Sorry about the hyphens imported from Word but I had to do this quick. I’ll do better next time.
Chinese Don’t Carry Cash
Read the report linked below about how Chinese don’t carry cash, credit cards or wallets, but pay everything with their phones. Everything about them accumulated digitally is used to qualify them for loans, jobs, security clearances and rewards based on their Communist Party loyalty. Digital information sent through their phones is also used to influence their choices in purchasing and elections.
Info: shpr.fyi/2Ekl27z
Artificially Intelligent applications such as autonomous killer drones to not be banned in Europe
In early April, the European Commission published guidelines intended to keep any artificial intelligence technology used on the EU’s 500 million citizens trustwor-thy.
Industry group DigitalEurope representing such companies as Microsoft, Facebook and Google influenced the European Regulators on Artificial Intelligence (AI) limitations, to NOT ban AI uses such as autonomous weapons.
Editor Note: As we wrote in the Shopper a year ago, military use of a drone programmed to kill and armed with a lethal lightweight rifle could be a catastrophically effective weapon.
The industry group also success-fully recommended against banning Chinese “social scoring” that uses big data to track and rank what you do—your purchases, your pastimes, your mistakes.
Info: shpr.fyi/2Jqv3Ex
Chicago and Detroit have bought real-time facial recognition systems.
Although perhaps not yet fully implemented, the recognition sys-tems will be used to identify want-ed persons as they appear in public.
For several years, companies have been suspected of using facial recognition by streetlight cameras as well as cellular tower travel route records of cellphones to alert sales-people about customers before they walk in together with their purchas-ing desires, habits and spending capability.
Most people don’t realize that carrying their phone results in their exact route and stops being record-ed by cell carriers, whose data then may be purchased by Google for sale to others. Further, many appli-cations installed in our phones do the same tracking. If on installing an app, it asks you to allow it to know your location, it will track you, usually for your benefit, but sometimes for data about you to sell to others.
Google among others has mil-lions of server farms loaded with virtually all such data about us. The sole purpose of recording such data is to sell it to companies, gov-ernments and others.
Google’s revenue in 2017 was $111 billion. The bulk of Google’s $110.8 billion revenue in 2017 came from its proprietary advertis-ing service, Google AdWords.
When you use Google to search for anything from financial infor-mation to local weather, you’re given a list of search results gener-ated by Google’s algorithm. The algorithm attempts to provide the most relevant results for your que-ry, and, along with these results, you may find related suggested pages from an AdWords advertiser who is paying Google for that ser-vice.
Info: shpr.fyi/2YFSMnD
ProtonMail voted best email provider
NordVPN (a top VPN provider, used by the Shopper) asked their developers and sys admins which email providers they use personally and what they would recommend to you.
Google, as one of the many email providers who reads our email, notorious for data harvest-ing, was caught in 2017 scanning users’ emails for personal infor-mation and using it to serve target-ed ads. The tech giant was accused of illegal wiretapping and stopped peeking into users’ emails after a class action lawsuit. However, to this day, Google bots still scan emails to detect spam and viruses, enable email searches, and use the auto-reply feature. It seemed like the scandal had been put to bed until The Wall Street Journal dis-covered that Google had been giv-ing third-party apps access to cus-tomers’ emails.
Every time someone logged into an app using their Google account, the app could ask for permission to access their emails. Many blindly accepted. You are not the only one who used an app to keep an eye on cheap flights or to plan your holi-days. Google stated that they re-view each app’s request to access sensitive data and block those that “misrepresent themselves.” Howev-er, it seems that they do not object to third-party developers reading their customers’ emails as long as they state it in their privacy policy.
NordVPN’s affiliates’ top best email provider: ProtonMail
ProtonMail is an open-source email service provider, based in Switzerland. It uses end-to-end encryption and requires no person-ally identifiable information to sign up. ProtonMail also allows setting an expiration date to emails, after which they will be automatically deleted from the recipient’s inbox.
Info: shpr.fyi/2VzJk3d
Sleeping less than seven hours damages our health, and sleeping in extra hours on weekends doesn’t help
One of the first studies to sug-gest that insufficient sleep can dis-rupt metabolism came out 2 dec-ades ago.
And yet, despite growing evi-dence that inadequate slumber is a risk factor for obesity and diabetes, approximately a third of US adults sleep fewer than the 7 hours a night recommended by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the Sleep Research Society.
Many people think they can re-pay sleep debt incurred during the week by catching extra z’s on the weekend but sleeping in on the weekend doesn’t help.
Info: shpr.fyi/2HrCBEA
Drug Companies Sued for Price Fixing
Soaring drug prices from both branded and generic manufacturers have sparked outrage and investiga-tions in the United States.
The criticism has come from across the political spectrum, from President Donald Trump, a Repub-lican, to progressive Democrats including U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is running for presi-dent.
The 20 drug companies engaged in illegal conspiracies to divide up the market for drugs to avoid com-peting and, in some cases, con-spired to either prevent prices from dropping or to raise them, accord-ing to the complaint by 44 U.S. states, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court in Connecticut.
45 of the 50 US States have filed suit against 19 drug companies, accusing them of price fixing gener-ic drugs, increasing the price of some by 1,000 per cent.
Info: shpr.fyi/2JLzNns
Eat more fiber
The popularity of low-carb diets, such as Atkins and keto, have helped give the macronutrient a bad name, and in part, it’s deserved.
“Have carbs got a bad reputation? Certainly…for a very understanda-ble reason,” said Jim Mann, MB, ChB, PhD, a professor in human nutrition and medicine at the Uni-versity of Otago in New Zealand. “They are highly refined, and, in many countries, sugar intake is high.”
But just as there are “bad” fats and “good” fats, there are also bad carbs and good carbs.
“We showed very clearly in our work in diabetes that the benefits of carbs came from the good carbs, and the good carbs are not high in sugar,” Mann said. “Good carbs are high in fiber.”
A high-fiber diet protects against a range of conditions,
Looking to add more fiber to your diet? Fiber — along with adequate fluid intake — moves quickly and relatively easily through your digestive tract and helps it function properly. A high-fiber diet may also help reduce the risk of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.
Women should try to eat at least 21 to 25 grams of fiber a day, while men should aim for 30 to 38 grams a day. Whole grains and vegetables are good sources of fi-ber.
Info: shpr.fyi/2VzRfgT
Marijuana use in youth results in 250% increase in suicidal thoughts
Cannabis use in youth age 12-18 results in 50% increase in depres-sion, and 250% increase in suicide ideation, in young adult years 18-32.
Eleven studies comprising 23,317 individuals were included in the quantitative analysis.
The probability of developing depression for cannabis users in young adulthood was 137% of the result for nonusers.
The probability for suicidal thoughts was 150% of that for nonusers.
The probability for suicidal at-tempt was 346% of the probability for nonusers.
Info: shpr.fyi/2WbcmKV
Suicidal emergency room visits by youth doubled from 2007 to 2015
Emergency room visits for sui-cide attempts and suicidal ideation doubled among youth between 2007 and 2015.
In the United States, suicide is a major public health concern and the second leading cause of death among youths age 10 to 18 years, persisting into early adulthood.1 Attempted suicide is the strongest predictor of subsequent death by suicide,2 and many children with suicide attempts (SA) and suicidal ideation (SI) first present to an emergency department (ED).3 Re-cent evidence has demonstrated marked increases in SA/SI among children and adolescents presenting to US tertiary children’s hospital emergency rooms.
Attempted suicide is the strong-est predictor of subsequent death by suicide.
Info: shpr.fyi/30seCfX
Widening Horizons — Philmont Scout Ranch
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Tucked away in the foothills of the southern Rockies, the Philmont Scout Ranch has become a holy grail, its stretches of untamed wilderness and challenging backcountry treks drawing more than 1 million Boy Scouts and other adven-turers from across the United States over the past 80 years.
For many of those who have spent time at the mountain retreat, they can’t get enough. It gets in the blood, it’s infectious and it’s the reason there was so much heart-break last year when a wildfire ripped through the heart of the ranch burning one-fifth of Philmont Scout Ranch.
Dozens of miles of trails were wiped out along with campsites, leaving behind a scar that will take years and millions of dollars to restore.
The work is necessary, ranch managers and troop leaders say, pointing to Philmont as a crown jewel of the scouting experience.
“There’s just a real sense of loss, kind of a grieving process so to speak,” said Roger Hoyt, a long-time Scout leader and Philmont’s general manager. “But at the end of the day, nature does renew itself and I think from the tragedy and the heartache comes this sense of renewal and opportunity.”
More than a half-million dollars already has been raised and the re-building effort is well underway with the installation of 85 new campsites and work to shore up some of the ash-covered hillsides.
Crews were sidelined in January due to snow, but work has resumed in the lower elevations as the clock ticks down for the start of the summer season.
And it will be a banner season with a record number of Scouts — possibly as many as 24,000 — expected to pass through Philmont, Hoyt said. Some of them initially planned to make the trek in 2018 but were derailed due to the fire and the subsequent closure of the back-country.