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The Speaker Editors
Millennials Owe Record Debt
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The group owes around $1.1t of the America’s $3.6t in consumer debt, and consumer debt it getting closer to 20% of GDP.
Where is the debt coming from? A lot comes from rising student and auto loans.
In addition to the economic risk involved in this kind of debt, it also has effects on psychology and behavior: A large portion of Americans reportedly worry about defaulting on loans in the next 12 months, and over 50% of those worriers are millennials. The group, aged 21 to 34 in 2017, are also changing spending habits by doing more searching and more waiting for lower prices before buying smaller items. Analysts are concerned that this trend will be the same when the group, entering the age where people usually buy homes and start families, shop or hold off shopping for large purchases.
These Tiny New Satellites
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So these tiny satellites being sent up into space in bundles …
The buzz company is called Planet, and they started in 2010 with a team of ex-NASA scientists.
They recently launched 88 new little imaging satellites in one go from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota, India.
Their satellites are called Doves, and they’re shoebox-like machines weighing around 11 pounds. They take a lot of pictures: right now, they can capture 58 million square miles per day, the equivalent of the land on our planet.
The company also recently bought Terra Bella, another imaging company, from Google (for an undisclosed amount, and in a deal that included Google buying data back from Planet). That added 7 better-quality camera satellites to their flock. They can now use their lower-res satellites to build a large picture of Earth and look for changes, and use the 7 Terra Bella units (which have 4 – 6x better resolution) to get details.
They also bought another satellite company that gave them an archive of satellite images dating back to 2008, as well as some more satellites.
Planet doesn’t have a monopoly in the field, though. While they have the lead in whole-Earth imaging, other companies that have better resolution, like DigitalGlobe, provide other services. DigitalGlobe’s resolution exceeds Planet’s: they can make make images from orbit in which they can resolve a laptop screen into a pixel.
Chinese Investment in U.S. Tripled Last Year
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140,000 Americans are now employed by 3,200 Chinese companies operating in the U.S., according to Chinese state media organization Xinhua.
The 140k is 9 times the 2009 number. And the dollar figure for investment, $46b, is three times what it was a year earlier.
Trump Invites Philippines’ Duterte to White House
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According to the White House, the President invited the president over the phone this week, but didn’t give further details about a meeting. The White House also said the two leaders talked about concerns about North Korea on the phone.
Trump is also scheduled to visit the Philippines in November.
Robots for Fruit-Picking Jobs
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Fruit may join the large number of U.S. crops that are harvested by machines.
Robotics companies like FFRobotics and Abundant Robotics are working on building machines to harvest delicate fruits.
FFRobotics is developing a 4- to 12-armed machine that has three-fingered grips to grab fruit and twist or clip it from a branch — at a rate of up to 10,000 apples an hour. The machines would leave about 10 or 15% of the fruit on the trees that humans would have to pick.
Abundant Robotics’ machine uses a vacuum to pull off apples.
The goal is to have these bots working in a couple of years, and analysts think they can do it.
Consumer Spending Low
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Q1 for 2017 GDP was weak: 0.7% annualized.
Of that, one of the weaker components was consumer spending, which rose only 0.3%, the weakest level for spending since Q4 2009.
Ivanka Booed
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The first daughter, invited to participate on the panel of a women’s summit in Berlin received groans and hisses as she stated that her father was a “tremendous champion of enabling women and families.”
Afterward, Ivanka commented, “It’s fine. I’m used to it,” and said that it was a matter of “politics.”
Ex-CIA Head on Wikileaks: “That’s the World We Live in Right Now”
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Wikileaks dumped a large amount of classified CIA documents this week. Thousands of pages detailed how the CIA’s software and techniques gather information, including how they hack into smartphones, computers, and internet-connected TVs. Wikileaks said the release was just the first installment of a larger collection.
Many apps were named specifically with details about how the CIA is able to enter them. There was also mention of a technique used to “crash” computers.
CIA insiders said the likeliest source of the breach was contractors the CIA worked with, according to PBS NewsHour, who interviewed former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who served during the Obama administration.
Panetta said that the most important thing with the leak was going to be “how do you replace those important tools that have now been made public, and try to reestablish our intelligence capabilities so we can gather the information that is absolutely essential in order to protect our country.
“This has been seriously damaging to the CIA and its ability to conduct intelligence operations. So I imagine that our first focus is on ‘What do we do to try to replace our ability to go after terrorists.”
Panetta commented on earlier leaks and steps that would have been taken to try to make their tools more secure but, “We are clearly living in a world in which the ability to hack has developed to a point where I happen to think that probably anything is vulnerable today.
“So I think you try to take steps to try to protect that kind of sensitive information, try to do what you can to make sure that those who are working for you are taking steps to protect it, contractors are taking steps to protect it, but the bottom line is that in today’s world I think you always have to be prepared that somebody may very well be able to get access to that kind of information, and if they do that they will make it public. I think that’s the world we live in right now.”
Panetta was asked about why the CIA needs these tools, when the NSA is responsible for those things. He said that the CIA is responsible for gathering information from overseas.
“There’s a reason we have not had another 9-11 attack in this country, and a lot of that is because our intelligence agencies, our law enforcement agencies, are sharing information and gathering information that makes sure we protects the United States.”
Back to the Moon? Trump’s Statement Rouses Spaceheads
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When President Donald Trump mentioned “other worlds” in his speech to a join Congress this week, the space community started buzzing.
“American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream,” said Trump at the end of his speech.
According to PBS NewsHour Science Correspondent Miles O’brian a manned mission could take place in 2019, as “all of a sudden there is wide agreement in the space community [the moon] might be the next step.” The mission may take the form of “learning how to live there on a sustained basis” — ie, a manned encampment.
A traditional barrier to space missions has been the large cost. NASA’s budget is around 19 billion, and the Army’s budget for space is around $40 billion, and analysts are considering ways these two organizations could borrow from each other in a force multiplier relationship, making it possible to make a moon mission with reduced costs to the country.
The private sector is also increasingly interested in the moon. SpaceX also is continuing to push toward commercial voyages. Elon Musk’s company announced a tourist trip for two people around the moon before.
Image: Foster + Partners/ESA
YouTube TV Announced
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YouTube announced Tuesday the coming of YouTube TV, a way to watch the kind of programming people normally watch on television, but on YouTube.
“Finally, live TV made for you stream ABC, CBS, FOX, NBC & more,” the entertainment website announced. “Never run out of DVR storage space. 6 accounts, 1 price. $35/month. Cancel anytime.”
The bulletin provided a signup for a mailing list for people to be contacted when the internet TV service was more ready — currently, the status of YouTube TV is “coming soon.”
Trump Bans Major News from White House Press Briefing, Says All News Sources Should Be Named
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President Donald Trump today continued his battle against American media.
“They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name,” said Trump at CPAC, and several mainstream news organizations, including the New York Times, the LA Times, and CNN, were banned from a press briefing Friday.
Trump advisor Steve Bannon yesterday also spoke aggressively with regard to the media, saying, ““It’s going to get worse because [Trump is] going to continue to press his agenda, and as economic conditions get better and jobs get better, they’re going to fight. If you think they’re going to give the country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken. Every day, every day is going to be a fight.”
The Associated Press and Time Magazine boycotted the press briefing in solidarity. Sally Buzbee of the Associated Press later told PBS NewsHour, “We felt today was different” from any other time in the past decades of their fight for access to the White House. “When there are news organizations that are being deliberately excluded, I think that’s different.”
She said that it was “really a struggle to get information about what the government is doing,” but that the AP would “do what they always do, which is … fight like mad to find out what is going on in terms of facts and … report that to the public. And we are going to do that every single day and we are not going to stop.
She told Judy Woodruff at PBS that they used unnamed sources when they knew the information was fact, not spin, and the person was in a position of authority to speak on the subject, and the information could not be printed otherwise, although they always tried to get sources to agree to use their names as a “gold standard.”
The move by Trump caused some to raise the issue of Americans’ constitutionally protected right to a free press.