Category Archives: Developmental

G7 American Allies Battle

g7 American allies

There was discord during the buildup to the G7 meetings of rich nations in Quebec. Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau was insulted because he thinks Trump considers Canada to be a security threat.

But President Trump did say he had to hit American allies with high tariffs for national security reasons.

G7 American Allies

Then on Thursday, which happened to be the D-Day anniversary, French President Macron took a shot at Trump saying, “No leader is forever.” He also said, “the six G7 countries without the U.S. are bigger than the American market.”

The next day Trump waded into the meetings insisting that Russia be included.

 

 

Elon Musk Moon

elon musk

Was bored with Trump and Russians when I came upon this piece in the Telegraph. It’s about the private space race. Elon Musk is the owner of Space X. His company plans to send tourists to the moon in 2018. His other company is Tesla.

He’ll be competing for the $20 million Google Lunar X prize. The competition includes a team featuring an Audi lunar rover.

Brazil

Brazil

The Olympics are coming to Brazil. The country is in deep recession, the water is filthy, Zika virus is rampant and the president is being impeached. President Dilma Rousseff was suspended by the Senate on Thursday.

She calls it a coup.

Crony In Chief

160125-crony-in-chiefTed Cruz has an ad showing Donald Trump bulldozing a widow’s home in order to make room for limousine parking at Trump Plaza. Trump didn’t do that. But he tried. He got the state of New Jersey to use its eminent domain power to go after the house. Trump lost in court but he thinks teaming up with government to seize private property for his own benefit is “wonderful”.

Crony Capitalism.

Kevin Williamson in National Review calls Trump “a lifelong crony capitalist who brags about buying political favors”. He goes on to say Trump supporters believe, “that they can dispatch a crony capitalist to undo crony capitalism in the same way that New Age healers believe that a little bit of diluted poison chases away similar toxins.”

iPhone 5 Fingerprints

130913-iphone-5-fingerprint-cartoon-

Apple introduced two versions of the new iPhone 5 this week.

iPhone 5 Special Print Function

The upscale version features fingerprint recognition technology. You don’t need a password, just your fingerprint. The upside is you’re unlikely to forget your fingerprint. (You might be unlikely to forget. I’m not. I have ten fingerprints and it’s not easy to keep them straight. I hope I can still use one of them to type in the name of my first pet to get an email link where I can enter a new digit.)

The downside is, it’s kind of creepy.

An NSA secret slide presentation about how it accesses data from mobile devises was leaked to Der Spiegel. You can see it here. The first slide has a picture of the famous Apple 1984 Superbowl ad. The copy says:

Who knew in 1984 that this (Steve Jobs) would be big brother and the zombies would be paying customers?

Yikes!

But Bloomberg says not to worry. With the new iPhone you won’t be leaving your fingerprints all over The Cloud. That information is stored within the device and not accessible to nosy parkers.