Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

You can see all the planets in the solar system in the sky tonight   Story by Anugraha Sundaravelu • December 29, 2022 It’s a lucky day for skywatchers as all the planets in our solar system will grace tonight’s night sky, in a rare astronomical event. You can see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn simultaneously with the naked eye (Picture: Shutterstock) © Provided by Metro You can see Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn simultaneously with the naked eye, while the two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, can be observed with binoculars or a telescope. Yesterday, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Jupiter and Mars could all be seen in that order in the northern hemisphere with the naked eye, starting from the southwestern horizon and moving east. Uranus, located between Mars and Jupiter, and Neptune, which is between Saturn and Jupiter, can be seen with binoculars or a telescope until the end of the year. On Wednesday night, all the planets appear...

THE TWITTER FILES: How Twitter Rigged The Covid Debate BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, DEC 26, 2022 - 04:44 PM Another day, another TWITTER FILES drop exposing the incestuous relationship between big tech and government. Today's edition, dropped by journalist David Zweig, focuses on ' how Twitter rigged the Covid debate ' by taking direction from both the Trump and Biden administrations (while at the same time trying to censor the former president).  What's somewhat notable is how aggressive government (and ex-government) officials were in trying to stifle free speech, while Twitter's non-government-linked employees would often push back  (and then totally fold) - a theme we've observed in previous drops. In one such instance, former head of Twitter's Trust & Safety team Yoel Roth tells former FBI lawyer and then-Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker to  calm his tits  over a Trump tweet. Of course, in the end the government typically got its way, as ...

Facebook Parent Settles Cambridge Analytica Data Harvesting Scandal For $725 Million BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, DEC 26, 2022 - 05:00 PM   Facebook parent Meta has agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal for $725 million, or just under 2.5 days of revenue (based on Q3 figures). To recap - in 2014, Aleksandr Kogan of Cambridge University in the UK built a Facebook app that paid hundreds of thousands of users to take a psychological test.  The app harvested not only the data of the test-taker, but the data of their Facebook friends as well . Kogan sold the resulting database  of up to 50 million Americans  to Cambridge Analytica, which provided analytical assistance to the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Facebook subsequently banned Cambridge Analytica, and in October 2019 agreed to pay the UK a £500,000 fine for exposing user data to a "serious risk of harm." The $725 million settleme...

Musk’s Neuralink Promising For Disabled, 'Ethical Concern' For Masses, Experts Say Authored by Petr Svab via The Epoch Times  (emphasis ours), December 22, 2022 The Neuralink implant that aims to allow a person to control a computer with thoughts has good potential to achieve its initial goal of helping paralyzed people communicate.  It may, at least to some extent, help restore vision for the blind. It may, to a significant degree, restore limb control for those with spine injuries, according to several neuroscientists. But when it comes to Neuralink’s broader goals of letting healthy people interface with computers directly via the mind, the technical capability is achievable,  but would lead to expansive ethical, safety, security, privacy, and even philosophical issues, experts told The Epoch Times. Neuralink—founded in 2016 by the world’s richest man, prolific entrepreneur  Elon Musk —recently applied to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) fo...