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Category: Criminality

His Shift on Climate Change Aside, Is Bill Gates Just Warming Up?

His Shift on Climate Change Aside, Is Bill Gates Just Warming Up?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

“In 2021, Random House published a book by software tycoon Bill Gates titled How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. The message was clear: The world is heading toward a climate catastrophe if humans keep using fossil fuels. Everyone in the world had been hearing that message loud and clear for the previous two decades, and Gates, who’s been moonlighting as a climate expert for just as long, was not only one of the loudest voices to broadcast it, but someone who had put piles of money where his mouth was,” The New American reports. Now Gates says that there’s no disaster on the horizon. “Climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future,” Gates announced this week on his personal blog, GatesNotes.”

Common Core

Many were up in arms about the Microsoft founder’s seeming ‘Come to Jesus moment,’ but we will remind you that in retrospect, Gates is often wrong. Case in point: Common Core, another Gates- backed project that was going to revolutionize education and on which the government spent trillions to implement. Well, “The Results Are In: Common Core is An All-Around Failure,” says the National Association of Scholars (NAS). “It will leave students ignorant not only of literature and history, but even the ability to read, write, and sum. All the emphasis on ‘skills’ is useless without rigorous standards and challenging content matter. Our students will know every way to add two plus two, and they’ll come up with a different answer each time.”

In fact, NAS “tested the first three years of schoolchildren entirely educated by the Common Core—and their test scores have fallen steadily.”  “Even Bill Gates Tacitly Admits His Common Core Experiment Was A Failure,” says The Federalist. At a cost of $4T to taxpayers, what to speak of the price students paid. Read More...

The AI Job Apocalypse and Corporate Fraud

The AI Job Apocalypse and Corporate Fraud

Photo by Patrick Weissenberger on Unsplash

We have a place outside of the city, with fruit trees and a blueberry bush, which we purchased years ago, at the end of the season, when they were basically dead. We have a green thumb, so we went for it, and nursed it back to life. Our bush is now flourishing. The fruit come ripe in July, one by one, then all at once when it hits peak season. It’s behind a fence to protect it from the animals, but birds are a different story. Try as you might, birds always find a way to get to the fruit, and we do our best to scatter them.

We needed to go into the city for a few days for meetings, just as the blueberries were beginning to hit their prime. We expected that the birds would have a field day in our absence, but we were looking forward to enjoying at least a few berries.

We were wrong: the ripe berries had been picked clean. Read More...

A Flea and a Fly and the Worst Flu Season in Years

A Flea and a Fly and the Worst Flu Season in Years

Image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay

Again, the headline is courtesy of a poem by Ogden Nash
“A flea and a fly in a flu
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, “let us flee!”
“Let us fly!” said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.”

It’s winter. It’s the height of flu season, and it’s being reported as one of the worst flu seasons in years. We’re always curious as to why and while we’re not a conspiracy theorist at all, it’s always interesting to connect the dots and to separate truth/science from media talking points. If you believe that the latter is an exaggeration, we came across this, and it’s worth a watch.

We’re hearing from more and more of our readers who took the Covid vaccine about what we’ll call ‘buyers regret,’ and this just in: Yale scientists link Covid vaccines to alarming new syndrome causing ‘distinct biological changes’ to body, the Daily Mail et al reported. Read More...

Silicon Valley Goes to Washington…Why?

Silicon Valley Goes to Washington…Why?

Photo by Andy Feliciotti on Unsplash

News stories have a way of quickly becoming yesterday’s news. Which for the most part they are, but what if there’s more to the story?

Ever wonder why the tech C suite has suddenly turned its attention to participating in the G qua Government suite (their  armies of lobbyists aside, of course) – and backed the current administration? We were curious, and there’s a reason why you need to look outside of the mainstream media for answers or connect dots that might be a bit obscured.

“The Shocking Reason Marc Andreessen Had to Endorse Donald Trump,” the Independent Sentinel reported – and not reported in the mainstream media. According to Andreessen, said the Sentinel, “The Biden Administration planned to control AI and only allow three companies to create it. The administration would crush all competing companies and classify the physics needed to run AI models. “AI is a technology, basically, that the government is gonna completely control. — Don’t fund AI startups,” Andreessen was warned. “That’s not something that we’re gonna allow to happen…We’re gonna control them, um, and we’re gonna dictate what they do.” Read More...

The Importance of Transparency

The Importance of Transparency

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

We’ve found that in tech, founders/the tech press, etc, in many cases, have a bad habit of stretching the truth, let’s call it, or at least of altering a narrative to suit their purposes. It’s top-down and the members of the tech cabal do it constantly – often with the willing assistance of the tech media, who let’s say tend to shy away from presenting the full picture.

Last week, “Microsoft and Apple (gave) up their OpenAI board seats,” MSN reported. “Microsoft reportedly told OpenAI that it’s confident in the direction the company is taking, so its seat on the board is no longer necessary.”

That’s the snapshot, which is often as far as many readers get, and let’s not forget that MSN, or Microsoft News, is a Microsoft property. Read More...

The Police Blotter of Tech

The Police Blotter of Tech

Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay

Big Tech never shrinks from pushing the envelope, or as the motto goes, ask forgiveness, not permission. We suppose that when you get away with it long enough and often enough, the lines don’t blur. They simply cease to exist.

Ask forgiveness is really understating the sentiment. In reality, their true approach is ‘why stop there?’

TikTok’s troubles just got worse: The FTC could sue them, too, Politico reported. Read More...

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

The 23 Memorable People & ‘Peccadillos’ of ’23 – Part One

Image by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay

Remember all the dumb things you did when you were 23 and thought you knew everything? No, the year wasn’t all bad. Then again, when you were 23, you had your moments, too…

We’ve made our list and checked it twice, so without further ado, the people and peccadillos of the year that’s coming to an end, but the real question is, in many cases, when – and where – does it stop?

  1. Sam Bankman-Fried. He held our attention for quite a spell, as tales of his exploits were revealed: defrauding investors left and right and spending money like it grew on trees. Which it did for him: shake the tree and there were even more funds in the FTX coffers. The one-time crypto king believed that his true strength was in his hair and that those carefully unkempt locks made all the difference in his meteoric rise. Maybe they did for a spell, but speaking of locks, fraud is fraud and the former wunderkind is heading to prison for an even longer spell.
  2. The new cryminal class. SBF tops long list of crypto hot shots facing legal reckoning. “His case was far from the first — or last — time that crypto founders and executives found themselves in legal hot water related to their digital-asset activities,” the Toronto Sun pointed out. There was also Terraform Labs co-founder Do Kwon; Alex Mashinsky, the former chief executive of Celsius Network; Su Zhu, co-founder of the bankrupt Three Arrows Capital hedge fund and Thomas Smith, Kyle Nagy, and Braden Karony — the people behind the crypto token SafeMoon, who were accused by federal prosecutors of using millions in investors’ funds to buy luxury homes and McClaren sports cars. When you can live that large is so short an amount of time, chances are there’s a small cell in your future.

Biometrics collection is certainly growing. Read More...

Tech’s Bad Hair Day

Tech’s Bad Hair Day

Photo by Birger Strahl on Unsplash

No one wants to say it out loud, but is the latest tech bubble bursting? While the Web 1.0 demise was a result of too much money chasing too much youth and inexperience, this time around it’s different: It’s a result of a different kind of huckster class which has woven itself into the fabric of tech.

And many investors were complicit.

WeWorked It

Yes, he did, ‘he’ being Adam Neumann, the company’s charismatic founder/showman who somehow convinced investors that WeWork was a tech company, and not just another real estate play. Tech startups were drawn to the space, but being able to rent office space using an online system doesn’t make you a tech company. There was WeWork Labs, but it was something of an accelerator by any other name and which other accelerator considers itself a tech company?  WeWork’s rapid expansion into new spaces and more cities did grab attention, as they’d almost instantly be 90+% full, it would be announced. Although the play was to rent ten floors, build out three, fill them, and as for the floors that hadn’t been converted? Details! Kick the can down the road and stick to the plan to show hockey stick growth. Read More...

The Return of the Dark Lords of Social

The Return of the Dark Lords of Social

Photo by Joshua Hoehne on Unsplash

From what we’ve witnessed about the tech space to date, tech is all about invention and reinvention.

Example: it’s a communications tool. How long has the telephone been around, meaning landlines? Instead of calling, we ping or email or Zoom. Nothing new, really: only the words and devices and delivery mechanisms have changed to deceive the clueless.

Tech is also about glorification and vilification – and sometimes both, in the same person. Everyone’s (former) hero Elon Musk bought Twitter and the tech media banded against him – no matter that Twitter had been a platform for propaganda and surveillance under Jack Dorsey’s tenure. Yet, no matter what, Dorsey, for some reason, can seemingly do no wrong. Read More...

Fake It Till You… Meh – Scratch That

Fake It Till You… Meh – Scratch That

Image by Elisa from Pixabay

Fake it till you make it has been the credo of the tech industry since the very earliest days of the industry. Make big promises and bold statements and no matter that the product may end up as shovelware of vaporware, founders were inventing the future and no matter that investors who bought into the hype were expecting big payoffs that often didn’t happen. You pay your money, you take your chances. So it goes.

Erin Griffin wrote an excellent piece in The New York Times recently entitled The End of Faking It in Silicon Valley and it’s must-read. “Faking it is over. That’s the feeling in Silicon Valley…Not only has funding dried up for cash-burning startups over the past year, but now, fraud is also in the air, as investors scrutinize startup claims more closely and a tech downturn reveals who has been taking the industry’s “fake it till you make it” ethos too far… the chorus of charges, convictions and sentences have created a feeling that the startup world’s fast and loose fakery actually has consequences.”

Gee, who’d have thought? Considering that California was basically founded on the Gold Rush, and the tech space was essentially the state’s second Gold Rush, didn’t investors realize that during that first Gold Rush, many were taken in by Fool’s Gold? History does have a way of repeating itself, and if it worked the first time… Read More...