DIRS.INFO The most relevant business & tech news

☆ A Small Town’s Tragedy, Distorted by Trump’s Megaphone
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-29 | by ( Charles Homans | Ken Bensinger | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In phone calls, Mr. Brandt and Mr. Ellingson both made a reference to some sort of political dispute. In his 911 call after he hit Mr. Ellingson, Mr. Brandt said the teenager had said “something about some Republican extremist group,” but he did not claim Mr. Ellingson was a member. Mr. Brandt told the dispatcher he believed the teen was “calling other guys to come get me.” There’s no evidence Mr. Ellingson did so. In the 911 call, Mr. Brandt described trying to leave in a panic only to be blocked by Mr. Ellingson. At one point he said he knew his running over Mr. Ellingson had been “more than” an accident.

☆ How El Chapo’s sons built a fentanyl empire poisoning America
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-09 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +23 min

Headed by Iván, El Chapo’s oldest son, the siblings have emerged as key figures in the Sinaloa Cartel, U.S. and Mexican anti-narcotics officials said. But he was killed in 2008 in Culiacán in a hail of bullets amid infighting between warring factions of the Sinaloa Cartel. The agency in April placed Iván on the list of its 10 Most Wanted Fugitives, joining Jesús Alfredo and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a Sinaloa Cartel legend and El Chapo’s alleged former business partner. They also kidnapped eight soldiers and surrounded military housing where wives and children of Mexican soldiers lived, Mexican officials said. Despite that blow to the Sinaloa Cartel, fentanyl keeps flowing north.

☆ Abandoned coal mines may be gold mines for geothermal energy
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-08 | by ( Diana Olick | In Dianaolick | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +3 min

The Biden Administration recently announced nearly half a billion dollars from both the Inflation Reduction and Infrastructure laws would go toward clean energy projects at former coal mines. Abandoned coal mines generally fill with water when the mining has ceased. Geothermal energy is not new, but taking it from abandoned coal mines is not yet common, especially in the United States. Geothermal energy from coal mines can be used not only to heat homes and buildings, but also to cool them. Kruse-Daniels said that while it is a relatively inexpensive form of clean energy, the location and legacy may be liabilities.

☆ The Smooth-Talking Republican Who Would Rule by Fiat
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-05 | by ( Jonathan Weisman | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican wunderkind running for his party’s presidential nomination, would like potential supporters to know he believes in the rule of law and the Constitution’s separation of powers — though his applications of such principles can seem selective. After intense study of the Constitution, Mr. Ramaswamy says he believes that the awesome powers of the presidency would allow him to abolish the Education Department “on Day 1,” part of an assault on the “administrative state” that his 2024 rival, Donald J. Trump, fell short on during Days 1 through 1,461 of his presidency. Never mind that the Constitution confers the power of the purse on Congress, and a subsequent law makes it illegal for the president not to spend that money. Mr. Ramaswamy also wants to eradicate teachers’ unions, though he concedes that they are governed by contracts with state and local governments. And he says he would unleash the military to stamp out the scourge of fentanyl coming across the Southern border, unworried by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which prohibits the use of the military for civil law enforcement.

☆ Tucker Carlson helped broker the deal that made Kevin McCarthy House speaker after 14 failed votes, text messages show
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Jacob Shamsian | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Tucker Carlson won concessions from Kevin McCarthy in a deal that made him House speaker, per his texts. McCarthy needed 218 votes to win his bid to become House speaker, giving him a small margin of error. The result was 14 rounds of votes that failed to produce a House speaker, making it the most contested speaker election in more than 150 years. Grossberg discussed some of the conversations between her and Carlson regarding McCarthy's House Speaker election in an interview with CNN on Tuesday night. On January 7, the House held its 15th vote for House Speaker.

☆ Paternity leave: In Japan, it's four weeks, but men are too afraid to take it
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-26 | by ( Chris Lau | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

Japanese men are entitled to four weeks of flexible paternity leave, on up to 80% of their salary, under a bill passed by the Japanese parliament in 2021. While it is illegal to discriminate against workers who take maternity and paternity leave in Japan, Iwahashi said workers on fixed-term contracts were particularly vulnerable. And anyway, “A little tweak on paternity leave won’t significantly change a declining birth rate,” he added. He also unveiled a plan aimed at boosting the uptake of paternity leave by encouraging firms to disclose their performance. But he saw a silver lining in encouraging paternity leave.

☆ Morning Bid: Investors adopt the brace position as banks topple
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-20 | by ( ) www.reuters.com time to read: +3 min

That pretty much sums up the reaction in Asian markets to the extraordinary government-engineered takeover of the storied Credit Suisse by UBS, along with a U.S. dollar supply operation by a Fed-led posse of major central banks. Investors seem torn between relief that Credit Suisse was not allowed to collapse or worries that it had to be saved in such a way in the first place. It's not helping that Credit Suisse shareholders are taking a nasty haircut in the deal, though not as painful as AT1 bond holders who seemingly won't get their $17 billion back. That's a break with convention that could threaten the future of the entire $275 billion CoCo market. Likewise, Fed fund futures fell, rose, then fell again as investors dared to divine what all this might mean for interest rates.

☆ Google search is bad and getting worse. Here's how search is evolving in the era of AI.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-09 | by ( Mason Pelt | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +12 min

He says Google search is worse than ever, and the company isn't financially incentivized to fix it. Google search is worse than it was three years ago. People use Google search in two waysPeople use Google to either find general information where any credible source is acceptable. Searching, "who is Neil Gaiman," or "list of the endless in the Neil Gaiman series" will likely give searchers the answers they seek. That sentence's chaotic grammatical mess is a window into the Google search results pages.

☆ What Guns Did to My Childhood
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-14 | by ( Mitchell S. Jackson | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +10 min

Isn’t a part of childhood feeling insecure and divining ways to resolve those feelings or else abide them? From Mitchell S. JacksonThe presence of gangs — mind you, a predictable symptom of poverty and neglect — led to the prevalence of guns that shaped much of the normal childhood maturing around me as a kid. It surprises me little to none that Black boys are the likeliest to die by guns. These guns alter their lives in significant ways, not in the least by nullifying the childhood grace of feeling the greatest distance from death. Amen, I’ve never had to sit him down for a stern talk on guns or the violence and grieving they reap.

☆ Did That Hit Arrive in 2022 or 1987? This Year, It Was Hard to Tell.
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-14 | by ( Jon Caramanica | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +12 min

Turns out it’s the same sample, a sleight of ear designed to trigger warm nostalgia, and also maybe a little confusion. Even its video is optimized for recognition, with Santana doing the same stomp Beyoncé does in hers, in an almost identical outfit. Throughout 2022, that gambit has been deployed again and again — by pop singers and rappers, established stars and newbies. Here, old songs — hip-hop classics, pop novelties and more — are scrunched and stretched sometimes to the point of absurdity. These songs are concessions that say the quiet part out loud — everyone has always been borrowing voraciously, from everyone else, constantly.

☆ AI-designed face paint inspired by Juggalos could potentially fool the 15,000 facial recognition cameras at the Qatar World Cup
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-12 | by ( Hannah Getahun | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

A team at Camoflags wanted to see if face paint designs could outsmart facial recognition cameras. The design, which uses concepts from Juggalo makeup, was designed by an AI program. A team known as Camoflags sought to answer that question with AI-generated, Juggalo-inspired face paint designs that could be used to evade facial recognition cameras. The experiment is uniquely suited to the World Cup, as face paint is a common feature at soccer matches for fans showing support for their teams. Face paint of the Tunisian flag stylized as Juggalo make up Courtesy of CamoflagsThe idea of using face makeup to try to fool facial recognition algorithms is not new.

☆ Elon Musk and Facebook's former chief security officer got into it on Twitter over the release of the 'Twitter Files Part 2'
▼ + stars: | 2022-12-09 | by ( Britney Nguyen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Elon Musk sparred on Twitter with Facebook's former security chief over "Twitter Files part two." Alex Stamos tweeted "Musk fired the lawyer" who would tell him what happens if non-employees have access to users' DMs. On Thursday, conservative columnist Bari Weiss tweeted the latest thread of "files," an installment about "Twitter's secret blacklists." Journalist Matt Taibbi tweeted the first part of the "Twitter Files" last week, which Musk described as internal communications that would reveal Twitter tried to censor free speech on the platform. Stamos tweeted that he was the target of "a wave of really poorly targeted racist and antisemitic slurs from" Musk's "posse," after Musk's reply.

☆ ‘Glass Onion’ sharpens the ‘Knives Out’ formula in a polished Netflix sequel
▼ + stars: | 2022-11-23 | by ( Review Brian Lowry | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

CNN —Rising to the challenge of matching its successful predecessor, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” maintains the razor-sharp formula, with a setup that feels even more conspicuously like an Agatha Christie homage before an extremely clever series of twists kick in. Writer-director Rian Johnson again assembles a solid cast behind Daniel Craig, but it’s his use of language – where nary a word is wasted – that finally gives the sequel its edge. Netflix opportunistically stepped up to acquire the “Knives Out” franchise and, departing from its usual “Stroke the filmmakers’ egos” approach to theatrical distribution, will actually give the movie a wide one-week-only release before it hits the streaming service in late December. Happily, “Glass Onion” finds new layers to explore, in a way that makes the prospect of a new “Knives Out Mystery” every few years sound like a perfectly reasonable idea, wherever and however one chooses to consume it. “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” premieres November 23 in US theaters and December 23 on Netflix.

Search resuls for: "Posse"

13 mentions found