Saturday, May 31, 2014

Financial and Tech News Worth Knowing

Huffington Post - The Wall Street Pension Scam. A short article that raises some good questions. I think it is interesting that many CEOs and wealthy individuals have no problem with paying CEOs bonuses when they have losses for the company or providing enormous fees to them when they leave the company; but, complain about pensions.

CNN - City of Tomorrow. This short video series shows what cities might look like in the future. While it presents everything as a positive, what it is really trying to convince you of is that being monitored by computers 24/7 is beneficial.

New York Times - A Synthetic Biology Conference Lures an Intriguing Audience. A big part of this blog is really about providing information to the readers on trends that they may not be aware of or that are more advanced than people suspect or understand. I strongly urge the readers to read the actual article. The article discusses the governments interest in turning living things into biological machines. Here is a quote from the article, "He added, “The most exciting and frightening thing I saw this morning was a slide talking about designing and synthesizing genomes next to a slide describing a human being.” and this, "In his own presentation, the F.B.I. agent, Carmine Nigro, bluntly warned, “These technologies do not just pose a risk to individual buildings or cities, but if cleverly deployed, can reduce our population by significant percentages.”

Wired - Square’s Found a Way to Beat Banks at the Loan Business. Square is a payment processing company that allows you to not have to carry cash. They are now offering cash advances to vendors that use their service. The point is that we are moving to cashless and this will bring in an all new form of banking and loans. As we go cashless, more and more of your financial transactions will be tracked and using sophisticated programs known as algorithms companies will be able to predict what you will do.

Wired - Microsoft’s Futuristic New Tool Translates Skype Calls in Real Time. If you don't feel like reading the whole article, just watch the video. Basically, the technology now exists that allows people's spoken words to immediately be translated into another language.

Huffington Post - Here's What Corporate America Really Thinks About You. The article discusses how we are all catagorized by data handlers, read the list and see where you fit in and how you are viewed.