Sunday, March 17
Saturday, March 16
In The NEWS
Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
> NCAA basketball conference tournaments to wrap this weekend with March Madness selection shows slated for Sunday; see projected men's bracket (More) | ... and projected women's bracket (More)
> Coldplay, Dua Lipa, Shania Twain, and SZA tapped as headliners for UK's Glastonbury Festival (June 26-30); see full lineup of performers (More)
> Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, returns to Instagram for first time since 2018 to launch new lifestyle brand (More)
Science & Technology
In partnership with Global Air Cylinder Wheels
> Scientists identify brain circuitry and chemistry responsible for translating stress into the sense of fear; findings may lead to treatments for conditions like PTSD (More)
> Three-decade-long study reveals link between teen pregnancy and increased risk of early death; Canadian teen mothers were twice as likely to die before the age of 31 (More)
> Undersea cable damage knocks out internet access to a number of countries across Africa; Ivory Coast reported as little as 4% connectivity throughout yesterday (More) | See map of the world's undersea internet cables (More)
Business & Markets
> US stock markets close lower (S&P 500 -0.3%, Dow -0.4%, Nasdaq -0.3%) following report showing higher-than-expected inflation (0.6%) in February for wholesale goods (More)
> Former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin working to form an investor group to buy TikTok from Chinese-based ByteDance (More) | See previous write-up on House vote to ban the app (More)
> Morgan Stanley names first head of artificial intelligence; company was previously the first Wall Street firm to implement OpenAI's ChatGPT into financial advisers' workflow (More)
Politics & World Affairs
> Biden administration sanctions Israeli settlers in the West Bank and outposts for ties to violence against Palestinians (More) | Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) calls for Israeli elections to replace Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (More) | Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas appoints adviser as prime minister amid calls for reform (More)
> Trump administration reportedly authorized CIA effort on Chinese social media to drive antigovernment sentiment, according to new report (More) | Manhattan district attorney calls for up to 30-day delay in Trump hush money trial following receipt of 100,000 new documents from investigators (More)
> James Crumbley, father of 2021 Oxford High School shooter in Michigan who killed four students, convicted of involuntary manslaughter; Crumbley had purchased the gun used in the shooting and failed to properly secure it (More)
SOURCE: 1440 News
Focus on Celebrities
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If a celebrity announces that they have cancer, the media goes crazy regarding how terrible that this celebrity has a grave disease...
In point of fact, thousands of Americans have cancer and go through all sorts of problems, especially because they do not have the finances to take care of themselves like the celebrities have.
And cancer is just one of many issues that the media focuses in on in an attempt to explain how celebrities should be pitied because they are having problems.
The media focuses on celebrities because they think that in so doing they will increase their ratings or sell more newspapers or magazines. Obviously, no one cares about the general public so highlighting them will not be financially popular.
This focus on celebrities will eventually work against them as people are realizing that celebrities are not that special after all.... especially Hollywood actors and actresses... since most of them are drug and alcohol addicts and are not good role models for our children.
In point of fact, money changes people... and just because they may or may not have cancer, there is nothing special about their lives.
Outgunned in the Drone Fight
The British Army began World War I with only two machine guns per infantry battalion. One gun was a spare, meaning the effective ratio was one per 1,000 soldiers. Historian John Ellis summarized, “For the British commanders, on the eve of the First World War, the machine gun simply did not exist.”
The inability to grasp the changing technological character of ground combat cost British forces dearly early in the war. In what remains the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army, tens of thousands of British soldiers were mown down by German machine gunners in the 1916 Battle of the Somme, despite automatic weapons having existed in a similar form since 1893.
The adoption of the machine gun is an apt analogy for the integration of small unmanned aerial systems in the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. military. As with the adoption of the machine gun, failure of vision, traditionalism, and bureaucratic resistance are leading to insufficient numbers and delayed force modernization.
Despite observing small drones proliferate globally and their growing use on modern battlefields, the U.S. military has still not equipped its infantry with adequate numbers or pushed ownership of these systems low enough to have an impact. READ MORE...
Friday, March 15
Gemini's Historically Inaccurate AI Images
Following controversy over historically inaccurate images, Google’s generative AI tool is under fire again by the company’s cofounder.
Sergey Brin, Google’s cofounder and former president of Google parent Alphabet, said Google “definitely messed up on the image generation,” and that he thinks “it was mostly due to not thorough testing.”
“[I]t definitely, for good reasons, upset a lot of people,” Brin said at San Francisco’s AGI House. He added that Google doesn’t know why Gemini “leans left in many cases,” but that it isn’t intentional, and other large language models could make similar errors.
“If you deeply test any text model out there, whether it’s ours, ChatGPT, Grok, what have you, it’ll say some pretty weird things that are out there that you know definitely feel far left, for example,” Brin said. He also said, "he kind of came out of retirement just because the trajectory of AI is so exciting.” READ MORE...
The Decline of the USA
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Despite many FLAWS like slavery, the USA is the greatest country in the world to live because of our US Constitution and our Bill of Rights that no other country in the world has.
In addition, the USA has the strongest economy, the strongest military, the best education, many freedoms, natural resources, and the best career opportunities than any other country in the world.
AT LEAST WE USED TO BE THAT WAY... UNFORTUNATELY, WE ARE NO LONGER IN THAT POSITION...
Not only did COVID hurt our economy but a premature transition to green energy is causing it to grow at an unusually low rate, while other countries like China and India are rapidly growing their economies as well as their populations.
In addition to our lackluster economy, our educational system has been slowly declining over 3 decades and is no longer ranked as the number one education in the world.
Our military is in need of upgrading its airplanes, naval ships, and military weapons but the current administration has no desire to do that. Recruitment into the military has been gradually declining as well so our military is shrinking in numbers.
There is a huge wealth gap in the USA that is getting worse each year and if labor receives wage increases to try and compensate, it will only worsen inflation, forcing companies to manufacture overseas where there are lower wages. This is the price we have to pay for having a great society.
Perhaps the greatest danger to our survival in the global marketplace is our national debt which seems to be steadily rising forcing us to pay more interest just to service the debt but not enough to reduce it. That will one day soon bite us in the ass by kicking us off the top of the global economy.
NOW... we have a new frontier that is about to raise it head in 2027 which is humanoid robots taking away most of our jobs. Predictions say this will not happen until after 2035, but now they are saying it will start in 2027 or earlier.
The jobs that humanoid robots take will place a huge burden on this country to find replacement employment, especially now that 10 million illegal immigrants have entered the USA, primarily to find work that is not available in their countries.
The United States of America is like a iceberg in the global economy and when more and more people come to that iceberg to have a better life, the iceberg is not large enough to support the extra weight so it begins to sink.
OUR SUCCESS IS CAUSING OUR FAILURE AND DOWNFALL... JUST LIKE ALL OTHER GREAT EMPIRES HAVE EVENTUALLY FALLEN OR COLLAPSED...
WILL THE REST OF THE WORLD COME TO OUR RESCUE JUST LIKE WE CAME TO THEIR RESCUE WHEN THEY ASKED US TO???
Bitcoin Surges to New Highs
New York CNN —Bitcoin surged to an all-time high Tuesday, shaking off a more-than-two-year rut that had put the future of the entire crypto ecosystem in question.
Bitcoin, the world’s oldest — and by far the largest — digital currency, traded above $69,000 Tuesday morning, topping the previous record of $68,789 reached on November 10, 2021, according to CoinMarketCap.
Over the past several months, bitcoin’s rally has been turbocharged by US regulators’ approval of exchange-traded funds pegged to the digital asset, which created an on-ramp for more traditional investors to incorporate bitcoin into their portfolios.
That approval took years of lobbying by crypto firms, and was granted only grudgingly by the Securities and Exchange Commission after a court ruled the regulator’s reasons for rejecting bitcoin ETF applications were “arbitrary and capricious.” READ MORE...
Thursday, March 14
Earth's Largest Desert Sands
The age of one of Earth's largest and most complex types of sand dune has been calculated for the first time.
Star dunes - or pyramid dunes - are named after their distinctive shapes and reach hundreds of metres in height.
They are found in Africa, Asia and North America, as well as on Mars - but experts had never before been able to put a date on when they were formed.
Now scientists have discovered that a dune called Lala Lallia in Morocco formed 13,000 years ago.
Star dunes are created by opposing winds that change direction. Understanding their age helps scientists understand those winds and unpick the climate of that era, says Prof Geoff Duller at the University of Aberystwyth, who published the research with Prof Charles Bristow at Birkbeck University. READ MORE...
Males and Females
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One of my strongest beliefs is that our FEDERAL GOVERNMENT should not tell us what to do with our bodies, how we should think, or when we should act based upon our beliefs. An example of this is that I believe a female has the right to have an abortion and if she does it is the business of no one else.
Consequently, I am not opposed to males wanting to be females nor am I opposed to females wanting to be males.
With that said, just because you make the transition from male to female does not make you a female and just because you make the transition from female to male does not make you a male.
THEREFORE... and obviously this is my opinion, males who have become females should not be allowed to participate in female sports because their biological body is still a male and has a stronger muscle and bone structure than REAL females have.
A solution would be to a third category of competition in sports perhaps called TRANSGENDERED where those who have made the transformation would compete against only those who also had made the transformation.
Is this fair or equitable?
It seems like to me it is but I am only one person.
However, we all know that equity in athletics is damn near impossible to achieve since there will always be people like MICHAEL JORDAN who were born with special talents that very few, if any, will be able to match.
Rich Countries Use More Resources
The extraction of the Earth's natural resources tripled in the past five decades, related to the massive build-up of infrastructure in many parts of the world and the high levels of material consumption, especially in upper-middle and high-income countries.
Material extraction is expected to rise by 60% by 2060 and could derail efforts to achieve not only global climate, biodiversity, and pollution targets but also economic prosperity and human well-being, according to a report published today by the UN Environment Program (UNEP)-hosted International Resource Panel.
The 2024 Global Resource Outlook, developed by the International Resource Panel with authors from around the globe and launched during the sixth session of the UN Environment Assembly, calls for sweeping policy changes to bring humanity to live within its means and reduce this projected growth in resource use by one third while growing the economy, improving well-being, and minimizing environmental impacts. READ MORE...
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