When you realize the $ickening mind$et of the people who think of such things, it makes you want to get as far away from them as possible as well as wash your hands:
"Entrepreneur donates brain-computer company to Tufts; Braingate is developing ways for disabled people to regain functions" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff, September 10, 2020
For more than a decade, scientist and entrepreneur Jeff Stibel’s company BrainGate has been developing ways to connect the human brain directly to computers, but Stibel doesn’t think the world is ready for his technology, because of the potential for abuse. So he’s giving away the company.
I think it looks like transhumanism and a complete conversion to a Borg-like hive.
Stibel is donating BrainGate to his alma mater, Tufts University, complete with more than a dozen patents covering the company’s work in brain-computer interfaces, the parties announced Thursday. He is also endowing two professorships at the school to lead a research program that will further develop the BrainGate technology, while grappling with its ethical challenges.
“I want to make sure, given my science background, that we’re focused on doing good and not harm,” said Stibel, cofounder of the venture capital firm Bryant Stibel, whose partners included the late basketball star Kobe Bryant.
I'm not going to pick at the carcass of $elf-$erving altrui$m.
BrainGate is based on research conducted at Brown University, where Stibel earned a master’s degree in cognitive science. It uses electrodes implanted in the brain to intercept and translate a person’s thoughts into signals that can control machines. The goal is to allow disabled people to use a robotic arm or transmit text messages over a smartphone, just by thinking about it.
“It is very much mind-reading,” Stibel said. “We are able to interpret signals of the human brain and translate that into output."
All of a sudden, the light went on over my head.
You combine this with the 5G rollout and vaccines and voila, we are there! The vaccines will have the nanobots or whatever that are need to transmit the data from the brain, and how long before the signals start coming the other way?
They will literally control the way we think.
The company has not brought products to market yet. It has been funded through grants from major universities that work with BrainGate on research projects, but Stibel said brain-computer interfaces could someday be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, for the medical applications alone, and some tech industry giants are moving quickly to commercialize the technology for the rest of us.
Oooh, those robber barons who have and will most benefit from the technocratic dystopia on the heels of the legendary COVID are doing it for us! I $ee!
For example, Facebook is running a research program in brain-computer interfaces for use with a new generation of augmented-reality glasses. The user might think about a Facebook friend and instantly see the friend’s page displayed on the lenses of his glasses.
Elon Musk, founder of the carmaker Tesla, has also launched a brain-computer interface company, called Neuralink.
“I don’t see anything scary about this technology," said Tufts biology professor Michael Levin in an e-mail. “We already have ways to put information into brains — paintings, books, movies, and to read out information from brains . . . this is just a more efficient way to do it," but Stibel worries about ethical challenges.
Before I get to that, what he says above is totally different in terms of processing information.
We take that in naturally, not hooked up to some computer like some cyborg filth.
Who will control the collected data, for instance? Could companies use it to violate our privacy, monitoring our thoughts much as they now monitor our mouse clicks? And as the technology improves, could such a system be used to alter the thoughts of those using it — a kind of mind control?
When was MK-Ultra, the '50s?
They never stopped working on it, and now they are on the cusp of making us all Manchurian Candidates (that wonderful director is now dead?).
“These are individuals who are not asking whether to do it, they’re asking how to do it," Stibel said. “I wanted someone to control the underlying technology and ask the question whether we should be doing this and when we should be doing it.”
Because BrainGate’s new owners are scientists and scholars, rather than business people, Stibel believes they will be free to focus on developing safe and ethical uses for the technology, and to set higher standards for the entire industry.
James Glaser, dean of Tufts' school of arts and sciences, said Stibel’s gift reflects his loyalty to the school, where he earned undergraduate degrees in philosophy and psychology.
“It’s powerful technology, but one we have to be careful with,” Glaser said. "He believes that Tufts will honor that trust.”
Yeah, take that the totalitarian and inhuman $cience won't be misused on FAITH!
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Related:
"A Harvard professor has won a $3 million prize for her work in life sciences. Catherine Dulac won for “deconstructing the complex behavior of parenting to the level of cell-types and their wiring, and demonstrating that the neural circuits governing both male and female-specific parenting behaviors are present in both sexes," the Breakthrough Prize Foundation said in a statement. The Breakthrough Prizes are meant to honor fundamental discoveries in the life sciences, physics, and mathematics that are changing the world. Its founders include Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of Facebook, and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google. A total of $18.75 million in prizes was awarded this year to support “scientists working on the biggest and most fundamental questions,” the foundation said....."
I didn't want to say it, but yeah, sexual predators and pedophiles could potentially use such technology, right?
Time is literally running out:
"For TikTok’s top influencers, is time running out?" by Hiawatha Bray Globe Staff, September 10, 2020
Lots of people have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 crisis. Brian Moller, also known as B Mo The Prince, has managed to lose three — radio broadcaster, club DJ, and basketball coach, and now he’s at risk of losing gig number four, if the Trump administration follows through on its threats to shut down Chinese social media titan TikTok.
Moller is a “TikTok influencer,” the small army of creative people who’ve turned their online popularity into a steady stream of cash from businesses who pay to have their products and services promoted in their videos.
Can turn you into a million-dollar brand if they whore you out right, and they even help give campaigns a boost!
TikTok is a smartphone app that lets users create short videos, set them to music, and distribute them via the Internet to anyone who’s interested. This deceptively simple idea has been leveraged by innovative people around the world. They’ve created millions of remarkable little movies that are often hilarious, heartwarming, inspiring — and most important from a business perspective, utterly addictive.
Maybe to this a$$hole, not me.
I have no interest in $elf-$erving $hit, but this feels like the Globe is Braying about it as being the NEW JOB that you can DO FROM HOME!
A CORPORATE CONGLOMERATE can come to your rescue and make you an "influencer."
Moller’s TikTok channel mostly features rapid-fire comedy routines, such as a sketch in which God confronts the year 2020 and demands to know why so many dreadful things have happened. It’s quick, clever, and lucrative. “I’ve been able to stay afloat with COVID taking away my other two jobs and the income from my business,” he said. “Banning the app will again strip me of yet another source of income.”
He's blasphemous and he wonders why his world is imploding?
Moller’s 433,000 followers are small potatoes compared to the true giants in the influence game, people such as Charli D’Amelio, a 16-year-old who has attracted nearly 85 million followers, and has a Dunkin Donuts coffee drink named after her.
The influencer's "game," huh?
Some corporation made a 16-year-old girl a star, huh?
GROSS!
TikTok claims 800 million worldwide use the app, including 100 million in the United States, making it far more popular than Twitter, and it makes TikTok the first Chinese media company to become hugely popular in the rest of the world, but TikTok’s success has alarmed some governments. They fear China could use the service to spread propaganda, or that Chinese intelligence agencies could force TikTok to hand over stores of sensitive data about users in other countries.
They may be, but that's the pot hollering kettle as we are the most lied to people on the planet courtesy of our governments and their mouthpiece ma$$ media.
Already India, which fought a military skirmish with China earlier this year, has cut off its citizens’ access to the TikTok network. Some Australian legislators have also backed a ban, though that government has said it has no plans to do so, and in August, President Trump announced that in 90 days he would ban US companies from doing business with TikTok’s parent company Bytedance as well as Tencent Holdings, maker of another popular Chinese app, WeChat.
China is taking over Australia courtesy of the government and Dan Andrews, so WTF are they talking about?
Several major companies based outside of China have expressed interest in acquiring TikTok’s US operations, including Microsoft, Oracle, and Walmart, but last week, the Chinese government said that it would have to approve any such sale, a new hurdle that could make it impossible to make a deal before the Trump deadline.
China, Microsoft, Oracle, Walmart, all the same.
Caught in the middle are thousands of TikTok influencers such as Moller, who spend hours each week coming up with videos that will attract hordes of followers, and give them the opportunity to turn their popularity into cash.
This is f**king di$gu$ting, folks!
Kyle Gove, another Boston-area TikTok influencer, has just 30,000 followers for his videos, which mostly feature snarky commentaries on Massachusetts geography and culture, but that’s been enough to let him earn money by promoting job search app JobGet and online retailer Old Dirty Boston.
“TikTok promotions have really helped me out with my financial situation,” Gove said. “The money I’ve made has helped me afford some extra general expenses.”
Influencers often team up with companies that can help build their audiences and win them lucrative endorsement deals. For example, Amp Studios in Huntington Beach, Calif., represents Brent Rivera, with 33 million TikTok followers, and Ben Azelart, who has more than 10 million followers. Amp runs influencer campaigns on behalf of corporate titans like LG, Coca-Cola, and Walt Disney.
Amp cofounder Max Levine said the threat of a TikTok shutdown has cast a pall over his business, because Fortune 500 companies don’t want to launch new marketing campaigns on a platform that’s in the government’s crosshairs.
Awwww, poo joo.
“There has been a dip in terms of new campaigns that we’re doing on TikTok,” Levine said. “They don’t want to invest in something that won’t be around in a month or two.”
Some influencers are spreading their time across other social media channels. It’s common for them to have accounts on YouTube and Instagram, and now some are trying to attract their TikTok audiences to these rival platforms.
When Instagram launched an imitation TikTok service called Reels in early August, Cambridge travel blogger Jon Miksis immediately climbed aboard.
“I’ve been able to grow substantially over there in the past few weeks,” said Miksis, who has 500,000 followers on TikTok, and about 48,000 on Instagram. He’s also started an account on another rival video service, Triller.
“Short-form video content isn’t going anywhere,” said Miksis, “so I’m confident that I would be able to build a following again on a different app in a post-TikTok world.”
Moller is also scrambling to get traction on Instagram, though with a mere 10,700 followers he’s got a long way to go.
Still, there’s reason for optimism. A deal to sell off TikTok’s US business may yet be worked out; the Trump administration is considering extending the deadline for a second time, according to news accounts, to allow more time for negotiations, and even if the administration tries to follow through on its shutdown threat, expect lengthy challenges in the courts.
Another backdown, great.
Even though Moller fears for his influencer income in the short run, he believes that in one form or another, TikTok will survive.
“Sooner or later this’ll get worked out,” Moller said. “There’s too much money to be made.”
And we all know that money makes the world go 'round!
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My influence will be in my legacy, for however long it lasts.
Related:
884,000 people file for unemployment
Go hop on TikTok and become an influencer!
Or take the other $hortcut to Wall $treet by SPACling:
"More Mass. companies are taking a shortcut to Wall Street" by Scott Kirsner Globe Correspondent, September 10, 2020
The road to Wall Street for promising young companies used to involve chartered jets, presentations to major investors such as mutual funds, and an anxiety-producing stretch during which investor consensus about how much the company was worth helped determine what the share price would be when the stock began trading.
That was the traditional process for an initial public offering, but this year, a growing number of Massachusetts companies are taking a shortcut to the stock exchange. They’re being bought by SPACs, or special-purpose acquisition companies, that are already traded on the market.
Looks like a Great Re$et con$olidation to me!
SPACs are sometimes called “blank check” companies, because they have money but no business operations. According to AGC Partners, a Boston investment bank, creation of these SPAC entities has hit a record high. In the third quarter so far, they have collected $20 billion in capital, an increase of 150 percent from the prior quarter, and have surpassed other types of stock market deals in volume.
DraftKings, the fantasy sports site headquartered in Boston, got to the Nasdaq Stock Exchange with an assist from a SPAC in April. Boston-based Cerevel Therapeutics, focused on developing drugs for Parkinson’s disease, announced it would sell itself to a SPAC in July, and in late August, Desktop Metal, a maker of 3-D printers in Burlington, said it would do the same.
Why are we seeing so much of this kind of action in 2020?
Ric Fulop, chief executive of Desktop Metal, took a prior company public the traditional way. That was A123 Systems, a maker of lithium-ion batteries for power tools and electric cars. It was one of the best-performing IPOs of 2009 — but the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012 following a big product recall, and its assets were sold off, but this is Fulop’s first time taking the SPAC route.
If at first you don't $ucceed, try, try again?
Desktop Metal makes machines that can turn digital designs into metal parts. The company’s first product, the Studio System, sells for about $60,000. Fulop’s cofounders include four MIT professors, and customers include Callaway Golf, Adidas, Goodyear, and Lockheed Martin. Ford’s head of manufacturing serves on Desktop Metal’s board, as does former General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt.
More f**kinjg MIC designing our lives.
If you don't think this is tyranny, start SPACling.
Fulop says it was always his vision to take Desktop Metal public. Of SPACs, he says, “we’re in a pandemic. This is a little more straightforward way to do it. We think it was a way to get to our goal of being a public company efficiently, where we could have more control.”
What does that mean, exactly? Fulop explains that instead of an investment bank deciding who will be the key investors for an IPO ― and discussions with those investors establishing a valuation at the eleventh hour of the process ― a SPAC allowed him to be in the driver’s seat, and sooner.
Fulop could assent to a deal with a particular SPAC — Trine Acquisition Corp. in New York — set his company’s valuation earlier in the process, and choose other investors who would put money into the transaction. In Desktop Metal’s case, those other investors include JB Straubel, cofounder of the automaker Tesla, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive who last year was involved with taking the space tourism company Virgin Galactic public in a SPAC deal.
“Curating the investor pool ― that’s the number one benefit,” Fulop says, adding that he wanted investors who would hold the company’s stock over the long-term, “instead of hedge funds or people who would be flipping it.” Fulop says that while a SPAC deal might have been “seen as too novel” a few years ago, he was more open to the approach after watching companies like DraftKings and Virgin Galactic use it as their path to the public markets.
Curating is the same as culling.
SPACs have “had an ugly past,” tainted by fraud and some lower-quality companies using it, says Jocelyn Arel, an attorney at the law firm Goodwin who focuses on SPAC deals, but she says “there have been some great companies that went public through SPACs,” including Smart Balance, the maker of healthy foods, a transaction she was involved with in 2004. Arel also notes that higher-quality investors are willing to be involved in SPAC deals these days; the mutual fund giants Fidelity Investments and T. Rowe Price are among those involved in the SPAC acquisition of Cerevel Therapeutics, which is expected to be finalized by the end of 2020.....
Yeah, those are above reproach as our heads are banged in the Desktop Metal.
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Related:
Boston ecommerce software firm recruits top Salesforce exec to be its president
Also see:
"Streaming high-definition videos and games can result in significant greenhouse gas emissions, depending on the technology used, according to a German government-backed study released Thursday. The report published by Germany’s Federal Environment agency calculated the amount of carbon dioxide produced by data centers where material is stored for streaming, and by the transmission technology used to get it to consumers. It concluded that streaming video over fiber optic cables results in the lowest amount of CO2 emissions — 2 grams per hour. Using copper cables produces twice that amount, while 3G mobile technology results in a hefty 90 grams of CO2 per hour. The report’s authors said streaming over next-generation mobile technology, known as 5G, would result in carbon dioxide emissions of 5 grams per hour, suggesting that widespread rollout could help cut energy consumption. Data centers, meanwhile, accounted for only a small share of the overall energy use, though the amount varied significantly depending on how efficiently servers were used and cooled, according to the report....."
OMG, it is ALL AGENDA all the TIME with the MOST OUTRAGEOUS LIES!
Now the oxygen-stealing, irradiating 5G microwaves that will increase your game download by 10 seconds are IN THE SERVICE OF a SUSTAINABLE WORLD and GREAT RE$ET in addition to acting as a total tracking mechanism after you have been vaccinated!!
The saddest thing is, such rank rot is coming from Germany!
"Some of Europe’s biggest cities, including London and Paris, will have a shortfall of 1.2 million apartments by 2030, according to a study of nine metropolises by the German Institute for Economic Research for real estate developer Wiener Komfortwohnungen....."
Why would they need so many apartments when people are moving away from crowded cities because of COVID?
What transfer of the population do they have planned?
"A deadly pig disease has materialized in Germany for the first time, threatening to hammer exports from Europe’s biggest hog-producing nation. A confirmed case of African swine fever has been identified in the eastern state of Brandenburg, Agriculture Minister Julia Kloeckner said Thursday at a briefing in Berlin. The virus, which kills most infected pigs within 10 days but is not harmful to humans, was detected in the corpse of a wild boar found near the Polish border....."
Who knows if that is their vaunted second wave, but what it is part of is the breakdown of the food supply chain that will soon lead to famine across the entire world. Those pigs will have to be culled and wasted.
Getting a little closer to our own shores:
"BP, the oil giant that announced a seismic strategy shift last month, made its first venture into offshore wind power with a $1.1 billion purchase of U.S. assets from Norway’s Equinor ASA. BP will receive a 50% stake in the Empire Wind and Beacon Wind developments off New York and Massachusetts....."
Reminds me of the forgotten Gulf Gusher from the Obama regime, and the pre$$ cleaned him up good of that scandal like all the others.
Beyond that, it tells you that the oil-and-gas companies will self-immolate in service to the Great Re$et.
Time to hunker down at home:
"Well after U.S. economies began reopening this year, Americans continued to stay home. By the latter half of August, 130 million Americans said they avoided eating at restaurants, a new U.S. Census Bureau survey analyzed by Bloomberg News shows. Only about 21 million of the nearly 250 million people had resumed dining out, according to the data gathered in collaboration with multiple federal agencies. Asked if they were still making fewer trips to stores in late August than before the pandemic, 70% said “yes.” Even among the youngest adults aged 18 to 24, 68% said they were shopping less. In some cases, the ability to stay home was tied to income. More than 70% of households earning more than $100,000 said they were able to substitute telecommuting for some in-person work. By comparison, only 27% of households with annual incomes under $75,000 said someone in their home was able to telecommute....."
Staying home and spending no money is the best thing to do at this stage.
Let the entire $y$tem grind to halt.
The $olution to it all, according to the New York Times and the Bo$ton Globe, is put women in charge!
They will end Amazon's price gouging!
"Amazon.com Inc. charged inflated prices for hand sanitizer, disposable gloves and other essentials months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a consumer watchdog said in a report accusing the world’s largest online retailer of price gouging. The report, released Thursday by Public Citizen, examines roughly two dozen products on Amazon’s site. The report challenges Amazon’s public position that it’s an innocent bystander of price gouging perpetrated by a select few “bad actors” selling products on its popular webstore....."
Oh, the $aintly Bezos committed the metaphorical $in of war profiteering?
