There's battle lines being drawn.
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Young people speaking their minds
getting so much resistance from behind

Friday, May 11, 2018

Linkee-poo is it Friday already

Sorry, lots of personal life stuff as well as the jobs.

"And a third has confirmed that a star blazing through the outskirts of the Milky Way actually hails from another galaxy altogether, the Large Magellanic Cloud." Look who's coming to dinner. (Grokked from Dan)

"Major depression is on the rise among Americans from all age groups, but is rising fastest among teens and young adults, new health insurance data shows." This is my resting shocked face.

"Tourists have been tearing up slabs of ancient rock and tossing them into a nearby reservoir, the Utah State Parks blog reported… These chunks of rust-colored sandstone are marked with the 200-million-year-old footprints of dinosaurs."

"Over the past two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant… A group of students from University of California, Berkeley and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or open a website… This month, some of those Berkeley researchers published a research paper that went further, saying they could embed commands directly into recordings of music or spoken text… 'We wanted to see if we could make it even more stealthy,' said Nicholas Carlini, a fifth-year Ph.D. student in computer security at U.C. Berkeley and one of the paper’s authors." Our robot overlords are already betraying us. (Grokked from Dan)

"The FCC announced Thursday morning that it would fine Adrian Abramovich, a Miami man who the commission said made almost 100 million spoofed robocalls over a three-month period at the end of 2016. The FCC argued that Abramovich’s operation made the phony calls to trick consumers into answering and listening to his advertising messages. The fine was based on 80,000 spoofed calls the commission had verified." I'd be lying if I said it's probably not because Ajit Pai had a bad vacation experience himself. Actually it's wanting to show he's actually doing something other than rolling back net neutrality.

"In The Coal Counties Of Central Appalachia, Will Trump's Promises Come True?" Narrator, "They won't have lasting power except in very specific industries where coal in an ingredient."

"Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin admitted that hearing Senator John McCain’s regrets about appointing her as his running mate in 2008 feels 'like a perpetual gut-punch.'" Imagine what it was like for the rest of us when there was a chance you may have been close to really getting elected.

"Mr. Giuliani took a leave of absence last month from the firm, Greenberg Traurig, one of the nation’s largest, to represent Mr. Trump. But the firm announced on Thursday that he no longer worked there as of a day earlier." Ah, yeah, Bob. The ending of that article is just fabulous, BTW.

"In addition, the administration wants to freeze (federal employee) salaries next year, and is considering a broader overhaul of civil service laws, all of which has public-employee groups nervous." But I thought the tax cuts meant we'd be swimming in all the increased revenue from the improved economy? "'We're not doing a great job of attracting young people to government,' said Thomas Ross… 'We need to do that, because the workforce is aging — 41 percent of the federal workforce is eligible to retire in five years." I guess calling them "the problem", blaming the hard working employees for all the failures of law, and labeling them as "takers" wasn't a big recruitment tool these last 30 years. So, hey, while we're facing such a crisis I know how we fix it. We show there's no chance of improving your life by working for the government (which used to be a big driver of bringing people into the middle-class) and we'll also cut your retirement benefits (probably the biggest sales point in recruitment for government workers). That aughta bring them in by the barrel-full.

No comments: