“You read that right: They’re not going to pay. It’s not just Illinois facing crippling pension liabilities: It’s also happening in California and New York.”
Read more: https://www.edelsonwave.com/real-wealth/illinois-passes-on-pension-debt/
“The new physical touching—for those selected to have a pat-down—will be be what the federal agency officially describes as a more ‘comprehensive’ physical screening, according to a TSA spokesman. The change is partly a result of the agency’s study of a 2015 report that criticized aspects of TSA screening procedures. That audit drew headlines because airport officers had failed to detect handguns and other weapons. An additional change prompted by the report was the TSA’s decision to end its ‘managed inclusion’ program, by which some everyday travelers were allowed to use PreCheck lanes to speed things up at peak times.”
“Dozens of air marshals had been arrested for crimes ranging from aiding a human trafficking ring to attempted murder. One air marshal used his badge to smuggle drugs past airport security while another used his to lure a young boy to his hotel room, where he sexually abused him. Air marshals had hired prostitutes in Barcelona and gotten into a fight with security guards after patronizing a brothel in Frankfurt. Another marshal’s in-air behavior concerned flight attendants so much that they reported it to the agency, saying ‘I can’t believe he is able to carry a gun!’ (That officer was later convicted of bank fraud for trying to cash a $10.9 million check that he said was a settlement after he was a scratched by a friend’s cat.) As time passed, the problems continued.”
“Trump has been saying that NATO members need to pony up their required contributions to NATO. Doesn’t all that seem a bit illogical? After all, why force taxpayers, both American and European, to continue contributing their hard-earned money to an entity that is obsolete, outdated, outmoded, and old-fashioned? But as we have seen with bureaucracies, once you bring them into existence they sometimes become like a permanent cancer on the body politic.”
Read more: http://www.fff.org/2017/02/24/part-obsolete-trump-not-understand/
“Google’s neural networks have achieved the dream of CSI viewers everywhere: the company has revealed a new AI system capable of ‘enhancing’ an eight-pixel square image, increasing the resolution 16-fold and effectively restoring lost data. The neural network could be used to increase the resolution of blurred or pixelated faces, in a way previously thought impossible; a similar system was demonstrated for enhancing images of bedrooms, again creating a 32×32 pixel image from an 8×8 one.”
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/google-ai-system-pixelated-faces-csi
“Presidential fear-mongering has a long and sordid history. We cannot understand the threat that Trump poses without recognizing how prior presidents used similar ploys.”
“President Rodrigo Duterte said he was embarrassed that anti-drugs officers had abused their power to engage in kidnapping, leading to the death by strangulation of Jee Ick-joo, on the grounds of the national police headquarters. More than 7,000 people have been killed since Duterte, nicknamed ‘the punisher’, unleashed his bloody crackdown seven months ago, some 2,250 in police operations and the rest still mostly under investigation. His six-year term ends in 2022.”
“Donald Trump has signed three executive orders to deal with ‘public safety’, including handing more authority to the police. He insisted that the US faced the ‘threat of rising crime’ and that ‘things will get better very soon’. [Jeff] Sessions, a longtime Senator from Alabama who was once deemed too racist to serve as a federal judge, told reporters that the US ‘has a crime problem’. ‘I wish the rise that we’re seeing in crime in America today were some sort of aberration or a blip,’ he said.”
“To the extent that AML policies have had an impact, it’s been negative. In addition to high costs and inefficiency, the laws and regulations have disproportionately harmed poor people.”
“The economic realities of the gaming industry seem to guarantee that the St. Petersburg organization will continue to flourish. The machines have no easy technical fix. At the same time, most casinos can’t afford to invest in the newest slot machines, whose PRNGs use encryption to protect mathematical secrets; as long as older, compromised machines are still popular with customers, the smart financial move for casinos is to keep using them and accept the occasional loss to scammers. So the onus will be on casino security personnel to keep an eye peeled for the scam’s small tells. A finger that lingers too long above a spin button may be a guard’s only clue that hackers in St. Petersburg are about to make another score.”
Read more: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/russians-engineer-brilliant-slot-machine-cheat-casinos-no-fix/
