Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #30

In reverse order of importance:

A new report says cats kill billions of wild creatures in the U.S. every year.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK: “Iran successfully launches monkey into space.” Maybe.

Despite all of last week’s hullabaloo, North Korea has apparently not yet conducted another nuclear weapon test.

The Department of Agriculture is trying to kick candy bars out of public school vending machines. Or, in other words, the Obama administration is still trying to turn millions of schoolchildren into libertarians.

DARPA has a 1.8 gigapixel drone camera that can “detect and track moving objects as small as six inches from 20,000 feet in the air.” Good thing it belongs to the U.S. government and not anyone that would ever abuse such a thing.

DEFENSIVE GUN USE STORY OF THE WEEK: A Detroit high school coach was walking two female athletes to their cars when two men attacked with a gun. The coach pulled his concealed weapon and shot them both.

An Alabama man stormed a schoolbus, killed the bus driver, abducted a kid, and took him to an underground bunker, where he has been in a standoff with police for the last week.

A Brazil nightclub caught on fire and killed a couple hundred people.

France continues to pound Islamists in Mali.

6 thoughts on “Everything You Need to Know About Last Week’s News #30”

  1. The DARPA thing really isn’t impressive. They’ve declassified satalites which can read liscense plates from space, and I’ve heard rumors that classified ones are much better than that, like enough to read newspapers. Hell, Google Maps comes darn close to 6″ of resolution. Maybe the tracking thing is news, but these days anyone can fire up a quadcopter and glue a video camera to it.

    1. Hmm, you’re probably right. I almost put in something about GDP / unemployment reports instead, but part of me just didn’t care about tenths of percentage points of large calculations that will just be revised later anyway!

      1. I don’t think anyone does unemployment graphs better than Calculated Risk, and they seem to be showing that unemployment is getting better, but very slowly. I agree it’s not worth getting excited about the monthly announcements. If the trend changes, I’ll get excited. At this point it’s probably 20% AD and 80% micro causedm and I don’t think there’s much political pressure to do effective things which would lower the unemployment rate.

  2. The DARPA thing really isn’t impressive. They’ve declassified satalites which can read liscense plates from space, and I’ve heard rumors that classified ones are much better than that, like enough to read newspapers. Hell, Google Maps comes darn close to 6″ of resolution. Maybe the tracking thing is news, but these days anyone can fire up a quadcopter and glue a video camera to it.

    1. Hmm, you’re probably right. I almost put in something about GDP / unemployment reports instead, but part of me just didn’t care about tenths of percentage points of large calculations that will just be revised later anyway!

      1. I don’t think anyone does unemployment graphs better than Calculated Risk, and they seem to be showing that unemployment is getting better, but very slowly. I agree it’s not worth getting excited about the monthly announcements. If the trend changes, I’ll get excited. At this point it’s probably 20% AD and 80% micro causedm and I don’t think there’s much political pressure to do effective things which would lower the unemployment rate.

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