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 | James Howard Kunstler |
 School Daze  |
| Sunday night was Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s turn through the CBS 60-Minutes wringer of censure with a visibly frustrated inquisitor Lesley Stahl trying to hector her into self-incrimination. The sad truth about American schools is that they’re a mirror for the painful collapse of the society they supposedly serve — a process ongoing for decades before Ms. DeVos came on the scene.
The expectation that some uber-regent can or ought to fix public education is bound to disappoint a news meMonday, March 12, 2018 |
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 | Nelson Hultberg - AFR.org |
| Pod People and the Matrix |
| The two greatest science fiction movies of the 20th century are Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and The Matrix (1999). Both are seminal cinematic efforts that portray big ideological truths about the dangers of modernity and tyranny, and they do so with relentless hammer blows of frightful eeriness.
The Pod People
Invasion of the Body Snatchers involves an extraterrestrial invasion in which mysterious plant spores have settled onto earth and then hatch into sinister leafy pods that migratSunday, March 4, 2018 |
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| James Howard Kunstler |
The Year in Trump  |
| For your reading pleasure Mondays and Fridays
There he is, our president, both immovable object and irresistible force, unsmiling with slitty eyes beneath that car-hood of a hair-doo, lumbering from one presidential prerogative to the next through squalls of opprobrium, perplexing leaders from foreign lands, punking congressmen and senators, inducing swoons of un-safeness among the zhes, theys, and thems on campus, provoking the op-ed bards of The Times to mouth-foaming hysterics, tweeting anyFriday, December 29, 2017 |
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| James Howard Kunstler |
| Dreamers Dreaming Dreams |
| Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are so out of the news now that people not listening to the mold grow in their sweltering bedrooms probably think these events had something to do with the Confederate defeat. Both The New York Times and the WashPo are much more concerned this morning with doings on the planet Saturn, and the career moves of fashion icon Chelsea Manning, which is perhaps how things should be in Attention Deficit Nation. Standing by on developments there….
In the meantime, personally, IFriday, September 15, 2017 |
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 | Mac Slavo - ShtfPlan |
| Rise Of The Machines: U.S. Military to Have More ROBOT Soldiers Than Human by the Year 2025 |
| Warfare is being reinvented. Like a scene out of The Terminator, the future of warfare is destined to include robot soldiers, unmanned aerial assault, and self-driving, weaponized vehicles. An $11 million contract approved by the Pentagon has been awarded to Six3 Advanced Systems. The US Department of Defense is calling on Six3 to “design, develop, and validate system prototypes for a combined-arms squad.” By the year 20Thursday, September 14, 2017 |
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 | Michael Ballanger |
| Silver: The Red-Headed, Freckle-Faced Stepchild |
| In grade school, I had a classmate named Craig McVeigh who was easily one of the most maligned kids in the school because as a big lad standing a full hand width taller than anyone and weighing thirty pounds more than anyone, he was never allowed to play in any sports that involved physical contact. Craig was fair, with bright, curly red hair with freckles adorning most of his exposed skin. Most of all, this lumbering giant of a boy was decidedly unlucky. He couldn't catch a break with a butterfFriday, September 8, 2017 |
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 | Frank Shostak |
| Do Seasonal Adjustments Help Identify Business Cycles |
| Various statistics that governments produce on a regular basis carry the label "seasonally adjusted". What is the meaning of this label? According to popular thinking the data that is observed over time (labelled as time series) is determined by four factors, which are:The trend factorThe cyclical factorThe seasonal factorThe irregular factorIt is accepted that the trend determines the general direction of the data over time, while the cyclical factor causes movements that are related to the busFriday, August 18, 2017 |
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| Graham Summer - Gains Pains & Capital |
| Machine Mania in the Marketplace: How Computers Came to Own the World |
| The following article by David Haggith is from The Great Recession Blog:
With 60% of stocks now being traded by bots that fake each other out in order to create buying opportunities, stock exchanges have lost their connection to the reason markets are created in the first place. The exchanges no longer exist as places for people to buy and sell ownership in a corporation. They exist simply as the neural junctions of a conglomerated machine that plays tricks on itself, and your sole goal is no Wednesday, August 2, 2017 |
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 | Gary Tanashian - Biwii |
| Law 101 Meets Psych 101 |
| By Gary TanashianLawyers and PsychologistsSteve Saville has a post out called Don’t Think Like a Lawyer. In the post he notes the following…“The job of a judge or juror is to impartially weigh the evidence and arguments put forward by both sides in an effort to determine which side has the stronger case. The job of a lawyer is to argue for one side, regardless of whether that side happens to be right or wrong. As a speculator it is important to think like a judge or a juror, not a lawyer.”While Sunday, July 23, 2017 |
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| Sprott Money |
| Amazon Prime Day! What Does This Mean - Dave Kranzler |
| Amazon stock is up $6 in pre-market trading because it’s…”Prime Day!”
But what does this really mean? It means AMZN will burn more cash
selling and fulfilling commodity products with free 2-day shipping. But
it will likely get another $20 pop in its stock because “Prime Day”
revenues today will grow X% over 2016’s “Prime Day.”
Am I the only person in the world who has figured out that AMZN’s e-commerce operating income margin is nearly zero?
Does anyone besides me know that AMZN’s non-NorThursday, July 13, 2017 |
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 | Richard Mills - Ahead of the Herd |
| Deveron UAS: First Mover Advantage in $32B Ag Market for Drones |
| A Brief History of Drones
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, have been around for the better part of a century, but it wasn't until the early 1990s that drones entered the popular lexicon, mostly through their use in stealth military applications.
The first “drone” (named for making a sound similar to a male bee) was actually a boat. Introduced at an exhibition at Madison Square Garden in 1898, inventor Nikolas Tesla used voice commands (actually radio frequencies) to make the unmanSunday, July 2, 2017 |
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 | Mish - Global Economic Analysis |
| How Can a Human Justify Asking to be Paid $15 to Work |
| McDonald’s announced it will replace cashiers in 2,5000 stores with self-service kiosks.
The story buzzed across the internet but Business Insider reported McDonald’s shoots down fears it is planning to replace cashiers with kiosks.
Official Denial
“McDonald’s has repeatedly said that adding kiosks won’t result in mass layoffs, but will instead move some cashiers to other parts of the restaurant where it’s adding new jobs, such as table service. The burger chain reiterated that position again Sunday, June 25, 2017 |
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 | Adrian Ash - Bullion Vault |
| GE2017: Vote, Vote, Vote for Gold! |
| Analysis of gold, the FTSE, cash, Gilts and inflation at UK General Election 2017...
MAKE NO mistake,
writes Adrian Ash at BullionVault.
National ballots rarely move gold or other investment prices. 2016's
Brexit referendum, like
Donald Trump's win as US president, were exceptions rather than the rule – no doubt because, both times, traders and Friday, May 19, 2017 |
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| Graham Summer - Gains Pains & Capital |
| Elon Musk Is About To Turn Us All Into Spacefaring Cyborgs With Neuralink |
| Get ready for the future organic humans - Elon Musk is about to take transhumanism to a whole new level...
What's Neuralink and do we still get to have sex in the future?
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface venture called Neuralink, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company, which is still in the earliest stages of existence and has no public presence whatsoever, is centered on creating devices that can be implanted in the human brain, with the eventuaTuesday, March 28, 2017 |
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| Gary Tanashian - Biwii |
| Moving Targets: Investors Need to Discriminate! |
| By Gary TanashianIn the current political climate herds are running every which way. There is the anti-Trump herd, the pro-Trump herd, the liberal herd, the conservative herd, the CNBC herd, the mainstream financial services industry herd, the Armstrong herd, the gold bug herd. and there are all those ideologies in play. But robotic thinking, unless it is in service to profitable trades like this one on an excellent company providing automation (ref. recent Fanuc NFTRH+ highlight), does not paFriday, February 10, 2017 |
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| Mish - Global Economic Analysis |
 Amazon Plans Robotic Supermarket Staffed by 3; Chinese Factory Eliminate 90 of Humans, Defects Drop 80  |
| Trump blames Mexico, China, and even Germany for taking US jobs and for US trade imbalances.
His message resonated with voters.
People can believe whatever “fake news” they want, but Trump’s theory on manufacturing jobs falls flat under any degree of scrutiny.
ZME Science reports Chinese Factory Replaces 90% of Human Workers with Robots. Production rose by 250%. Defects dropped by 80%.
According to Monetary Watch, the Changying Precision Technology Company focuses on the production of mobile phWednesday, February 8, 2017 |
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| Mac Slavo - ShtfPlan |
| Training Our Replacements: “Bionic Barrista Will Terminate Millions Of Jobs” |
| This article was written by Tyler Durden and originally published at Zero Hedge.
Editor’s Comment: The coming age of automation will threaten every existing job in this country. There are two directions it could go – new levels of human ingenuity and adaption; or a new wave of government dependency wherein nearly everyone relies upon government or privately-sponsored “universal living wages” in order to survive. Without a purpose or gainful employment, the vine of creativity, learning, and progrMonday, February 6, 2017 |
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| Nelson Hultberg - AFR.org |
| The Deep State, Trump, and JFK |
| Donald Trump is a revolutionary, and government establishments loathe revolutionaries. This has been so since human societies began. Those who threaten any society’s prevailing power blocs with a diminishment of their prestige and influence are always targeted by those power blocs as an enemy to be undercut, smeared, and even exterminated if necessary. This is a law of politics that is as assured as the flow of tides and the paths of the planets.
What is the Deep State? It is the vast array of bWednesday, February 1, 2017 |
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| Mish - Global Economic Analysis |
| Robots Replace Robots |
| Existing robots are just not good enough. If we replace robots with better robots, we can reduce the number of robots and get rid of more humans as well.
Please consider Foxconn Boosting Automated Production in China.
Foxconn Electronics is automating production at its factories in China in three phases, aiming to fully automate entire factories eventually, according to general manager Dai Jia-peng for Foxconn’s Automation Technology Development Committee.
In the first phase, Foxconn aims to seSaturday, December 31, 2016 |
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| Mac Slavo - ShtfPlan |
| Why Social Security Is Doomed: “Birthrate At Lowest Level on Record”… And the Future Is Unfunded |
| Here’s more evidence that the “recovery” never really happened, and good reason to think that the entire social net structure is doomed to fall apart.
The birthrate, long tied to economic growth, has been dropping to its lowest point in recorded history – both nationally and, in particular, in the state of California.
This demographic shift is bad news for the economy – in terms of housing, consumer markets, and especially for the long-term funding of social security, medicaid, medicare and otheThursday, December 22, 2016 |
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