Wednesday, June 19
In The NEWS
Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
> World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler headlines Team USA men's golf squad for the 2024 Paris Olympics (More) | Team USA swimming Olympic trials also underway; see latest results (More)
> Scooter Braun retires as a manager after 23 years of managing artists like Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande; Braun notably acquired rights to Taylor Swift's first six albums, which led to Swift's "Taylor's Version" rerecordings (More) | Country singer George Strait breaks record for largest-ever ticketed concert in the US with 110,905 people in attendance (More)
> The Florida Panthers look to win their first Stanley Cup as they take on the Edmonton Oilers tonight (8 pm ET, ABC) with a 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven series (More)
Science & Technology
In partnership with Med-X
> Apple battery supplier TDK claims to have developed a solid-state battery with 100 times higher energy density than those used in typical consumer electronics (More)
> Beetle study reveals the evolution of complex chemical defenses millions of years ago allowed the bugs to diversify and spread worldwide; the 400,000 known beetle species represent about one-quarter of all discovered lifeforms (More)
> Engineers develop noninvasive device to target and modulate specific brain regions; approach may provide new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's (More)
Business & Markets
> US stock markets close higher (S&P 500 +0.8%, Dow +0.5%, Nasdaq +1.0%); S&P 500 ends at another record, Dow snaps four-day losing streak (More)
> Photoshop maker Adobe sued by Federal Trade Commission for allegedly pushing consumers toward expensive subscription plan without disclosing cancellation fee (More) | IRS to target loopholes involving sophisticated transactions used by complex partnerships that result in lowered or no taxes; IRS estimated to collect $50B over 10 years (More)
> Money management firm Fisher Investments agrees to sell up to $3B minority stake to private equity firm Advent International and sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi (More)
Politics & World Affairs
> President Joe Biden expected to announce new policy today protecting undocumented spouses of US citizens from deportation, allowing them to apply for work permits, and easing their path to legal residency (More)
> Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dissolves War Cabinet after two former centrist generals resigned last week; Netanyahu to form smaller forum of advisers to strategize on Israel-Hamas war (More) | See war updates (More)
> Indian national Nikhil Gupta is extradited to the US, pleads not guilty to charges of plotting to assassinate a New York City-based Sikh separatist leader, who seeks an independent state in northern India (More) | See our previous write-up (More)
Liberal Downfall
When I first got interested in politics, it was when JFK Jr. was president, and he made the statement: "ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country."
Behind JFK Jr. was MLK Jr. who made the statement: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
When the Democratic Party lost sight of these two concepts, I decided that I could no longer be part of that political movement in the USA.
The Republican Party offered alternatives that impressed me, but I was so disillusioned by politics and political liars that I did not want to belong to either party.
Most of what's happening today in the USA is SOCIALISM paid for by our taxes. Most of the socialistic programs, we cannot afford but continue them anyway since they are on the books. The billionaires could bail out the country, but they have no desire to give any more money than they have to our government, regardless of the situation.
In addition to facing a national debt crisis, the USA has got to deal with over 10,000,000 illegal immigrants and well as future economic situation where humanoid robots with AI are going to replace American workers.
It is obvious to me that LIBERAL POLICIES are not suited to deal with those kinds of issues. I doubt that conservative politics will be able to adequately deal with it either. Perhaps, collectively they can solve the problem.
But, when they do, they must also face our enemies:
- China
- Russia
- Iran
- North Korea, just to name a few and it is doubtful that liberals are going to want to risk their lives to save this country, if and when she gets into war.
Robot Driving Car
A team of roboticists at the University of Tokyo has taken a new approach to autonomous driving—instead of automating the entire car, simply put a robot in the driver's seat. The group built a robot capable of driving a car and tested it on a real-world track. They also published a paper describing their efforts on the arXiv preprint server.
Virtually all efforts to build a self-driving car have focused on making the car itself autonomous—humans sit in the passenger seat or in the back. These efforts involve adding a host of sensors in addition to processing power. They have also been met with mixed results.
In this new effort, the research team wondered if it might not be easier and cheaper simply to build a robot that can be taught how to drive a car and put it in the driver's seat of a normal vehicle. To find out if that might be possible, they built such a robot and tested it on a track at the University of Tokyo's Kashiwa Campus. READ MORE...
Tuesday, June 18
Opinion
Male or Female?
Boys will always be boys
Men will always be men
Girls will always be girls
Women will always be women
If you are a woman and want to dress as a man, .is your right to do so but it does not make you a man.... even if you take male hormones.
If you are a male an want to dress as a female, it is your right to do so, but it does not make you a female... even if you take hmones
In The NEWS
Sports, Entertainment, & Culture
> "The Outsiders" wins Best Musical, "Stereophonic" wins Best Play at 77th Tony Awards; "Stereophonic" leads all shows with five awards (More)
> Bryson DeChambeau edges Rory McIlroy to win golf's 124th US Open, his second major championship (More) | Edmonton Oilers stave off elimination, beating the Florida Panthers 8-1; Panthers have 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven Stanley Cup Final series (More)
> "Inside Out 2" hauls in $155M in its opening weekend, the second biggest opener ever for an animated film at the US domestic box office (More)
Science & Technology
> Chipmaker Nvidia releases Nemotron-4, a platform to create synthetic data that can be used to train large language models in place of real content (More) | Generative AI models are running out of data (More)
> Ancient ant specimen trapped in amber suggests the insects evolved to have complex social lives as early as 100 million years ago (More)
> Baby stars travel at thousands of miles per second around Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, astronomers find (More) | Learn about black holes, the universe's most mysterious objects (More, w/video)
Business & Markets
> US stock markets close mixed Friday (S&P 500 -0.04%, Dow -0.2%, Nasdaq +0.1%), with the Nasdaq climbing to a record high (More)
> Hyundai's Indian unit files for an initial public offering, seeking to raise $2.5B with a listing planned for later this year (More)
> Subscription vitamin startup Care/of announces it is shuttering operations and laying off all staff; pharmaceutical company Bayer had a 70% stake in Care/of once reportedly valued at $225M (More)
Politics & World Affairs
> Wildfire north of Los Angeles expands to over 14,000 acres as of this writing, forcing over 1,200 people to evacuate (More) | Heat dome expected in the Northeast and Midwest this week (More) | What is a heat dome? (More, w/video)
> Seventy-eight countries affirm Ukraine's territorial integrity at peace summit; countries including India, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa don't sign on to text while Russia and China were not invited (More) | Russia ends hostage situation in a prison in southern city of Rostov-on-Don allegedly involving ISIS-affiliated inmates (More)
> Police in Germany shoot man wielding an ax hammer and gas bomb at a parade in Hamburg hours before the city hosted the first soccer match of the 2024 European Championship (More)
Death Penalty
I understand the mindset of those who seek revenge in that if you kill one of mine then I should kill you or one of yours.
The Bible says an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth... but the religious say this phrase was in the Old Testament and was superseded by the words of the New Testament.
Of course, if you are not religious, it does not matter.
Whether it is revenge or not revenge do we have the RIGHT to take a person's life because they have taken someone else's life?
What kind of person does that make us if that is what we want to do?
On the other side of the coin, putting that person in jail for the rest of his life, will cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars... and is that how you want your taxes spent?
How would you feel about a man raping and killing a mother of five?
Should this person live?
And, once we take this person's life, will that ever bring back the mother for these five children?
If I accidentally killed someone, should I be punished?
If I accidentally killed someone after drinking alcohol, should I be punished?
WE ALL DIE... some early and some late in life but our death is inevitable.
Why should we spend our money on prisons? Why not build a facility in Artica and Antartica and put all the inmates there to take care of themselves. The can police or kill themselves. They can grow, harvest and cook their own food. Make their own clothes. They will be away from society and if they perish, they perish.
Then there would be no reason to have a death penalty.
Emotional Intelligence
Most people think they are better judges of character than everyone else. (Of course, that statement is statistically impossible — read it again.) For years scholars cast doubt on this notion, regarding perceptivity as more a learned skill than a natural ability. However, recent research into what is called “the good judge” of character suggests that some people do have an advantage in this area. One 2019 study found “consistent, clear, and strong evidence that the good judge does exist” — in other words, some people are indeed better than others at judging personality.
My own experience bears out this finding. Over my two decades of working with leaders across industries as wide-ranging as private equity, apparel, health care, and agribusiness, I’ve found that some people are extraordinarily adept at judging others, but these individuals are few and far between. The vast majority of professionals think their judgment of others’ personalities is accurate. In truth, they fall prey to a whole range of biases that skew how they size people up and in turn lead to horrible decision-making. READ MORE...