WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Telecommunications giant AT&T Inc, which paid President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen at least $200,000, said on Wednesday it had cooperated fully with the special counsel in the Russia probe.
“When we were contacted by the Special Counsel’s office regarding Michael Cohen, we cooperated fully, providing all information requested in November and December of 2017,” the company said in a statement.
Space travel may be exciting, and self-driving cars certainly get a lot of hype.
However, as Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins points out, there remains a good argument that the world’s oceans – and the ships that roam them – often get overlooked when it comes to advances in transportation technology.
How will shipping change in the coming years, and what trends can we look to for guidance on the future of shipping?
THE FUTURE OF SHIPPING
Today’s infographic comes to us from Futurism, and it gives examples of ships already in production – or in the concept phase – that aim to make activity on the world’s oceans greener and more autonomous.
There are two main trends that emerge from these upcoming ships: an increased use of alternative energy and higher levels of automation.
GREENER SHIPS
Fuel accounts for about half of the operating costs of the shipping industry – so the type of fuel used to move ships between ports is paramount. Since the 1960s, heavy fuel oil (HFO) has been the dominant choice for the industry. It’s cheap and plentiful, but it’s also extremely dirty.
Shipping today only produces 3% of carbon dioxide emissions – but it’s areas like sulphur (15% of global total) and particulate emissions (11% of total) that are considered a bigger problem.
As a result, the industry is not only moving to use cleaner oil-based fuels – but some companies are aiming to use alternative energy as well. In the ships above, you’ll see the addition of LNG and fuel cells, as well as the use of solar and wind to help power the future of shipping.
Rolls-Royce is building an autonomous smart ship right now with Google that will monitor its surroundings in intense detail, while making autonomous decisions on the deep seas.
Autonomous shipping is the future of the maritime industry. As disruptive as the smartphone, the smart ship will revolutionize the landscape of ship design and operations”
– Mikael Mäkinen, President, Rolls-Royce Marine
Implementing this technology on the high seas has a longer development cycle than that for autonomous vehicles, but that doesn’t mean the idea is dead in the water.
It just means we’ll have to wait a little longer to see the future of shipping in action – and for now, the prospect of viewing all of the world’s ships in real-time will just have to suffice.
Tesla is an uninvestable stock for me, not just because of its high valuation but also because it fails our fairly basic quality test, which I shamelessly borrowed from Warren Buffett: Would I still buy this stock if right after the purchase the stock market were to close for ten years? If you are a big Tesla car and stock fan, before you start throwing rocks at me, pause and wait till you finish this article – the rocks and I will still be there.
Think about the next ten years. But before you start mentally drawing upward-sloping lines from the current environment into the next decade and drooling over the rosy vision of Tesla’s future that Elon Musk has painted – produce half a million model 3s and bunches of semis and roadsters, and then send a roadster to Mars (I kid you not; that is in his 2018 plan – I’d like you to think about another version of the next ten years: higher (maybe much higher) interest rates, a recession in the US and around the globe, and a less promiscuous bond market where Tesla would have pay a substantial premium to US Treasuries (as would any other company that loses over a billion dollars a year in a highly cyclical industry). And now answer this question: Would Tesla survive this change in economic weather if it happened next year or even three years out? And the answer is … a weak “maybe” at best, and “unlikely” at worst.
The counterargument I’d get: Yes, but we are not going into a recession. Actually, we are. I (and nobody else, for that matter) just don’t know when. After nine years of appreciating stock markets and tepid economic growth, we tend to forget that recessions are a regular economic fact of life, usually arriving every four to five years (so we are overdue for one). Most Millennials have yet to experience adulthood (have a job and a family) through a recession. They have also never had to borrow at high interest rates – but that is liable to happen, too.
Recessions are usually caused by expansions. Recessions are like the hangover that comes after the wild college party (economic expansion). It’s hard to have a good, fun college party with lots of booze and then not experience a hangover. (I am not speaking from recent personal experience but rather am trying to communicate in language to which Millennials can relate). During the expansion party, companies may build up too much inventory or erect too many factories, and consumers may overconsume.
If you own high-quality companies, ones that meet Buffett’s “ten-year stock market closed rule” (as we do), you don’t have to spend a lot of time and energy thinking about when the recession will hit (we don’t). However, if you own Tesla you’d better have a very clear, shiny crystal ball that will reveal lots of detail about the direction of interest rates and the global economy.
Recessions are tough for deeply cyclical companies: The bulk of their costs are fixed, and thus lower sales usually result in significant declines in net income and often lead to losses. This is why car companies and their deeply cyclical brethren don’t trade at high price-to-earnings levels when the economy is doing well. That is when their earnings are high. The market doesn’t usually take these high earnings at face value, knowing full well that there are lower earnings (or losses) around the corner when recession comes. Tesla, however, doesn’t have to worry about this low price-to-earnings problem, because in spite of its $50 billion market valuation, it has no earnings, just losses. It trades at whatever price-to-future Elon Musk tells you it does.
If you own Tesla stock and you only see one rosy (Musk) version of the future, you are ignoring the very real risk that the benign economic environment of today will not persist indefinitely into the future . Good luck – you’ll need plenty.
One additional but very important point. In the past I was dismissive of traditional automakers’ ability to compete with Tesla. I felt their hundred-year past of producing internal combustion engine (ICE) cars was going to hold them back, the same way Nokia’s dumb-phone past prevented it from effectively competing against Apple’s iPhone. Nokia tried to take the dumb-phone operating system Symbian and turn it into a smartphone operating system. It had a lot of engineers who knew the Symbian operating system, and thus it seemed a logical path at the time. The right approach would have been the more difficult one: Hire new engineers and create a brand new operating system. There was absolutely no reason why Nokia could not have developed its own Android-like OS, even if doing so would have required either retraining or, more likely, laying off Symbian engineers.
For a while it looked like I was right about cars, as the Big Three took a hybrid (Symbian-like) approach to electric cars – they were having a hard time saying goodbye to ICE. However, as we look at the future lines of electric cars coming from US and German automakers, we now see them severing the connection to their ICE past and embracing electric.
Disclosure: I am an unsecured lender to Tesla through my $1,000 deposit on a Model 3.
Vitaliy Katsenelson is chief investment officer at Investment Management Associates in Denver, Colo. He is the author of “Active Value Investing” (Wiley) and “The Little Book of Sideways Markets” (Wiley). Read more on Katsenelson’s Contrarian Edge blog.
Bitcoin has been crashing like a Bad Santa all week long—it had surged up to $19,856 last Monday and had plunged as low as $11,590 by Friday, bouncing back up to $14k and change. So anyone who bought bitcoin last Monday is still smarting, and those who bought below $12k yesterday are feeling just plain smart.
Either way, this column will tell you how to join the fun.
In search of a Christmas miracle, we’re going to map out the ten steps for setting up your own bitcoin trading account. It is so fast and simple that in 15 minutes or so, you will be linked-up, “appified” and able to invest in bitcoin and other digital currencies from your smartphone. Once you are set up, you can make each crypto purchase in seconds.
If you dare. Lately it has been a pretty scary videogame.
Millions of people seem undaunted; convinced this bubble still has plenty of room to grow. Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, now is said to have 13.3 million accounts—more than Charles Schwab & Co. (10.6 million) and, maybe, sign of just how much this Bitcoin Bubble is inflating.
This, at a time when stocks are especially hot since the Trump election that has so many of my liberal pals in New York apoplectic and foaming at the mouth. (Then again, they never have felt so outraged and alive—they love it.)
It took a full year for stocks to go up 30%, yet you can lose 20% on bitcoin in just two days. Example: if you bought into bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin this past Wednesday evening (12/20), by Friday afternoon you were down a sickening 20% in bitcoin and almost as much in ETH and LTC. Don’t ride this wild rollercoaster if you can’t stomach that kind of a setback.
For those of you who can, and for those of you who believe you are ready to get started on this tumultuous investing journey, here’s an easy guide, step by step, to setting up a cryptocurrency trading account. We did it the other day at Coinbase. When in doubt, go with the biggest, it may be the biggest for a good reason.
Step 1: Go to app store, download Coinbase app. In a minute or two it’s ready to go.
Step 2: Before you open up the app for the first time, make sure you know, ahead of time, the online password to your checking account, if that is the account you will link up to Coinbase to transfer real U.S. dollars into purchases of tiny increments of untraceable bits. Same goes for the credit card you might link to your new Coinbase account (which triggers a 4% fee rather than the 1.5% fee charged for linking to your bank account).
Step 3: Open the app. Give fingerprint, and the opening screen shows the Bitcoin price at the moment, and a year-long fever chart that starts at $800 in January 2017 and soars to $19,205 by December 2017. It is exhilarating. Two buttons beckon: Sign Up or Log In. Touch on Sign Up.
Step 4: A few screens in, the app has you use your phone-cam to snap a picture of your driver’s license, front and back, and then it has you take a selfie of your face. It tells you it must verify the photos and will get back to you in five to 10 minutes.
Step 5:Five minutes or so later, you are verified, and a fast questionnaire pops up: fill in your occupation and “employed by,” and a message flashes: “You’re almost ready to invest.” Click the green box labeled, “Complete account setup.”
Step 6: The app teases you with the current flashing prices of the coins you anxiously are waiting to buy (BTC, ETH, LTC), as it sends a verification number to your phone. You enter that number into a box on-screen, and the next message says: “You’re almost ready to buy.” (Italics added). Note the change in verbiage from “ready to invest.”
Step 7: “Please complete your account,” the app instructs. You add a payment source (your banking account is recommended), a user name and a password (write it down on a slip of paper and slide the paper into your wallet; security pros might preach against it, but they preach against most everything, and hacks keep happening anyway.)
Step 8: Now take a deep breath and psyche up. For some people wary of how bubbly bitcoin is, talking yourself into making the first bet is like a testosterone-soaked trader trying to talk himself into getting married. You never will be truly ready, so just take the leap. Do it in a small way, and don’t flinch when what you bought suddenly slides in value.
Step 9: Commence buying. Touch the teensy “Prices” icon in the bottom left of your phone to see the latest coin bids, then touch “Accounts” and you get a screen of “wallets,” one for each coin type. Touch the bitcoin (BTC) wallet and a new screen pops with two buttons: Buy. Sell. Can’t sell what you don’t yet own, so you click Buy.
Step 10: Instantly a new screen shows up, with the numbers pad helpfully displayed near the bottom so you can enter in the dollar amount you are about to spend. You tap in the dollar figure into a box marked USD, the app calculates the microscopic portion of coin that sum will fetch, you tap on “Buy” at the top of the screen, confirm the buy on the next screen and BAM!
A new screen shows, against a field of royal blue, a checkmark in a circle at the top, and below it a headline declaring: “Your buy was successful!” And below that, the exact portion you just bought, starting with a zero and carried out to eight decimal places. Or in the case of this purchase (of bitcoin cash, BCH, a new offshoot that we bought at 11:19 p.m. on Friday night):
0.08721555 BCH
At the bottom of the screen a bar instructs: Go to Accounts. When you press it, up comes the listing of the asset you just bought, with the Buy and Sell buttons at the ready. One back-arrow press and you are back to the full Accounts page listing five “wallets” for buying five separate currencies (BCH, BTC, ETC, LTC and the good ol’ USD).
From there you can get fancier, setting price alerts to learn when a currency has fallen to the price you were waiting to see. “Never miss an opportunity,” the Coinbase app advises. This can get obsessive pretty quickly (and drain your time away from Facebook, Instagram and Snap). The app also can alert you when your bitcoin crashes down through a floor you specified, in case you want to sell.
Although, selling isn’t really the point here, is it? If you are bold enough (or unwise enough) to bet on this ethereal thing everyone is talking about, then maybe it is best to put up your money and leave it there for a while, electing patience over panic. You are a rough rider trying to stay on top of this giant, swelling bubble and hold on long enough to reap returns from those who jump on after you. With easy apps like Coinbase, millions more investors may be aiming to do just that. Giddyap!
Next: Five Easy Pieces of advice for bitcoin trading.
Shares of Alibaba fell on Thursday morning, despite an exciting news story involving the Chinese e-commerce juggernaut, which is rushing to shake up the way people buy cars in China. Alibaba seems to be taking a page from Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods, with the continued push into physical retail. The plan outlined by Alibaba, is to open two giant car vending machines in early 2018, shaped like a futuristic tubular building with a giant cat’s head on top.
Having monopolized the online world, Alibaba continues to push offline with investments in Chinese bricks and mortar retailers.
Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang said back in November, “physical stores serve an indispensable role during the consumer journey, and should be enhanced through data-driven technology and personalized services in the digital economy.”
“By fully integrating online and physical channels together with our partners, we look forward to delivering an original and delightful shopping experience to Chinese consumers,” he added.
So how does this vending machine work?
The smartphone user must open Alibaba’s Taobao app to scan a car. The app will then process the picture and let the user pick a color and other basic options.
Next, the app will require the user to take a selfie to confirm their identity. Once confirmed, the app will arrange for a test-drive at a car vending machine.
To retrieve the car, the customer will gain access through a facial recognition device at the staffless vending machine. According to the company, a “super member” does not need to leave a deposit to retrieve a vehicle.
Once the identity is confirmed, the multi-floor vending machine will rotate cars like a ferris wheel until the car is found. The test-drive is limited to three days, after which Alibaba can arrange for the sale or the user can choose a different model. Alibaba members are limited to five test-drives per month, where Alibaba is relying on its financial services arm to vet members before borrowing.
Alibaba said it will open two locations starting in January 2018 (Shanghai and Nanjing), and it plans to open “dozens” more across China later in the year. The vending machine concept blended with car buying, is an attempt by the company to streamline the buying process to as quick as opening a can of soda.
“Our thinking behind the Car Vending Machine is focused on helping users solve certain problems they face in the car-buying process. To do that, we are building a physical, experiential store that offers staffless car pickup through facial-recognition, three-day ‘deep’ test-drives, and a one-stop-shop that displays [cars from] all mainstream brands at once,” said Huan Lu, marketing director of Tmall’s automotive division.
Just a few months after implementing a massive 60% hike in gasoline taxes, raising them from $0.297 per gallon to $0.417, the state of California is now one step closer to implementing a brand new tax that would charge drivers for each mile driven.
As a quick example of how shockingly misguided such a piece of legislation would be, the logical conclusion here is that poor people who have been forced out of cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego due to rising rents would now be forced to incur yet another massive tax for simply commuting into city centers to do their jobs...in essence, in many cases, it would serve as a regressive tax on the poorest families...
So how did we get here? It all started back in 2014 when California passed Senate Bill 1077 calling for a mileage tax. The bill kicked off the California Road Charge Pilot Program which sought to design and test various strategies for implementing a mileage tax.
Now, after 3 full years of studying various methodologies for tracking mileage, from requiring a "plug-in" for each vehicle to tracking your smart phone movements to more manual systems that would track odometers, the California State Transportation Agency (CalSTA), according to a newly filed report is officially ready to declare a mileage tax "feasible". Here"s what they found:
The Road Charge Pilot Program successfully tested the functionality, complexity, and feasibility of the critical elements of this new potential revenue system - road charge - for transportation funding.
Manual options provide the highest degree of privacy and data security, but will in all likelihood be the most difficult to enforce, and could be costly to administer
Plug-in devices are the most reliable options, however as new technology emerges this methodology could be obsolete by the time a road charge program is adopted
More technologically advanced methods, such as the smartphone application with location services and the in-vehicle telematics show great promise, but need further refinement
Of course, as State Senator Scott Wiener points out, a mileage tax will be a huge blow to all the folks that have been coaxed into electric vehicles over the years by tax subsidies which made them more affordable. While those folks have been able to avoid gasoline taxes, part of the calculus that supposedly makes them "affordable", they won"t be able to avoid a mileage tax. Per CBS:
But it’s not just a question about money, it’s also a question about fairness.
State Senator Scott Wiener and others are saying that when it comes to road taxes, it’s time to start looking at charging you by the mile rather than by the gallon.
“If you own an older vehicle that is fueled by gas, you’re paying gas tax to maintain the roads. Someone who has an electric vehicle or a dramatically more fuel efficient vehicle is paying much less than you are. But they are still using the roads,” Wiener said.
“People are going to use less and less gas in the long run,” according to Wiener.
And less gas means less gas tax, and less money for road repair.
“We want to make sure that all cars are paying to maintain the roads,” Wiener said.
Yet another reason for California residents to promptly consider a move to Texas...
In the latest indication that the cryptocurrency market top has arrived, a 30-year-old IT professional in New Zealand – who didn’t want his identity revealed, presumably for fear he would be targeted by criminals (or worse: tax collectors) – sold his house to build a "virtual-currency mine" at a "secret west Auckland location."
Readers who have been following our coverage of the New Zealand property market will understand the irony inherent in this exchange: Much like bitcoin, housing costs in New Zealand have been massively inflated thanks in part to an influx of foreign capital, with Chinese buyers representing one of the largest groups of investors, according to the New Zealand Herald.
A small room filled with incredibly powerful computer hardware that trawls through millions of transactions a second...
The man first became interested in bitcoin in 2013 when the price of a bitcoin was about $1. Earlier today, bitcoin was worth in excess of $18,000.
The 30-year-old IT professional, who didn"t want to reveal his identity, has created a "virtual-currency mine" at a secret west Auckland location; a small room filled with incredibly powerful computer hardware that trawls through millions of transactions a second.
The man first became interested in the monetary phenomenon in 2013 when the price of a bitcoin was about $1. Earlier today, bitcoin was worth in excess of US$18,000.
Despite an unremarkable start to his venture, a friend suggested he purchase more equipment to increase his returns.
"Then we got talking: What if we put $5000 into it? What if we put $10,000 into it? What if we sold the house and put it into all of these?
"That"s literally what I did: Sold the house in Hamilton and here we are today."
With the $60,000 equity he received from the $300,000 sale, he purchased the expensive, high-powered computer equipment necessary for a lucrative virtual-currency mine and spent over 400 hours researching how to set it up and find pay dirt.
Aside from spending NZ$1,500 (about $1,000) on his power bill, the unidentified crypto miner can essentially just sit back and watch the cash roll in – something that’s allowed him to fund both his wedding and his honeymoon to Fiji.
Fans whir constantly in the 35C heat so his expensive equipment doesn"t crash, but other than a $1500 a month power bill, the digi-miner doesn"t have to lift a finger other than to flick through his smartphone and watch his virtual money rise and fall in value.
And so far it"s mostly been rising - at an astounding rate. In just three months the man has funded his $30,000 wedding and honeymoon, as well as a trip to Fiji.
"I get rewarded for validating and verifying that people have the cryptocurrency ... [and] that if they try and send it to somebody else they"re not trying to be fraudulent," he said.
While the man said he’s weathered several rough patches where bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies that he mines have declined sharply, the good times have so far greatly outweighed the bad…
"If you were to take $100,000 and put it into a term deposit you"d get back, what, 5 per cent over five years, 10 years? I mine more than that overnight," he said.
"I"ve woken up some mornings and I"ve lost $2000 overnight due to the price fluctuations. [But] the good mornings outweigh the bad mornings and unless you"re in a hurry there"s nothing wrong with sitting on it for six months or 12 months."
Still, he readily admits bitcoin and digital currencies more broadly are “uncharted territory.”
Students of the 2000 dot-com bubble would probably disagree.
With the iPhone X, Apple’s re-designed anniversary iPhone, official launch today, we saw the familiar images of people lining up in front of Apple Stores around the world to be among the first ones to get their hands on the new device.
Despite the X’s lofty price – it starts at $999 for the smaller 64 GB model, making it the most expensive iPhone to-date – it’s safe to say that Apple could sell a lot more units on Friday than it can possibly produce by then. When the iPhone X became available for pre-order last Friday, it was sold out within minutes and the estimated delivery time currently stands at 5 to 6 weeks.
According to Apple’s official support website, the company’s latest smartphone is just as expensive to repair as it is to acquire.
Repairing the screen alone will set you back $279 or nearly twice what you pay for a new iPhone 8 screen. If you’re unlucky enough to break more than just your screen, you’ll be out $549 to get your phone fixed.
Earlier we showed that in a striking lack of enthusiasm for Apple"s latest offering, the iPhone 8 which went on sale today, there were just two people in "line" in front of an Apple store in China: less than the security guards at the same location.
Unfortunately for Tim Cook, it appears that it was not just China as the entire world appears to have gotten collective cold feet when it comes to Apple"s newest gizmo, because while Apple Stores are usually faced with shockingly long lines on the morning of a new iPhone launch, that wasn"t the case today. Anywhere.
As various reports have pointed out, some Apple Stores have very short lines out front for the iPhone 8, if they have anyone at all. According to Reuters, that there were fewer than 30 people at Apple’s Sydney store, which usually has hundreds out front. And it described a “less lively mood in Asia” than for previous launches.
In California, ABC7 reporter Chelsea Edwards posted a photo from outside of an Apple Store with no one in front of it.
This is the extent of the line up for the new iPhone in Brisbane. Just a dozen deep. Clearly not as much excitement as in previous years. pic.twitter.com/iJGg6S3k3Z
According to CBS LA, the Pasadena store was also missing a line of eager fans.
Previous releases of the iPhone attracted hundreds of Apple fans waiting in the early morning hours at several stores across Southern California. The Apple Store has a ticketing system, but that never stopped eager iPhone fans from camping out overnight.
But on Friday morning, all was quiet on Colorado Boulevard, except for employees inside the store handing out tickets.
To be sure, some pockets of enthusiasm remained, such as at Apple’s location at the World Trade Center and on Fifth Avenue in New York which did have a line this morning, and there appeared to be a big turnout in Singapore.
As we commented earlier, and the Verge adds, there are reasons this launch might not be getting as much turnout. For one, this is the 10th generation of the iPhone, and hype has probably just died down. People are no longer lining up to buy their first or second smartphone, and this year’s model doesn’t have any revolutionary new features that people are willing to wait overnight for.
Furthermore, in November Apple is launching the next "revolutionary" iPhone — the iPhone X — not the iterative update that’s coming out today. It’s the same reason there wasn’t a rush for the iPhone SE, either.
More concerning is that there are signs that the iPhone X is cutting into iPhone 8 online orders, too. Speaking to BuzzFeed News, Angela Ahrendts, Apple’s retail leader, said “it’s kind of our fault” that lines are going away, because Apple gives customers a choice of where to buy their phone, online or in person. That’s been true for years, though. BuzzFeed also says it saw short lines in Toronto, London, and Los Angeles.
While it is too early to conclude if the sudden disappearance of customers is troubling for Apple"s future says, it is hardly the reception Tim Cook - who carefully cultivates the image of pent up demand by parading the lines of people greeting its every product launch - wanted. Still, more important will be what happens outside Apple stores on November 3rd, when the iPhone X comes out, although with concerns mounting about the public"s receptivity to the phone"s face-scanning technology which has already received scathing criticism among even pro-Apple outlets, some investors are unwilling to wait: AAPL stock is down over 1% today and is about to have its worst week since April 2016.
Given the volume of time people spend immersed in their smartphones, iPads and laptops, an unconnected life is pretty hard to imagine these days. For the majority of millennials, the time before the world wide web is now nothing more than a distant memory, a memory that"s been eviscerated by the ubiquity and life-changing impact of connected technology.
Interestingly, Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes that it isn"t just millennials who are losing touch with a world without smartphones, emails and social media. Research from Ipsos has found that society in general just can"t live without the internet.
When in 2013 Ed Snowden revealed to Joe Sixpack that his data was indeed being hacked and intercepted, not by crazy vodka swilling Ivan in Novgorod but by team America, there was the sort of surprise and outrage that comes with finding your 5-year old just wiped snot across your brand new leather sofa. A lot of yelling and screaming, limbs flailing, and a decent level of embarrassment for Johnny Snotnose, who in this instance was the NSA.
Less than 12 months later, all was forgotten. In the end nobody gave an isht.
In the ghettos of social media the Kardashians were calling and "Hey look, did you know there are pornos on the Internet with woman and farm animals?"
Joe Sixpack doesn"t care about the fact that his photos are accessible, even the naughty ones. Indeed almost every app downloaded today requests permission to breach that gap. Joe doesn"t care about his contacts list being breached. He clicks the "Sure, rape me" "Accept Permissions" button with glee, eager to get the download finished so that he can start sharing photos of what"s on his dinner plate with the whole world because... well, actually I have no idea.
It"s insane to me. Sadly the hoi-polloi spend more time looking at Joe"s dinner choice than reading the fine print on the permissions they"ve just granted to the apps downloaded.
You"d be forgiven for thinking that a goldfish-like memory could be to blame. I certainly thought people would care but obviously I was wrong because ever since then we"ve had more reasons to be outraged over real problems of this nature than you could shake a stick at.
Since Snowden, Wikileaks have provided an absolute deluge of additional fodder in this space. What"s happened?
Nothing! Nobody cares.
Just yesterday we were alerted to "Dumbo" a CIA project.
Try finding anything on the MSM about it and it"s like searching for a Texan cattle farmer at a vegan food festival.
Sure, we know the MSM are a complete joke but the masses still gather around the MSM drinking fountain for their daily dose of intellectual junk food. What did they have to say on the topic?
Instead of outrage and public humiliation showered on the perpetrators, we"re treated to snowflakes, daffodils, and bubble bath enthusiasts fighting the injustices perpetrated on Joey, who goes by the name Sheila due to his desire to don a frock and spend all his money rearranging his bits at the cosmetic surgeon.
There is, however, one thing that"s going to change it all...
Money.
Data security is like a seatbelt. It only matters when you park the beemer into a gum tree at speed.
People only protect data when that data is attached to economic value.
Ask anyone who"s bought, sold, and transacted in bitcoin what computer they use and not one will say a Windows machine.
The reasons for this are quite simple. That"d be like driving blindfolded at speed without a seatbelt, after chugging back a half a bottle of Glenfiddich.
This is just a first step in data security, and I use bitcoin as an example because typically the folks who have spent any time figuring it out know a thing or two about data security and cryptography.
Back to the masses, though.
Clearly when the wet-lipped psychopaths at some three letter agency are looking at Joe"s Facebook content or the naughty video he made last night with his girlfriend, Joe doesn"t much care. But when Joe begins storing real value and assets on his computer or smartphone and they get stolen, then, and only then, will Joe very quickly attach value to his data security. The learning curve promises to be steep.
Adoption of safety measures will come faster than Brangelina were picking up new ethnic babies from Nambabwia or wherever a few years back. When people realise that their livelihood is directly attached to their data security, then, and only then, will the begin to care.
Mark Andreessen famously stated that software is eating the world and by George, he was right. With all that software though comes a different set of problems. One of those problems, one even larger than John Prescott, is cyber security.
Now once again, I suspect Joe Sixpack won"t give an isht if someone can see that he"s turning on his heating system from his smartphone while on the way home. But when it gets disrupted and hacked and his phone automatically pays for a weekend at the Marriott in Bali without his knowledge, Joe will search for solutions in a blind panic.
When Joe begins getting paid via smart contracts and in value tokens attached to his workplace and it"s all done on a network, Joe will care a lot.
Economic incentives, both fear and greed, never change. What"s changing is our financial architecture and how we"re going to have to deal with that.
Fortunes will be made on the back of what promises to be an explosion in data security. Watch!
- Chris
"The great fear that I have is that nothing will change." — Edward Snowden
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Liked this article? Then you"ll probably like my other missives on
More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis...
...Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, [teens today] talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”
I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.
Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data - some reaching back to the 1930s - I had never seen anything like it.
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What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.
The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet.
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More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.
Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.
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There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives - and making them seriously unhappy.
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You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.
There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media.
The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.
Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating. But only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.
The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991.
Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school. For some, Mom and Dad are such good chauffeurs that there’s no urgent need to drive. “My parents drove me everywhere and never complained, so I always had rides,” a 21-year-old student in San Diego told me. “I didn’t get my license until my mom told me I had to because she could not keep driving me to school.”
The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the Great Recession, but teen employment has not bounced back, even though job availability has.
At the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.
So is depression. Once again, the effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.
Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.
This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes.
The correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone. As the technology writer Nick Bilton has reported, it’s a policy some Silicon Valley executives follow. Even Steve Jobs limited his kids’ use of the devices he brought into the world.
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If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen. Of course, these analyses don’t unequivocally prove that screen time causes unhappiness; it’s possible that unhappy teens spend more time online. But recent research suggests that screen time, in particular social-media use, does indeed cause unhappiness. One study asked college students with a Facebook page to complete short surveys on their phone over the course of two weeks. They’d get a text message with a link five times a day, and report on their mood and how much they’d used Facebook. The more they’d used Facebook, the unhappier they felt, but feeling unhappy did not subsequently lead to more Facebook use.
I realize that restricting technology might be an unrealistic demand to impose on a generation of kids so accustomed to being wired at all times. Prying the phone out of our kids’ hands will be difficult, even more so than the quixotic efforts of my parents’ generation to get their kids to turn off MTV and get some fresh air. But more seems to be at stake in urging teens to use their phone responsibly, and there are benefits to be gained even if all we instill in our children is the importance of moderation. Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.
As we reported last week, Cowen analyst Andrew Charles calculated that McDonald’s “Experience of the Future” strategy could allow it to replace 2,500 cashiers with “Big Mac ATMs” by the end of 2017 – and another 3,000 in 2018.
Now, in a hint of what’s to come for the nightlife industry, the Las Vegas Sun reports that the a bar relying solely on robot bartenders – the first of its kind in the US - will open on Friday.
“Tipsy Robot, a 2,500-square-foot bar to open Friday at the Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood, boasts two robotic bartenders ready to make your favorite concoction any way you like.”
The bar is being run by Rino Armeni, the chairman of a company called Robotic Innovations, who said he decided to open the first robot bar in Las Vegas to give the city a leg up on other nightlife hubs like New York City and Miami.
Here’s how it works:
“Customers place their order on one of the dozen tablet stations in the bar or through the Tipsy Robot app on their smartphone.They then pay with cash or credit card and enter their email address.
A QR code (barcode) is sent to the email, which the customer places above various windows available. The barcode is scanned and the drink is entered into the system. Patrons can see where their drink is in the queue and are alerted when their order is up.
Each robot has access to more than 60 kinds of liquor, and drinks can be mixed and poured into a 12-ounce plastic cup within 70 seconds.”
Armeni stressed that the robots are meant to be a novelty, and that he believes Technology that carries out human jobs ultimately won’t replace human servers.
“We have a human bar on the side, and the robotic bar is mostly an attraction and entertainment,” Armeni said, “It’s no different from the fountains at Bellagio and the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign.”
However, if the robots’ performance lives up to the description provided by the Sun – well, let’s just say that bartenders who were hoping to make a good living in Sin City might want to consider a move.
“Ice, lemon, limes and sugars are stored behind the wall of the robots. Juices, sodas and liquors are housed above them.
Aside from perfect pours every time, Armeni said the robots don’t spill and don’t waste any ingredients.
“They work to perfection, so everything the robots make is perfect,” he said.
Tipsy Robot’s location at the entrance of the Miracle Mile Shops on Las Vegas Boulevard was chosen because of its heavy foot traffic, Armeni said.
“We wanted to find a place where there was a lot of people coming through,” Armeni said. “At this location, there is an average of 24,000 people coming through a day, so that was what sold it to us.”
In addition to the robots, the bar will employ 16 humans, including what Armeni calls “Galactica Ambassadors,” women dressed in space-themed metallic silver dresses – they’re basically a squad of hostesses. Technicians are also on hand to tend to the machines should problems arise.
The techs also ensure the robot"s self-cleaning system is working properly because unlike bartenders and other servers – whose hygiene habits are largely a matter of trust – these robots automatically clean their robot “hands” between each drink.
Now, if two robots, whose only associated costs are the initial investment, maintainence costs, and the electricity required to operate them, can perform the exact same job as a human server, ask yourself: How could anybody justifying being paid $15 an hour to perform the same job - but not as well - as an oversized electric back-massager hooked up to an iPad?
Researchers at the Univerisity of Texas at Austin recently completed a comprehensive study illustrating the effects of smartphones on the human brain. What they found was that ‘smart’ phones actually make us dumb.
According to the study, Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity, having a smartphone around is a definitive way to lower our cognitive ability.
According to the study’s authors, Adrian F. Ward, Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy, and Maarten W. Bos, results from two experiments indicate that even when people are successful at maintaining sustained attention—as when avoiding the temptation to check their phones—the mere presence of these devices reduces available cognitive capacity. Moreover, these cognitive costs are highest for those highest in smartphone dependence. We conclude by discussing the practical implications of this smartphone-induced brain drain for consumer decision-making and consumer welfare.
The study points out the fact that smartphones are a revolutionary way for people across the world to access information and stay connected with the simple tap. They note that this state of constant connection would not have even been possible, just ten years ago. They also note the massive contribution to humanity that smartphones have brought us.
However, according to the study, the ease of completing simple tasks in the presence of our smartphones is hindered — even if our phones are off.
In one experiment, the researchers asked study participants to sit at a computer and take a series of tests that required full concentration in order to score well. The tests were geared to measure participants’ available cognitive capacity — that is, the brain’s ability to hold and process data at any given time. Before beginning, participants were randomly instructed to place their smartphones either on the desk face down, in their pocket or personal bag, or in another room. All participants were instructed to turn their phones to silent.
The researchers found that participants with their phones in another room significantly outperformed those with their phones on the desk, and they also slightly outperformed those participants who had kept their phones in a pocket or bag.
The findings suggest that the mere presence of one’s smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive functioning, even though people feel they’re giving their full attention and focus to the task at hand.
“We see a linear trend that suggests that as the smartphone becomes more noticeable, participants’ available cognitive capacity decreases,” Ward said. “Your conscious mind isn’t thinking about your smartphone, but that process — the process of requiring yourself to not think about something — uses up some of your limited cognitive resources. It’s a brain drain.”
READ MORE:First of Its Kind Study Shows that Change in Diet Alone — Not Drugs — is Curing Diseases
Dependency on one’s phone is also a factor in determining the level of cognitive degradation, according to the study.
Researchers asked the nearly 800 smartphone users to self-report on their level of smartphone dependency — or how strong of an urge a person feels to use their phones to simply get through the day.
Participants performed the same series of computer-based tests as the first group and were randomly assigned to keep their smartphones either in sight on the desk face up, in a pocket or bag, or in another room. In this experiment, some participants were also instructed to turn off their phones.
The researchers found that participants who were the most dependent on their smartphones performed worse compared with their less-dependent peers, but only when they kept their smartphones on the desk or in their pocket or bag.
The fact that the researchers found that it didn’t matter whether the phone was on or off is a telling sign over the power of technology. Merely having a smartphone nearby reduces our ability to focus and perform tasks because part of our brain is constantly devoted to the phone and actively working to not pick it up or use it.
“It’s not that participants were distracted because they were getting notifications on their phones,” said Ward. “The mere presence of their smartphone was enough to reduce their cognitive capacity.”
How long is it since you last used your phone? Chances are, you"re using it right now to view this post. Analysts from Statista"s Digital Market Outlook have revealed that the amount of time we"re spending with our smartphones online has increased substantially over the last few years.
The term "smartphone addiction" is by now pretty well-established (you can take a test here to see if you might be a sufferer). As our infographic shows, across the world, this addiction seems to be tightening its grip. Of the countries surveyed, smartphone owners in Brazil spend by far the most amount of time online. The average user in 2016 spent close to 5 hours per day surfing - more than twice as long as in 2012.
Perhaps this explains the collapse of global worker productivity, as we detailed previously, adjusting for the WWII anomaly (which tells us that GDP is not a good measure of a country’s prosperity) US productivity growth peaked in 1972 – incidentally the year after Nixon took the US off gold.
The productivity decline witnessed ever since is unprecedented. Despite the short lived boom of the 1990s US productivity growth only average 1.2 per cent from 1975 up to today. If we isolate the last 15 years US productivity growth is on par with what an agrarian slave economy was able to achieve 200 years ago.
The Answer to the economic dilemma of our time is simple then - "Put The Smartphone Down"... but then again, what will happen to Amazon, Google, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and all the "real" economy drivers behind the stock market illusion?
The march towards an Orwellian future where every form of human behavior is being monitored by AI driven appliances and electronics is quickly becoming a reality. This was the plan from the start and as we can see the ruling elite have not slowed down one bit in their attempt to create this kind of world.
It is thus no surprise that Samsung is releasing a new smart phone last week called the S8 and S8+ that has a software called “Bixby” which will be studying your behavior in real-time and will be reacting, responding and “learning” from you accordingly.
The new Samsung S8 smart phone represents one of the first portable devices released to the general public in which the owner will be officially creating a 2-way relationship with the machine. The phone will carry a feature that can be activated which will require biometric data (retinal scan and facial recognition) in order to use the phone and you can sure many people will take advantage of this feature. Passwords and pin numbers will soon be no more as the masses are conditioned into using biometric data.
The Bixby software in the latest Samsung smart phone will:
“learn your routines to serve up the right apps at the right time”
And it:
“is an intelligent interface that learns from you to help you do more.”
The dark technocratic future of humanity is now coming to full view as the technocratic ruling elite continue to push their technocracy and technology to no end.
The questions that we need to be asking ourselves are questions like, when will humanity as a whole start pushing back? When will those in the Department of Justice demand an end to unnecessary research? When will people in large masses call this out and consider certain advanced scientific research unethical? When will the line be crossed where additional research into certain areas like artificial intelligence (AI) be considered an act of aggression against humanity or even a punishable crime? I’m referring to the people of the nation states demanding observation of human right to privacy and holding elected officials accountable. And I’m also referring to consumers becoming aware of what they buy and choosing where and how they spend their money.
I believe all of this is part of the JADE (at the) HELM revelations of 2015-2016. A plan for “mastering the human domain”. A plan made possible by companies like Ratheon which have been pushing a thing called BBN AI technology, a highly sophisticated technological platform that incorporates super high speed real-time learning, adaptation and awareness features. (see video below for more)
Solutions
Stopping the agenda of the technocrats is the solution. People everywhere must step up, begin paying attention and start fighting back. And the very first thing we need to do is shine a bright light on this issue, spread the awareness and hope that enough people see the problem. That means educating the stubborn “Progressive” Liberal Left and anyone else who has a blind faith in technology. This awareness must then turn into action. Here are some solutions.
1- Throw away, disable or stop using your smart phone or any smart device around your home for that matter.
2- Replace your smart phone with a non-smart phone
3- Change your paradigm and see if you can free yourself from cell phones all together
4- Realize that smart phones and smart devices are slowly being pulled into the equation for work and survival. Demand that your boss (if you work for someone) not force you to use a smart device. Let’s challenge the legality of this now growing practice and problem. Just focusing and pointing to the dangers of EMF waves emitted by these devices alone may give us the legal authority to stop employers from requiring the use of these devices.
5- If you must have a cell phone (like many of us do) then learn all the safest ways to use it which include among other things keeping it as far away from your body as possible.
6- As best you can, stop texting your friends and family for every little thing and go back to talking to each other and meeting in person.
7- Make a focused effort to raise awareness of this issue and help spread the word.
Finally, realize that Technocracy is just another form of oppression. Despite all the voices of today that glorify technological advancements, realize that humans are made to move around and work while on earth. It’s the large corporations that want to replace all forms of labor with robots. It’s the ruling elite in control of the nation states that want every form of behavior recorded with the aid of their technology and very little to none of this actually benefits humanity. While many inventions of the 19th century improved the human experience the technological advancements of today are going far beyond what humanity needs to be happy and healthy. Let’s learn to identify this problem quickly so we can implement solutions today and now.
Even as talk about robots taking over low-(and not so low) skilled jobs has been all the rage in recent months, few Americans have been faced with the imminent threat of being displaced by Johnny 5. Not so in China, where a viral clip released by the local TV broadcaster shows an army of little orange robots sorting out packages in a warehouse in eastern China, the latest example of how machines are increasingly taking over menial factory work in the world"s most populous nation.
The People’s Daily shared the behind-the-scenes footage of the self-charging robot army in a sorting centre of Chinese delivery powerhouse Shentong (STO) Express. The video, also released by the SCMP, shows hundreds of round Hikvision robots, each roughly the size of a seat cushion, swivelling across the floor of the large warehouse in Hangzhou. A worker is seen feeding each robot with a package before the machines carry the parcels away to different areas around the sorting centre, then flipping their lids to deposit them into chutes beneath the floor.
The robots identified the destination of each package by scanning a code on the parcel, thus minimising sorting mistakes, according to the video.
The army of robots can sort up to 200,000 packages per day and are self-charging, so they can work 24/7, although they are presently used only for about six or seven hours each time from 6pm according to a STO Express spokesman.
An STO Express spokesman told the South China Morning Post on Monday that the robots had helped the company save half the costs it typically required to use human workers. They also improved efficiency by around 30% and maximised sorting accuracy, he said.
“We use these robots in two of our centres in Hangzhou right now,” the spokesman said. “We want to start using these across the country, especially in our bigger centres.”
Manufacturers across China have been increasingly replacing human workers with machines, for one simple reason: Chinese wage growth is soaring with average wages in China"s manufacturing sector rising above those in countries such as Brazil and Mexico.
Meanwhile, the output of industrial robots in the country grew 30.4% last year. In the country’s latest five-year plan, the central government set a target aiming for annual production of these robots to reach 100,000 by 2020.
Elsewhere, Apple’s supplier Foxconn last year replaced 60,000 factory workers with robots. The Taiwanese smartphone maker has several factories across China, with the bulk of the hundreds of thousands of employees set to be rep[laced by robots.
In Wilbur Ross" first public announcement, the former hedge fund manger and current Trump commerce secretary announced that China"s telecommunications giant ZTE has agreed to pay a total of $1.2 billion in penalties and plead guilty to violating U.S. sanctions on Iran, selling US technology to Tehran, and obstructing a federal investigation, ending a five-year probe that has raised trade tensions between the U.S. and China. The penalty was among the largest ever in a sanctions case.
ZTE was accused that over a six-year-long period, it planned to obtain technology products from the U.S., incorporate them into ZTE equipment and ultimately ship the equipment to Iran. The company agree to settle because as the WSJ adds, it avoided a more-devastating supply cutoff of U.S. components, which the Commerce Department slapped on ZTE in March 2016 and immediately suspended as a settlement was negotiated. Without key components such as Qualcomm processors for its smartphones, ZTE’s ability to produce some of its major products could have been crippled in a matter of months, putting it at the risk of bankruptcy.
The Chinese telecom giant will pay an initial fine of $892 million as part of the settlement, and will plead guilty to conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, among other charges, in the agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce, Department of Treasury and Department of Justice.
“The highest levels of management within the company approved the scheme,” and the company “repeatedly lied to and misled federal investigators,” said Mary McCord, who runs the Justice Department’s national security division.
The Commerce Department investigation followed reports by Reuters in 2012 that ZTE had signed contracts to ship millions of dollars worth of hardware and software from some of the best-known U.S. technology companies to Iran"s largest telecoms carrier.
"ZTE acknowledges the mistakes it made, takes responsibility for them, and remains committed to positive change in the company," ZTE Chairman and Chief Executive Zhao Xianming said on Tuesday in a statement. An agreement caps a year of uncertainty for the Shenzhen-based company, which in March 2016 was placed on a list of entities that U.S. suppliers could not work with without a license. ZTE acted contrary to U.S. national security or foreign policy interests, the Commerce Department said at the time.
Commerce will recommend that ZTE be removed from that list if the company lives up to its deal and a court approves its agreement with the Justice Department.
According to Reuters, ZTE said it has agreed to an additional penalty of $300 million to a division of the Commerce Department that will be suspended during a seven-year term on the condition that the company complies with requirements in the agreement. The settlement includes $101 million to settle potential civil liability for Iran sanction violations. The action marks the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control"s largest settlement to date with a non-financial entity.
One of the world’s biggest telecommunications gear makers and the No. 4 smartphone vendor in the United States, ZTE sells handset devices to U.S. mobile carriers AT&T, T-Mobile US and Sprint. It relies on U.S. companies including Qualcomm, Microsoft and Intel for components.
Reflect on that: the average US adult watches 5 hours of television PER DAY. There are roughly 242 million people 18 and over living in the US. So that means we collectively consume 1.2 billion hours of TV per day. That"s over 440 billion hours per year.
Imagine how much more we could get accomplished as a nation if we devoted even just half of that time into self-betterment projects or public service. That"s a staggering amount of human productivity we"re pissing away.
And note that I"m only looking at the TV usage stats -- there"s an additional 4.5 hours of internet/smartphone/radio time (per day!) we"d benefit from cutting back on, too. With so much of our day spent being a screen zombie, how the hell do we get anything done?
But despite my ranting, I"m not a complete ascetic about television. Yes, I do watch it -- in moderation -- as does the rest of my family. But in my household, the TV is usually off. And when on, it"s usually to watch a specific show or film -- not to "see what"s on" and mindlessly channel surf.
And amidst the vast sea of cable-network detritus, every so often there"s a show or two that I find worthwhile -- either for entertainment or for learning something.
Recently, there are two shows I"m currently enjoying that deliver on both counts. And very surprisingly, they"re "reality TV" -- a genre I usually associate as the worst of the worst when it comes to low-quality programming. But I"m finding I"m learning some useful lessons from these two series, and I thought I"d take a moment to share my observations for those who might want to tune in and see for themselves.
Both of these shows are on the History Channel. That"s pure coincidence, or perhaps a sign that the History Channel doesn"t produce pure dreck. But just in case you"re wondering, no, Peak Prosperity has no relationship with them, nor is getting anything in return for mentioning them here. I simply like these two shows.
"Alone" (History Channel, Thursday nights)
Alone is an experiment in the "lone wolf" approach to survival.
Each season (they"re on Season 3 now), they drop 10 contestants -- each of whom is well experienced with outdoor survival -- off in a remote part of the world and see who can last the longest without any support from or interaction with other people.
Contestants are allowed to bring 10 items from a pre-approved list of 50 -- and that"s it. They"re dropped off far enough apart so that they won"t come into contact with each other. They must learn to acquire shelter, food, warmth, etc all on their own. Whoever can last the longest without requesting/requiring emergency evacuation wins -- and receives a check for $500,000.
Here"s a quick trailer for the show, to give you a sense of what the conditions are like:
For anyone with a prepper mindset, Alone is fun to watch. As mentioned, all of these people are experienced outdoorsmen/women. They know what they"re doing. Each brings their own set of skills, and they"re often delightfully creative in how they apply that expertise to feed and shelter themselves. Human ingenuity, especially when under pressure, is an amazing force to behold.
But ingenuity only goes so far. When completely removed from the supply chain of modern living, survival is hard.
Even though the contestants are intentionally located in areas where fish and wild game live, obtaining enough calories to live consumes all of their time and focus. Most days, they"re not able to replace the calories they expend. Substantial weight loss occurs.
Creating a shelter that can withstand the onset of winter and its harsh storms is another requirement contestants must attend to. One that gets harder as their energy saps due to their deficient diet.
Watching this show, you learn quickly that those armchair preppers who buy a pile of camping gear and then consider themselves all set to go "live off the grid" during a crisis are delusional. Alone shows us how much work needs to be put in day after day to provide the calories needed to sustain just a single person. These contestants are experts in hunting and foraging and yet most days they fail to provide for themselves. And remember, they"re in an unpopulated area. For those of us who live near a well-stocked river or forest, how long will it take for the deer and fish there to dwindle away if our entire neighborhood is competing with us for food? A week?
Plus, there"s a huge "shit happens" factor, too. Initial shelter designs fail. Firewood becomes scarce. Scavengers steal your food. One contestant this season got bitten by a Chilean Recluse spider, whose venom is more potent than a rattlesnake"s and can cause organ failure (she pulled a very cool MacGyver maneuver and created a poultice from native plantains and lentils to draw out the poison successfully). There are just so many points of failure out there waiting to happen. And keep in mind, these conditions don"t involve other people lurking around who want to steal your stuff.
But the biggest challenge, by far, is mental. How contestants deal with the complete and total social isolation determines their odds for success.
As we talk about in our book Prosper! as well as often on this site, humans are social animals. We"re wired to co-exist with others. Remove that interaction, and we"re out of our natural element. Remove that interaction for long enough, and our ability to function can become seriously compromised.
We write often of Social Capital and Emotional Capital, both of which are critical success factors on Alone. The structure of the competition deliberately removes the Social Capital factor: there"s no morale-boosting camaraderie, nor is there anyone to turn to when your own abilities aren"t up to the task. But it"s the Emotional Capital element that matters most: through the setbacks, though the hunger, through the cold, through the boredom, through the fear -- How are you going to persevere?
The contestants here are seriously hard people. They can deal with a prodigious amount of physical adversity -- for most of these folks, substantially more than the show will throw at them. But when you start hearing them question their resolve (Why am I doing this?), or whether it"s worth spending so much time away from their family, you know their will is breaking. It"s a classic signal they"re about to tap out. Once the will is broken, the physical tribulation just serves as the excuse to leave.
It"s surprising to see how relatively little time it takes for these folks to break mentally. Season 1 lasted 56 days. That"s less than 2 months. Season 2 lasted 66 days. Now, while that"s certainly a lot longer than I would have lasted, I would have expected experienced wilderness enthusiasts to go on for much longer -- like the trappers of past centuries were able to. Also, remember that there"s a half-million dollar payout awaiting the victor. Part of the swift attrition is likely due to the harshness of the regions the show takes place in, but watching on a weekly basis, it"s clear that it"s the isolation that gets folks in the end.
What Alone does a good job of, in my opinion, is validating our opinion that The lone wolf is a myth. Very, very few of us can truly "go it alone" -- in times of crisis, or anytime otherwise for that matter. We need to live in community; to leverage the strengths of others, as well as to have purpose in life and to be psychically nourished. We literally starve both our mental and physical well-being when we isolate ourselves from social contact.
More importantly, the lessons of the show underscore how emotional resilience is *the* critical success factor for overcoming adversity. Those rich in it find the strength and the ingenuity to carry on. Those poor in it give up -- no matter how well-resourced they are in other forms of capital.
It"s important to keep in mind that Emotional Capital is something all of us can build, and usually at no financial cost (feel free to read our recommended steps here) . As we often say about dealing with crisis: It"s not the insult that will determine your fate, it"s your reaction to it.
Alone: Season 3 airs Thursday nights on the History Channel. Past episodes can be streamed online or purchased from iTunes.
"The Selection" (History Channel)
I only recently stated watching The Selection: Special Operations Experiment, but I"m fully sucked in at this point.
This is a first-run series that takes 30 qualifying civilians and puts them through a hyper-intense boot camp run by US special forces instructors. The goal is to meet similar performance standards that elite combat soldiers like Navy Seals, Green Berets and Army Rangers are held to. There is no monetary prize for any contestants who pass.
First off, let me make it clear that I don"t have any military experience, so I have no first-hand knowledge underlying my opinions of this show. Nor do I mean to equate what these contestants go through the with the rigors and dangers of those who serve in the active military. I had a lot of respect for our active servicemen and women beforehand. I simply have even more for them now.
Exceptionally grueling is the best way to describe the program the contestants for The Selection are put through. As the professional instructors explain, their job at the start is to weed out the weak. One they"ve done that, they then focus on weeding out the strong. Those remaining after that (if any) have the mettle the special forces are looking for.
It"s not like this is a group of creampuffs. To be chosen for the show, contestants had to meet an array of rigorous fitness qualifications. One guy mentioned how much weight he can deadlift. That"s something I myself work at, and while I"m not the strongest guy at the gym, my deadlift is a respectable 340lbs. His is over 500lbs. So most of these men and women are legit bad-asses.
The first two days of the program are a non-stop pain-fest of physical challenges. The goal is to force anyone and everyone whose body can"t meet the standard, or whose commitment to the program isn"t firm, to quit. The workouts are punishing, and they just keep coming. The instructors are brutal -- cruel even. They"re looking for weakness. And if they find any, they press on it -- hard. Sleep and rest is minimal and interrupted, sometimes by being blindfolded and sent to interrogation.
Here"s a brief preview that shows (just a slice of!) what"s thrown at these guys:
Five candidates quit in the first few hours. By the end of Day 2, half had dropped out.
And then, the psychological stress component dialed up. By this point, the instructors knew that those remaining had a lot of physical fortitude. But how strong was their mental resolve?
Candidates were "captured by the enemy", bound, blindfolded and placed into boxes for hours, with recorded baby cries and klaxons blaring over loudspeakers. They quickly lost track of time and place. After that came drowning tests. And more sleep-deprivation. And harsh criticism of their commitment to the program.
After Day 5, it was down to just 8. Now the series is at Day 9, with just 5 candidates left.
While it may sound like this is a TV show for sadists (and it probably does appeal to that audience segment), I"ve found a lot of inspiration and insight following it. As inhumanely cruel as it appears in its application, there"s a method behind the instructors" madness. Here"s what I"ve learned:
The mind trumps the body. "Your mind will fail before you body does" repeat the instructors throughout this series. What they mean is that, if you"re conscious and functioning, you have more in you to keep going. As in Alone, what defeats these contestants is almost always a breakdown of their willpower. Yes, severe physical abuse is being doled out, but based on their real-life experiences and those of their fellow soldiers, the veteran instructors know first-hand that limits are set by the mind. Find a way to expand those mental limits, and the body will follow.
It"s shocking to watch the attrition process during the show, because it"s largely so hard to predict. Some of the earliest drop-outs were big guys, guys who looked like contenders to last until the bitter end. But there was some mental shortcoming each had; a lack of confidence, a fear, a hubris -- some "seed of doubt" as the instructors called it that, once identified, they "watered to grow into a beautiful quit tree".
And on the other hand, there were candidates who lasted longer than anyone expected; again, due to the mental factor. One standout was a smaller guy from the Philippines who couldn"t have weighed more than 130lbs (if that). By sheer force of will, he outlasted men who outweighed him by 100 pounds of muscle. He was only dropped from the program when the instructors realized he couldn"t swim(!) during an ocean exercise.
Based on my own life experience, I wholeheartedly believe the same is true for overcoming ANY obstacle, physical or otherwise. It"s what we believe we can do, or endure, that determines our destiny. If we work on strengthening our emotional resilience (as discussed in the previous section) -- on expanding what we believe to be possible -- we can achieve dramatically more in our lives.
Finding your "Why?" is the key to perseverance. Building on the importance of mental fortitude is the criticality of having a guiding purpose. What"s the reason that keeps you moving forward when times get tough?
The instructors call this "finding your Why?". Those with a strong Why? can power through abuse. On the show, these are the folks who were able to withstand tear gas, torture, drowning risk, extreme heat/cold, physical exhaustion, lack of sleep, and the instructors" head games. Those without a bedrock Why? folded early.
Through little mini-interviews during the show, you get a glimpse inside the heads of the candidates. Those with something to prove -- to themselves, to a family member, or to society -- are the ones faring best. They have a cause, a goal, or a driving principle that is sustaining them. Fear of the pain of betraying that outweighs the physical and mental pain they"re being subjected to.
Having a rock-solid Why? is the #1 determinant to completing their brutal selection process say the instructors. I believe it. And that insight has inspired me to look inwards at my own internal motivations. What, specifically, is my Why? How solid is it? What might I be able to do to strengthen it?
How solid is yours?
Humans belong in a tribe. What"s really fascinating to watch in this series is that, as the pool of contestants winnows down, those remaining no longer are competitors. They begin to develop a team mentality. It ceases being, Can I make it through the next challenge? and instead morphs into, What can I do to make sure WE get through it?
This, of course, is what the instructors are looking for. From experience they know that an effective soldier is part of a team, who puts that team"s objectives and welfare above his/her own.
While I assume this has been a time-proven lesson over the thousands of years of human warfare, it"s really inspirational to see how the remaining candidates feed off of each other"s support. As the adversity intensifies, the strength they draw from going through it together visibly grows.
This directly reminds me of the discussion we had on this site with with Sebastian Junger about his book Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. Junger, who spent over a year embedded with an army platoon in an Afghanistan hot zone, observed the tight-knit brotherhood that soldiers in combat develop. Many of them have trouble re-integrating into the relative quiet of civilian life, not due so much to issues of PTSD, but to loss of that sense of belonging and purpose.
Junger notes that humans evolved as a tribal species, living in close groups of no more than 60 people, under constant threat from other tribes and natural stressors.
So, in a very real way, the remaining candidates on this show are living -- really truly alive as humans were meant to be.
When they"re removed from the group for interrogation, it"s not uncommon for these incredibly tough people to cry when the instructors challenge their commitment to remain. You can see that at this point they"re experiencing a fulfillment and a self-discovery that is very rare for them -- and so, they view this unbelievably punishing experience as a priceless gift. I find myself envying these guys.
The challenge for the rest of us is to ask ourselves, How can I add more tribalism to my life? We live in a society that actually values independence from -- not interdependence on -- others. We are starving our social receptors in much the same way as the contestants on Alone are. Why? The benefits of brotherhood/sisterhood are so clear when we can see them. Why not have more of that in our lives? Why not be more alive?
