Monday, December 11, 2017

Bitcoins, New Nomads: Reality Check: Who’s buying the Putin calendar?

Queensland election: how Palaszczuk's Adani veto turned tide for ALP

Aussie Bitcoin exchanges now need to register with the govt


Bitcoin Could Cost Us Our Clean-Energy Future



RBS boss likens bitcoin to Dante's Inferno as currency tops $15000

Living in cars, working for Amazon: meet America’s new nomads Guardian

The richest 1 percent now owns more of the country’s wealth than at any time in the past 50 years Washington Post



There was the ever-present worry that aircraft would make war even more horrific.  Some called for the international control of aviation to prevent its misuse.  A few even advocated the complete destruction of all aircraft on the grounds that even civilian machines could be adapted for war.
…At the opposite end of the spectrum were the enthusiasts who expected that soon everyone would be able to fly their own personal aircraft…As early as 1928, Popular Mechanics predicted a car that could be turned into a helicopter, but most commentators thought the autogyro was a better bet — although it did need a short horizontal run before take-off…As late as 1971, Isaac Asimov was still expecting that VTOL [vertical take-off and landing system] machines would eventually take the place of automobiles.




Firefighters free YouTube prankster who cemented head into microwave Guardian. PlutoniumKun: 

“Paging Mr. Darwin.”


Timeline For Artificial Intelligence Risks Human Cusp  Conscious AI is coming very soon. Why should machines want humans around? Or a biosphere, for that matter?

theguardian uk: “Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s optimism about the future of the web is starting to wane in the face of a “nasty storm” of issues including the rollback of net neutrality protections, the proliferation of fake news, propaganda and the web’s increasing polarisation. The inventor of the world wide web always maintained his creation was a reflection of humanity – the good, the bad and the ugly. But Berners-Lee’s vision for an “open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries” has been challenged by increasingly powerful digital gatekeepers whose algorithms can be weaponised by master manipulators. “I’m still an optimist, but an optimist standing at the top of the hill with a nasty storm blowing in my face, hanging on to a fence,” said the British computer scientist. “We have to grit our teeth and hang on to the fence and not take it for granted that the web will lead us to wonderful things,” he said. The spread of misinformation and propaganda online has exploded partly because of the way the advertising systems of large digital platforms such as Google or Facebook have been designed to hold people’s attention. “People are being distorted by very finely trained AIs that figure out how to distract them,” said Berners-Lee…”





Reality Check: Who’s buying the Putin calendar? BBC. Regardless of whether the sales figures are fake news or not, some of these pictures are priceless


Enterprises hesitant to embrace ambiguity in the past, now want and need to be agile to meet evolving customer, technology, and market dynamics.
The post Structure your organisation to be a ‘lean, customer-centric, winning machine’ appeared first on Blog | Deloitte Australia



It’s Amazon’s World—But Do You Want to Live There?Wall Street Journal. When you’ve lost the Journal…plus the idea that Amazon is the cheapest option is often incorrect.See this comparison with Costco, for instance. 
The operative phrase is…”And before shipowners say that automation will never happen, they should visit Quingdao’s new automated container terminal that operates 24/7 with only 9 employees.” Yikes!!
It Will Take More Than Single-Payer to Make Baltimore Healthy Nation (resilc). Someone should give the Nation hell over this headline. The fact that blacks are hurt by continued ghettoization isn’t an argument against single payer. And ignores that single payer would increase mobility.
Democrats poll test class warfare message against GOPMcClatchy. Resilc “Demozzz, please get your own house in order before….”