Category Archives: Technology

Think Amazon’s “Fulfillment Centers” are High Tech? Try Blimps and Drones!

Saturday, 20 October 2018 05:36

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, October 19, 2018:

Over the last two or three years, tens of thousands of people have watched YouTube videos (see Sources) of the unbelievable technology that companies like Amazon and British online grocery company Ocado are using to cut delivery costs and times for their customers. Each of Amazon’s “fulfillment centers” ships upwards of a million orders every single day, with nary a human in sight.

Give Amazon credit. It saw the technology it would need as far back as 2012 when they bought Kiva Systems, the developer of the little Kiva robots that look like oversized Roombas. Kiva was leasing their robots and their technology to companies like The Gap, Walgreens, Staples, Office Depot, Crate & Barrel, and Saks 5^th Avenue. But when those leases ended, Amazon didn’t renew them. It wanted the Kiva technology for itself.

Today, in its more than 100 massive distribution or “fulfillment” centers, there are hundreds of thousands of Kiva robots doing the work humans used to do just a few years ago.

The million-square-foot fulfillment center in Baltimore is typical, as Christopher Mims explained in The Wall Street Journal:

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Amazon Robotics Is Automating Everything

Friday, 19 October 2018 05:30

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, October 18, 2018:

When Amazon, the largest Internet retailer in the world, purchased Kiva Systems in 2012, it paid almost a billion dollars for it; and it transformed, and continues to transform, the company. Amazon wanted the technology behind the Kiva robots that were previously being used by The Gap, Walgreens, Staples, Office Depot, Crate & Barrel, and Saks 5th Avenue. When the contracts with those companies ran out Amazon didn’t renew them.

It wanted Kiva’s technology for itself.

Today, in its more than 100 massive distribution or “fulfillment” centers, there are hundreds of thousands of Kiva robots doing the work humans used to do just a few years ago. There are YouTube videos depicting this transformation from human “pickers” to robotic pickers.

The million-square-foot fulfillment center in Baltimore is typical, as Christopher Mims explained in the Wall Street Journal:

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Trump’s 36-Year-Old Son-in-Law Won the White House for Him

Thursday, 12 January 2017 06:27

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, January 11, 2017:

Embed from Getty Images

Jared Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald Trump, gave him an early birthday present, naming him to his new administration as a senior advisor on Monday. The next day Kushner turned 36.

Married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka (shown), Kushner responded to the “all hands on deck” message following Trump’s nomination at the Republican National Convention last summer. Kushner dropped everything and started building a national political campaign from scratch. Blessed with precious little political experience, but with smarts (degrees from Harvard and New York University), Kushner saw the problem: no staff, no money, no experience, no strategy, no nothing. So he called on some of his contacts in social networking, asking for referrals to the brightest and the best to help.

He found Brad Parscale, a web designer in San Antonio, and built a team of 100 people around him. Calling the team “Project Alamo,” the two learned the ropes quickly: traditional TV, radio, and print advertising were 1) expensive, and 2) not very effective in reaching the people Trump needed to win. Instead, through trial and error, Kushner spent less and less on TV and radio and focused on the social networking tools Facebook and Twitter. Said Kushner:

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Beware the 300-Pound White Penguin Watching You at the Mall

Wednesday, 07 September 2016 05:48

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, September 5, 2016:

In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Big Brother’s primary enabler was the telescreen. It could be turned down but never turned off, and it recorded all behaviors and conversations to be analyzed for traitorous intent.

Knightscope has no discoverable link to the telescreen with its big, fat white Penguin called K5, but its capabilities are astonishing. Those capabilities came to light following an incident at an upscale mall in Palo Alto last month when a K5 ran over a 16-month-old toddler by mistake. Company officials expressed “horror” at the incident, apologized, and then invited the family of the toddler to view its upgraded version of K5, which, it promised, would avoid such incidents in the future.

The rollout of K5 (version 2.0, if you will) was no doubt impressive, as K5 has an amazing array of technology designed as “an advanced anomaly detection device” – read: detect, record, analyze, and then inform its handler of suspicious activities taking place nearby. Stacy Dean Stephens, Knightscope’s vice president of marketing told Digital Trends:

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Knightscope Robots: Enhanced Safety or More Invasive Surveillance?

Tuesday, 06 September 2016 04:58

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, September 5, 2016:

NXT Robot

Not a Knightscope robot, but close

Knightscope robots — one for inside work, the other for outdoors — have been under development for three years, and have logged 35,000 hours of testing and 25,000 miles of rolling through malls, parking lots, and manufacturing facilities. And yet, within weeks of the K5 outdoor model being released in the Stanford Shopping Center, an upscale shopping mall in Palo Alto, California, one of them couldn’t avoid hitting a 16-month-old toddler and running over his foot.

It was a poor start to Knightscope’s first major public contract with the mall, and they did the best they could to ameliorate the situation:

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CEO Resigns From Obama’s Entrepreneur Board

Tuesday, 09 August 2016 04:27

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, August 8, 2016:

Embed from Getty Images

When Elizabeth Holmes (above), the 32-year-old CEO of medical technology startup Theranos, was named as one of President Obama’s presidential ambassadors for global entrepreneurship (PAGE) last year, she sounded like the winner of a beauty contest, telling her audience how she was going to save the world:

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Russia Wants to Fly Over the U.S. Using Its Latest Spy Technology

Tuesday, 23 February 2016 13:35

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, February 22, 2016:

Russian Air Force Tupolev Tu-214ON which will ...

Russian Air Force Tupolev Tu-214ON

According to the Associated Press, Russia is about to ask permission of the Open Skies Consultative Commission (OSCC) in Vienna, Austria, to fly its latest reconnaissance aircraft, the Tu-214ON (left), over the United States. The airplane will have the latest in spy technology, including

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Rubio’s Donors Reveal His Support of a Different Agenda

Friday, 06 November 2015 15:36

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, November 6, 2015:

View image | gettyimages.com

With the recent revelation that Senator Marco Rubio has been receiving, and is actively soliciting, funds from billionaires with vastly different agendas from those voters who elected him in 2010, many are questioning how he would act if he were elected president.

With the departure of Scott Walker from the Republican cast of candidates seeking their party’s nomination, and with the virtual disappearance of a presence in the polls by establishment candidate Jeb Bush, it was no surprise that Rubio’s star began its ascendancy. As Paul Singer, one of Rubio’s wealthy donors, wrote, Rubio

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Walmart’s Stock’s Selloff Hinges on Perceived Economic Gloom

Friday, 16 October 2015 05:44

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, October 15, 2015:

English: Inside the Walmart (still branded as ...

Inside the Walmart at West Plains, Missouri.

Within minutes of Walmart’s announcement on Wednesday that the world’s largest retailer would see its profits drop between six and 12 percent next year, the company’s stock started a decline that only ended after it had lost 10 percent of its value, its worst single-day performance in 37 years.

Despite a previous warning from Walmart in August that its quarterly profits, year-over-year, would likely fall by 15 percent, and despite the company’s stock continuing its decline from $90 a share in January to $67 before the announcement, investors were caught off guard. Now trading below $60 a share, investors have seen the value of their Walmart holdings drop

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Oil Price Rebound Not Likely to Last, Says the IEA

Wednesday, 14 October 2015 15:03

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, October 14, 2015:

View image | gettyimages.com

Since early August the price of crude has jumped almost 20 percent, moving some, including those in OPEC’s cartel, to conclude that its strategy is working: Flood the market to force prices so low that marginal producers, especially in the United States, will go out of business. With the resultant decrease in supply, prices will rebound, hopefully to levels where the cartel’s countries can continue to fund their welfare/warfare states.

Said the cartel last week:

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Fracking Is Boosting Reshoring of American Jobs

Friday, 10 July 2015 04:57

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, July 9, 2015:

In its latest report on American competitiveness, the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates that the average cost to make goods in the United States is now only five-percent higher than in China, and between 10 and 20 percent lower when compared to the major European economies such as Germany and France. In less than three years, BCG projects China’s advantage to disappear altogether.

While part of the reason is rising wages in China and in the Eurozone and American companies improving their productivity faster than their competitors abroad, the primary reason, says BCG, is fracking — the technology that has driven energy costs to a fraction of what they were just a few years ago.

Back in August 2013, Harold Sirkin, a senior partner at BCG, predicted the U-turn that would result in “reshoring” of millions of jobs, starting in 2015:

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Neo-Luddites in Paris are Losing to Uber

Wednesday, 01 July 2015 05:26

This article was published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, June 29, 2015:

View image | gettyimages.com

Although the definition of “neo-Luddism” is a “movement of passive resistance to the … frightening technologies of the computer age,” in Paris the resistance is hardly passive. Last week taxi-drivers shut down entrances to and exits from the Charles De Gaulle International Airport, attacked cars driven by Uber drivers (including their passengers), overturned some of them, and set tires on fire. All this to express their frustration over how Uber is slowly, inexorably, putting them out of business. Since they were on strike, even when customers wanted a ride, the cartel members turned them down. After all, they were on strike! (Shown above are passengers toting their own luggage away from De Gaulle airport.)

As the head of taxi company G7 said on French television,

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FCC Fines AT&T $100 Million

Friday, 19 June 2015 02:58

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, June 18, 2015:

View image | gettyimages.com

In its ruling adopted on June 3 and released for public viewing on June 17, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), chaired by Tom Wheeler (pictured), announced that it was not only fining AT&T $100 million for violating its so-called “transparency rule” but also was going to mandate that AT&T install numerous “requirements to bring AT&T into compliance” with that rule.

At issue was AT&T’s repeatedly stated policy that at certain times and under certain specifically stated circumstances, subscribers to its “unlimited” data services would experience a slowdown (called either “congestion” by its supporters or “throttling” by its enemies such as Consumers Union) in connectivity. AT&T bent over backwards to make sure that every one of its customers was aware of the possibility, including

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SAVs are Raising Existential Questions for Car Companies

Saturday, 23 May 2015 05:15

This article was first published at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, May 22, 2015:

View image | gettyimages.com

SAVs are “shared autonomous vehicles” – driverless, robotic automobiles – and they are already raising serious questions that GM and Ford are just starting to address. Questions like: what business are we in today? What business will we be in tomorrow? Twenty-five years from now? Will we be in the car business or the transportation business? What does that mean? What do we do now so we’re still around and profitable then?

GM spokesman Jim Cain put the SAV revolution in the best possible light:

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EMP Threats Force NORAD Back Into Cheyenne Mountain

Thursday, 07 May 2015 03:58

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, May 6, 2015:

News that NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) was moving back into its previous Cheyenne Mountain underground bunker in Colorado Springs first surfaced during a news conference by NORAD Commander Admiral William Cortney on April 7.

It’s moving, said Cortney, “because of the very nature of the way that Cheyenne Mountain is built. It’s EMP-hardened.” EMP, short for an electromagnetic pulse, is a burst of electromagnetic energy produced by a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, considered capable of widespread damage.

NORAD is also moving because of real world threats by enemies of the United States who now possess the capabilities to launch a nuclear weapon from the south where NORAD is blind.

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Energy Department Approves Six LNG Export Plants; More Coming

Tuesday, 28 April 2015 14:51

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, April 28, 2015:

View image | gettyimages.com

On April 14, the Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Regulatory Commission published a remarkable summary of its recent approvals for private energy companies to build LNG (liquid natural gas) export plants along the East and Gulf Coasts.

What’s remarkable is that for decades the DOE has bought the argument that exporting LNG to customers around the world might jeopardize its supply here in the United States. It also bought the argument that allowing private producers to ship their product overseas would only encourage more fracking here with its claimed attendant but unproven dangers to the environment.

That the DOE is giving approval to LNG export facilities is proof that reality has finally replaced ideology at the agency, at least for the moment. As expected,

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Hybrid Owners Trading Them in for SUVs

Saturday, 25 April 2015 04:30

This article was first published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, April 24, 2015:

English: A Tesla Roadster, Reva i and Ford Th!...

A Tesla Roadster, Reva i and Ford Th!nk electric

Back before his credibility had been so greatly tarnished along with his confidence in government as a solution to every problem, President Obama made a promise in his 2011 State of the Union speech that realists knew he couldn’t keep: he was going to put one million electric and hybrid vehicles (EVs) on the road by 2015:

With more [government funded] research and [tax credit] incentives, we can break our dependence upon oil … and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.

The Department of Energy (DOE) called his proclamation a “key milestone toward dramatically reducing dependence on oil and ensuring that America leads in the growing electric vehicle manufacturing industry.” The agency boasted that already those manufacturers were ramping up to produce more than 1.2 million EVs by 2015, thanks to government subsidies, consumer tax credits, federally funded programs to help cities prepare for the growing demand for EV charging stations, as well as continued and increasing “support” [read: grants and loans] for R and D.

It’s 2015. The manifesto proclaimed from on high in January 2011 has fallen a little short:

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Little Old Lady About to Make History in the Oil Patch

Friday, 03 April 2015 05:16

This article first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Thursday, April 2, 2015:

Historians like people who make history. People like Rosa Parks (the “first lady of civil rights”), and Suzette Kelo (see Kelo v. City of New London). So much so that Laurel Thatcher Ulrich made herself known by writing “Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History,” in which she said:

Some history-making is intentional; much of it is accidental. People make history when they scale a mountain, ignite a bomb, or refuse to move to the back of the bus.

It may be that historians will someday add Sandra Ladra to that list.

Sandra Ladra was sitting in her recliner in her home in Prague, Oklahoma, on the evening of November 5, 2011, when

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Oklahoma Earthquakes Rattling the Fracking Industry

Wednesday, 01 April 2015 05:37

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, March 31, 2015:

View image | gettyimages.com

Sandra Ladra was sitting in her recliner in her home in Prague, Oklahoma, on the evening of November 5, 2011, when the largest earthquake in the state’s history shook her house so violently that her chimney collapsed, sending stones through the roof and hitting her legs. Said Ladra: “I nearly went into shock. You just really don’t think you’re going to live through it.” She added, “It was just like an explosion or something. The rocks and the cement from the fireplace were hitting the fireplace so hard it was like a white fog in here [with] everything falling off the walls.”

The earthquake was rated at 5.6 on the Richter scale which, according to the U. S. Geologic Survey,

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Wiki Lawsuit Highlights NSA’s All-Inclusive, Unconstitutional Spying

Thursday, 12 March 2015 04:50

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, March 11, 2015:

Official portrait of NSA director Keith B. Ale...

Official portrait of NSA director Keith B. Alexander

As reported by The New American on Tuesday, Wikipedia has joined forces with the ACLU in representing itself and other groups violated by the NSA’s unrestrained data collection by suing the agency.

The lawsuit holds that the NSA has — by its relentless, warrantless, and suspicionless secret acquisition of Wikipedia’s private customer information — not only infringed on the precious freedoms of those customers guaranteed in the First and Fourth Amendments, but also exceeded authority granted to it by Congress under the 2008 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments Act.

Early in President George W. Bush’s first term, the NSA was given essentially carte blanche to

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