GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT: Former Google, Facebook Execs Launch AI Human Resources Firm to ‘Remove Human Bias.’
Author Archive: Stephen Green
April 19, 2018
WHAT A WASTE: Dick’s Sporting Goods to destroy all unsold assault-style weapons.
I’m starting to warm up to the phrase “assault-style,” since it’s a tacit admission that the rifles only look like assault weapons.
CRIME OF THE CENTURY: Canadian who posted drug smuggling trip on Instagram sentenced to prison.
I FEEL THE NEED… USAF Announces Major New Hypersonic Weapon Contract.
The $928 million contract will cover the “design, development, engineering, systems integration, test, logistics planning, and aircraft integration support of all the elements of a hypersonic, conventional, air-launched, stand-off weapon,” according to information released by the Air Force.
In a statement, Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek said the program has been dubbed the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon. It is “one of two hypersonic weapon prototyping efforts being pursued by the Air Force to accelerate hypersonics research and development,” she said. “The Air Force is using prototyping to explore the art-of-the-possible and to advance these technologies to a capability as quickly as possible.”
The second program is the Tactical Boost Glide program, which the Air Force is working on with DARPA. The service plans to have a prototype ready by 2023.
Faster, please.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE (SCHOOL SAFETY EDITION): Wyoming district allows armed staff in area cited by Betsy DeVos. “The 4-2 vote by the Park County School District No. 6 board in Cody came after more than six months of discussion and debate.”
The sounds you hear are not gunfire, but of heads exploding.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Deep Staters Referred to DOJ and Much, Much More. “Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and 10 other congressman sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions recommending a criminal investigation into such extra-constitutional, bureaucrat, actors as Loretta Lynch, Hillary Clinton, James Comey and Andrew McCabe.”
PROCUREMENT: The Navy’s F-35 Has a New Weapon (To Strike Deep Into Enemy Territory).
“With JSOW-C in its internal weapons bay, the Navy’s F-35C can now eliminate the toughest ground targets from significant standoff ranges,” Mike Jarrett, vice president of Raytheon Air Warfare Systems, said. “JSOW’s advanced warhead and smart fuse provide fighter pilots with plenty of flexibility against hard and soft targets — plus, it has many programmable effects.”
The JSOW — which integrates a dual-charge BROACH warhead with a WDU-44 shaped augmenting warhead and a WDU-45 follow through bomb — is particularly adept at cracking open high value hardened targets.
Carriers aren’t obsolete yet.
AND NOW THIS: Tesla’s 2018 Goes From Bad To Worse As Safety Regulators Launch Probe.
Tesla’s “planned” factory shutdowns could end lasting far longer than planned. That is, if California workplace safety regulators have anything to say about it.
What has been a volatile and taxing month for Tesla just got worse, because in the latest headache for Elon Musk, Bloomberg reports that California regulators are now looking into workplace safety issues…
California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health said it has opened a new investigation into Tesla Inc. following a report about worker protections at the company’s lone auto plant in Fremont, California.
The state agency “takes seriously reports of workplace hazards and allegations of employers’ underreporting recordable work-related injuries and illnesses” and “currently has an open inspection at Tesla,” said Erika Monterroza, a spokeswoman for the state’s industrial relations department.
California requires employers to electronically submit what it calls Log 300 records of injuries and illnesses. Monterroza said that while the state doesn’t disclose details of open inspections, they typically include a review of employers’ Log 300 records and checks to ensure that serious injuries are reported within eight hours as required by law.
… ostensibly prompted by a scathing expose that was published earlier this week by Reveal, questioning whether Tesla was accurately reporting its workplace safety incidents.
SpaceX is having a very good week. Tesla, not so much.
BITING THE HAND: Venezuela arrests two Chevron executives amid oil purge.
“Chevron Global Technology Services Company is aware that two of its Venezuelan-based employees have been arrested by local authorities,” Chevron said in a statement.
“We have contacted the local authorities to understand the basis of the detention and to ensure the safety and wellbeing of these employees. Our legal team is evaluating the situation and working towards the timely release of these employees.”
A Chevron spokeswoman declined to provide further details on the case or the status of its operations. The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The executives were arrested after disagreements with their PDVSA counterparts over procurement processes, two of the sources said.
The arrests highlight risks for foreign firms in Venezuela. Some insiders say a fracturing ruling elite is using the purge to wage turf wars or settle scores.
It could also be that the two men are being used as either hostages or scapegoats — both of which are conventional tools of public policy in failing socialist paradises.
WHACK-A-MOLE: As Islamic State Fades in Syria, Another Militant Group Takes Root.
The group’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, a former al Qaeda fighter, has vowed to conquer Damascus and impose Islamic rule across Syria. in a January speech, he exhorted followers to engage in “a war of ideas, a war of minds, a war of wills, a war of perseverance,” according to the SITE Intel Group.
Thousands of fighters with the group—an offshoot of the Nusra Front, al Qaeda’s former Syrian affiliate—have dug in around Idlib, analysts say, as the U.S. concentrates on Syria’s other battles and moves toward what President Donald Trump has said would be a quick exit from Syria.
“The area seems to be out of focus for Western powers,” said Hassan Hassan, a Washington-based analyst with the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, a think tank. “The jihadis are having a honeymoon there.”
Bill Whittle once compared killing terrorists to mowing the lawn — a chore that has to be done regularly, or else your yard becomes overgrown.
WINNING: Russia appears to have surrendered to SpaceX in the global launch market. “The 4 percent stake isn’t worth the effort to try to elbow Musk and China aside.”
In the past, Russian space officials have talked tough about competing with SpaceX in providing low-cost, reliable service to low-Earth and geostationary orbit. For example, the Russian rocket corporation, Energia, has fast-tracked development of a new medium-class launch vehicle that it is calling Soyuz-5 to challenge SpaceX.
On Tuesday, however, Russia’s chief spaceflight official, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, made a remarkable comment about that country’s competition with SpaceX.
“The share of launch vehicles is as small as 4 percent of the overall market of space services,” Rogozin said in an interview with a Russian television station. “The 4 percent stake isn’t worth the effort to try to elbow Musk and China aside. Payloads manufacturing is where good money can be made.”
According to an independent analysis, the global launch market is worth about $5.5 billion annually. Losing its half-share of this market, therefore, has probably cost the Russians about $2 billion, which is a significant fraction of its non-military aerospace budget.
An American President in cahoots with the Kremlin would probably find some regulatory justification to prevent SpaceX from stealing business from Russia.
TYLER O’NEIL: Apple Will Launch a News Subscription Service to Combat ‘Fake News.’ “No word on how it will avoid anti-conservative bias…”
I’m still a fan of Apple’s hardware and software, but as the company looks increasingly to services to fuel growth, they’ve lost some of their famous focus — and have begun to annoy in other ways, too.
April 18, 2018
ASK THE RABBI: Why Don’t Jews Believe in Original Sin?
STOP ME IF YOU THINK YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE: Morrissey says Loony Left calls everyone racist to change the subject.
TONY HELLER: Thirty Years Of The James Hansen Clown Show. “It has been thirty years since CO2 hit 350 PPM and NASA’s James Hansen warned that the Midwest was going to burn up and dry up.”
You’ll want to read the whole, schadenfreudelicious thing.
DAVID SOLWAY: Intentional Communities Fail. “Millennials, take heed. Every experiment in utopian socialism known to history has failed.”
Nobody knows best for everybody.
“CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW…”: California Progressives Launch (Another) Attack on Free Speech.
On Sunday evening, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait published a piece asking why more disgruntled Republicans don’t punish their party by switching sides. Chait notes that the “strongest defense against the election of an extreme or unfit leader is for his more mainstream partners to defect en masse.” Yet with few exceptions, Never Trump Republicans — especially Never Trump social conservatives — were steadfastly Never Hillary and remain (as Chait calls it) “Never-Democrats.” Why?
I’d suggest the answer lies in the words “extreme” and “mainstream.” Chait’s premise implies that Republicans have gone extreme, yet more-sensible conservatives are strangely refusing to join a mainstream opposition. Yet that’s not how the world looks from the right side of the aisle. From there, it looks as if the Democratic party is responding to Trump by galloping away from the center, doubling down on the very policies and ideologies that led Evangelicals to vote en masse for Trump as a form of simple self-defense.
It’s interesting, for example, that Chait makes the argument just as the California State Assembly is set to vote on a bill that would actually — among other things — ban the sale of books expressing orthodox Christian beliefs about sexual morality.
Yes, ban the sale of books.
What should Californians do with all those unsold books — burn them?
THAT’S A MIGHTY BIG IF: Stormy Daniels to donate to Planned Parenthood in Trump and Cohen’s names if she wins case.
PRECIOUS GEMS: These diamonds are tiny, flawed, and may come from a long-lost planet.
A new study published in Nature Communications today offers a dramatic origin story for the meteorite. Based on materials found inside the diamonds nestled within, researchers think this may be the remnant of a long-lost planet or planetary embryo; one that was still in its infancy when the chaos of the early solar system obliterated it.
In this case, the diamonds aren’t the most important part of this story. They’re just the heavy-duty packaging for much more precious cargo held inside. While a jeweler might see a bit of rock trapped inside a diamond as a flaw, to a geologist it is precious. Because of their strong crystal structure, diamonds can preserve minuscule bits of material that would otherwise disappear under the relentless changeability of the universe over time.
Researcher Farhang Nabiei—of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland—was looking at the relationship between the diamonds and the layers of graphite surrounding them when he started wondering about the small pockets of substances trapped within.
Upon closer inspection, he found that the material inside the diamonds could only have been formed at incredibly high pressures—much higher than anything the meteorite would have been subject to as it crashed toward Earth. These diamonds must have held the weight of an entire world — literally.
Read the whole thing — this is an amazing find.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE: Missouri’s Governor Was Already in Trouble. A New Felony Claim Adds to That.