Monday, July 3, 2017

In Trump's America, Infrastructure Is Not for the People


The president’s 2018 budget proposal bulldozes support for nearly everything that wouldn’t entice private investors.
President Trump’s 2018 budget proposal warns that ongoing neglect of America’s roads, bridges, and trains will have consequences. “If the United States continues to underinvest in infrastructure, we will continue to fall further and further behind our peers,” it states.
In the distant universe of nine months ago, such talk might have rallied Americans on both sides of the political aisle. Public money for stuff everyone uses! Huzzah! But the year is 2017, and America’s worst landlord sits in the Oval Office. When the White House clucks its tongue at the state of the nation’s failure to invest in infrastructure, it does not then go on to suggest that government should pay for infrastructure: “[S]imply providing more Federal funding for infrastructure is not the solution.”
There’s not a lot of explanation about why that is, but the budget does detail which transportation funding sources deserve to be axed. The U.S. DOT faces a 13 percent slash to its total discretionary budget. Between cuts to Amtrak, regional transit grants, and a plug-pull to the ailing Highway Trust Fund, a theme emerges: Projects that can’t turn a dime don’t deserve federal taxpayer support. Which means most infrastructure projects. Fixing roads, building bridges, and running trains, it seems, is worthwhile only when someone can profit.  
Let’s start with the source of about 25 percent of public highway and mass transit spending nationwide: the Highway Trust Fund. The HTF is supposed to be stocked with fuel tax revenues, but it’s faced insolvency for years, as Congress refuses to raise the gas tax to keep up with rising construction costs and cars become more fuel-efficient. So Congress has had to stabilize the HTF by drawing from other pots.

Trump’s budget reduces HTF life-support by $95 billion by 2027. The budget expects that with such a withdrawal, “Highway Trust Fund outlays” will “conform to baseline levels of Highway Trust Fund revenues.” In other words, the administration will let it live on whatever tax revenues it’s designed to bring in.
Those numbers don’t add up. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Trust Fund will face a deficit of $139 billion by 2027without additional infusions. So Team Trump seems to have forgotten $45 billion, somewhere. Chalk that up to the budget’s generally baseless accounting, perhaps.
Setting that aside, balancing the trust fund seems like a good idea. But this budget doesn’t propose a way to help it generate more revenues. So what happens the roads and transit systems that the fund is supposed to pay for?
For highways, the answer is lassoing capital from the private sector. Rather than directly fund many infrastructure projects, the administration plans to leverage $200 billion in public funds to incentivize “$1 trillion in private/public infrastructure investment” over the next ten years.
The alchemy that turns $200 billion into $1 trillion features nowhere in the budget. In a fact sheet on this “infrastructure initiative,” the White House explains it will “pursue” a number of strategies to nudge investors into the occasionally-lucrative road-building game. Mostly, it’s free lunch for private investors: For example, the administration hopes to lift the cap on how many tax-exempt bonds the government is allowed to sell to investors. They may also liberalize tolling policies, and allow companies to take over rest stops and other roadside amenities. They’ll expand certain federal grant programs, such as TIFIA, that are specifically designed for projects that can leverage private investment, using tax breaks.
“Trump budget trickle down: Cut direct spending from Highway Trust Fund and replace it with tax credits to elite Wall Street investors,” tweeted Kevin DeGood, the director of infrastructure policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Pretty much.

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Nice Investment Opportunity

 While living in Ta Khmau, Cambodia I happened to notice a man separating his trash and then I noticed his electric scooter. I approached him and introduced myself, he's the administrator for a Cambodian school close to the weight room I work out in.
 Nevertheless, time marches on and we become friends, I had no idea that before I came to "visit" home in Cocoa Beach, FL. that he was going to become a business partner.
 I built him this website that's about 90% complete.


 Fast forward to the present:
 I'll be heading off to winter in Puerto Vallarta, timing my trip back to my new home in Ta Khmau on 3 May 18'.
 This is where it's going to get fun, within 2 or 3 months of my arrival, we'll head off to New Zealand where he can set up eco-friendly tours and activities. (That's not my thing) My portion of this combined effort is to identify and purchase eco-friendly buses, vans and equipment to abide by standards set forth by Stanford, Harvard, NSF International, etc.
I'll also be in charge of maintaining this equipment and vehicles.

 This is going to take quit a bit of my time but it's for a great cause.

 If you're interested in getting involved, have input and or advice, possibly looking to invest, take the time to send me an email or you can call: ntech-solutions@live.com / +1-321-352-3097
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/globalsysnica/

*I also have property in America / Florida for sale.



My SEO Freebie to Website and Blog Owners

 I build websites all over the world and customers have complained that they weren't generating revenue. I respond by saying, "Your site needs the proper SEO and back linking" for a fair price. They seldom listen so I'm going to give this information away for free.



A Simple Step by Step Guide to SEO


(My blogs are free and consultation is at a price less than your hosted site)

GMO's Have Been Signed into Law, Cancerous or Not.

***This post is not about our former president who signed GMO's into Law but about how the seed was planted many years ago. I'm only adding this linked site to validate my post.


This post is to convey the following video.

Your children and grandchildren are suffering and will suffer.

Monsanto 




You Truly Believe Osama Bin Laden Knocked Down the World Trade Centers?

...you didn't go to far in life did you? If you believe that Osama Bin Laden knocked down the World Trade Centers, you're not that bright.

There are 3 segments to this documentary and I pay little attention to the first portion, I don't involve myself  with religious beliefs and I don't care. Paying attention to the later 2/3rd's may change your life!



 This site is for "forward thinkers" Only! > http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/

10 Stats About Artificial Intelligence That Will Blow You Away

 Bill Gates calls this market the “holy grail” of computer science.

 Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates recently called artificial intelligence "the holy grail that anyone in computer science has been thinking about" during Vox Media's Code Conference. Gates discussed the rapid progress of speech recognition and computer vision technologies over the past five years, and noted that "the dream is finally arriving."
If that dream arrives, tech investors should recognize the major trends and players in this market. To get started, let's examine 10 fascinating facts about the AI industry.


1. $5.05 billion market by 2020

Research firm Markets and Markets estimates that the AI market will grow from $420 million in 2014 to $5.05 billion by 2020, thanks to the rising adoption of machine learning and natural language processing technologies in the media, advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare industries.
Key players in machine learning include big cloud players like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN)Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and IBM. Nuance Communications (NASDAQ:NUAN) is the top "pure play" in natural language processing.

2. 6 billion devices will request AI support

Gartner estimates that 6 billion connected "things" will be actively requesting support from AI platforms by 2018. These devices will likely include many connected appliances, cars, wearables, and other gadgets included in the broader Internet of Things market.

3. $5.4 billion invested in AI start-ups

There are currently 1,031 AI start-ups listed on AngelList, with an average valuation of $5.2 million -- which equals nearly $5.4 billion in venture capital investments. The three most-followed companies on that list are robotics company Autonomous, team productivity software maker Crux, and AI social news aggregator Zero Slant.

4. 80% of executives believe AI boosts productivity


A recent study by AI language company Narrative Science found that 80% of executives believed that AI solutions boosted worker performance and created new jobs. Thirty-two percent said voice recognition technologies were the most widely used AI technology in their businesses -- which is good news for companies like Nuance.

Image

The idea of speaking to your phone initially seemed awkward, but a recent study by Creative Strategies' Carolina Milanesi found that just 2% of iPhone users had never used Siri, while 4% had never used Google Now.

6. Virtual assistants will make decisions for you

Gartner believes that the data gathered from users in cloud-based neural networks will power 40% of mobile interactions between virtual personal assistants and people by 2020. This means that all the data you voluntarily feed to Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Google, and Amazon will be used to create a complex cloud-based profile that cloud-based "smart agents" can use to predict your needs and desires.
Follow us on Facebook >  https://www.facebook.com/globalsysnica/

Personal Semi Autonomous Defense Systems



***For obvious reasons, this can't be revealed in full while on US soil.
Do you live outside the US? 24 hours lands me anywhere on the planet.


It's official: the United States is a Third World country

Trump's presidency promises massive tax cuts for the rich, chump change for the middle class and the working poor will get the finger, writes Dennis Jett. "And income inequality, which is already at historic highs in this country, will grow even more and make other third world countries look downright egalitarian.


If there is one clear result of this presidential election, it is that the United States has become a third world country. No, it has not sunk into the ranks of the underdeveloped economically (yet), but it certainly has gotten there politically.
Here is the evidence. How many times have people in Latin America, in response to the troubles that their countries faced, said "we need a strong leader." That is the solution for which many Americans cast their ballots on Election Day as they expressed their disgust with the dysfunctionality Of Washington.
They assumed that someone like Donald Trump, who pretends to be a strong leader, is going to fix everything and make their lives better. And just like those in Latin America who have expressed similar sentiments over so many years, they could not be more wrong.
Usually in Latin America a new president enters office with sky-high approval ratings. Then as he proves incapable of changing much of anything, those ratings start to decline until he leaves office with his approval in the low teens, if not single digits.
Trump will not even get that much of a break at the start. A plurality of people voted against him again calling into question, as it did in 2000, whether the United States is really a democracy. And the demonstrations around the country show how deeply unpopular he is already.
So the first major party candidate in American history with zero experience in government or the military is going to make the government run efficiently and command the military wisely? A man whose supposedly successful business empire is one giant with job and Ponzi scheme can make the changes required?
The lobbyists and billionaires have already hijacked the transition in order to ensure Washington continues to serve the interests of wealthy and influential.
So nothing will change for the better and it will not take people long to figure that out. Even if their only source of information is Fox News and their response to globalization is to bury their heads in the sand, they still have to face reality, the lack of blue collar jobs and the triumph of the status quo.
And what little confidence there is in Trump will soon start to decline. One teacher, who accurately predicted his victory, is now saying he will also be impeached.
Of course, congress will attempt to distract people from reality by doing things like "reforming" taxes, which means exploding the deficit and giving the rich massive cuts, the middle class chump change and the working poor the finger.
And income inequality, which is already at historic highs in this country, will grow even more and make other third countries look downright egalitarian.
Obamacare will be repealed on the insurance companies to increase their profits and millions of Americans will return to being one illness away from financial ruin. Thousands of them will die prematurely as a result.
Meanwhile, Washington will keep the fear of terrorism, which is a lot of risk for the average America getting stuck by lightening on a clear day, alive and healthy.
As in the third world, the legislative branch in Washington has an approval rating in the teens, which is still higher than it deserves. The only thing that will change is people will look for the next easy answer instead of trying to understand how their government works and demand that it do better for all. At least we have no history of military coups so that's easy presumably will not be available.

But those who care about American leadership should not be discouraged. The United States will be the leader-just of the third world and no longer the entire world.

http://www.univision.com/univision-news/opinion/its-official-the-united-states-is-a-third-world-country


Will Donald Trump be assassinated, ousted in a coup or just impeached?


The ‘most deadly adversaries of republican government,’ wrote Alexander Hamilton, arise ‘chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?’ Hamilton’s warning against ‘intrigue, and corruption’, published in 1788, speaks eerily to the Washington of today, where Donald Trump’s enemies imagine he is a Russian ‘agent of influence,’ bought or blackmailed by the Kremlin. The new chief magistrate himself is in full Nixon mode, at war with the media, the intelligence community, the ‘establishment’ and the ‘rigged system’, even as he takes his place behind the desk in the Oval Office for the first time. The scandal — if that’s what it is — has now inevitably been titled ‘Watersportsgate’. Is it conceivable that, like Nixon, Trump might eventually be forced from office?

It seems absurd to ask this question in the week of the new President’s inauguration. Still, the Senate Intelligence Committee has already announced hearings into ‘links between Russia and individuals associated with political campaigns’. The committee’s Republican chairman issued a statement saying the inquiry would be ‘bipartisan’ and would rely on ‘the issuance of subpoenas if necessary to compel testimony… The Committee will follow the intelligence wherever it leads.’ If Trump’s staff or friends did meet with Russian officials to co-ordinate hacking the US presidential election, there is a word for that: treason, the first and most important of the ‘high crimes and misdemeanours’ set out in the constitution as grounds for impeachment. But Trump’s people have denied that any such meetings took place. And even if there were meetings, what was discussed? And if there were any discussions that would trouble a Senate committee, was Trump even aware? What did the President know and when did he know it?
If, if, if — a long chain of ifs. Importantly, there is almost no public discussion in Congress — from either party — of impeaching Trump. One of the very few to talk openly about the possibility was Congresswoman Maxine Walters, a Democrat, as you would expect. She told the cable news channel MSNBC that Trump had ‘wrapped his arms around Putin so tight… I don’t buy it, I don’t think the American people buy it, and he’s not going to get away with it. We’re going to investigate him and find out what is this real connection he’s got.’ She concluded: ‘Let’s find out… whether we’re putting a man in the most important office in the free world who may be held hostage by Putin and Russia.’ I was told by a senior Congressional aide that other House Democrats were keeping quiet until after the inauguration for tactical reasons. They recognised there was no support for hearings among the majority Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, the place where any move to impeach would have to originate. This is not (yet) 1974.

You have a great idea but it requires and audience and funding

Bring your ideas to Sys Nica.


  We bring ideas to life.





WHY THE US GOVERNMENT IS TERRIFIED OF HOBBYIST DRONES


IF YOU WANT to understand why the government freaked out when a $400 remote-controlled quadcopter landed on the White House grounds last week, you need to look four miles away, to a small briefing room in Arlington, Virginia. There, just 10 days earlier, officials from the US military, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FAA gathered for a DHS “summit” on a danger that had been consuming them privately for years: the potential use of hobbyist drones as weapons of terror or assassination.
The conference was open to civilians, but explicitly closed to the press. One attendee described it as an eye-opener. The officials played videos of low-cost drones firing semi-automatic weapons, revealed that Syrian rebels are importing consumer-grade drones to launch attacks, and flashed photos from an exercise that pitted $5,000 worth of drones against a convoy of armored vehicles. (The drones won.) But the most striking visual aid was on an exhibit table outside the auditorium, where a buffet of low-cost drones had been converted into simulated flying bombs. One quadcopter, strapped to 3 pounds of inert explosive, was a DJI Phantom 2, a newer version of the very drone that would land at the White House the next week.
Attendee Daniel Herbert snapped a photo and posted it to his website along with detailed notes from the conference. The day after the White House incident, he says, DHS phoned him and politely asked him to remove the entire post. He complied. “I’m not going to be the one to challenge Homeland Security and cause more contention,” says Herbert, who runs a small drone shop in Delaware called Skygear Solutions.
A DJI Phantom 2 drone is equipped with three pounds of mock explosive at a January 16 DHS conference.
 
DANIEL HERBERT
The White House drone, of course, wasn’t packing an explosive and wasn’t piloted by a terrorist—just a Washingtonian who lost control of the device while playing around in the wee hours. But the gentle censorship directed at Herbert illustrates how serious the issue is to counterterrorism officials.

A Drone Maker Takes Decisive Action

The Phantom line of consumer drones made by China-based DJI figures prominently in the government’s attack scenarios. That’s not because there’s anything sinister about DJI or the Phantom—in fact, just the opposite. The Phantom is the iPod of drones, cheap, easy to use, and as popular with casual and first-time fliers as with experienced radio control enthusiasts.
With all the attention surrounding the White House landing, DJI felt it had to take action. So last Thursday it pushed a “mandatory firmware update” for its Phantom 2 that would prevent the drone from flying in a 15.5 mile radius of the White House. So far it's the only drone-maker installing what's known as GPS geofencing

By 2030, this is what computers will be able to do


Developments in computing are driving the transformation of entire systems of production, management, and governance. In this interview Justine Cassell, Associate Dean, Technology, Strategy and Impact, at the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and co-chair of the Global Future Council on Computing, says we must ensure that these developments benefit all society, not just the wealthy or those participating in the “new economy”.
Why should the world care about the future of computing?
Today computers are in virtually everything we touch, all day long. We still have an image of computers as being rectangular objects either on a desk, or these days in our pockets; but computers are in our cars, they’re in our thermostats, they’re in our refrigerators. In fact, increasingly computers are no longer objects at all, but they suffuse fabric and virtually every other material. Because of that, we really do need to care about what the future of computing holds because it is going to impact our lives all day long.
Tell me about the technological breakthroughs we have already seen, and what you expect to see in the coming years?
Some of the exciting breakthroughs have to do with the internet of things. In the same way we have a tendency to think of computers as rectangular boxes, we have a tendency to think of the internet as being some kind of ether that floats around us. But quite recently researchers have made enormous breakthroughs in creating a way for all objects to communicate; so your phone might communicate to your refrigerator, which might communicate to the light bulb. In fact, in a near future, the light bulb will itself become a computer, projecting information instead of light.




Similarly, biological computing addresses how the body itself can compute, how we can think about genetic material as computing. You can think of biological computing as a way of computing RNA or DNA and understanding biotechnology as a kind of computer. One of my colleagues here at Carnegie Mellon, Adam Feinberg, has been 3D-printing heart tissue. He’s been designing parts of the body on a computer using very fine-grained models that are based on the human body, and then using engineering techniques to create living organisms. That’s a very radical difference in what we consider the digital infrastructure and that shift is supporting a radical shift in the way we work, and live, and who we are as humans.
And quantum computing allows us to imagine a future where great breakthroughs in science will be made by computers that are no longer tethered to simple binary 0s and 1s.
How is computing changing? What are the forces driving those changes?
Some of the ways that computing is changing now are that it is moving into the fabrics in our clothing and it’s moving into our very bodies. We are now in the process of refining prosthetics that not only help people reach for something but in reaching, those prosthetics now send a message back to the brain. The first prosthetics were able quite miraculously to take a message from the brain and use it to control the world. But imagine how astounding it is if that prosthetic also tells the brain that it has grasped something. That really changes the way we think of what it means to be human, if our very brains are impacted by the movement of a piece of metal at the edge of our hands.
How could developments in computing impact industry, governments and society?
First of all, there’s really a disruption of all industry sectors. Everything from the information and entertainment sectors, that can imagine ads that understand your emotions when you look at them using machine learning; to manufacturing, where the robots on a production line can learn in real time as a function of what they perceive. You can imagine a robot arm in a factory that automatically remanufactures itself when the object that it is putting into boxes changes shape. Every sector is changing and even the lines between industry sectors are becoming blurred, as 3D-printing and machine learning come together for example; as manufacturing and information; or manufacturing and the body come together.
What needs to be done to ensure that their benefits are maximized and the associated risks kept under control?
If you think about the future of computing as a convergence of the biological, the physical and the digital (and the post-digital quantum), using as examples 3D-printing, biotechnology, robotics for prosthetics, the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, other kinds of artificial intelligence, you can see the extent of how life will change. We need to make sure that these developments benefit all of society, not just the most wealthy members of society who might want these prosthetics, but every person who needs them.
One of our first questions in the Council is going to be, how do we establish governance for equitable innovation? How do we foster the equitable benefits of these technologies for every nation and every person in every nation? And, is top-down governance the right model for controlling the use of these technologies, or is bottom-up ethical education of those that engage in the development of the technologies and their distribution, a better way to think about how to ensure equitable use?
I believe that all technologists need to keep in mind a multi-level, multi-part model of technology that takes into account the technological but also the social, the cultural, the legal, all of these aspects of development. All technologists need to be trained in the human as well as the technological so that they understand uses to which their technology could be put and reflect on the uses they want it to be put to.
What will computing look like in 2030?
We have no idea yet because change is happening so quickly. We know that quantum computing – the introduction of physics into the field of computer science – is going to be extremely important; that computers are going to become really, very tiny, the size of an atom. That’s going to make a huge difference; nano-computing, very small computers that you might swallow inside a pill and that will then learn about your illness and set about curing it; that brings together biological computing as well, where we can print parts of the body. So I think we’re going to see the increasing infusing of computing into all aspects of our lives. If our Council has its way, we’re going to see an increasing sense of responsibility on the part of technologists to ensure that those developments are for good.
What technology or gadget would you most like to see by 2030?
In my own work, I’m committed to ensuring that technology brings people together rather than separating them. There’s been some fear that having everybody stare at their cellphone all day long is separating us from one another; that we are no longer building bonds with other people. My own work goes towards ensuring that social bonds and the relationships amongst people, and even the relationship between us and our technology, supports a social infrastructure, so that we never forget those values that make us human.
To my mind it’s not a particular gadget that I want to see, it’s gadgets that ensure the bond between people is not only continued but strengthened, that the understanding amongst nations and amongst individuals is improved by virtue of the technologies that we encounter.

Super Laser Weapons Are Coming To Navy Ships By 2018


The United States military has been working on laser weapons for decades, but now we finally have a sense of when Navy ships will start using super lasers on enemy targets — by 2018.
Laser weapons aren’t a new defense technology — the Department of Defense (DoD) first shot down a drone with a laser 43 years ago. At the height of the Cold War, the US military believed that lasers could help them get an edge on the Soviets, and President Kennedy approved heavy funding for laser research. In 1968, DoD’s research arm, ARPA (now DARPA), began the project Eighth Card, with the aim of putting laser weapons on US Air Force aircraft. The name was a poker reference — lasers, they believed, would be the “eighth card” that would give them the winning hand. The first successful test took place at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico in November 1973 when a large machine mounted on the ground beamed a laser at a MQM-33B drone, causing it to split into pieces.
But it took decades to develop the technology to the point where a laser weapon could be powerful and compact enough to fit onto a ship or a plane. It wasn’t until a US Navy demonstration in 2013, that the DoD finally started touting lasers as a viable weapon against fast-moving crafts and missiles.

Now it seems, the Navy is finally preparing to put super laser weapons on destroyers and cruiser warships.
This month at the Surface Naval Association national symposium, Rear Admiral Ronald Boxall, director of Surface Warfare Division, spoke of the Navy’s plans for laser technology implementation. According to the military news site Scout Warrior, Boxall said the Navy intends to shoot a 150-kilowatt laser from a test ship within the next year. “Then a year later, we’ll have that on a carrier or a destroyer or both,” he said.
That wattage could light 2,500 standard lightbulbs. A single laser beam of that much power is enough to take down an aircraft.
A 150-kw laser would be 3 to 10 times more powerful than the Laser Weapon System (LaWS) the Navy tested in 2014, which was about 15-50 kw, and struck and melted a target in the air and in the ocean.




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