Thursday, November 17, 2016

THOSE JOBS AIN'T COMING BACK

TOP OF THE NEWS:

- Why Trump — or any other politician — can't do much to bring back manual labor jobs (LA Times) "But it will be almost impossible for Trump to fulfill his promise to bring back most of the assembly line gigs lost to globalization, economists say. The U.S. has moved toward advanced manufacturing, which employs highly educated people, and plants that once required manual labor are now manned by robots that work faster than people and cost less. U.S. factories are producing more than ever, with far fewer employees."

- Trump Campaign’s Easy Answers Confront Hard Reality (NYT) "For decades, political analysts on the left have been perplexed by working-class Americans who give their vote to a Republican Party whose motivating principle revolves around delivering tax cuts to the rich. This time around, however, they delivered their vote to a Republican who promised to directly address their plight. Under either situation, the frustrated working-class voters who cast their vote for Mr. Trump are likely to remain as frustrated as ever: stuck with insufficient education in a world of low growth and diminishing opportunity. Maybe they will figure out that most of the industrial jobs they lost are gone for good, that protectionism can’t bring them back, and that the main driver of their plight is technological change."

BUSINESS:

- Ever Wanted to Back a Start-Up? Indiegogo Opens the Door to Small Investors (NYT) "Indiegogo is the first major crowdfunding site to use a new securities rule that took effect six months ago, allowing ordinary investors to risk up to a few thousands dollars a year backing private companies."

- GE Wants To Be The Next Artificial Intelligence Powerhouse (FastCompany) and General Electric Just Signed Its Largest Power Plant Software Deal Yet (Fortune)

HEALTH:


- Drug combo reversed plaque buildup in heart patients’ arteries (WaPo)

NEWS:

- Trump faces growing tension with key Republicans over national security issues (WaPo) "'After exchange w Trump transition team, changed my recommendation: stay away. They’re angry, arrogant, screaming 'you LOST!' Will be ugly,’' tweeted Cohen, who served from 2007 to 2009 as counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He was a driving force behind an open letter last spring — eventually signed by 122 Republican national security leaders — who opposed Trump’s candidacy."

- Trump Won Because Voters Are Ignorant, Literally (FP) Trump owes his victory to the uninformed. But it’s not just Trump. Political scientists have been studying what voters know and how they think for well over 65 years. The results are frightening. Voters generally know who the president is but not much else. They don’t know which party controls Congress, what Congress has done recently, whether the economy is getting better or worse (or by how much). Trump’s victory is the victory of the uninformed. But, to be fair, Clinton’s victory would also have been. Democracy is the rule of the people, but the people are in many ways unfit to rule."

- Obama in a state of denial about Trump, as Democrats work through the stages of grief (WaPo)

TECHNOLOGY:


- Google’s New PhotoScan App Gives You a Quick and Easy Way to Digitize Your Old Photographs (Wired) "The new PhotoScan is a standalone app for both Android and iOS, and scanning a picture is a clever combination of manual shooting and computational photography. Once you take an initial photo of… a photo, the app recognizes the four corners of the frame and displays circular overlays on each corner of the scanned image. You then point your phone camera at each circle, create a robust scan of the image, and PhotoScan gets to work from there."

- We Don't Always Know What AI Is Thinking—And That Can Be Scary (FastCompany) "Artificial intelligence is making decisions by reviewing people's medical tests in hospitals, credit histories in banking, job applications in some HR systems, even criminal risk factors in the justice system. Yet it's not always clear how the computers are thinking."

- The Next Big Front in the Battle of the Clouds Is AI Chips. And Microsoft Just Scored a Win (Wired)

BOTTOM OF THE NEWS:


- McDonald’s Is Making a Change to Its Big Mac Recipe for the First Time Ever (Fortune) "The Big Mac was first introduced in 1967 and, for the first time in those 50 years since, McDonald’s is changing up the recipe by adding Sriracha. Don’t worry—the old Big Mac isn’t going anywhere."

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