Around the globe, intelligent and pervasive industrial automation has been catapulted in recent years to a top national or regional priority. Known by different names, e.g., “Advanced Manufacturing”, “Smart Manufacturing”, “Industry 4.0” or “Factories of the Future” to highlight a few, these initiatives all bear the same characteristics, i.e., transforming the manufacturing process from a patchwork of isolated silos to a nimble and seamless whole fully integrated with the downstream and upstream production environment.
There is, in fact, a close link between modern manufacturing and the advent of the Internet of Things.
According to a startling new piece of research by a pair of political science professors, ordinary Americans have virtually no impact at all on the making of national policy. By contrast, reports The Hill, “The analysts found that rich individuals and business-controlled interest groups largely shape policy outcomes in the United States.”
By Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, U.S. Army retired and
Lt. Gen. James M. Dubik, U.S. Army retired
Army Magazine, 15 August 2014
No political or military leader responsible for the lives of citizens who become soldiers ever wants to give the order to put American service members at risk. That desire is even more present after more than a decade of waging and fighting war. The decision to employ American forces should be based upon U.S. interests and an objective assessment of what kinds of forces are needed to achieve the outcome the nation’s interests require, not merely what its leaders desire. The U.S. sustains its military forces to defend itself and its interests. These forces exist to provide options for political leaders. The current “no boots on the ground” mantra is a policy, not a strategy; moreover, it is problematic from five important perspectives: strategically, operationally, institutionally, historically and morally.
The end result of World War I was the creation of the League of Nations and the argument that sovereignty leads to disunion and catastrophe. World War II led to the creation of the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. I believe that a third world war is nearly upon us, one that may involve weapons of monetary destruction more so than weapons of mass destruction. Each supposed disintegration of global unity has eventually led to greater centralization, and this is something the skeptics seem to forget. The progression of crises suggests that the next war will lead to total globalization under the dominance of a minority of elitists posing as “wise men” who only wish to bring peace and harmony to the masses. In the meantime, the skeptics will continue to mindlessly debate in the face of all reason that the whole thing was a fluke, an act of random mathematical chance, leading coincidentally to the one thing the establishment rulers crave: total global totalitarian micromanagement.
As we had, likewise, reported on after the issuance of last weeks SVR report, of the estimated 111,000 Saudi Arabian students currently in the United States, 8,000 have been identified as being Islamic State (IS) [also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)] terror members, of which nearly 3,000 of them have become “Ebola Martyrs” willing to die in their “mission” of infecting as many Americans as they can before their stated deadline of October.
Phi Beta Iota: We have no direct knowledge. By all accounts available the US intelligence community appears to have helped the US special operations community achieve an extraordinary intervention in the past 24 hours. The FBI has absolutely no clue who's who among all the foreigners inserted into the USA, and least of all among the Saudis and the combination of Israelis and multinational “sayonim” (Jews who blindly support the Zionist state). Note that the posited 8,000 above could easily provide a 1,000 individuals to be voluntarily infected with Ebola or anything else AFTER their arrival in the USA, with the viruses imported via the Saudi diplomatic pouch. However, having lost all faith in the integrity of the US Government in relation to the public interest, we do not discount the possibility that this is a false flag operation intended to justify a fake Ebola crisis to further test the ability of the federal government to restrict travel and shut-down any areas of the country they wish. We pray the Obama Administration understands just how close the USA is to massive armed push-back against the militarization (and potential federalization) of the state and local police. We suspect Obama has no one he can actually trust to tell him the truth.
The plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the use of the “no fly list” to bar a US citizen from boarding an aircraft said last week that he would introduce a leaked copy of the government's Watchlisting Guidance “to show just how objectionable and evidence-free Defendants' watch listing process is.”
The government said it did not acknowledge the authenticity of the leaked document, and that the case should be dismissed since the Attorney General had invoked the state secrets privilege concerning core issues that it raised.
In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty
EXTRACT
Ms. Guidry, 35, earns money by using her own car to ferry around strangers for Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, ride services that let people summon drivers on demand via apps. She also assembles furniture and tends gardens for clients who find her on TaskRabbit, an online marketplace for chores.
Her goal is to earn at least $25 an hour, on average. Raising three children with her longtime partner, Jeffrey Bradbury, she depends on the income to help cover her family’s food and rent. That has become more unpredictable of late. Uber and Lyft, her driving mainstays, recently cut certain passenger fares. Last month, TaskRabbit overhauled the way its users select their helpers; immediately after the change, Ms. Guidry’s stream of new clients dried up.
“You don’t know day to day,” she said. “It’s very up in the air.”
Phi Beta Iota: Anything less than a dollar a mile (50 cents for wear and gas, 50 cents for labor, home base door and return) is a losing proposition — to clear $25 an hour one must drive at least 50 billable miles in that hour. To make the $50,000 a year that $25 an hour would normally add up, one must have eight full revenue hours. Very few people achieve this, dog walkers being a possible exception. There are two sharing economies — perhaps many more. The first leverages existing assets and created variable income increases. The second leverages labor, and appears to be a losing proposition for most. What we see is a dearth of analytic models and a dearth of data — we see a desperate need for the rethinking and redesign of entire communities and cities to achieve cost of living reductions on the order of 50%, while optimizing the time-energy composition of the constituent individuals in any given community.
