• NEW CALIFORNIA RULES FOR ‘INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR’ STATUS: A state Supreme Court ruling last month sets new standards which will require every California employer to reevaluate everyone being paid compensation, to determine supportable overtime & tax reporting treatment. Workers are now presumed to be employees unless three factors exist: (1) Work scope “outside the usual course of hiring in the entity’s business”; (2) Evidence that the work is “independently engaged in a trade or business – the usual steps of establishing & promoting such as “incorporation or LLC, licensure, business locations & phones, advertising”; (3) “Free from the type of control ‘typically exercised,’ even if the employer does not choose to control the precise manner or details of work.” [CITRON & DEUTSCH NWSLTR – Jun 28. 18]
  •  “FALSE HOCKEY-STICK FORECASTS HAPPEN because of the disconnection between long-term strategy and the one-year operating plan.” Innovative companies are increasingly shifting from annual ‘Strategic Planning’ meetings to an ongoing process, and from multi-year budgeting to a rolling 12-month plan. Reality is that “once-a-year review is poorly suited to the dynamic nature of today’s business environment… and that incisive strategy conversations belong as part of regular management team meetings,” with a pipeline of initiatives for executing direction. Beyond the practical capacity to control timelines for transitional changes, this process can also overcome “challenges that plague strategy development including corporate politics, cognitive biases, the sway of individual incentives, and/or sandbagging by risk-averse managers.” DCG has decades of expertise in structuring effective process for strategic direction & implementation. Let us guide you.  [McKINSEY – Jun 13, 18]
  •  A WEIRD VIDEO GAME WHICH “POSITIONS SELF-CANNIBALISM AS A POSITIVE, MORAL AND FUN ENDEAVOR.”  ‘EAT ME’, is a mobile game which “symbolically deals with capitalism’s buyer’s remorse,”  manifested by a flying pig who discovers the Universal Truth that eating food is murder, so “on his quest for dematerialization, he  avoids eating cute fast-food friends (fries, burgers, shakes) as they plunge towards him from above. Otherwise he grows fatter until eventually exploding; but if he completes a level without eating anyone, gets rewarded with a respite to eat himself” one body part at a time… transcending consumptive corporeality and holding the key to inner peace, happiness & freedom.”   [ARTILLERY – Jul/Aug 18]
  •  “THE MASSIVE SPEED ADVANTAGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) OVER THE HUMAN MIND… will challenge our sensibilities and understanding of what constitutes life, our rights as humans, our moral compass, our sense of authority, and especially the ethical limits of science… Machine learning compresses learning cycles overwhelmingly since its ability to do one thing a billion times and get it perfect is a minute fraction of the nearly 32 years it takes humans to accumulate a billion seconds of intertwined fragments that make up who we are, with ability to rethink, shift gears, modify our approach and improvise at a moment’s notice… While AI is still in its infancy, we are seeing a number of emerging fields that bridge the hard & fast boundaries of biology and robotic – between organic/inorganic, biological/biomechanical engineering and artificial/real life – now all beginning to blur…as AI has a way of rewriting our current laws of physics.” When might artificial intelligence become real intelligence? is becoming a realistic question.” [FUTURIST THOMAS FREY – Jan 23, 18]
  •  “HOW DO CIVIL WARS HAPPEN? When two or more sides disagree on who runs the country and can’t settle the question through elections because they don’t even agree that elections are how you decide who’s in charge… Our system of government is based on the Constitution, but that’s not the system that actually runs the country today – where power (whether Federal or State, Executive or Legislative or Judiciary) is moved around by who controls an institution, be it politicians, media, corporations or non-profit sector… There’s no consistent legal standard, only a political one; an ideological network which some call the Deep State or Shadow Government… Professional government is a guild and, like medieval guilds, doesn’t allow one to serve if not a member having been indoctrinated into its arcane rituals. Since Trump and the bunch he brought in with him aren’t in the Club, we’re seeing what the pros do when amateurs try to walk in on them – investigate and send them to jail, using the tools of power to bring them down… ‘Representative’ government is about representing people, not about ideas of identity-politics groups represented by faces which nobody elected… Have no doubt, we’re in a civil war between conservative volunteer government and a leftist Democratic professional government.”  [D. GREENFIELD – sultanknish.blogspot.com – Jan 26, 18]
  •  THOUGHTS FOR THE WEEK: A robot can now fully prepare a burger, from bun toasting to toppings, in five minutes. Creator, a San Francisco restaurant, launched the “20 computer, 350 sensor, 50 actuator mechanism” machine last month and charges $6.

About exercise:  A whale swims all day, only eats fish, and drinks plenty of water, but is still fat… 

Beware the latest crazy “booster bag” scam: https://biggeekdad.com/2012/10/the-booster-bag-scam/