LNN

20 FEET!!!

The UN sounds a little scary when they word it like this...

"Resistance is Futile!"

Wow!

pizzlies or grolars? Wow....

Almost prophetic!

This post was almost prophetic.... 

This is a little weird.

Talk about inciting the mobs!!!  This video is very scary.

Friday afternoon, the Trump administration (aka 13 federal agencies) released a 1,656-page report describing the potentially disastrous effects of climate change on the U.S. economy.

And while this report wasn't the first edition of the U.S. National Climate Assessment (the government is required to publish one every four years), it sounds the loudest alarm. The main takeaway?

• "With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century."

In fact, the losses are already piling up. Here's a quick look at three different sectors profiled in the National Climate Assessment.

Supply chains

• Big picture: "Current and projected climate-related impacts on our economy include increased risks to overseas operations of U.S. businesses, disruption of international supply chains, and shifts in the availability and prices of commodities."
• Real-world example: Flooding in Thailand in 2011 cost U.S.-based Western Digital $199 million (it makes hard drives in Thailand). Ford was also forced to pause production there.

Ocean ecosystems

• Big picture: "The Nation's valuable ocean ecosystems are being disrupted by increasing global temperatures through the loss of iconic and highly valued habitats and changes in species composition and food web structure."
• Real-world example: Sea surface temperatures on the Northeast Continental Shelf experienced a dramatic increase in 2012. That extended the lobster fishing season, leading to oversupply and a "severe price collapse."

Vulnerable infrastructure

• Big picture: "Sea level rise (SLR) is progressively making coastal roads and bridges more vulnerable and less reliable."
• Real-world example: U.S. Route 17 in Charleston, SC currently floods more than 10x a year. By 2045? It could experience up to 180 floods annually (and each flood costs the city $13.75 million in 2015 dollars).

Zoom out: The administration's report is also noteworthy because it contradicts the administration's own climate-related economic policies (like rolling back environmental regulations). Just last week, the president mocked the threat of climate change in a pre-Thanksgiving tweet.

But there was so much we didn't get to, such as climate change's effects on agriculture, transportation, and tourism. Check out the full report while you pass the time in a car, train, plane, or buried in a sofa today.

While Google and Facebook let users opt out of seeing targeted ads, it’s impossible to opt out of being tracked or being included in the datasets used to create targeting algorithms. According to Carnegie Mellon’s Libert, “you may assume if you don’t see a targeted ad for shoes they stopped tracking you, but that’s not the case whatsoever. There are technological ways to prevent some level of tracking, but it’s like taking aspirin to cure your cancer, it may make you feel a little better for a few hours but you’re still dealing with cancer. The only way to root out the cancer of targeted advertising is regulation. Europe is conducting a grand experiment right now with GDPR, and the rest of the world is watching.”

See also:

We're building an artificial intelligence-powered dystopia, one click at a time, says techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci. In an eye-opening talk, she details how the same algorithms companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon use to get you to click on ads are also used to organize your access to political and social information. And the machines aren't even the real threat. What we need to understand is how the powerful might use AI to control us -- and what we can do in response.

In his testimony to the US Senate last spring, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that his company doesn’t sell user data, as if to reassure policymakers and the public. But the reality—that Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other social media companies sell access to our attention—is just as concerning. Actual user information may not change hands, but the advertising business model drives company decision making in ways that are ultimately toxic to society. As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci put it in her 2017 TED talk, “we’re building a dystopia just to make people click on ads.”

...

Google and Facebook figured out how to commodify "reality" itself by tracking what people (and not just their users) do online (and increasingly offline too), making predictions about what they might do in the future, devising ways to influence behavior from shopping to voting, and selling that power to whoever is willing to pay. 

“As societies, we have never agreed that our private experience is available for extraction as behavioral data, much of which is then fed into supply chains for the manufacture of behavioral predictions,” Zuboff told me in a phone interview.

...

In copying the traditional media's advertising-based business model, internet companies neglected to adopt a crucial rule: the separation between business operations and editorial decisions. Though the rule was far from universally respected, 20th century journalism's code of ethics prohibited financial considerations from influencing news coverage. This ethical screen allowed American capitalism to subsidize the press, which in turn helped keep the government and companies honest: checks and balances at work.

This all fell apart with targeted advertising, which stole journalism's lunch money and used it to sustain platforms whose driving logic isn't to educate, to inform, or to hold the powerful to account, but to keep people "engaged." This logic of "engagement" is motivated by the twin needs to collect more data and show more ads, and manifests itself in algorithms that value popularity over quality. In less than 20 years, Silicon Valley has replaced editorial judgment with mathematical measures of popularity, destabilized the democratic systems of checks and balances by hobbling the Fourth Estate, and hammered nail after nail into the coffin of privacy.

Motherboard

(ProPublica).

Quote

...As many CPAP users discover, the life-altering device comes with caveats: Health insurance companies are often tracking whether patients use them. If they aren’t, the insurers might not cover the machines or the supplies that go with them.

In fact, faced with the popularity of CPAPs, which can cost $400 to $800, and their need for replacement filters, face masks and hoses, health insurers have deployed a host of tactics that can make the therapy more expensive or even price it out of reach.

Patients have been required to rent CPAPs at rates that total much more than the retail price of the devices, or they’ve discovered that the supplies would be substantially cheaper if they didn’t have insurance at all.

Experts who study health care costs say insurers’ CPAP strategies are part of the industry’s playbook of shifting the costs of widely used therapies, devices and tests to unsuspecting patients.

“The doctors and providers are not in control of medicine anymore,” said Harry Lawrence, owner of Advanced Oxy-Med Services, a New York company that provides CPAP supplies. “It’s strictly the insurance companies. They call the shots.”

Insurers say their concerns are legitimate. The masks and hoses can be cumbersome and noisy, and studies show that about third of patients don’t use their CPAPs as directed.

But the companies’ practices have spawned lawsuits and concerns by some doctors who say that policies that restrict access to the machines could have serious, or even deadly, consequences for patients with severe conditions. And privacy experts worry that data collected by insurers could be used to discriminate against patients or raise their costs.

...

(Vox).

Sad. 

French regulators censoring US citizens free speech?

What has this world come to?

Thank you Facebook.

Share this if you care at all about your rights.

The saga continues.

This post just went from gross to scary.

The food display looks enticing to you doesn't it?

Well... it also is lickable and a temptation that some dogs also find irresistible

Think twice before wrapping your fingers around that sandwich or wrap.. 

And no... this wasn't a "service dog"

Public Health in restaurant establishments in the United States has plummeted over the past few years unfortunately.

People years ago would have been horrified by this.

But isn't a dogs tongue supposedly cleaner than a humans?   (why do I doubt this wives tale?)

I love this idea

Awww. Sad... but we don't have any members from Zimbabwe on here. Or at least I doubt it seriously.

Haha... I could have sworn they were flocking here...  

Wait a minute!!  This guy may be on to something!!

I want to retire early... can you see the ramifications?

What we see today, what the Egyptians would have seen: split cutaway view.

Source: The Edinburgh Casing Stone – A piece of Giza at the National Museum of Scotland

Just thought I would add this to the overall complexity of the structure. ;-)