> A former US air force master sergeant who nicknamed himself “Al Capone” has pleaded guilty to defrauding the military branch out of $37m by inflating the cost of IT contracts – and giving some of the extra money to an individual he called “Godfather”.
> Alan Hayward James, from Texas, ran a nine-year scam, beginning in April 2016, which also saw him funnel excess funds to himself, his family and his co-conspirators.
> Monarch Tractor raised over $240 million for its self-driving, electric tractors guided by artificial intelligence that debuted in 2023. That year, Time called the vehicle one of the year’s greatest inventions, and Forbes predicted that the company would become the world’s next billion-dollar startup. The company was later valued at $518 million. Now, the company has abandoned its Livermore headquarters after laying off its entire staff last year and warning it may “shut down.”
The instagram video of a farmer trying it out is interesting- the farmer noted it was dangerous and the only thing he could successfully get it to do was split logs:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DWec9aukq-Q/
In my mind tractors are just plain dangerous. I can't say I have driven tractors that much but I've put them in ditches and have gotten closer to rollovers on tractors without a ROPS than I like. I've heard a lot of stories about people getting caught up in PTOs and it's famous that a young man was driving down a hill with a haywagon and had the transmission pop out of gear and couldn't get it back in and died when the tractor crashed at the bottom of the hill.
So I wouldn't expect it to be safe around an autonomous tractor and even with an operator I trust I always have an exit plan and know where I'm going to bail if I see the machine going the wrong way.
Overall agri-tech is challenging. Personally I am not so interested in more AI-generated Nobel Prize winners as I am in machines that can pick strawberries, change bedpans and do other things we need.
"Prosecutors ... argued Holmes is a reoffending risk, pointing out that she has been advising a biotech startup run by her husband Billy Evans from inside prison."
Ambulance drivers, truckers, delivery drivers and taxi drivers are more likely to get bladder cancer, most likely from holding in urine but also probably from diesel fumes and pathogens from road dust particulate matter.
My shitty ambo company sold our sleeping quarters as revenge when we tried to unionize and so we would have to sleep in the rig and would run the engine to keep warm, I am sure I will meet an early death from sucking in all those diesel fumes over night shifts.
100% agree- the Jewish home for the aged is the nicest facility I ever saw in my career as a medic. I asked some of the nurses I worked with about why they were on such a different level - better than even the fanciest most expensive $30k a month places in Portola Valley or Palo Alto - and was told it's because taking care of the elderly is a fundamental tenet of Judaism.
In my own quest in the SF East Bay, right before COVID stole the scene, I ended with choosing a board and care for my parents that is owned and administrated by a retired nurse with a Filipino background. It is a family-run affair rather than some corporate warehouse. It is a converted small motel, with about 15 rooms, not the typical converted single-family home. This means they are just large enough to have an overnight staff shift and multiple daytime staff roles, instead of one person struggling to handle everything.
It's by no means one of these places that puts on a facade of being a retirement resort. A first impression might be that it is dingy. But, for the combination of dementia and other care needs we have had on our plate, they have provided just about the best care I could hope for.
Along the way, I've had to disregard superficial judgements from some extended family or family friends, who seem to harbor a fantasy image of elder care as an elevated experience with the trappings of a luxury hotel stay and experiences fit for aristocrats. In a dream, I too wish my mom could have stimulation and education in her final years like immersion in an artist colony combined with a Parisian salon from a novel.
I settled for a place that consistently keeps her safe, gives her communal meals, manages her hygiene, manages her medications, monitors her health, and communicates reasonably well with me on these topics. I also visit weekly and take her to all her medical appointments etc., so I think I have an accurate view of how things really go there.
My biggest lesson from this, applicable to future generations, is to find your enriching experiences and setup your end of life plans while you are young. By the time you or your family realize you are in decline, you likely have lost the cognitive and/or emotional flexibility and/or agency to really adopt the most enjoyable lifestyle or life setting. Your more basic care needs will start to dominate all decision-making.
> taking care of the elderly is a fundamental tenet of Judaism
As it's done in most of Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa. US/Canada were turned against family and tradition thanks to decades of brainwashing by movies, TV, and ads. To be cool you had to go to a college in another state. Then move to a big city. Pick career over family and having children. Take antidepressants.
Also a former medic, the best care homes I ever went to were the Jewish Home for the Aged. They were so much nicer and the patients there never had decubitus ulcers or staph infection in skin folds from not being cleaned.
The worst place I ever saw was Atherton Long Care which supposedly is fancy and expensive but they had neglected an old lady so poorly I actually reported them to CDPH and the ombudsman. She had full on necrotized tissue under both her breasts and a rotted unchanged g-tube that you could smell all the way down the hallway to the nursing station it was so sad. John George Psych hospital and Cordilleras MHRC are both also very sad hellholes. Patients sleeping laying on the floor in the hallways with a blanket because the rooms are full etc. We had a lady who purposely stabbed herself in the eye so she could go to the ER to get out of Cordilleras because it was so awful.
What I found if you ever need to place your loved on in a care home is the sniff test is the best assessment of how well it's run and if the patients are cared for. If patients are cleaned regularly and not left to sit in their own diapers it really shows there is enough staff ratio and attention given to the patients. Go on a random evening or day and at different times. Food quality is also a good indicator - eat lunch with your parents there. Would you eat this yourself voluntarily? If yes, it's probably a good place not run on a shoestring budget.
Also - hn readers - if your mom is in a care home please always check under her breasts to ensure she is clean and dry there every time you visit. Far far too many old ladies get candida and bacterial infections under their breasts that are never cleaned or taken care of because it's embarrassing to check or clean and dry so then it just gets wet and rots and is painful, sad and gross and can lead to even worse things like cellulitis or an abscess.
> The connection is believed to be the spatial reasoning involved in routing.
This is triggering me lol. I was a Paramedic for 10 years and 3 of those years were before GPS existed and we had these awful 900 page 5" thick things we had to wield on the fly called Map Books. It was part of our probation period testing and they would time us to pick out the routes reliably within a certain deadline or not graduate from being a probie.
While your partner drove to the call you'd put the book on your lap and flip to the big large grid which would tell you which map your location would be on (page 770), then you'd look up the street in the back appendix to get the coordinates for the specific house (P5, C2) and then find the cross street on another page (P5, C3), go to the grid and find the closest appropriate hospital for the purpose of the call (different ERs have different functions- for gunshots go to Highland, for amputations go to CalPac Davies, for heart attacks go to UCSF, etc) (page 815), the street location for that (A6, C4) and then make your route while flipping back and forth between all the pages while simultaneously telling your partner where to turn as you go.
When I went to a better ran company, dispatch would give us map page and grid coordinates over the radio when we got the call.
Within a few months you learn most of the neighborhoods and routes, and road hazards and preferences- for example if going to UCSF from the Peninsula take O'Shaughnessy because there's no traffic and is a smooth ride. And if you're going to Seton Hospital from 101 slow down around the turn on the on ramp onto 280 because there is a GIANT bump that will knock your partner in the back's head into the ceiling and not be comfortable for the patient on the gurney.
Map books were no fun but some of the dudes I worked with definitely became route-finding savants.
> Map books were no fun but some of the dudes I worked with definitely became route-finding savants.
Similar. I worked doing deliveries for an event company all over the greater NY area, based out of Queens. I usually rode jump-seat and spent a few years with a retired trucker who was such a savant. He could maneuver a truck through any tight/precarious situation with great precision and care. He could visit a location once and recall it next year, every year.
The most impressive was a full day gauntlet starting at 5 AM where he navigated starting in south queens NYC to a stop in Staten Island, then off to Jersey city, then up to Sleepy Hollow NY, then all the way to some Greek church deep in Suffolk county through the winding maze that is the north shore - no map, no gps.
The most scary situation was driving a smaller Isuzu cab-over box truck through Brooklyn on a hot summer day. We had no AC, windows down, headed along a narrow avenue under the elevated train tracks. A passing truck was a little too far - BOOM- a loud shattering glass and bang sound. Turns out that idiot hit his mirror violently into ours so hard it showered him directly in the face with shards of mirror. I only got hit with a few pieces in the arm and a bunch landed on my lap. He didn't flinch. He kept the truck strait while muttering "I've been waiting for that to happen again." He thankfully only had two small cuts on his face, nothing went into his eyes. We lucky passed an auto parts store and he was able to rig up something on the mirror bar, continued on and finished the route.
He was a real character and he always had a lot of fun and crazy road stories. That dude also taught me to drive a truck with air brakes which is also how I learned to drive a manual. In addition to showing me all the secret traffic avoidance and toll beating routes, he was a foodie and showed me a lot of interesting restaurants he'd stop at along our routes. He took me to the famous Wo Hop in Manhttan's China Town when you could just walk in and get a table (late 90's.) He parked the truck at an inactive construction site a block away and moved cones around it so we didn't get a ticket. That character knew all the tricks :-)
In a similar vein, to drive a black taxi in London you have to pass The Knowledge of London exam which requires becoming a human routing database for over twenty thousand streets and landmarks.
There is also a very good TV comedy-drama film of 1979 about some characters working towards passing the Knowledge exam. The film was, of course, called The Knowledge:
Hah. My father has similar stories from his time as a paramedic. There were some transitions from one page to another that were considered unusually difficult, and during training they would find a way to force the rookie map-book reader to handle these transitions. Bonus points if they could handle the situation when the route continually straddled a page boundary!
They also, of course, knew which streets had been re-marked as one way and such since the map book was published, so they got the rookie into tricky positions where the world conflicted with the map, forcing them to spend only part of the time with their nose in the book.
> Alan Hayward James, from Texas, ran a nine-year scam, beginning in April 2016, which also saw him funnel excess funds to himself, his family and his co-conspirators.
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