People who ask themselves why they need a dashcam usually have one thing in common: They've never been a serious collision. Even in fender benders, these gadgets can save you an immense amount of time and hassle, stopping headaches before they even start.

If you're looking for a reliable starter cam, the myGEKOgear Orbit 110 Full HD Dashcam hits all the marks for a surprisingly low price point.

The video quality is likely higher than you'll need in most cases - but better to be safe than sorry. It shoots 1080p HD video day or night, thanks to the CMOS sensor. Another crucial factor: A 120-degree wide-angle lens that allows you to capture more than just the lane in front of you.

Once you mount it, you're good to go. A G-sensor will automatically detect undue braking or collisions, and the video is stored on an 8GB MicroSD card (but you can also expand your storage up to 32 GB if you like).

The Orbit 110 is currently on sale for half off the retail price, but you can take an extra 15% off that by using the holiday discount code MERRYSAVE15. Read the rest

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There's no shortage of wireless chargers out there. So when one scores a Best of Innovation Award at the Consumer Electronics Show, we take notice. And, those industry nods mean good news for just about anybody with a smartphone, because the HyperCharger X Wireless Charger means there's no excuse for losing power when you're out and about.

As a straight-up wireless charger, the thing packs a punch. It has 7.5 watts of power for Qi-compatible devices. No plugs in sight? It's also a power bank with 6,000 mAh of capacity, more than enough to get multiple devices throughout the day.

For old-school gadgets, you can charge by a 15W universal USB port. You can even charge up your phone wirelessly while recharging up the unit via the port, so there's no downtime.

And the cherry on top? The entire thing is as small as an iPhone X.

Right now, you can get a 2-pack of HyperCharger X Wireless Chargers for more than 40% off the retail price, but you can take another 15% off that final cost by using the holiday discount code MERRYSAVE15. Read the rest

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The increasingly popular social media application TikTok has a concerning relationship with the Chinese state. That link became ever the more concerning today, when reports began circulating of a brand new partnership between the company that owns TikTok, ByteDance, and the government of China.

ByteDance owns the video-sharing app TikTok, and has established a joint venture with a Chinese state media group, official registration documents show.

“The joint venture will focus on partnership in the digital rights of short videos,” a ByteDance spokeswoman told Reuters in response to inquiries about the deal:

ByteDance, which is one of China’s fastest-growing startups, has formed a series of partnerships with state media organizations in order to feed its leading news aggregator platform, Jinri Toutiao.

Under the latest deal, Beijing Liangzi Yuedong Technology Co Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of ByteDance, will own 49% of the new company, Pengpai Audiovisual Technology (Jinan) Co Ltd, with Shanghai Dongfang Newspaper Co Ltd holding the remaining 51% majority stake, the documents from the National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System showed.

Shandong-based Pengpai Audiovisual was established on Dec. 10 with a registered capital of 10 million yuan, according to the documents. Pengpai is the Chinese name of ThePaper.cn, an online newspaper published by Shanghai Dongfang.

ByteDance unit establishes venture with Chinese state media firm [reuters.com] Read the rest

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In Utah, liquor authorities who have long been aligned with the Mormon patriarchs who more or less run everything in the state have poured thousands of gallons of drinkable beer down the drain -- no, literally-- after a change in state law allowed higher-alcohol beer. Utah's Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control destroyed roughly $18,000 worth of beer in a single day on Friday, AP reports:

Authorities say they were legally required to dump the beer from state-owned liquor stores because a new law allowed those beers to be sold in private stores instead.

Utah had long prohibited grocery and convenience stores from selling beer stronger than 4% alcohol by volume. Everything else was sold at state liquor stores.

The law effective Oct. 31 increased that limit to 5%. Because the state-owned stores can’t stock anything available on the open market, officials discounted beers between 4% and 5% before Halloween, then threw away everything that was left.

The 275 cases of bottles and cans were recycled, they say. Read More: Utah tosses thousands of gallons of beer after law change [apnews.com] Read the rest

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In Georgia, a man was arrested after he called the sheriff's office to confess -- three separate times.

The Thomasville Times-Enterprise reports that Lt. Tim Watkins of the Thomas County Sheriff’s Office says the suspect called at 5 a.m. on Friday to confess he'd stolen a car, and was now about 12 miles away in the small town of Boston, Georgia.

“He wanted to confess and turn himself in,” said an officer. “He called three times.”

"He called a third time and reported that he had broken into the Citgo and was drinking a beer," the officer told a reporter.

[via AP] Read the rest

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Nancy Astor was the first woman to sit in Parliament; this is true. She took her seat as a member of the Conservative Party on November 28, 1919. And so, to celebrate the centennial, the party put up a brand new statue of her outside of her former home at Plymouth Hoe. According to the BBC, the statue was made by artist Hayley Gibbs and cost lb125,000, which was raised through crowdfunding.

It's somewhat of a relief that they paid for it themselves. Because Astor wasn't actually the first woman elected to Parliament. No, that honor went to that incomparable badass Constance Markievicz, the Irish revolutionary, suffragette, and staunch advocate for workers' rights. In keeping with Sinn F'ein's abstentionist policy, however, Markievicz refused to actually take her seat in the British House of Commons, or participate in any parliamentary processes.

But okay, fine. Nancy Astor was the first woman to literally take her seat in Parliament. Whereas Markievicz famously advised women to, "Leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver," Astor once said, "I am the kind of woman I would run from." Case in point: while Astor claimed to despise the Nazi party for oppressing women, she also allegedly told Joseph Kennedy that she saw Hitler as a welcome solution to the “world problems” that were the Jews. According to the History News Network:

Astor wrote Kennedy that Hitler would have to do more than just "give a rough time" to "the killers of Christ" before she'd be in favor of launching  "Armageddon to save them.

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Consulting giant McKinsey is embroiled is a string of scandals, from the revelation thatit designed ICE's gulags to the news that it charged New York $27.5m for a fraudulent (and worse-than-useless) violence reduction program for Rikers Island, to the news that it charges US governments $3m/year for advice from fresh-out-of-college, inexperienced 23-year-olds.

Reading about these scandals, you may be asking yourself how it's possible that McKinsey can be so extraordinarily terrible, and for an answer, you need look no further than the company's own internal discussions of its role in society.

Propublica obtained McKinsey's 2010 internal history, in which employees are told that the firm is comparable to "the Marine Corps, the Roman Catholic Church, and the Jesuits" in that it is "analytically rigorous, deeply principled seekers of knowledge and truth" married with a sense of shared values that exceeds what "even the Catholic Church can promise."

McKinsey has, since then, disclosed a number of new potential conflicts in old bankruptcy cases and paid $32.5 million to creditors and the United States trustee to settle claims over insufficient disclosures. The trustee has said that “McKinsey failed to satisfy its obligations under bankruptcy law and demonstrated a lack of candor.” The firm denies wrongdoing and says it settled “in order to move forward and focus on serving its clients.”

Subsequently, McKinsey has moved, in effect, to rewrite the rules. It drafted a protocol ostensibly meant to clarify what advisers like itself need to disclose. Critics pointed out that McKinsey’s protocol allows such firms to avoid disclosing relationships they deem indirect or “de minimis.”

There remains more to come.

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Ohio lawmakers introduced legislation that would see women and doctors charged with murder if they did not re-implant fetuses from ectopic pregnancies in women's uteruses, a procedure that does not exist and is impossible.

Now we're getting some insight into how legislators came to introduce this bizarre bill: according to State Rep John Becker [R-Gilead/@beckergop)], the relevant passages were written by Right to Life Action Coalition of Ohio lobbyist Barry Sheets, who advised Becker that he could ignore scientists who pointed out that the only evidence that the procedure could be performed were two "case reports," one published in 1917, the other in 1980.

Becker now says that if anyone is at fault, it's the medical journals, for failing to retract these two isolated reports. He told the Cincinnati Enquirer, "But these are documented. They should get the medical journals corrected if this is wrong."

To the geneticist's concerns that Becker was promoting a rarely used procedure without knowing the possible side effects, Sheets responded, to a forwarded email, “That's a good one.”

“The ‘side-effects’ are that the embryo was carried to full-term and a baby was given birth to, according to the 'case reports,'” Sheets wrote. “What are the 'side-effects' on the current treatment for ectopic pregnancies on the embryo? Oh, that's right — death.”

Lawmaker Says He Didn't Research Ectopic Pregnancy Procedure Before Adding To Bill [AP]

Emails: Lobbyist Helped Draft Bill Suggesting Docs Could Reimplant Ectopic Pregnancies [Cincinnati Enquirer]

(Image: Ohio House of Reps; Hulu; modified) Read the rest

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Taylor Swift has been embroiled in a terrible dispute with Scooter Braun, who acquired Swift's former label for $300m, delivering him control over Swift's first six albums. Swift says that Braun had bullied and tormented her for years, and that the owner of her original label, Scott Borchetta, had sold the label to him in order to punish Swift.

Since then, Braun has used his ownership of Swift catalog to bar her from performing her own hits on tour (he eventually relented after bad publicity) and to engage in general petty fuckery with no obvious business case, seemingly motivated entirely by his desire to make Swift miserable by weaponizing her own creative output.

But Braun didn't just happen to have $300m lying around to use for his vendetta. He raised that money from private equity investors, who have fast become the most unpopular rich people in a crowded field of loathesome sociopaths.

On Thursday, Swift accepted the "Woman of the Decade" award at Billboard's Women in Music conference, and in her speech she called out both the investment firm and the individuals who funded it as having culpability in her torment: "the Soros family, 23 Capital and the Carlyle Group." Swift went on to criticize private equity as a whole, calling it a "potentially harmful force [to] the music industry [that is] buying up our music as if it is real estate, as if it is an app or a shoe-line."

According to the New York Post, one of the named investors "was stunned that the normally staid world of private equity was even mentioned at a rock ‘n’ roll event."

Private equity stunned to be dragged into battle between Taylor Swift and Scooter Braun [Richard Morgan/New York Post]

(Thanks, Kathy Padilla! Read the rest

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Every year, the AI Now Institute (previously) publishes a deep, thoughtful, important overview of where AI research is and the ethical gaps in AI's use, and makes a list of a dozen urgent recommendations for the industry, the research community, and regulators and governments.

This year's report is especially important, as algorithmic discrimination, junk science, bad labor practices, and inappropriate deployments have gained salience and urgency.

The Institute's top recommendations are:

* Stop deploying "emotion detection" systems ("governments should specifically prohibit use of affect recognition in high-stakes decision-making processes"). These are junk science ("built on markedly shaky foundations") but they're being used for everything from medical care to insurance to student performance evaluation.

* Stop using facial recognition in "sensitive social and political contexts" ("including surveillance, policing, education, and employment — where facial recognition poses risks and consequences that cannot be remedied retroactively").

* Fix the industry's diversity problem "to address systemic racism, misogyny, and lack of diversity."

* Expand bias research beyond technical fixes: "center 'non-technical' disciplines whose work traditionally examines such issues, including science and technology studies, critical race studies, disability studies,and other disciplines keenly attuned to social context" (see: "second-wave algorithmic accountability")

* Mandatory disclosure of AI industry's climate impact: "Disclosure should include notifications that allow developers and researchers to understand the specific climate cost of their use of AI infrastructure."

* Give workers the right to "contest exploitative and invasive AI" with the help of trade unions: "Workers deserve the right to contest such determinations [by "AI-enabled labor-management systems"], and to collectively agree on workplace standards that are safe, fair, and predictable."

* Give tech workers the right to know what they're working on and to "contest unethical or harmful uses of their work": "Companies should ensure that workers are able to track where their work is being applied, by whom, and to what end."

* Expand biometric privacy rules for governments and private actors: A call to universalize Illinois's world-beating Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). Read the rest

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Once you've cut steak or poultry with some actual quality knives, it's really tough to go back to those budget blades you bought at the department store a couple of decades ago.

Consider that a fair warning about this 5-Piece Professional Damascus Chef's Kitchen Set. The holiday discount makes it easy to buy for a friend. But if you do, you might be eating dinner at their place a lot more often.

The striking look on the metal is a beautiful side effect of the ancient methods that Black Forge Knives uses to produce them. The end result is Damascus steel, extremely hard and capable of being honed to a precise edge.

The set includes a butcher's knife, filet knife, and other standard sizes to suit any kitchen needs, plus a leather pouch for easy carrying. Like a trusty cast-iron pan, there's a bit of oiling and care required to keep them at their best - but when they're at their best, there's nothing quite like them.

The entire set is already more than 60% off retail, but you can take an extra 15% off the final price by using the coupon code MERRYSAVE15. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/tI-oPoUDAzc/save-over-75-on-this-5-piece.html

Concerned about your eyesight? You probably should be. And we're not just talking about seniors here. Young or old, we're all at risk of coming down with vision issues

Most of us might get a vision test only once every couple of years or so when we get a new pair of glasses - if that. And there's not many who can afford regular preventative trips to an optometrist.

Luckily, there's an effective middle ground. The vision experts at EyeQue have a range of home test kits that can help you keep track of your vision.

The basic Personal Vision Tracker makes the whole procedure simple, not to mention inexpensive. You can use it multiple times over years for less than the cost of a single visit to most eye doctors. It's a device that attaches and pairs with your smartphone and allows you to get accurate readings on your vision within minutes. You can even use the results to order eyeglasses online from eyeque.com.

Need a little more in-depth info? The EyeQue VisionCheck is a similar unit that you can even use with your eyeglasses on if you'd like to confirm that your current prescription is up to snuff. This unit also lets you track your vision ratings by doing tests once a month and comparing your stats.

There's even the EyeQue Insight, a more full-featured version of the test that's tailor-made for kids but packed with useful info for all ages. The dual-lens device again attaches to your smartphone, and the tests are sweetened up for the younger set by way of an animated mascot and virtual prizes. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/yBFLi1tmR3g/these-home-vision-tests-offer.html

The Miami Herald reports that a high-ranking officer in the Monroe County Sheriff's department instructed another officer to act like a "white supremacist" and a "Neo-Nazi cop" when detaining a black suspect. The officer, named as Capt. Penny Phelps, was recorded and "relieved of her command."

Phelps was removed from her post as head of the major crimes and narcotics units on Wednesday, according to paperwork released to the Miami Herald Saturday. Ramsay said it is too early in the investigation to comment on whether Phelps could lose her job.

“We have to have all the facts first,” he said Saturday, adding Phelps has been with the sheriff’s office about 18 years and makes about $110,000 a year.

Reached by phone Saturday, Phelps said policy prohibits her from talking about the case.

The Herald has the tapes.

Photo: Monroe County Sheriff Read the rest

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Radicalized, my collection of four novellas, is one of the Wall Street Journal's picks for best sf books of 2019! My thanks to Tom Shippey, who listed it alongside of David Walton's Three Laws Lethal, Daniel Suarez's Delta-v, Erin Craig's House of Salt and Sorrows and Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Mother!

Read the rest

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[We're delighted to have Rosemary Frei back with us, this time reporting on a global transformation: once, infrastructure was created efficiently cheap central bank funding and now it's done with public-private partnerships, at much higher price-tags, creating massive transfers from taxpayers to the biggest businesses and private equity funds in the world. As we get ready for huge infrastructure buildouts to address climate change, the super-rich stand to reap trillions – money we could be spending on saving our lives and even our planet. -Cory]

Trillions of dollars are being plowed into high-tech hospitals, zero-emission public transit and other megaprojects around the globe. Shiny new infrastructure is popping up virtually everywhere, from Australia to Appalachia.

Yet leaders aren’t disclosing what taxpayers’ bills will be for this in the coming years.

They aren’t even determining the maximum affordable amount for the infrastructure projects, the majority of which are being delivered via public-private partnerships (‘P3s’).

Nor are any of the major political parties in Canada or the U.S. calling for objective value-for-money analyses, including studies of what the best greenhouse-gas-reduction bang is for each scarce public buck spent on green projects.

In addition, government agencies don’t always take such basic money-saving steps as offsetting the cost of new subway or LRT stations by finding developers that will build and pay for extensive retail, commercial and residential spaces on top of those stations.

This is despite already-unprecedented levels of government debt. And there are many other budget pressures: just one example is the impending loss, due to the switch to electric cars and trucks, of the more than $16 billion of gas and diesel tax collected annually by the feds and provinces in Canada. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/mgM2iHg09Cg/cashing-in-on-climate.html

We love our smartphones and tablets, but we also love to write. For a while now, there hasn't been a workable solution. Either hook it up to a keyboard (which defeats the purpose of a portable gadget) or resign ourselves to typing on tiny, unresponsive glass icons.

Looks like technology has finally caught up to the dilemma with a decent roll-up keyboard.

The Roller Wireless Rollable Keyboard pairs up quickly and easily by Bluetooth to a tablet or smartphone. There's a cradle built-in to the design that doesn't harm the portability an ounce but makes a great mount for whichever screen you're using.

The layout for the keyboard is a full-size five-row QWERTY format, with a matte finish and raised keys that respond nicely. If you're pulling an all-nighter, never fear. The battery life can handle up to 288 hours of work. When you're done, a magnetic sensor turns the whole thing off as soon as you roll it up.

The Roller Wireless Rollable Keyboard is currently on sale for 20% off, but you can knock another 15% off the final price by using our holiday discount code MERRYSAVE15. Read the rest

http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/rp3vvwS4UkY/this-5-row-bluetooth-qwerty-ke.html

SpotHero is an app that lets you reserve parking in advance. It seemed like a cool idea, so I installed it and gave it a try when I had a business lunch on Tuesday. I entered the name of the restaurant in Hollywood and SpotHero showed me a map of parking spots near the restaurant. I found one on the corner of Argyle and Sunset for $6.

When I arrived at the parking lot, I found that the entrance was barricaded. A worker standing by the entrance told me that the entire lot had been rented for the day. I showed her my SpotHero reservation, and she called for the lot attendant who came over told me the same thing. He said I could go to another lot at the corner of Hollywood and Vine and that I "might be able to work something out with them." He described the lot, but when I drove there I couldn't find the lot he was talking about, and I had my doubts that they would let me park there anyway.

At this point, I was already late for my meeting. Fortunately, I found a metered spot in the street, which is rare for this area, and paid $8 for 2 hours. So I ended up being late and paying $14 for parking.

After my meeting, I contacted SpotHero through Twitter to let them know about the problem with the lot. I received a reply on Wednesday morning:

This is Emily from SpotHero, our Social Media Monitor passed your information along to me.

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For years we’ve had silverfish darting around our guest bathroom floor. I bought some silverfish traps (little cardboard boxes with sticky goo to ensnare them) and they helped, but didn’t stop them. In 2017 I read that lavender oil is a good silverfish repellent. It’s only for a small bottle on Amazon, so I decided to give it a try. I wetted the end of a Q-Tip with the oil and ran it around the perimeter of the bathroom floor, adding a little extra to a seam between the floor and the wall. It smelled nice and did not see a single silverfish for two weeks. I finally saw one, reapplied lavender oil on the perimeter of the floor, and it keep the little bastards aways for an even longer time. Now I hardly ever see them, and treat the floor every few months.

Image of silverfish by Christian Fischer, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link Read the rest

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