ford only has a hybrid F-150 planned for 2020. Via: Reuters: Ford Motor Co said on Wednesday it will invest $500 million in […]
Amazon’s Alexa Reviewers Can Access Customers’ Home Addresses
April 24th, 2019Via: Bloomberg: An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program. The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. The […]
The Pentagon Is Investing in Space Robots to Repair Satellites
April 24th, 2019Via: Nextgov: The Pentagon’s research office wants to send robots into space to inspect and repair the nation’s satellites. Today the U.S. has more than 400 military, government and commercial satellites circling the globe in geosynchronous Earth orbit, or GEO, a celestial path about 22,000 miles above the ground. These high-altitude satellites are ideal for […]
DHS Plan for Face Scanning at Airports Sparks Alarm
April 24th, 2019Via: The Hill: Lawmakers and civil liberties advocates are calling on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to halt plans to begin using facial recognition technology on nearly all departing air passengers within the next four years. The agency’s plan has reignited the fight over the sensitive technology. Critics say facial recognition technology is not […]
U.S. Navy Drafting New Guidelines for Reporting UFOs
April 24th, 2019Via: Politico: The U.S. Navy is drafting new guidelines for pilots and other personnel to report encounters with “unidentified aircraft,” a significant new step in creating a formal process to collect and analyze the unexplained sightings — and destigmatize them. The previously unreported move is in response to a series of sightings of unknown, highly […]
