Free Republic

QINGDAO, China — After Haier Group bought the General Electric Co. appliance unit last year, the Chinese company's chairman says he gave its American managers unusual orders: Ignore me. Zhang Ruimin built Haier from a failing refrigerator factory in the 1980s into the biggest maker of major appliances, a sprawling global enterprise that built its U.S business from a South Carolina plant. Now, he is trying to transform a traditional manufacturer with 60,000 employees in 25 countries into a nimble, Internet-age seller of consumer goods and services from web-linked washing machines to food delivery. To do that, Zhang has broken...

The Trump Dossier upon which the whole Russiagate scandal rests describes a process of decision making within the Russian government that bears no relation to reality, thereby proving itself a fake. It has become increasingly clear over the last two weeks that the amateur sleuths who are driving Russiagate are taking the Trump Dossier prepared by the British ex-MI6 officer Christopher Steele as their starting point. This is despite the fact that the Trump Dossier is still “uncorroborated”, and has been trashed by seasoned intelligence professionals like former CIA Acting Assistant Director Michael Morell. Right from the first moment the...

While 150 watts is generally associated with lightbulbs and other devices that are usually thought of as low-power and benign, at Olympus Laser Creations in Rochester, 150 watts is all it takes to craft wood into elaborate decorative boxes. The shop and products are the result of the minds of Lance Crummett and Steve Luce, two former Olympia tech industry workers who found themselves unemployed after they were laid off three years ago. “After a suitable time of enjoying our day off, we decided that we actually needed to make some money,” Crummett said. At the company they had worked...

Recently, much has been made of the role that artificial intelligence will play in taking our jobs. From manufacturing to driving to fighting wars, AI’s ascendancy into the workforce elicits everything from celebration to consternation. Depending on who you ask, AI will save jobs, or create jobs, or will banish humans from the job market forever. While the singularity is a long way off, the anxiety has set in. Salespeople are nervous, too. A million business-to-business salespeople are already in danger of losing their jobs to websites by 2020, according to Forrester. The basic sales jobs are already migrating to...

There are many travel jobs that allow you to travel for an extended period of time. Be my guest, Google it. You’ll find lists upon lists, from Au Pairs, Wwoofing and volunteering to work as a bartender, waiter, and scuba instructor. Whilst these are all great ways to make money as you travel the world, they require you to be in a specific location for a length of time. Sure, many travelers enjoy this as they’re able to soak up the culture. Others prefer being on the move and not having to worry about finding a job because they have...

This week's revelation by Democratic operative Evelyn Farkas that the Obama Administration had the Trump campaign under surveillance and shared the information gathered with the Hillary Clinton campaign sparked a spirited defense from long-time California Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters. "Many small-minded people focus on the illegality of spying on American citizens for political gain as if that is more important than the fact that a traitor has become this nation's president," Waters said. "President Obama put in place an organization that contains a kind of database that no one has ever seen before in life. That's going to be very...

Last September, French physicist Serge Galam attracted some attention (and ridicule) when he applied a concept known as “sociophysics” to the American election and predicted that Donald Trump would win, despite what all the polls were saying. Feel free to wade into this quagmire at your own risk, but here’s just a taste of the explanation. According to a model of opinion dynamics from sociophysics the machinery of Trump’s amazing success obeys well-defined counter-intuitive rules. Therefore, his success was in principle predictable from the start. The model uses local majority rule arguments and obeys a threshold dynamics. The associated tipping...

Pedestrian deaths saw a significant spike in 2016, reaching a staggering total of 5,997, the highest total ever recorded since the U.S. began tracking the measure more than two decades ago. The reason? People are distracted more than ever by texting and using their smartphones. According to preliminary state data gathered for the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), pedestrian fatalities surged 11 percent from 2015 to 2016, continuing an upward trend. Pedestrian fatalities surged 10 percent from 2014 to 2015. According to the Associated Press,

U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao quashed rumors Wednesday night that President Donald Trump's administration and GOP lawmakers would wait to unveil a plan for infrastructure revitalization until 2018. Though it still might take that long to get legislation through Capitol Hill, Chao announced at a department event in Washington that a $1 trillion infrastructure proposal would be unveiled by the end of the year. She teased a "strategic, targeted program of investment valued at $1 trillion over 10 years," according to Reuters. "The proposal will cover more than transportation infrastructure. It will include energy, water and potentially broadband and veterans...

Massachusetts State Rep. Michelle DuBois posted a warning on her Facebook page yesterday saying that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents would be conducting a raid in the city of Brockton, MA. DuBois claimed the warning came to her from a “friend in the Latin community.” The warning stated, “I have a message for the immigrant community of Brockton. Please be careful on Wednesday 29. ICE will be in Brockton on that day.” It continued, “If you are undocumented don’t go out on the street. If there is a knock on the door of your house and you don’t know...

At least 122 million out of the total 415 million jobs, or nearly 30 percent of jobs available in China's digital economy in 2035, will be produced by Alibaba, according to a new report from management advisory firm Boston Consulting Group (BCG). An article published by alizila.com cited a recent study, "Year 2035: 400 Million Job Opportunities in the Digital Age," which said that Alibaba economy will generate jobs as it further expands into cloud computing, media and entertainment, and financial technology. "If Alibaba-generated employment has the same share of China's digital economy in 2035 as in 2015, the platform...

As I understand the video, he's trying to create an easy way for people to figure out how to track the money in government to help make corruption harder to to do. https://www.facebook.com/Reason.Magazine/videos/10154566547184117/

Cenk Uygur bristles at the notion that the progressive media company he co-founded more than a decade ago, the Young Turks, is becoming the Breitbart of the left—that is, a pugilistic news outlet waging an ideological war with the establishment class. If you ask him, the comparison is backward. "Andrew Breitbart, when he was on my show before he passed away, said they emulated us, not the other way around," Uygur told me in mid-March, after finishing a panel at South by Southwest. "They get a lot of credit now because our idiot president reads them, but in terms of...

The potential threat of technological unemployment is one of the most hotly debated economic issues of our times: in boardrooms and trade union offices but also increasingly amongst policy-makers. The catch-all term ‘digital’ may have been added to numerous political concepts in recent years but beyond such branding there has been very little debate of substance about what a comprehensive policy response to this threat should be. We do not know whether some of the more sombre predictions about large-scale job losses will materialize but we do know that governments and others need to be prepared if and when substantial...

The world population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. China and India, the two largest countries in the world, have populations totalling around one billion. In four years, by 2022, India is predicted to have the largest population in the world, surpassing China. This means we need new ways to grow food that are smarter and helps regulate our use of land, water and energy in order to feed the planet and avoid a global food crisis. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute believe the answer lies in sensors, artificial intelligence (AI) and robots. In a new...

Dang, I hate to make one of these "vanity" posts, inviting the "are you logged in?" comments, but I need my home computer with its VNC-type program for work, and I've never seen this weird crap before (I'm on my husband's computer to post this). Maybe I'm asking for it because I'm running Windows 7 (*sigh*) on a Dell PC. I was typing an e-mail in Outlook, and suddenly it was like the darned thing was commandeered. The screen presentation shifted on its left side. The mouse control orientation is hosed, too. Yes, I forced a re-boot a couple of...

This week, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif) disclosed that "there is substantial evidence that the Obama Administration gathered and disseminated covert surveillance material on the incoming Trump Administration. It seems like this might've been illegal." Arizona Sen. John McCain (R) was outraged by what he termed "an unprecedented violation of our national security. I'm sure that any covert surveillance of Trump ordered by President Obama was only done for very good reasons. By going public with this information Rep. Nunes has betrayed our former President and alerted those who treasonously conspired with the Russians to deny Hillary...

For a guy who claims to be above or beneath or beside grubby politics in America, FBI chief James Comey sure does manage to insert himself into the seamiest corners of politics and seize the spotlight at the most fraught moments possible. In this past election, Jim Comey was the “Where’s Waldo?” of American politics. First he condemns Lady Dragon Hillary with the most damning exoneration in the history of public prosecutions. Then he slays her in public with just weeks to go before the election — only to ride up on his armor-suited horse in a failed effort to...

It's not quite what Trump's tweet seemed to suggest, unless . . . Here’s a pattern you’ve probably noticed about the way the media deals with President Trump. When his literal words might be off target but his meaning can be justified, his literal words are all that matters. But when his literal words turn out to be accurate . . . well, that’s not what he meant! Did the Obama Administration wiretap Trump Tower? Or were there some other form of FISA surveillance that Trump clumsily described as a wiretap in a very specific building? We’ve already dealt with...

Several days ago, one of my arch nemesis oldfartrants, a senile old hippie bum from West LA who has a YouTube channel advocating socialism has now called for the overthrow of Donald Trump. This, after spending nearly a decade referring to Conservatives as traitors and opponents of Barack Obama as seditionists. He attacks Trump comparing him to Hitler and attacking other conservatives such as Ron Paul, Paul Ryan, John Boehner, Sarah Palin and so on. Yet now its not treason anymore to be in dissent, its no longer treason to want to overthrow an elected official like Trump or...