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

Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship   FRIDAY, JAN 28, 2022 - 07:40 PM  Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com, Journalist Jonathan Cook has  a new blog post  out on his experience with  being throttled into invisibility by Silicon Valley algorithmic suppression  that will ring all too familiar for any online content creators who’ve been sufficiently critical of official western narratives over the last few years. “My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares,”  Cook writes. “Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds.  ‘Going viral’ is a distant memory. ” “I won’t be banned,”  he adds.  “I will fade incrementally,  like a small star in the night sky — one among millions — gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowl...

  Flying Car Certified To Fly, Paving Way For Mass Production Of "Very Efficient Flying Cars"   BY TYLER DURDEN WEDNESDAY, JAN 26, 2022 - 09:25 PM Authored by Katabella Roberts via The Epoch Times  (emphasis ours), A hybrid car-airplane known as “AirCar” has been issued a certificate of airworthiness by the Slovakian civil aviation authority, potentially paving the way for the future of flying vehicles. The dual-mode car-aircraft vehicle, which looks like a sports car, was created by a team of eight highly-skilled specialists at the Slovakian company  Klein Vision,  which was founded by Professor Stefan Klein. Klein has devoted the last 20 years to making the flying car a reality. It was awarded the certificate by the Slovak Transport Authority  after successfully completing 70 hours of “rigorous flight testing compatible with European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) standards,” Klein Vision said in a statement ( pdf ). Flight tests ...

  Renting Robots For Less Than Minimum Wage Is A Boon For Companies   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 11:20 PM Automation has rapidly expanded in businesses of all sizes to cope with rising wages and  labor shortages . Robotics help firms streamline otherwise inefficient tasks and slash labor costs amid an inflationary environment.  Orders for robotic machinery have jumped for automotive, agricultural, construction, electronics, food processing, and warehousing companies. The benefits of employing a robot over a human are now being realized for small and medium-sized companies.  Jose Figueroa, who manages Polar Manufacturing, a small company that produces hinges, locks, and brackets in south Chicago, told  Wired  that he employed a robot on the production line that costs only $8 per hour versus a minimum wage of $15 per hour for humans. He said the robot has allowed workers to concentrate on other tasks while increasing output. "Smal...

Visualizing The Power Of The World's Supercomputers   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 21, 2022 - 04:15 AM   A supercomputer is a machine that is built to handle billions, if not trillions of calculations at once. Each supercomputer is actually made up of many individual computers (known as nodes) that work together in parallel. A common metric for measuring the performance of these machines is  flops , or  floating point operations per second . In this visualization,  Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu uses  November 2021 data from  TOP500  to visualize the computing power of the world’s top five supercomputers. For added context, a number of modern consumer devices were included in the comparison. Ranking by Teraflops Because supercomputers can achieve over one quadrillion flops, and consumer devices are much less powerful, we’ve used  teraflops  as our comparison metric. 1 teraflop = 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) flops. Superco...

Microsoft to buy Activision in $68.7 billion all-cash deal Steve Kovach @STEVEKOVACH January 18, 2022 8:33 AM EST KEY POINTS ·         Microsoft will buy video game giant Activision Blizzard in a $68.7 billion all-cash deal. ·         Activision makes popular game franchises such as Call of Duty. ·         Activision has been mired in controversy in recent months due to allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct among company executives. Microsoft  announced Tuesday  it will buy video game giant Activision Blizzard in a $68.7 billion all-cash deal. The price means Microsoft will pay $95 per share for Activision. Shares of  Activision  soared 27% on Tuesday morning following the news while  Microsoft ’s stock fell less than 1%. This would be Microsoft’s largest acquisition to date, followed by its purchase of LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 bill...

China Reveals AI News Anchor, Almost Indistinguishable From Real Human   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 14, 2022 - 09:00 PM By Shawn Lin of The Epoch Times,   “Hello everyone, I am the artificial intelligence news anchor on National Business Daily. I am the virtual twin of the original host. I have been running—reporting the news—undetected for 70 days now,” the AI news anchor N Xiaohei revealed itself to its television viewers on Dec. 20, 2021, after 1700 hours of a continuous live news broadcast. (R) A screenshot image of the real-life news anchor on the “N Xiaohei Finance” program (L) N Xiaohei’s AI-rendered virtual twin in a blue background. On the same day, the Chinese state-controlled media National Business Daily (NBD) and the AI company Xiaoice jointly announced the official launch of their collaborative live news broadcasting TV programs run entirely by AI—the first of its kind. The TV program is named “AI Business Daily.” It will broadcast financial news 24 ho...

Apple's Mixed Reality AR/VR Headset Faces Delays Due To Overheating, Cameras And Software   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 14, 2022 - 08:00 PM We regret to inform you that the transformation of your daily life into  The Matrix  has been delayed by several months, at least. The next big widely anticipated AR/VR release - a headset launch from Apple - appears to have run "head first" into a  reality  check.  The company's planned mixed-reality headset product has been delayed by "at least a few months," according to a new Bloomberg report. The device had been planned for an unveiling at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June.  But Apple is now battling "development challenges related to overheating, cameras and software" that may have pushed the timeline for the product's release back from its late year 2022 expected date. The headset, which hasn't been discussed publicly by the company, has been "years in the maki...

Amidst A Historic Shortage Of Drivers, Debate About Autonomous 18-Wheelers Has Begun   BY TYLER DURDEN MONDAY, JAN 10, 2022 - 10:50 PM   While the debate about the safety of self-driving cars rages on between automakers and regulators, another debate is about to begin: can massive self-driving 40 ton 18-wheeler trucks be safe on the roads? Forcing the issue are companies like J.B. Hunt , Uber’s freight division and FedEx - all of whom are testing autonomous big rigs. The technology, which could be useful now during the current driver shortage, is likely still years away. But that hasn't stopped the issue from being hotly contested,  according to a new Bloomberg report . Sterling Anderson, co-founder of Aurora Innovation Inc., sees the obvious benefits: “Human drivers, by our nature, have to eat, sleep and take breaks. What that leads to is enormous underutilization of these trucks and much slower movement of goods.” Haven't these drivers learned anything from ...

Move Over Farmers, The Fully Autonomous, Self-Driving Tractor Has Officially Arrived   BY TYLER DURDEN FRIDAY, JAN 07, 2022 - 05:00 PM   It's not often you hear the words "John Deere" and "controversy" together, but that's exactly what is coming to pass as the agricultural staple looks to debut its first fully autonomous tractor. Equipped with six pairs of stereo cameras and AI, John Deere’s new 8R tractor can both perceive its environment and navigate, according to a new  writeup by Wired . It relies on neural network algorithms analyzing data streaming into its cameras.   In fact, it can even "find its way to a field on its own when given a route and coordinates, then plow the soil or sow seeds without instructions, avoiding obstacles as it goes," the report says. This is a far cry from the autonomous tractors available today, many of which can only operate in limited situations.  Jahmy Hindman, Deere’s chief technology office...