Sunday, May 8, 2016

The complete guide to fleeing President Donald Trump's America

For folks across the nation, the election of Donald Trump would make America grate — again.

The mere thought of President Trump taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2017, has already led to threats from U.S. citizens that they would leave our red, white and blue borders behind if The Donald reaches The White House.

FULL COVERAGE: THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION

Don't wanna live here if this spray-tanned, megalomaniacal, compulsive liar is elected to the highest office in the land? Don't worry, neither do we. Take a look at all your options if Donald Trump is (God forbid) wins the presidency.

The tycoon-turned-politician won at least seven states on Super Tuesday, putting him one step closer to the White House, and his critics — and they’re plentiful — are one step closer to the border.

ince declaring his candidacy last June, Trump has insulted everybody fromJohn McCain to Pope Francis, from Mexicans to Muslims to Megyn Kelly.

KING: NOT LONG BEFORE SOMEONE GETS KILLED AT TRUMP RALLY

Left-leaning Americans have been threatening to leave the country since Trump announced his candidacy last summer with a hate-filled, derogatory speech in which he called Mexicans rapists and drug dealers

The warnings of emigration have continued through his campaign — so much so that a tiny Canadian island created a website to welcome Trump haters.

Of course, such threats are nothing new. The late director Robert Altman started the trend during the 2000 election, becoming the first celebrity to say he'd leave the U.S. if George W. Bush was elected. But the threatened escape never happened: He died in Hollywood six years into Bush's presidency.

Minnesota-born "Monty Python" member Terry Gilliam renounced his American citizenship in 2006 in protest of Bush's reelection, although the actor moved to London in 1968.

THE FAKING OF A PRESIDENT: TRUMP'S FIRST 100 DAYS IN OFFICE

So how does a Trump foe make the big move to more progressive pastures in 2016? And of all the Trump-free countries, which is best for a soon-to-be-expat?

Here’s a Daily News cheat sheet on moving your feet before First Lady Melania puts on her dancing shoes for the inaugural ball.

Enclaves for expats

The first step of any great escape plan? Picking a destination.

The most well-rounded country

Trust expats who have already fled their countries: Singapore might be your best bet. The island nation boasts the top quality of life for expats, according to a 2015 survey of expats by InterNations, a 2 million-person strong network of migrants.

MARK J. ROZELL: SAVING THE GOP FROM DONALD TRUMP

The Asian county earned the title for its slew of high-paying jobs, welcoming atmosphere, stellar health care facilities and top-notch public transit. English, one of Singapore's four official languages, is used frequently, especially in urban areas, so communication barriers are limited for Americans.

"I love the cosmopolitan nature of the city; its international population is well-traveled & open-minded," one expat said.

As a bonus, Singapore boasts the No. 1 most efficient health care system in the world, as rated by Bloomberg. The U.S. ranks at No. 44, and could dip even lower with Trump at the helm. The billionaire has long blasted Obamacare and scoffed at government-run health care — even though the system seems to be working out really well for Singapore.

The cheapest (and the friendliest!) country

When it comes to personal finances, Ecuador might be the answer. It ranks No. 1 for cost of living and is high on the list for just plain happiness.

The South American country goes easy on expats' wallets, ranking No. 1 for cost of living. In Ecuador, only 9% of expats said their disposable income isn't enough, compared to a global average of 23%.

RACIST DONALD TRUMP CAN'T HIDE BEHIND DOUBTS ANYMORE

And when the massive shavings coax expats southward, you'll be greeted by tons of friendly faces. Ecuador is the easiest country for expats to make new friends, according to the InterNations report.

"Expats living in Ecuador find it the easiest out of all 64 destinations worldwide to settle down in this country," the survey says.

Plus, there are far more women in Ecuador's government than in the U.S. Here, 20 women served in the Senate this term, while 84 women were in the House of Representatives in 2015 — both houses were comprised of roughly 80% men. Ecuador's one-chamber National Assembly has 59 women, compared to 78 men. That should be good news to all those women Donald Trump has verbally attacked over the years.

This only gets better...or worse depending on how you look at it:

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/complete-guide-fleeing-president-donald-trump-america-article-1.2549397

8 Ways magnetic levitation could shape the future

*Fully Interactive

Please visit:

http://tinyurl.com/hnoooqj

Are you 50+ and wondering where to store your money?

The Federal Reserve is the most optimistic. The Bank of Japan made the biggest mistake. The Bank of Canada is the most accurate, but it's got the easiest job.

These are just a few of the findings of Bloomberg's first-ever ranking of Group of Seven central banks according to their ability to forecast their own economies. Turns out the financial crisis really did ruin everyone's estimates, just like the Greek crisis might this year, and complicated economies are harder to deal with.

The best forecaster of all: the International Monetary Fund. It beat the Bank of Canada, the winner in the rankings, more often than not on growth and inflation.

But the IMF doesn't have a national mandate to set interest rates or deploy other tools, which is a key reason central banks exist and the motive for their forecasts. The projections are cranked into guidance on future policy moves that banks are offering more than ever — guidance that gets used by companies and governments for their own decisions.

“Central banks ought to be much better at what they do,” said Rob Carnell, chief international economist at ING Groep in London. “If they're trying to convince us all that they know where things are going by using forward guidance you'd think that they know something that we don't. But unless they're much better at analyzing the data, we shouldn't listen to them and they've got nothing to say.”

The Bloomberg analysis shows central banks' performance has improved as the crisis eased. Since 2012, as the European debt crisis started to fade, they've mostly had lower forecast errors for either growth, or inflation, or both. The BOE had one of the biggest improvements, with its forecast error for inflation falling to 0.68 percentage point from 1.23. The BOJ is still struggling with its growth projections, with the average error rising to 2.1 percentage points from 1.39 point.

To compile these results, Bloomberg looked at gross domestic product estimates one year ahead, inflation two years ahead, and compared them to average annual results from 2005-2014. The overall score reflects a Taylor Rule approach that gives equal weight to growth and inflation. (The methodology is here and the numbers behind the rankings are here.) Bloomberg also compared banks' performance over the 10-year period to the last three years, and to an index created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Observatory of Economic Complexity.

The results also show that the Fed's estimates overshot GDP in nine of 10 years. The BOJ's miss on growth in the 2008-2009 fiscal year was the biggest, at 5.2 percentage points versus 2.6 percentage points in Canada. The Bank of England had the biggest inflation miss, underestimating consumer price gains by 3.1 percentage points in 2011.

The European Central Bank was the only one to significantly outperform the IMF on growth, beating it in eight of 10 years. The Bank of Canada beat the Washington-based lender just three out of 10 years on growth and two out of five years on inflation.

Full > http://tinyurl.com/nfdvv4c
*You might wish to consider saving something outside of paper dollars.

Robot cars: 10 things you need to know

1 Google's driverless cars

Since the internet giant announced its ambition to create a driverless car within the decade, its fleet of 10 converted Toyota Priuses have led the way in self-driving robotic vehicles. So far they have covered more than 300,000 miles on California's roads without incident. The cars have roof-mounted cameras and sensors that constantly scan their surroundings, building up a 3D map of each route. Last year, a blind man named Steve Mahan was able "drive" one of the cars in Morgan Hill, California.

2 The Mercedes-Benz laser-controlled car

Mercedes has fitted a radar system to the front, rear and all four corners of one of its S-Class saloons. Along with cameras concealed in the front and rear windscreens the car collects information and compares it to a 3D digital map created by Nokia. In August, the car drove 62 miles at speed along a prepared route. The great advantage it has over the Google car is that the control equipment is all hidden within the body of the car. Mercedes isn't the only one snapping at Google's heels. Nissan, Volvo, Audi, GM, Ford and Toyota are all working on prototypes.

3 Dynamic cruise control

Cruise control was one of the first great steps towards the self-driving car, but active cruise control takes the system to the next level. You set your desired speed and let the car do the rest. It uses forward-facing lasers to "see" traffic. When it detects a vehicle in front, it reduces your speed. When that car moves over, it resumes the original speed.

4 Collision mitigation systems

Imagine a "digital aunt" sitting in the back seat and keeping a constant watch on the road. If the car ahead brakes suddenly she will alert you. And that's what these systems do. If the distance between you and the car ahead starts to reduce rapidly, it will pre-tense the seatbelts, turn on the hazard lights and, in the most sophisticated systems apply full brakes. Volvo's City safety system will react to pedestrians, cyclists and even animals as well as cars.

5 Parking sensors

Reversing until you feel your bumper pressing on the car behind helps you squeeze into the smallest spaces, but won't impress the neighbours. Sensors now beep and flash as you near an object. Many cars now feature these both at the back and front and occasionally at the side. Using cameras, these images can be viewed on the dashboard. The most advanced models create a bird's eye graphic of your exact position. They'll even watch out for pedestrian crossing behind you.

6 Park assist

For domestic harmony alone, an intelligent parking system is worth its weight in gold. Ultrasonic sensors in the front bumpers scan each space to see whether it is big enough. When it finds one, you select reverse and let go of the steering wheel. The car does everything else. All you have to do is apply the handbrake at the end. Unless, of course, you have an electronic handbrake in which case you don't even have to do that.

7 GPS-controlled gear change

Using GPS to scan the topography ahead, predictive satellite-aided transmission monitors your driving behaviour and matches it to the road conditions. Essentially, it knows there is a big hill around the next bend and so selects the appropriate gear. This improves your drive and saves fuel. Rolls-Royce uses this system to create its so-called "magic-carpet" ride.

8 Attention warning system

Nodding off at the wheel is of huge safety concern. Using a system of in-cabin sensors and driving monitors, your car is watching you for signs of drowsiness. If your driving becomes erratic or your head movements are abrupt, the car will create an unpleasant high-pitched sound and flash a warning at you which states "You are dangerously tired! Stop as soon as it is safe to do so!"

9 Lane departure control

Cameras monitor where your car is in its lane. When you veer near the white line it will make your steering wheel or your seat vibrate. The more advanced systems will also apply "bias braking" to straighten you up, others will even override the steering wheel to keep you safely in the middle of your lane.

10 Dynamic headlights

Lights that turn on and off on their own, point in the right direction and dip when another car is near.

More features

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The Springtail Exoskeleton Flying Vehicle ideal for the quick getaway

Interactive

The Springtail Exoskeleton Flying Vehicle built by Trek Aerospace is a single pilot vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) vehicle that supports the operator/pilot in a standing position. View gallery (5 images)

May 4, 2009 Last week we reported on the two-seater Hummel helicopter concept and mentioned that it looked very similar to the SoloTrek XFV (Exo-skeletal Flying Vehicle) backpack helicopter flown in the movie Agent Cody Banks. We haven't had a close look at this Exoskeleton Flying Vehicle but, although the design was first tested in 2003, it's still a unique form of transport that we hope to see more of in the future.

The Springtail Exoskeleton Flying Vehicle, built by Trek Aerospace, is a single pilot, vertical take-off-and-landing (VTOL) vehicle that supports the operator/pilot in a standing position. The aircraft is powered by a single 118 hp rotary engine, which drives two counter-rotating fans housed in one meter diameter ducts on each side of the aircraft above the pilot. Counter-rotating the blades eliminates the torque usually associated with a single rotor helicopter, so the Springtail does not require a tail rotor.

The aircraft is controlled by a fly-by-wire computer system that can tilt each fan individually to control pitch and yaw. It has a top speed of 113 mph (180 kph) and a range of 184 miles (295 km) from a 12.3-gallon (46.6-liter) fuel tank. With an empty weight of 375 pounds (170 kilograms), it can carry a payload of 358 pounds (162 kilograms). With a full tank, the maximum take off weight is 834 pounds (378 kilograms).

The Springtail EFV-4 "A" research vehicle achieved its first transition to forward flight on November 5, 2003, while a "B" model, with improved variable pitch blades, was tested in 2005. The Springtail VTOL is for sale, but unfortunately due to FAA regulations can only be sold as an experimental aircraft, which limits how it can be flown. The asking price is USD$1.25 million.

Paul Evans

VIEW GALLERY (5 IMAGES)

*From Business Insider

10 Reasons To Delete Your Facebook Account

And, don't miss: 10 Reasons You'll Never Quit Facebook (Even If You Think You Want To) →

After some reflection, I've decided to delete my account on Facebook. I'd like to encourage you todo the same. This is part altruism and part selfish. The altruism part is that I think Facebook, as a company, is unethical. The selfish part is that I'd like my own social network to migrate away from Facebook so that I'm not missing anything. In any event, here's my "Top Ten" reasons for why you should join me and many others and delete your account.

10. Facebook's Terms Of Service are completely one-sided. Let's start with the basics. Facebook's Terms Of Service state that not only do they own your data (section 2.1), but if you don't keep it up to date and accurate (section 4.6), they can terminate your account (section 14). You could argue that the terms are just protecting Facebook's interests, and are not in practice enforced, but in the context of their other activities, this defense is pretty weak. As you'll see, there's no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, they see their customers as unpaid employees for crowd-sourcing ad-targeting data.

9. Facebook's CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior. From the very beginning of Facebook's existence, there are questions about Zuckerberg's ethics. According to BusinessInsider.com, he used Facebook user data to guess email passwords and read personal email in order to discredit his rivals. These allegations, albeit unproven and somewhat dated, nonetheless raise troubling questions about the ethics of the CEO of the world's largest social network. They're particularly compelling given that Facebook chose to fork over $65M to settle a related lawsuit alleging that Zuckerberg had actually stolen the idea for Facebook.

8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy. Founder and CEO of Facebook, in defense of Facebook's privacy changes last January: "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time." More recently, in introducing the Open Graph API: "... the default is now social." Essentially, this means Facebook not only wants to know everything about you, and own that data, but to make it available to everybody. Which would not, by itself, necessarily be unethical, except that ...

7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch. At the same time that they're telling developers how to access your data with new APIs, they are relatively quiet about explaining the implications of that to members. What this amounts to is a bait-and-switch. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then they make it publicly available. Since they are in the business of monetizing information about you for advertising purposes, this amounts to tricking their users into giving advertisers information about themselves. This is why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter in this regard: Twitter has made only the simplest (and thus, more credible) privacy claims and their customers know up front that all their tweets are public. It's also why the FTC is getting involved, and people are suing them (and winning).

Update: Check out this excellent timeline from the EFF documenting the changes to Facebook's privacy policy.

6. Facebook is a bully. When Pete Warden demonstrated just how this bait-and-switch works (by crawling all the data that Facebook's privacy settings changes had inadvertently made public) they sued him. Keep in mind, this happened just before they announced the Open Graph API and stated that the "default is now social." So why sue an independent software developer and fledgling entrepreneur for making data publicly available when you're actually already planning to do that yourself? Their real agenda is pretty clear: they don't want their membership to know how much data is really available. It's one thing to talk to developers about how great all this sharing is going to be; quite another to actually see what that means in the form of files anyone can download and load into MatLab.

5. Even your private data is shared with applications. At this point, all your data isshared with applications that you install. Which means now you're not only trusting Facebook, but the application developers, too, many of whom are too small to worry much about keeping your data secure. And some of whom might be even more ethically challenged than Facebook. In practice, what this means is that all your data - all of it - must be effectively considered public, unless you simply never use any Facebook applications at all. Coupled with the OpenGraph API, you are no longer trusting Facebook, but the Facebook ecosystem.

4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted. Even if we weren't talking about ethical issues here, I can't trust Facebook's technical competence to make sure my data isn't hijacked. For example, their recent introduction of their "Like" button makes it rather easy for spammers to gain access to my feed and spam my social network. Or how about this gem for harvesting profile data? These are just the latest of a series of Keystone Kops mistakes, such as accidentally making users' profiles completely public, or the cross-site scripting hole that took them over two weeks to fix. They either don't care too much about your privacy or don't really have very good engineers, or perhaps both.

3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account. It's one thing to make data public or even mislead users about doing so; but where I really draw the line is that, once you decide you've had enough, it's pretty tricky to really delete your account. They make no promises about deleting your data and every application you've used may keep it as well. On top of that, account deletion is incredibly (and intentionally) confusing. When you go to your account settings, you're given an option to deactivate your account, which turns out not to be the same thing as deleting it. Deactivating means you can still be tagged in photos and be spammed by Facebook (you actually have to opt out of getting emails as part of the deactivation, an incredibly easy detail to overlook, since you think you're deleting your account). Finally, the moment you log back in, you're back like nothing ever happened! In fact, it's really not much different from not logging in for awhile. To actually delete your account, you have to find a link buried in the on-line help (by "buried" I mean it takes five clicks to get there). Or you can just click here. Basically, Facebook is trying to trick their users into allowing them to keep their data even after they've "deleted" their account.

2. Facebook doesn't (really) support the Open Web. The so-called Open Graph API is named so as to disguise its fundamentally closed nature. It's bad enough that the idea here is that we all pitch in and make it easier than ever to help Facebook collect more data about you. It's bad enough that most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. It's bad enough that they claim to own this data and are aiming to be the one source for accessing it. But then they are disingenuous enough to call it "open," when, in fact, it is completely proprietary to Facebook. You can't use this feature unless you're on Facebook. A truly open implementation would work with whichever social network we prefer, and it would look something like OpenLike. Similarly, they implement just enough of OpenID to claim they support it, while aggressively promoting a proprietary alternative, Facebook Connect.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks. Between the farms and the mafia wars and the "top news" (which always guesses wrong - is that configurable somehow?) and the myriad privacy settings and the annoying ads (with all that data about me, the best they can apparently do is promote dating sites, because, uh, I'm single) and the thousands upon thousands of crappy applications, Facebook is almost completely useless to me at this point. Yes, I could probably customize it better, but the navigation is ridiculous, so I don't bother. (And, yet, somehow, I can't even change colors or apply themes or do anything to make my page look personalized.) Let's not even get into how slowly your feed page loads. Basically, at this point, Facebook is more annoying than anything else.

Facebook is clearly determined to add every feature of every competing social network in an attempt to take over the Web (this is a never-ending quest that goes back to AOL and those damn CDs that were practically falling out of the sky). While Twitter isn't the most usable thing in the world, at least they've tried to stay focused and aren't trying to be everything to everyone.

I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn't mean we have to actually put up with them. Furthermore, their long-term success is by no means guaranteed - have we all forgotten MySpace? Oh, right, we have. Regardless of the hype, the fact remains that Sergei Brin or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett could personally acquire a majority stake in Facebook without even straining their bank account. And Facebook's revenue remains more or less a rounding error for more established tech companies.

While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

Now, don't miss: 10 Reasons You'll Never Quit Facebook (Even If You Think You Want To) →

Dan Yoder is VP of Engineering at Border Stylo

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. It was originally published on the author's blog.

*I'm not going to delete my account yet it's time to pull back. I have seemingly reunited with more reasons that I left certain people and situations than I've gained in new productive bonds.

For now I'll turn my attention to drone modifications and finishing off details on my semi automated home defense systems.

Friday, May 6, 2016

What I Learned from the Five Percenters

*Don't shoot the messenger, I find interesting information & tech and blog it.

Five Percenters say that the black man is Allah and the white man is the devil. I am a white man, and also a Muslim, and Five Percenters exist for the pleasure of neither white people nor Muslims, but I have been a friend of this community for roughly a decade now. This relationship has transformed the ways in which I see the world and also myself.

I first encountered the Five Percent during the cross-country wanderings that became my American Muslim road book, Blue-Eyed Devil. Though most Five Percenters do not consider themselves to be Muslims, I saw this community as a necessary component of the story of American Islam. So I went to their headquarters, the Allah School on Seventh Avenue in Harlem, and ended up having a pretty good time. Because the Five Percenters were critically under researched and misrepresented, I embarked on a project entirely devoted to them: The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip-Hop, and the Gods of New York.

In the course of collecting texts, interviewing community elders, decoding Wu Tanglyrics, and hanging out at Five Percenter gatherings (parliaments), something changed. As an amateur ethnographer, I was not prepared to be affected by the materials that I was ingesting. Spending thousands of hours thinking about the Five Percenters, I actually began to internalize their narratives, symbols, and ideas. Though I wasn’t entirely inside, I was no longer outside. My position became a strange in-between space that I would examine in another project, Why I am a Five Percenter.

The first lesson I learned from the Five Percent was simple: Fuck white people. Seriously. White people are devils. I don’t mean this as a statement on biology, because the category of “race” is only political fiction and bad science. I’m using the term more in the sense of what it means to be marked as white in an unjust society. The fact is that I benefit from being white in several ways that I recognize, and many, many more that I usually fail to see. Because I am so often blind to the benefits of my whiteness, it is possible that I unintentionally reenforce those benefits, no matter how vehemently I say that I oppose racism or shower white affection on groups like the Five Percenters. When people want to sound like they’re theoretically sophisticated, they describe this phenomenon with the term, “white privilege.” I call it Satan.

Malcolm X returned from Mecca with a belief that classical Islam’s allegedly transracial brotherhood could help white Americans to move beyond the race poison that has been so deeply injected into their brains. However, I’ve also seen white Muslim converts use this claim to color-blindness as an excuse to avoid talking seriously about race. Mix white privilege with the privilege of religious orthodoxy, and you get a white Sunni who doesn’t have to consider why Elijah Muhammad was so absolutely necessary for this country.

There have been numerous white Five Percenters throughout the community’s history, and I have ironically found a greater fulfillment of Malcolm’s experience in Mecca through the Five Percenters than in my Sunni conversion. A Five Percenter elder told me that if I rejected white supremacy and strove for righteousness, I could not be called a devil; though he believed in the Five Percenter doctrine of white devils, he would not hold that against me as an individual. The answer was not for white people to instantly stop being white, as Malcolm had claimed that Islam would do for them, but to directly confront their whiteness and everything that whiteness does in the world. To be white in America means that I have been groomed to be a devil. The Five Percenters allowed me a space in which I could confess that and work to transcend it.

Five Percenters also gave me some useful ways for thinking about myself as a Muslim. Their claim to personal godhood offers, among many other things, a statement on organized religion. At a time when I was unsure of my own identity as a Muslim, Five Percenters—who generally reject the term “Muslim” for themselves—empowered me to claim ownership of my Islam. The Five Percenter disdain for religious hierarchies actually rescued my Muslim-ness. It was through the ability to make choices about my tradition that I could have any relationship to it at all. The Five Percenter breakdowns of “Allah” as “Arm Leg Leg Arm Head” and “Islam” as “I Self Lord And Master” gave me everything that I had sought in taqwacore.

Five Percenters study the Supreme Wisdom Lessons, the initiatory texts of the Nation of Islam, without blind adherence to the NOI institution or authorities such as Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan. In that way, they’re kind of like Salafi Muslims, who advocate a “straight to the texts” approach and see themselves as above Islam’s established legal schools. But unlike the Salafis, who seek to minimize the role of creative interpretation, Five Percenters emphasize the power of the individual reader to draw meaning up from the text. For Five Percenters, the truth of the Lessons is less about what they “really” say than the understanding that you, as the reader, produce from them. I’ve done my own work with the Lessons, but have also applied a Five Percenter approach to my relationship with the Qur’an and the prophetic traditions.

I’m not god and I’m not the devil. I am a human being, and the Five Percenters have helped me along the road to full humanity and peace within both my mosque and my own skin.

Michael Muhammad Knight (@MM_Knight) is the author of nine books, including Blue-Eyed Devil,The Five Percenters,and Why I am a Five Percenter.