2019-03-30

Fwd: Executive orders can't be reversed by ed executive orders.... insanity!

On April 28, 2017, Trump issued an executive order reversing three memoranda and one executive order in 2015 and 2016 by then President Barack Obama withdrawing about 125 million acres of the Arctic Ocean from oil leasing. The Obama order also prevented drilling in certain parts of the Atlantic Ocean

Gleason ruled Friday that the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act only allows a president to withdraw lands from consideration by the Interior Department for leasing -- not to revoke a prior withdrawal. She ruled Congress is the only institution that can reverse a president's decision with regard to this matter, saying Trump's executive order "is unlawful, as it exceeded the President's authority."
"The wording of President Obama's 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress," Gleason said.


Bacon Weave: The Ultimate BLT Trick

2019-03-24

Italy bans unvaccinated kids from school

https://youtu.be/vyG1fpZg3Fs

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Crisis of Perceived Poverty

Indeed, by some measurements, the American millennial is a member of the wealthiest and most comfortable generation of human beings to have ever lived on this planet.

This reality is not reflected in perception, though. According to the Gallup-Sharecare Well-Being Index, which has measured how Americans feel about their overall well-being since 2008, 2017 was the worst year on record. But unlike 2009, when financial worries put significant downward pressure on the average American's self-assessment, the factors driving down happiness are emotional and psychological today. Americans are lonelier. They are more political, and both of Americas two major parties feel like they are losing cultural and electoral ground relative to their adversaries. They are economically insecure, even though more Americans are employed and the number of Americans in the labor market is stable—defying the expectation that labor force participation rates would decline as the Baby Boomer generation retires. In the aggregate, Americans are not worse off than they were a decade ago, but many of them think they are.

2019-03-12

How Democrats Can Beat Trump in 2020 - The Atlantic

If Trump's only hope for winning a second term turns on his ability to paint us as socialists, we shouldn't play to type.

That's not to say Democrats should abandon our priorities. We should work hard to combat climate change. We should fight to expand health-care coverage and reduce costs. We should find ways to make the tax code more progressive. But we shouldn't fall for Trump's sucker punch.

2019-03-09

The Verge: The US Air Force’s jet-powered robotic wingman is like something out of a video game

The need for pilots are diminishing.

The US Air Force's jet-powered robotic wingman is like something out of a video game
The Verge

The XQ-58A Valkyrie is designed to operate as a 'loyal wingman' Read the full story


2019-03-04

How plastic from clothing gets into seafood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beUhzQAkanM

I am wondering how long it takes plastics to break down?  I always thought that anything organic small enough would be broken down by bacteria.

Also, some chemicals used to make plastics are carcinogenic.

I have seen in the past how ships would dump their garbage at sea, and I wonder if this is still a common practice?

2019-03-03

Les Moonves - Wikipedia

The next month, it was revealed Moonves had been involved in paying a $9.5 million settlement to actress Eliza Dushku, who claimed she was written out of her starring role on CBS drama Bull as retaliation for reporting sexual harassment by co-star Michael Weatherly;

The future of humanity

I see a danger to the future existence of the human race, and it is the kind of thing that people should think about and prepare for now. Sometime in the next 50 years machines will be smarter than people. There are major technical hurdles to overcome, such as the inevitable end of Moore's Law, which probably mean that it is not right around the corner or even within the next couple of decades, but it will happen, and easily within this century. And if for some reason it does happen within the next couple of decades then that means the results will be upon us that much sooner.

We can predict what will happen next and follow it to its logical conclusion, which is a future without people.

As machines become smarter, people will become increasingly reliant on technology. We can see that already with smartphones, which only have been with us for barely over a decade. Eventually machines will do all the heavy mental work, which will make our lives easier, but also make us more dependent.

And since we will be so dependent on the machines, we will start incorporating them into us. This will evolve over time until we are no longer purely human, but human machine hybrids. Perhaps when your biological brain dies, the machine part of you will be able to continue with all your memories intact. Maybe it would have an artificial body or maybe it will exist in a virtual world. It is likely that some would prefer to live in a virtual world where they can do more things than they could in the real world. Taken to the eventual extreme, our descendants would no longer bother with biological bodies and prefer to exist as machine intelligences either in the real world or in virtual ones.

The evolutionary pressure will be against purely biological people. Having machines incorporated into you will make you more productive, competitive, and increase your quality of life.

The future I describe might be long distant, but if it is not the future we want for the human race then we should start thinking about it now. Maybe we could have a Pure Human movement that would prohibit the merging of machine intelligence with human intelligence? This could be roughly analogous to the current legal ban on human cloning, because we very likely have the technology right now to clone humans, but countries ban it because they are uneasy about the implications of where that might take us.

However, we might not be able to prevent it. Linking machines with human intelligence is likely to happen in such small steps that we will easily adjust to it. It is sort of happening already with our dependence on computers. It could also start as a series of military applications where having the most effective soldiers determines who wins the wars. And once the genie is out of the bottle, we will never get it back in.

Best wishes,

John Coffey