How Robots & Algorithms Are Taking Over

In September 2013, about a year before Nicholas Carr published The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, his chastening meditation on the human future, a pair of Oxford researchers issued a report predicting that nearly half of all jobs in the United States could be lost to machines within the next twenty years. The researchers, Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, looked at seven hundred kinds of work and found that of those occupations, among the most susceptible to automation were loan officers, receptionists, paralegals, store clerks, taxi drivers, and security guards. Even computer programmers, the people writing the algorithms that are taking on these tasks, will not be immune. By Frey and Osborne’s calculations, there is about a 50 percent chance that programming, too, will be outsourced to machines within the next two decades.

In fact, this is already happening, in part because programmers increasingly rely on “self-correcting” code—that is, code that debugs and rewrites itself*—and in part because they are creating machines that are able to learn on the job. While these machines cannot think, per se, they can process phenomenal amounts of data with ever-increasing speed and use what they have learned to perform such functions as medical diagnosis, navigation, and translation, among many others. Add to these self-repairing robots that are able to negotiate hostile environments like radioactive power plants and collapsed mines and then fix themselves without human intercession when the need arises. The most recent iteration of these robots has been designed by the robots themselves, suggesting that in the future even roboticists may find themselves out of work.

The term for what happens when human workers are replaced by machines was coined by John Maynard Keynes in 1930 in the essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” He called it “technological unemployment.” At the time, Keynes considered technical unemployment a transitory condition, “a temporary phase of maladjustment” brought on by “our discovery of means of economizing the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” In the United States, for example, the mechanization of the railways around the time Keynes was writing his essay put nearly half a million people out of work. Similarly, rotary phones were making switchboard operators obsolete, while mechanical harvesters, plows, and combines were replacing traditional farmworkers, just as the first steam-engine tractors had replaced horses and oxen less than a century before. Machine efficiency was becoming so great that President Roosevelt, in 1935, told the nation that the economy might never be able to reabsorb all the workers who were being displaced. The more sanguine New York Times editorial board then accused the president of falling prey to the “calamity prophets.”

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US to deploy in Poland Patriot missiles

Complex air defense Patriot

As part of the Polish-American military exercises near Warsaw, the United States deployed its air defense complexes Patriot, reports Reuters.

The exercise involves about 100 US military personnel and 30 vehicles. Maneuvers are on the ground in the Polish town of Sochaczew, 50 km from Warsaw.

Polish Defense Minister Tomasz Semonyak stressed the close cooperation of his country with the United States, noting that both countries are friends and partners for 16 years.

"If necessary, the United States stand firmly on our side," - he said in the presence of the American ambassador.

Lavrov called the US missile defense a real threat to Russia

Poland does not yet have its own air defense system and intends in the coming weeks to choose a company supplying the corresponding complex.

In addition to the US firm Raytheon, which produces missiles (Patriot), in the competition for the purchase involved a consortium of French companies as well as European group MBDA.

Earlier today it was reported that a group of NATO ships emerged from the waters of the Black Sea after the completion of there exercise .

Shark ate German in Egypt

Photo: Reuters

Sharks in the Red Sea have resumed attacks on humans

For the first time in five years the shark attacked a man in Egypt.

Tourist from Germany was killed in a shark attack in the Egyptian resort of El Quseir on the Red Sea coast, reports RIA Novosti . According to local media, the shark bit off his leg, he died on the way to the hospital.

This was the first shark attack on any human in Egypt over the past five years. In 2010, another Egyptian resort on the Red Sea three tourists suffered shark bites but lived to tell the tale, the three that survived were from Russia and the one killed was from Germany.

Then came a series of attacks as Egyptian authorities had to close beaches in the popular resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.

City of Sacramento is in the fourth year of a record drought

The Arrowhead Mountain Water Company bottling plant, owned by Swiss conglomerate Nestle, on the Morongo Indian Reservation near Cabazon, Calif. Photo credit: Damian Dovarganes/AP.

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The city of Sacramento is in the fourth year of a record drought – yet the Nestlé Corporation continues to bottle city water to sell back to the public at a big profit, local activists charge. 

The Nestlé Water Bottling Plant in Sacramento is the target of a major press conference on Tuesday, March 17, by a water coalition that claims the company is draining up to 80 million gallons of water a year from Sacramento aquifers during the drought. 

The coalition, the crunchnestle alliance, says that City Hall has made this use of the water supply possible through a “corporate welfare giveaway,” according to a press advisory. 

A coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans and other concerned people announced the press conference will take place at March 17 at 5 p.m. at new Sacramento City Hall, 915 I Street, Sacramento. 

The coalition will release details of a protest on Friday, March 20, at the South Sacramento Nestlé plant designed to “shut down” the facility. The coalition is calling on Nestlé to pay rates commensurate with their enormous profit, or voluntarily close down. 

“The coalition is protesting Nestlé’s virtually unlimited use of water – up to 80 million gallons a year drawn from local aquifers – while Sacramentans (like other Californians) who use a mere 7 to 10 percent of total water used in the State of California, have had severe restrictions and limitations forced upon them,” according to the coalition. 

“Nestlé pays only 65 cents for each 470 gallons it pumps out of the ground – the same rate as an average residential water user. But the company can turn the area’s water around, and sell it back to Sacramento at mammoth profits,” the coalition said. 

Activists say that Sacramento officials have refused attempts to obtain details of Nestlé’s water used. Coalition members have addressed the Sacramento City Council and requested that Nestle’ either pay a commercial rate under a two tier level, or pay a tax on their profit. 

CRACKS IN THE DRY BED OF THE STEVENS CREEK RESERVOIR IN CUPERTINO, CALIF. PHOTO CREDIT: MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ/AP

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In October, the coalition released a “White Paper” highlighting predatory water profiteering actions taken by Nestle’ Water Bottling Company in various cities, counties, states and countries. Most of those great “deals” yielded mega profits for Nestle’ at the expense of citizens and taxpayers. Additionally, the environmental impact on many of those areas yielded disastrous results. 

Coalition spokesperson Andy Conn said, “This corporate welfare giveaway is an outrage and warrants a major investigation. For more than five months we have requested data on Nestlé water use. City Hall has not complied with our request, or given any indication that it will. Sacramentans deserve to know how their money is being spent and what they’re getting for it. In this case, they’re getting ripped off.” 

For more information about the crunchnestle alliance, contact Andy Conn (530) 906-8077 camphgr55 (at) gmail.com or Bob Saunders (916) 370-8251 

Nestlé is currently the leading supplier of the world’s bottled water, including such brands as Perrier and San Pellegrino, and has been criticized by activists for human rights violations throughout the world. For example, Food and Water Watch and other organizations blasted Nestlé’s “Human Rights Impact Assessment” in December 2013 as a “public relations stunt.”

“The failure to examine Nestlé’s track record on the human right to water is not surprising given recent statements by its chair Peter Brabeck challenging the human right to water,” said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. She noted that the company famously declared at the 2000 World Water Forum in the Netherlands that water should be defined as a need—not as a human right.

“In November 2013, Colombian trade unionist Oscar Lopez Trivino became the fifteenth Nestlé worker to be assassinated by a paramilitary organization while many of his fellow workers were in the midst of a hunger strike protesting the corporation’s refusal to hear their grievances,” according to the groups. 

The press conference and protest will take place just days after Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine, revealed in an op-ed in the LA Times on March 12 that California has only one year of water supply left in its reservoirs.

“As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century. 

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.” 

Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown continues to fast-track his Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels to ship Sacramento River water to corporate agribusiness, Southern California water agencies, and oil companies conducting fracking operations. The $67 billion plan won’t create one single drop of new water, but it will take vast tracts of Delta farm land out of production under the guise of “habitat restoration” in order to irrigate drainage-impaired soil owned by corporate mega-growers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. 

The tunnel plan will also hasten the extinction of Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Klamath and Trinity rivers. The peripheral tunnels will be good for agribusiness, water privateers, oil companies and the 1 percent, but will be bad for the fish, wildlife, people and environment of California and the public trust. 

The Delta smelt may already be extinct in the wild!

In fact, the endangered Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish in the entire Bay Delta Estuary, may already be extinct, according to UC Davis fish biologist and author Peter Moyle, as quoted on Capital Public Radio. 

“Prepare for the extinction of the Delta Smelt in the wild,” Moyle told a group of scientists with the Delta Stewardship Council. 

According to Capital Public Radio: 

“He says the latest state trawl survey found very few fish in areas of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where smelt normally gather. 

‘That trawl survey came up with just six smelt, four females and two males,’ says Moyle. “Normally because they can target smelt, they would have gotten several hundred.’ 

Moyle says the population of Delta smelt has been declining for the last 30 years but the drought may have pushed the species to the point of no return. If the smelt is officially declared extinct, which could take several years, the declaration could change how water is managed in California. 

‘All these biological opinions on Delta smelt that have restricted some of the pumping will have to be changed,’ says Moyle. 

But Moyle says pumping water from the Delta to Central and Southern California could still be restricted at certain times because of all the other threatened fish populations.” 

The Delta smelt, an indicator species that demonstrates the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, reached a new record low population level in 2014, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fall midwater trawl survey that was released in January. 

Department staff found a total of only eight smelt at a total of 100 sites sampled each month from September through December 

The smelt is considered an indicator species because the 2.0 to 2.8 inch long fish is endemic to the estuary and spends all of its life in the Delta. 

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has conducted the Fall Midwater Trawl Survey (FMWT) to index the fall abundance of pelagic (open water) fish, including Delta smelt, striped bass, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and American shad, nearly annually since 1967. The index of each species is a number that indicates a relative population abundance.

The Bohemian Club

The Bohemian Club

The term “gentlemen’s club” arouses all kinds of lewd thoughts, but the gentlemen’s club founded in San Francisco in 1872, known simply as the Bohemian Club, is not what you think. The club started out with a diverse group of cultured men, including young artists and journalists who appreciated the arts. It was eventually overwhelmed with influential leaders (prime ministers and presidents have been members) and businessmen who didn’t quite fit the definition of “bohemian,” transforming it into a more traditional fraternal organization. Although, there is nothing traditional about the club’s annual encampment ceremony, which resembles a scene from The Wicker Man. The men gather around a 40-foot owl shrine surrounded by Redwood trees for the elaborate “Cremation of Care” ceremony. It’s an symbolic gesture that is meant to banish worldly cares. Weird(er) note: the owl talks. For years member and broadcast journalist Walter Cronkite provided the creature’s recorded voice.

Monsanto settles 7 lawsuits after 2013 GMO-wheat scare

Agrochemical giant Monsanto has settled class action lawsuits with farmers in seven states over genetically modified wheat incident in 2013. Without any admission of liability the company will pay some $350,000 in donations to agricultural schools.

The agricultural biotechnology corporation announced donations of $50,000 to agricultural schools in Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The St. Louis based company also promised to reimburse a portion of the costs associated with the case. Monsanto said it can’t disclose how much that will cost.

The settlement agreement with wheat farmers across the US stems from a number of lawsuits related to the May 2013 discovery of genetically-modified wheat on a farm in Eastern Oregon that resulted in temporary limits on certain exports of soft white wheat. Japan and South Korea temporarily suspended some wheat orders, while the EU called for tougher testing from the US.

“This agreement puts that money to work in research and development efforts for the wheat industry,”said Kyle McClain, Monsanto chief litigation counsel. “Resolution in this manner is reasonable and in the best interest of all of the parties.”

The settlement puts to rest seven court cases associated with the company’s GMO practices, but it will“not resolve claims that remain pending by wheat growers in Arkansas who also filed suit,” the company said.

In November, Monsanto has already agreed to settle about $2.4 million worth of damages in other lawsuits related to the Oregon scandal. The history of settlements seems like a drop in the ocean for a company that made $2.74 billion last year that with sales of $15.86 billion.

The USDA has yet to approve any GMO strain of wheat to be grown in the US, but Monsanto field tested a genetically engineered variety from 1998 through 2005 before withdrawing their application from the agency’s regulatory approval process.

Roundup Ready, as the wheat strain is amicably known, was supposed to be either destroyed or stored 10 years ago when it was outlawed. The miracle strain was resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup pesticide, and was one of a number in a whole range of Roundup Ready products.

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SOURCE: RT

Biotech Bans Anti-GMO Group from SXSW Food Supply Panel

It continues to be clear that the awakened public will not so easily be brought down by the GMO industries. However, at South by Southwest (SXSW), it appears that money from GMO corporations talks as true debate is controlled and censored. Katherine Paul, Associate Director of the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), an organization dedicated to protecting organic standards, has officially been censored from SXSW.

The OCA was asked to sit on the “Southbites: Feed Your Mind” debate held in Austin, Texas but then had their invitation revoked directly from the orders of Cathleen Enright, executive Vice President of food & agriculture, for the Biotech Industry Organization (BIO).

Paul describes a March 3rd phone conversation with Enright, who defended her position by using GMO industry talking points, in which she stated that GMO agriculture is “sustainable” and GMO foods are “safe.” Anyone who says otherwise is making “scary” statements that have no basis in fact because every shred of scientific evidence suggesting health or safety concerns related to GMOs “has been discredited.”

It is a financially proven fact that GMO food is a corporate liability for any company that chooses to manufacture or add these altered ingredients to their products. Scores of GMO corporations and pro-GMO companies continue to experience large hits to their stock prices and trust as the public heads for the exits. Pro-GMO marketing departments are losing, and losing big.

Previously tasked with marketing a product whose success relies on its consumers not knowing where to purchase its product, GMO marketers are being paralyzed into obscurity by the rush of voting with their dollars. The tactics being witnessed currently are those of sore losers that have lost their monopoly on the market, debate, and information.

We have witnessed the people of Vermont win a vote to simply label their food only to be sued and attacked by a conglomerate of GMO corporations. We are now learning about major scientific and research fraud from a new book by Steven Drucker titled ‘Altered Genes Twisted Truth: How the Venture to Genetically Engineer Our Food Has Subverted Science, Corrupted Government, and Systematically Deceived the Public.’

It appears on all levels the corporate memo has gone out to push GMO’s by any means necessary in their hopeless push before the final rejection. This is a warning to all individuals, conferences, groups, and companies: The GMO industry no longer has the hearts and minds of the people. Like a vampire in dire need of blood, the industry will latch on to anything it can find to parasite and use up that entities integrity and good name to push their products and agenda.

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