Holly Leonard has been homeless on and off for years. There was a stint in jail and, more recently, a period in a women’s homeless shelter, while her husband slept in their car.
But last month, the two moved into a one-bedroom apartment in San Jose, Calif., complete with a small garden. Ms. Leonard found it on Craigslist while using her Nexus 5 smartphone — a donation from Google that she got from a San Jose nonprofit called Community Technology Alliance.
“People don’t put out ‘for rent’ signs anymore, so the Internet is the best way,” Ms. Leonard said. “You can’t even go get a paper application for a lot of things. You can’t get a job unless you get online.
“Before I got a free phone, it was like you’re almost nonexistent.”
The smartphone giveaway program, though small, typifies the way Bay Area tech companies have started to respond to the glaring homelessness problem right outside their luxurious company campuses: not by donating clothes or serving food, but by using technology.
The documentary makes clear that the Green Movement is a "big business" not a "big cause".
It is not only a big business for those directly involved in the Green Movement like solar and wind companies but it is also big business for the media; the politicians, their friends and their families; foreign countries; multi-national corporations (many of which brand themselves as American companies); and even American colleges and universities.
The use of the word regcession in this essay and in the documentary is not a mistake or a misspelling. It is a word we have created in an attempt to brand the economic decline in America as what it really is. America's economic decline is not a cyclical recession as the government would have us believe, but rather a 24 year reduction in American manufacturing jobs caused by excessive regulations. We know we are not experiencing a recession because recessions do not last for 24 years and they do not put countries 17 trillion dollars in debt. Ironically, not only are excessive nonsensical Environmental Protection Agency regulations bankrupting America and American citizens, they are also increasing worldwide pollution. All of this is occurring as the politicians hide the truth by producing flawed and misleading unemployment statistics, and by moving millions of Americans on to government assistance and out of the workforce.
China is braced for a wave of industrial bankruptcies as its slowing economy forces companies with sky-high debts to the wall, the country's premier has said.
Premier Li Keqiang told lenders to China's private sector factories they should expect debt defaults as the world's second largest economy encounters "serious challenges" in the year ahead.
However, figures this week revealed that Beijing is copying the Japanese tactic of ramping up public infrastructure spending to replace the steep slowdown in private sector investment. Fixed asset investment, a measure of government spending on infrastructure, expanded 17.9% during the first two months of 2014, the National Bureau of Statistics said.
Responding to inquiries about a possible data breach involving customer credit and debit card information, upscale retailer Neiman Marcus acknowledged today that it is working with the U.S. Secret Service to investigate a hacker break-in that has exposed an unknown number of customer cards.
We're at a crisis point now with regard to the security of embedded systems, where computing is embedded into the hardware itself -- as with the Internet of Things. These embedded computers are riddled with vulnerabilities, and there's no good way to patch them.
Thousands of small satellite dish-based computer systems that transmit often-sensitive data from far flung locations worldwide – oil rigs, ships at sea, banks, and even power grid substations – are at high risk of being hacked, including many in the United States, a new cyber-security report has found.
Researchers have found vulnerabilities in industrial control systems that they say grant full control of systems running energy, chemical and transportation systems.
Last year, more than 30,000 winter deaths were thought to be caused by fuel poverty, up by a third from the previous year, according to the Office for National Statistics. - http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059992359
Across Europe, low income residents are being sacrificed to the Green Gods of Faux Environmentalism. Increasing numbers die in winter, unable to heat their cold dark homes — while fat green government and EU officials and cronies pat each other on the back in congratulations for pushing the penetration of the intermittent unreliables big wind/solar to more and more destructive heights.
Liberalism always generates the exact opposite of its stated intent.
In the 1990s, a professor at a medical university in Stockholm decided to test his students' knowledge about the progress of global development. He was staggered to discover the class, some of the brightest people in Sweden, scored fewer than two out of five on average.
Chimpanzees randomly choosing answers would likely have done better, scoring half right....
Rosling has been on a mission to inform since the realization that his students -- and his fellow professors -- were somewhat woefully informed about the state of the world. Today CNN publishes Rosling's latest survey of the United States which shows Americans, like most of the world, are far behind the reality in their understanding of world development but ahead of some -- for example, Swedes.
The Paul Ehrlich types moved seamlessly from global cooling to global warming. I'm sure they can move back again, as long as the solution is massive suffering and poverty. Cause history begins this morning.
Lawmakers said today they have “serious questions” about the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship after a Government Accountability Office report recommended slowing construction for further testing.
“The strategy has been ‘Buy before fly,’” said Paul Francis, the GAO’s managing director of acquisition and sourcing management, who testified at today’s hearing. “It is a ship in full-rate production, but its operational effectiveness will not be demonstrated for years to come. That’s where we are today.”
Most of the planned 52 ships will already be under contract or built by the time operational testing is completed in 2019, he said.
Francis said the Navy should consider buying the ship only in “minimum quantities” until enough testing is completed to prove its effectiveness.
Sean Stackley, the Navy’s assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition, rejected the GAO’s advice, saying any pause in construction would increase costs and delay needed testing.
“Now is not the time to slow the program,” Stackley told the panel. “This is our most affordable warship program.”
Africa cannot rely on outside people to come and feed our poor or treat our sick, says African businessman and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim. The key is good governance, in both the public and private sectors.
What actually happened in the last 50 to 60 years is that we missed a lot of opportunities. At the moment of independence, many African countries like Ghana and Egypt had higher income per capita than China, India or Singapore. Where are we now? And where are those guys?
I think the blame should rest squarely on the way we have governed ourselves.
Not any amount of aid is going to move Africa forward. The only way for us to move forward is to ensure good governance – the way we manage our economy, our social life, our legal structures and institutions – that is the basis for development. We cannot rely on people to come and feed our poor or treat our sick. This is the responsibility of our governments.
Since income being generated at an individual level is not a reliable indicator that work being performed, I prefer a different distinction: schlep work versus sexy work. If there is schlepping involved, it is more likely to be real work. If there are sexy elements involved, it is more likely to be conspicuous production pretending to be work...
... when you actually poke at what people think of as creative — the broader universe around prototypical categories like fine art, rock music or programming — you realize they don’t really mean creative. They mean sexy.
In which Gizmag visits the company’s Bellevue, Washington headquarters and talks to the President and Chief engineer, Chris Lewicki.
Our capacity as a species to move into an area, become the masters of that area, to improve the quality of life for everyone by using resources and developing businesses and creating economies means we’re at a point where we don’t want to constrained by the surface of this planet. Our mission statement is expanding the economic sphere of humanity off the surface of the planet.
The only thing that will do that outside of taxpayer dollars, which are finite and contested, is to create an economic engine and an economic reason for doing it. We fully believe that space resources are that economic engine.
To be able to use the resources of space, to explore space, imagine that if we were building railroads that we had to ship in everything from Europe. We didn't do that, of course. It’s all about using those resources locally, so in space the first resource we’re interested in is water.
Water is such a simple thing. Why would you ever need water? There’s plenty of it here on Earth. We’re not bringing water back to Earth. We don’t want to ship water into space because it’s very heavy and very expensive to send it there. Just to send a liter to the International Space Station it’s US$10,000 and to the Moon it’s $50,000.
Space habitats, space stations are going to need hundreds of thousands or millions of liters of water, but there are some asteroids 75 meters across that are water rich. Just one has enough hydrogen and oxygen to fuel every Space Shuttle that’s ever been launched. It’s useful for fuel, its useful for supporting life and it’s full-blown radiation shielding for all those people talking about going to Mars. So, that is a resource that is of near-term interest.
In a classic case of procrastination, China has been keeping its massive debt crisis at bay by issuing more debt. However, Fitch's Charlene Chu, a leading expert on China's debt, thinks the country's time is up. "The credit-driven growth model is clearly falling apart," said Chu in a recent report.
Want to buy a military-grade drone? That won’t be easy, unless you’ve got a good relationship with Beijing...
... China could become a drones “proliferator” to developing countries, according to a report (PDF) released on June 13 by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.”Chinese companies appear to be positioning themselves to become key suppliers of UAVs in the global market…Chinese UAVs are likely to be attractive to developing countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, particularly given their price points,” the report concludes.
