technology

40% Of US Workers Now Earn Less Than 1968 CPI-Adjusted Minimum Wage

"40.28% of all workers make less than $20,000 a year in America today. So that means that more than 40 percent of all U.S. workers actually make less than what a full-time minimum wage worker made back in 1968. That is how far we have fallen. Good paying full-time jobs are disappearing, and they are being replaced by low paying part-time jobs. So far this year, 76.7 percent of the jobs that have been 'created' in the U.S. economy have been part-time jobs. That would be depressing enough, but what makes it worse is that wages for many of these low paying jobs have actually been declining over the past decade even as the cost of living keeps going up." Continue reading →

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Why College Football Will Be Dead Within 20 Years

"An acronym that has higher education administrators very worried is MOOC - Massive Open Online Course. In short, a MOOC is a tuition-free online course that can be taught to a massive number of students simultaneously. Pundits often talk about 'disruptive technology'; technology that brings about massive changes in life, business, or the economy. The phrase can be overused, but if anything qualifies, MOOCs are it. It's one thing to offer a course for free online, but the idea is crazy, right, that a college or university could replace traditional classroom education with online coursework for credit or even offer an entire degree online for free?" Continue reading →

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Bad Day for Beltway Liberalism: August 5, 2013

"The reporters who work for the Post are in the wrong profession. Their peers in Boston could do nothing. They sat their until most were fired, one by one. They will suffer the same fate. The industry is a buggy whip. The industry was liberalism’s trifecta: newspapers, television networks, and the school system. Two are bleeding red ink. The third soon will be, as online education enables students to live at home, take courses online, graduate with accredited degrees, and pay $15,000 in tuition, total. A widely accepted estimate is that half of all American universities will go under over the next five decades." Continue reading →

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Amazon.com Creates 5,000 Jobs, Destroys 25,000 in the Process?

"Amazon has managed to grow to its current level with just about 89,000 employees, or almost exactly half of TJX’s workforce. To do that yet pull down 150% more revenue makes Amazon about five times more efficient than TJX, measured by retail sales per staffer. Amazon is able to do so because the number of shoppers who can be served per warehouse employee is much higher than at a typical retail location—especially the smaller stores that TJX mostly uses. One IT guy can take the midnight shift and keep a few thousand servers up and running, but one janitor cannot clean the floors at two locations, let alone 400." Continue reading →

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Meet Tian Yu: The woman who nearly killed herself making your iPad

"Tian Yu worked more than 12 hours a day, six days a week. She had to skip meals to do overtime. Then she threw herself from a fourth-floor window. Without its No 1 supplier, the Cupertino giant’s current riches would be unimaginable: in 2010, Longhua employees made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute. That same year, 18 workers – none older than 25 – attempted suicide at Foxconn facilities. Fourteen died. Tian Yu was one of the lucky ones: emerging from a 12-day coma, she was left with fractures to her spine and hips and paralysed from the waist down. She was 17." Continue reading →

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Senate edited Snowden’s Wikipedia page to change description from ‘dissident’ to ‘traitor’

"In a move sure to grind the gears of conspiracy theorists everywhere, a member of the US Senate recently edited Snowden’s Wikipedia page from describing him as a ‘dissident’ to a traitor, according to the entry’s changelog. The user’s IP address was quickly traced back to the US Senate. It is not clear if the person is an active Senator, a staffer or an intern, but the change certainly came from the Senate. The attempted edit, made August 2, was rejected by a moderator on the grounds it ‘seemed less than neutral,’ according to the posted rejection, which also listed the IP address and showed it was registered to the US Senate." Continue reading →

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Amazon Billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Life Story

"Today, Jeff Bezos shocked the world by acquiring the Washington Post for $250 million. It's just the latest twist from Bezos, one of the world's richest men thanks to his founding of ecommerce giant Amazon. If you're unfamiliar with Bezos' story, we've put together an abridged version here." Continue reading →

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WaPo and Bezos: The Hope and the Reality

"The reality: Amazon to buy Washington Post fresh after $800M deal to host CIA servers — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 5, 2013. The CIA has reportedly signed a massive cloud computing deal with Amazon, worth up to $600 million over the next 10 years. FCW reports that its sources have told it Amazon will build a private cloud infrastructure for the CIA, to help it 'keep up with emerging technologies like big data in a cost-effective manner not possible under the CIA's previous cloud efforts.' [..] Perhaps the single biggest item on Amazon’s legislative agenda is a bill that would empower all states to collect sales tax from online retailers." Continue reading →

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Exposing high-security flaws with 3D Printing

"MIT students David Lawrence and Eric Van Albert showed how 3D printing could allow anyone to replicate a Schlage key for their high-security Primus locks used in Government offices, medical and detention centres. The Primus lock and key system are tightly controlled by Schlage and bear the words 'Do not duplicate' across the top. They are considered to be one of the hardest locks to pick in the world. With the use of a normal 2D scanner, their code – the software deciphers the code on each key - and the use of a 3D printing service like Shapeways the pair have managed to duplicate working Primus lock keys." Continue reading →

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Motorola’s Moto X: First Impressions

"Ordering a phone to your own specs takes four days in most cases, but that time frame can shift by a day or two if, say, everyone wants an olive-green phone with orange accents. Making this type of customization a reality is a smartphone assembly plant in Fort Worth, the only one of its kind in the U.S. Motorola purchased the facility (it had once been a Nokia (NOK) plant) and employs around 2,000 people there to put together phones based on specs coming out of Motomaker, as well as standard-issue devices in black or white. Motorola says it doesn’t know how much of the production will be taken up by custom orders." Continue reading →

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