At November’s end, 1.6 percent fewer jobs were advertised than a year previous, the first slip since August, the U.S. Labor Department reported. At the same time, layoffs jumped 17.6 percent to 1.9 million, as layoffs in the lodging and hospitality industries more than doubled due to new restrictions on social mobility. Layoffs have largely affected low-wage jobs. However, job...
JOBLESS CLAIMS SURGE
During the week of 9 January, the number of first-time claims for unemployment payments surged to 965,000 from 784,000 the week before, the U.S. Labor Department reported. The number was the highest since the week of 22 August. Analysts had expected 800,000 new claims. The unemployment rate held firm at 6.7 percent. Workers filing late because of the December holiday...
WORLD WIDE WEB INVENTOR WANTS DO-OVER
In 1980, during his off-hours as a consultant software engineer at CERN, the Swiss Particle Physics Laboratory, Sir Berners-Lee wrote a private program for storing information. He said the motivation was to mimic the way the human brain stores and accesses information. The engineer’s work evolved to become utilized as a decentralized data retrieval system more famously known as the...
“UNCONTROLLABLE” AI CLOSE TO REALITY
The tech website “Interesting Engineering” referenced an alarming new report by the prestigious Max Planck Society that assessed human’s capability for controlling killer Artificial Intelligence technologies. According to the report, science is rapidly approaching the point where AI will effectively break out of human control, something previously only presaged by doomsday blockbuster sci-fi movie franchises like The Matrix and Terminator...
GOOGLE FLEXES WITH FITBIT ACQUISITION
Google data and tracking just got bigger. On 15 January, Fitbit, a leader in wearable health and fitness analytics tracking technology, announced it was being bought out by Google, the world’s largest tech and human data-mining company. The move will expand Google’s already huge capacity to track and mine human data. Founded in 2009, Fitbit has become synonymous with wearable...
ALL THE PRESIDENT’S APPS: TECH COUP 2021
In a whirlwind week of unprecedented tech censorship, the world witnessed President Donald J. Trump silenced in the waning days of his presidency. The pretext for the digital coup was a chaotic breach of the Capitol building during a massive MAGA protest in Washington, DC, on 6 January. The President had called for the protest himself on the date Congress...
TOILET PAPER OF RECORD: FULL OF CRAP
It was a two-color story that gobbled up nearly two-thirds of a page in The New York Times last Thursday with the headline: 10% of Congress Has Been Infected at Some Time The paper had outlines of Congress broken up in red and blue with the seats darkened of those who got the virus. Below that was a list of...
TREND TRACKING LESSON: NYT PROMOTES AGENDA
Oklahoma, which does not have a statewide mask mandate, is experiencing its highest coronavirus infection rate since the beginning of the outbreak, The New York Times reported last Thursday. Their headline read: “Oklahoma, With No Mask Mandate, Faces Surge in Cases” The Times wrote, “Oklahoma is in the grip of a frightening surge of the coronavirus, the worst it has...
STATEN ISLAND BOROUGH PRESIDENT: NO “HEIL HITLER”
Oh “heil” no. Leticia Remauro, a Republican from New York’s Staten Island, found herself in hot water last week after she said “Heil Hitler” while protesting the state’s coronavirus lockdown. The New York Times reported that Remauro is running for borough president and was outside Mac’s Public House, a bar that has also clashed with city and state officials over COVID...