According to Quartz, Amazon hired 120,000 seasonal workers in 2016 and 2017 vs. only 100,000 this year. Since consumer spending is up at the moment, this may be a sign of increased automation at their warehouses.
Now, given my own experience with Amazon Fresh, if they can find a way for a robot to inspect a bag of lettuce and make sure it isn’t rotten, it will be a great advance for robot-kind.
The next U.S. recession could be a rough one, according to Harvard economist Martin Feldstein. The argument is that the Federal Reserve will continue to raise short term interest but very gradually, not leaving itself a lot of room to lower them when a recession hits. At the same time, due to the pro-cyclical tax cuts, the government will not be able to increase deficit spending by a lot because it will not be able to afford the increased interest payments. And third, low unemployment seems to be causing inflation.
It would not be surprising if the rate on ten-year Treasury bonds rises to 5% or more over the next few years. With an inflation rate of 3%, the real yield will be back to a normal historic level of over 2%.
This normalization of the ten-year interest rate could cause the P/E ratio to return to its historical benchmark. A decline of that magnitude, from its current level of 40% above the historic average, would cause household wealth to shrink by about $8 trillion. The historic relationship between household wealth and consumer spending implies that the annual level of household consumption would decline by about 1.5% of GDP. That fall in household demand, and the induced decline in business investment, would push the US economy into recession.
If you have an enormous nest egg, a 2% real return on bonds doesn’t sound all that terrible. For the rest of us relying on stocks to help us build that nest egg (those of us lucky enough to have a little extra income to save, that is), this doesn’t seem like good news.
Well, maybe there’s a little hope. This journal article says they will decline by 70-90% by mid-century. However, the ones that survive can somehow be used to regenerate the others.
From Bloomberg: New drugs mean not only that AIDS can be effectively managed in people that already have it, but that the risk of transmission can now be very low in people taking the drugs. Some drugs even have a strong protective effect for people who have not been exposed but are considered at risk of exposure. According to this article, eradication of the disease now seems possible for the first time.
WARNING: I never promised this would be a 100% family friendly blog. Nevertheless, it’s been awhile since I checked in on the latest sex robots. Well, this is a blog about the fabulous science fiction future, and we all need to face up to the fact that sex robots are likely to be a part of that.
Anyway, I offer this paper first of all because it’s funny, and second of all because even if it turns out to be a joke, the technology to analyze videos of thousands of hours of sexual acts, analyze them using the latest data science techniques, and program the results into a robot almost certainly all exist. Yesterday’s “phone sex” will almost certainly evolve into tomorrow’s virtual brothel. I think it is more or less harmless although it means the way real human beings interact with each other will continue to evolve. But that has been going on for a long time and there is no reason to think it should stop now.
According to NPR, people in Sweden are voluntarily inserting microchips into their fingers and using them for identification and payment.
The chips are designed to speed up users’ daily routines and make their lives more convenient — accessing their homes, offices and gyms is as easy as swiping their hands against digital readers.
They also can be used to store emergency contact details, social media profiles or e-tickets for events and rail journeys within Sweden…
Around the size of a grain of rice, the chips typically are inserted into the skin just above each user’s thumb, using a syringe similar to that used for giving vaccinations. The procedure costs about $180.
There are also some interesting statistics on the declining use of cash in Sweden. The article says that in Stockholm only 1 in 4 people uses cash once a week (or more) and only 15 percent of retail transactions involve cash (and this was already down to less than half as of 2010).
I haven’t always been on the “organic” band wagon 100%. For one thing, the name is stupid. Chugging a glass of diesel fuel would be about as organic as you could get, in terms of the definition of the word I learned in high school chemistry. I am strongly in favor of sustainable farming practices that build soil, protect biodiversity, and prevent groundwater and surface water pollution. But in terms of health benefits, I have never felt the benefits were all that proven, and to some extent the industry is just based on scare tactics. I also wonder if the billions of humans on the planet can be fed without resorting to fossil fuel-derived fertilizer, and I still think that is dubious. But here is one large study in JAMA that did find significant evidence of a link between organic food (as labeled at the grocery store) and reduced cancer risk.
Association of Frequency of Organic Food Consumption With Cancer Risk: Findings From the NutriNet-Santé Prospective Cohort Study
Main Outcomes and Measures This study estimated the risk of cancer in association with the organic food score (modeled as quartiles) using Cox proportional hazards regression models adjusted for potential cancer risk factors.
Results Among 68 946 participants (78.0% female; mean [SD] age at baseline, 44.2 [14.5] years), 1340 first incident cancer cases were identified during follow-up, with the most prevalent being 459 breast cancers, 180 prostate cancers, 135 skin cancers, 99 colorectal cancers, 47 non-Hodgkin lymphomas, and 15 other lymphomas. High organic food scores were inversely associated with the overall risk of cancer (hazard ratio for quartile 4 vs quartile 1, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.63-0.88; P for trend = .001; absolute risk reduction, 0.6%; hazard ratio for a 5-point increase, 0.92; 95% CI, 0.88-0.96).
Conclusions and Relevance A higher frequency of organic food consumption was associated with a reduced risk of cancer. Although the study findings need to be confirmed, promoting organic food consumption in the general population could be a promising preventive strategy against cancer.
I researched the risk measures a little. The hazard risk ratio of 0.75 means that people eating mostly organic food (scoring in the top 25% of however they are measuring that) are 25% less likely than people eating the least organic food. That seems significant. From a quick skim, it appears they did try to control for differences in lifestyle (i.e., similar nutrition and exercise levels) and family history of cancer when coming to their conclusions.
Apparently, you can influence your circadian rhythm by heating up or cooling down your body at certain times of day, and a well-timed and designed bath is one way to do that. You’ll need a clock, a water thermometer, an air thermometer, and an understanding of the metric system.
In the study, researchers at the University of Freiburg in Germany assigned 45 people with depression to either soak in 40C water for up to 30 minutes and then wrap themselves in blankets and hot water bottles for a further 20 minutes, or take 40 to 45 minutes of aerobic exercise twice a week. Eight weeks later, those taking regular warm baths in the afternoon scored six points lower on a commonly used depression scale, while the exercise group scored three points lower on average…
Your bathwater should be just a little hotter than body temperature, which is about 37C. Somewhere between 40C and 45C is ideal…
Consider the temperature of the room as well. A Japanese study showed that bathing in 41C water in a 25C room increased body temperature more than taking a bath in a 14C room. However, if taking a bath to promote sleep before bed, the room temperature should be cooler: 18C is ideal.
I think you have to take this with a grain of salt, but yes, according to this dubious Russian source. The article bases part of its argument on Giphys of Terminator 2 and 2012.
The president of the Academy of Geopolitical Problems believes that an “asymmetrical response” would work much better for Russia, as it is able to produce nuclear weapons with a yield of more than 100 megatons.
If “areas with critically dangerous geophysical conditions in the US (like the Yellowstone Supervolcano or the San Andreas Fault)” are targeted by those warheads, “such an attack guarantees the destruction of the US as a state and the entire transnational elite,” he said.
The production of around 40 or 50 such mega-warheads for ICBMs or extra-long-range torpedoes would make sure that at least a few of them reach their target no matter how a nuclear conflict between the US and Russia develops, the expert said.
Digging into Wikipedia a little bit, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested was in fact a 50-megaton bomb detonated by the USSR in 1961, and it was originally designed to be 100 megatons. The largest ever detonated by the US was 15 megaton device in 1954. It is worth noting thought that modern nuclear missiles can have 8 or more warheads attached to them.
A paper in Nature explains what a “quantum internet” could look like.
In stage 1, users will start getting into the quantum game, in which a sender creates quantum states, typically for photons. These would be sent to a receiver, either along an optical fibre or through a laser pulse beamed across open space. At this stage, any two users will be able to create a private encryption key that only they know…
In stage 2, the quantum internet will harness the powerful phenomenon of entanglement. Its first goal will be to make quantum encryption essentially unbreakable. Most of the techniques that this stage requires already exist, at least as rudimentary lab demonstrations.
Stages 3 to 5 will, for the first time, enable any two users to store and exchange quantum bits, or qubits. These are units of quantum information, similar to classical 1s and 0s, but they can be in a superposition of both 1 and 0 simultaneously. Qubits are also the basis for quantum computation. (A number of laboratories — both in academia and at large corporations, such as IBM or Google — have been building increasingly complex quantum computers; the most advanced ones have memories that can hold a few dozen qubits.)
So it seems as though the main advantage of a quantum internet would be truly secure communications. Which I guess is at least something, but doesn’t seem as though it would revolutionize everyday life anytime soon. There are no predictions in this article about when it might happen other than “a long time”.