I’m no longer shocked by anything I uncover when I’m researching the porn industry. But when PornHub, the Internet’s largest online sewage facility, released statistics for 2015, I felt sick.
Yahoo said it will cut 15% of its headcount, while exploring “strategic alternatives” in parallel, in a move aimed at cutting costs and calming investors.
These days, flying means having your travel documents in order and carrying multiple forms of identification. American fliers could potentially even have to carry a passport on domestic flights if their state does not stick to the government’s Real ID timeline.
Do you know what your “threat score” is? Today, more than 90 percent of all local police departments and nearly all government agencies employ some sort of technological surveillance. One of the most common applications is called “Beware”, and it scans billions of “arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches” and social media postings to give authorities an idea of who they are dealing with. So the next time that police pull up in front of your home, it is likely that what you have posted on Facebook will be searched. If you have said things that could be construed as “anti-government” or “anti-police”, there is a very good chance that you will have a very high “threat score” and you will be on “the red list”.
Did you know that 95 percent of all retail sales in Sweden are cashless? And did you know that the government of Denmark has a stated goal of “eradicating cash” by the year 2030? All over the world, we are seeing a relentless march toward a cashless society, and nowhere is this more true than in northern Europe. In Sweden, hundreds of bank branches no longer accept or dispense cash, and thousands of ATM machines have been permanently removed. At this point, bills and coins only account for just 2 percent of the Swedish economy, and many stores no longer take cash at all. The notion of a truly “cashless society” was once considered to be science fiction, but now we are being told that it is “inevitable”, and authorities insist that it will enable them to thwart criminals, terrorists, drug runners, money launderers and tax evaders. But what will we give up in the process?
Most Americans have absolutely no idea how incredibly vulnerable our electrical grid is, but Ted Koppel does. For many years, Koppel was the level-headed host of Nightline on ABC, but now he is issuing a very chilling warning to America. For more than a year, he investigated potential threats to our power grid, and he has detailed what he discovered in a new book entitled “Lights Out“. He is convinced that a massive cyberattack could take down our entire electrical grid for an extended period of time, and he was horrified to learn that the Department of Homeland Security really doesn’t have a plan for how to deal with this kind of a scenario.
What would you do if the power grid went down and never came back up? One of these days, and it could be a lot sooner than most people think, we will all wake up in a country without electricity. And considering how utterly dependent we have become on technology, that is a very frightening scenario to consider. How would Americans react if nothing worked? Just imagine a world where everything electronic is dead. I am talking about lights, cell phones, computers, televisions, ATMs, heating and cooling systems, credit card readers, gas pumps, cash registers, refrigerators, hospital equipment etc. When the power goes out for a few hours, that can be a major inconvenience, but what if it went out all over the nation and it didn’t come back on for months or even years? This is one of the greatest potential threats that the United States is facing, and yet very few people are even talking about it.
One of the biggest existential challenges that transhumanists face is that most people don’t believe a word we’re saying, however entertaining they may find us. They think we’re fantasists when in fact we’re talking about a future just over the horizon. Suppose they’re wrong and we are right. What follows? Admittedly, we won’t know this until we inhabit that space ‘just over the horizon’. Nevertheless, it’s not too early to discuss how these naysayers will be regarded, perhaps as a guide to how they should be dealt with now. So let’s be clear about who these naysayers are. They hold the following views: 1) They believe that they will live no more than 100 years and quite possibly much less; 2) They believe that this limited longevity is not only natural but also desirable, both for themselves and everyone else; 3) They believe that the bigger the change, the more likely the resulting harms will outweigh the benefits. Now suppose they’re wrong on all three counts. How are we to think about such beings who think this way? Aren’t they the living dead? Indeed. These are people who live in the space of their largely self-imposed limitations, which function as a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are programmed for destruction – not genetically but intellectually.
Bringing a 30,000-year-old virus back to life sounds like the plot of a real-life horror movie. So if you were scared by the incurable virus in the movie “28 Days Later,” you might want to stop reading right now.
Kicking the world’s largest machine into overdrive is turning out to be harder than expected. Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland, say that plans to run their physics experiments at higher energies are likely to be delayed until next year.