Mushrooms... Friend or Foe?

Quote:Half Moon Bay: Seven dead in another California mass shooting

'The US state of California is reeling from its third mass shooting in eight days after a man shot dead
seven former co-workers south of San Francisco. The attacks took place in the coastal city of Half Moon
Bay. Some of the victims were Chinese-American.


Suspect Chunli Zhao, 66, was arrested after driving to a police station.

It comes as the state mourns the deaths of 11 people in Monterey Park - about six hours south-east of
Half Moon Bay - during Lunar New Year celebrations. And just over a week ago, six people including a
teenage mother and baby were killed at a property in Goshen, central California.

In emotional remarks at a news conference in Half Moon Bay on Tuesday afternoon, California Governor
Gavin Newsom said he's grown weary of having to "say the same things we hear again and again" in the
wake of mass shootings.

"What the hell is wrong with us that we allow these weapons of war and large capacity magazines out on
the streets and sidewalks?" he asked. "Why have we allowed this culture, this pattern, to continue?"
"Only in America do we see this kind of carnage," he added.

The latest bloodshed to hit the state took place at two farms around the Half Moon Bay community in what
officials have described as instances of workplace violence. Four victims were discovered at a mushroom farm,
while the other three were later found at a nearby trucking business. An eighth victim who was transported to
hospital is out of surgery and in a stable condition, San Mateo County Sheriff Christina Corpus said at a
news conference on Tuesday.

The victims were five adult men and two women, Sheriff Corpus said. All of them were agricultural workers,
Half Moon Bay Mayor Deborah Penrose told CNN on Tuesday. The suspect was a resident of Half Moon Bay
and employed at the Mountain Mushroom Farm, Sheriff Corpus said.

"The only connection between the suspects and the victims is that they may have been co-workers," Sheriff
Corpus said. "All of the evidence we have points to this being an instance of workplace violence." The operator
of the farm - California Terra Garden - later confirmed that the suspect lived at one of the two locations where
people were killed.

The suspect is due to be arraigned on Wednesday in Redwood City, California, according to local US media
outlets. Alicia Ortega said her partner, Martin Martinez, a manager of the mushroom farm, was shot and killed
in the attack.

The last time she spoke to him was in "the morning, when he [went] to work", she told KPIX, a local affiliate o
CBS News, the BBC's US partner. A number of children who had recently been let out of school and lived on
the rural property saw the attack take place, Sheriff Corpus said.

"For children to witness this is unspeakable," the sheriff's office said.
After carrying out the killings, the suspect drove to a local police station where his arrest was caught on camera.
US news channels showed the suspect being pinned to the ground and arrested by police. He used a legally
purchased semi-automatic pistol, Sheriff Corpus said.

San Mateo County Board of Supervisors President Dave Pine told the Associated Press news agency that the
attacks were committed by a "disgruntled worker". In a statement, President Joe Biden said he was praying for
the victims and called on Congress to pass legislation reintroduced this week by Democratic senators that would
raise the minimum age to purchase assault weapons in the US to 21.

Just hours after the attack, seven people were injured and one person was killed in a shooting in Oakland - about
40 miles (64 km) north-east of Half Moon Bay. The Half Moon Bay attack is the 37th mass shooting in just 24 days,
according to Gun Violence Archive.

Even as details of the deadly attack in Half Moon Bay were coming in, detectives in the south of the state were
still hunting for a motive for the killings in Monterey Park. There, an elderly Asian immigrant murdered 11 people
in a suburban dance hall, before killing himself as police closed in...'

Mint a Trillion Dollar Platinum Coin!

Quote:The Trillion-Dollar Coin Might Be the Least Bad Option

Why the legal scholar Rohan Grey thinks the U.S. Mint can defuse the debt-ceiling standoff.

Rohan Grey is a law professor at Willamette University, in Oregon, and a leading promoter of an arcane idea that could save the country from all that drama: The Biden administration could exercise its unilateral legal authority over U.S. currency to mint a trillion-dollar platinum coin and use it to pay the government’s bills. The idea seems peculiar—it first surfaced in 2010 in the comments section of a niche blog devoted to unconventional monetary policy—but Grey and others believe it would be less disruptive than many alternative scenarios.

Annie Lowrey: Let’s start with a simple question. What is the debt ceiling?

Rohan Grey: Before the debt ceiling existed, Congress would include a method of financing with each individual spending bill that it passed. Every piece of spending legislation would say The Treasury is going to issue a certain amount of securities of this duration and type or Congress will fund it with this tax or by seigniorage.

In 1917, during World War I, Congress consolidated different authorities into one and allowed the Treasury to issue bonds without its specific guidance; it created the debt ceiling. Then in World War II, in 1939, it said: As the U.S. government gets more complicated, we’re going to put more trust and discretion in the executive branch. We’ll give you a general limit on the amount of Treasury securities you can issue, and you can use those funds for all our spending commitments. The history of the debt ceiling—counterintuitively—is the history of giving the Treasury, the executive branch, more discretion.

Lowrey: And now?

Grey: As is often the case in politics, the minute you create something, it gets used in unexpected and counterintuitive ways. The debt ceiling has become a locus, a symbolic place, for politicians to fight over overall spending, overall budgeting. Every time people want to second-guess budget practices, every time they don’t like a certain social-welfare program, the debt ceiling becomes a way to object.

Lowrey: Right now, a handful of Republicans have said they won’t lift the ceiling unless Congress negotiates a new set of spending cuts. What happens if Congress does not agree to do that and does not lift the ceiling?

Grey: Right now, we’re using “extraordinary measures,” which is something we’ve done repeatedly once the Treasury exhausts its authority to issue more bonds. Many of those extraordinary measures are much more ridiculous than minting the coin.

Lowrey: We’ll get there in a second.

Grey: The short answer is we have found increasingly convoluted and elaborate ways to avoid a situation in which the Treasury cannot pay its bills. Going forward, one option is to ignore the debt ceiling entirely. Continue issuing Treasury securities—this is sometimes called the Fourteenth Amendment option. If you’re not going to do that, you have two options. You can continue to pay the bills.

Lowrey: In that scenario, the Treasury is seeing if the Federal Reserve would let it overdraw its checking account, basically?

Grey: Right. The second choice is to not spend money that Congress has told the executive branch it must spend—whether that’s repaying existing debt, paying interest on existing debt, contractual debts, Social Security payments, anything else.

You ignore the debt ceiling and openly violate existing law regarding financing. Or you do not violate the debt ceiling, but you violate existing law regarding spending. My concern with the latter is that it means the Treasury secretary is put in the position of deciding what to spend money on and what not to spend money on. That’s a huge executive-branch power grab. In fact, President Nixon tried to do it in the 1970s. He said [in effect], I don’t want to spend money on certain welfare programs going to Black communities. Congress passed the Budget and Impoundment Control Act saying, No, when we say you have to spend, you have to spend. And the Supreme Court has reinforced that view in cases going back to Kendall v. Stokes in 1838.

Lowrey: A major concern is that if we default, there are going to be huge disruptions in the financial markets. Why?

Grey: Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt [in 2011], not because there was a chance the U.S. could not pay—the U.S. prints money; it can always pay its debts—but because of the absolute ridiculousness of the political situation. Creditors had reasonable concerns that the United States would fail to govern itself properly. That was the real concern: not default, but cartoonish incompetence.

I would be concerned that the president is willing to openly violate constitutional directives—that’s a bad state of affairs. From everything I’ve heard, there’s unanimity that that is where we’re headed. The White House will prioritize certain payments over others.

Lowrey: What does minting a trillion-dollar coin have to do with all of this? It’s got to be the greatest policy proposal to ever come from a blog comment, I guess.

Grey: The first form of constitutional lawmaking through internet meme.
There’s the general issue. There’s a famous Columbia Law Review article by these very serious constitutional law scholars, Neil Buchanan and Michael Dorf. The White House has used it as their guiding framework for debates over what to do. Buchanan and Dorf lay out a trilemma with the debt limit. Congress gives you three directives in seeming contradiction with one another: You have to spend X. You have to tax Y. You can only issue Z amount of debt. If those are in tension, they argue the debt limit should be the one that gets violated.

I agree with that. But there is, in fact, a fourth option. To frame it as a three-legged stool, you’re already failing. You’re already bringing ideology into what could be an open-ended discussion. If we take seriously that there are limits on spending, limits on taxation, and there is a debt ceiling, we have to exhaust that fourth option before we start ignoring laws on the books: the platinum coin.

Here’s the specific way it works: There’s a provision of law—deliberately put there by a very visionary U.S. Mint director, who had very ambitious goals for the Mint—that lets the Mint issue coins of whatever denomination they want and in whatever quantities they want. The coins don’t have to have a certain amount of metal content. They don’t have to be commemorative, circulating, or noncirculating—that’s all open. They have to be proof coins, which means high production grade. They have to be nice and shiny.

We don’t think of the Mint and the Fed as sisters, but they are, by the way. It’s just one is the sort-of lonely one that nobody talks about. The power to create money in the Constitution is literally the power to coin money.

Lowrey: So you mint a coin.

Grey: Yes. This is also thanks to a Republican named Mike Castle, as part of a commemorative-coin upgrade act that gets incorporated in an omnibus law. Mike Castle’s vision was predictably quite narrow: He wanted to make revenue for the Mint, and by extension the government, by selling commemorative coins. He was thinking in much smaller orders of magnitude, like a few million dollars or something. A nice little revenue raiser. But what if we make coins that aren’t $100 in face value or $1,000 in face value? The sky’s the limit.

Lowrey: How does minting the coin avoid the debt ceiling?

Grey: The Treasury secretary has the Mint create a trillion-dollar platinum coin. It deposits it at the Fed, which credits the Treasury for the full base value of the coin. The Federal Reserve gets an asset and a liability matching one another. It’s just like you taking a $100 bill to the bank and the bank giving you $100 in deposit liability. This is exactly the way that existing coins get booked, by the way. Just with a few more zeros.

Lowrey: It’s a goofy idea. It’s a dumb-sounding idea. It feels like exploiting a loophole. Is that why we haven’t done it?

Grey: That’s a very cynical position. People are coming up with all kinds of gimmicks that sound serious. They sound so complicated. You know, I was an elementary-school teacher, so I don’t have a problem with ideas so simple a 5-year-old can understand them. When a 5-year-old says, “Hey, maybe we shouldn’t have wars anymore,” you’ll hear people say, “Oh, you’re so naive! You’re a child! You don’t understand how the world really works.” Oh, I’m sorry. You’re the smart one! That’s why you’re dropping bombs on Vietnam!

The idea that all of these complicated mathematical models, all these complicated legal analyses, are valid—it’s bullshit. The reality is that this is a self-imposed problem, because we have a fetish for complexity and so-called financial nuance. Look at the history of extraordinary measures that the Treasury secretary has been taking since the 1980s! They’re all accounting gimmicks, every single one of them. People in the corporate-finance world say that [minting the coin] is a joke; this is a gimmick. They’re really saying it’s populist, not technocratic.

Lowrey: I do wonder whether they would have just done it 10 years ago if it had sounded less weird, or if the media had covered the idea differently.

Grey: When public officials want to change the number of years that the National Security Agency is allowed to retain data, they do it on a rainy Wednesday buried in paragraph three of a press release.

Lowrey: Instead we have a debt-ceiling near-crisis every couple years. It’s financial Groundhog Day.

Grey: For a long time, during the Obama administration, the strategy was: Let’s not legitimize debt-ceiling terrorism. If we start talking about ways to get around it, we’re taking the pressure off the Republicans to come back to the negotiating table and do what they should do.

It’s very dangerous to play a game of chicken. It requires two sides to play! If you swerve, there’s no game of chicken anymore. The Obama administration wanted to play a game of chicken. And their bet paid off in the sense that Mitch McConnell eventually blinked and kept blinking. It wasn’t costless. It was at the expense of millions of people that had to get sent home and didn’t get their paychecks, and a huge amount of political energy was devoted to this issue that could have been focused on other things. And they went through the deficit-reduction commission. It wasn’t costless. It was a very risky gamble that required them to say, in essence, I’m willing to lie about the obligations that I have as the executive branch to respect Congress’s spending authority.

Lowrey: If we were talking 10 years ago, I think I would have said that this was about small-government ideology on the Republican side. I would have been wrong about that. It’s not about budgetary discipline; it’s more about procedural power.

Grey: Yes. Their logic is: I want to litigate the previous Congress. I can’t do that. I can’t unwind the spending bills that were passed. I don’t have the votes. I’m going to point at the president and make him the patsy for it so I can shadowbox the prior Congress.

Lowrey: There’s a new set of Republicans doing just that.

Grey: You know, I think the media has to take some responsibility here too. We uncritically accept the Democrats’ framing of this as the correct one. The reality is, whether you are a bunch of apocalyptic children or seemingly cool-headed technocrats who can’t work out how to actually make government work, you’re both part of the problem. And hopefully, the media can take responsibility for the fact that they’ve had 10 years to frame this with a different narrative, and they haven’t done it. Every time, the fourth option is a gimmick, but extraordinary measures aren’t; every time, violating the Constitution is the “reasonable” path forward.

Quote:The Fed will have to accept the $1tn platinum coin by Nathan Tankus (Jan 18, 2023)

The US is approaching yet another self-inflicted debt-ceiling crisis, and that means it’s time to revisit a proposal to circumvent the entire contrived drama by minting a $1tn coin and depositing it with the Federal Reserve.

I’ve written about the basics of this idea before, which have been extensively covered by many news media outlets. You can read my summary of it here. Today I want to focus on potential reason(s) the White House is not pursuing the “coin option”.

Word is that the Biden administration has one core objection: they do not believe the Fed will accept the coin. This is consistent with comments from a White House spokesperson in 2021. Without the Fed’s co-operation, the argument goes, there is no way to turn the coin into funds to make bank payments.

So why wouldn’t the Fed accept the coin? This is not actually a simple question.

The platinum coin would be legal tender when issued, and the Fed is a fiscal agent to the Treasury. Being a fiscal agent means making payments, accepting deposits and providing other payment-related services to the Treasury. Thus, the Fed would appear to be obliged to accept the coin. But there’s one catch: coins are only “issued” and monetised when they are purchased.

As a result, if the Treasury were to try to deposit the coin at the Fed, the Fed could claim they don’t have an obligation to accept it and credit Treasury’s accounts, because it has not yet been “issued”. In other words, the central bank would decide that the round chunk of platinum from the US Mint is not yet a coin. (This makes the catch we cite above more of a Catch-22, as the Fed’s acceptance is what would “issue” it as a coin.)
...

Nevertheless, we can’t completely rule out the possibility that the Fed would indeed try to interfere with the coin’s issuance by refusing to accept it. The Treasury would then have to get an injunction against the Federal Reserve. The potential delays in receiving that injunction from legal debate and the like are not the kind of uncertainty the Treasury wants to deal with.

In that sense, it was worthwhile to mint and deposit a $1mn coin a year ago in order to have this legal fight in advance and set precedents for today. Since that didn’t happen, does that mean the platinum coin is not a useful option for today?

Not at all. The Treasury has more fiscal agents than the Fed. All it needs to do is find a chartered bank willing to accept the coin in deposit. That bank could then turn around and deposit the coin in its account at the Federal Reserve, and the Treasury can either make payments from that bank account, or transfer the funds to its own account with the Fed.

The coin, having already been issued, would be legal tender, and the Fed would have no basis for refusing it. Even so, I don’t think the Fed would force the Treasury to seek alternatives. So the Biden administration should call the Fed’s bluff. Avoiding catastrophic default — or needless austerity — is on the line.

The Doomsday Clock was moved from 100 seconds to 90 seconds to midnight today, Jan. 24, the closest it's ever been to Armageddon. Should have been mothballed 30 years ago.







Subspecies of psychic mutant-humans:



The Alpha-Omega The 'Divine Bomb'



To read the reasoning behind the decision of the Bulletin’s Science and Security Board to reset the Doomsday Clock, which takes into account nuclear risks, climate change, biological threats (especially disease outbreaks), and disruptive technologies, see lords of doom: (now translated in Russian & Ukrainian)


Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists




BBC Doomsday



Barron's





Today in 1961—less than four days after President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration—a B-52G bomber on airborne alert over North Carolina suffered a massive fuel leak, caught fire, and exploded approaching Seymour Johnson AFB. As it broke up, two 3.8-Mt B39 Mod 2 H-bombs fell out. Only a single “simple, dynamo-technology, low voltage switch” kept it from detonating.

As the weapons broke free, three of four arming safety devices in one of the bombs were activated, causing it to run through all but one step of the arming sequence as it plunged to earth.

Unlike the first bomb, the second bomb’s parachute did not deploy. It broke up as it penetrated the sandy clay soil at about 700 mph, ~.75 miles from where the first bomb landed, in tobacco and cotton fields about 12 miles north of Goldsboro. This bomb was also partially armed.


Here is a good overview of this Broken Arrow excerpted from the Sandia National Laboratories 2010 documentary, “Always/Never: The Quest for Nuclear Safety, Control, and Survivability.”




As this simple simulation shows (and depending on the wind patterns the day of the accident), if even one of these nuclear weapons had exploded, it would have devastated eastern North Carolina and much of the eastern seaboard, changing US history forever.


NukeMap


In 2012, North Carolina's Our State Magazine published a retrospective on the accident which included first-person accounts from Adam Mattocks, a pilot on the flight, and Billy Reeves, who was an 18-year-old living outside of Faro and saw the plane crash:

The Night Hydrogen Bombs Fell Over North Carolina

In 2018, former explosive ordnance disposal technician Lt. Jack ReVelle (USAF, ret.) talked with the BBC about locating, defusing, and salvaging the two thermonuclear bombs involved in this very serious Broken Arrow accident.


Defusing Nuclear Bombs: The Goldsboro 'Broken Arrow'


Also in late 2018, ReVelle talked about his experiences at this nuclear weapons accident site with his daughter Karen for StoryCorps on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition.”


8 Days, 2 H-Bombs, And 1 Team That Stopped A Catastrophe

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Ever wonder what happened to the Alien craft testing program at Area 51?

Did it suddenly disappear after Bob Lazar spilled the beans on the evening news in late 1989?

Well for one thing, that location continued to test these craft there until the end of 1992.

I collected the reports and videos people took out there until 1993 then -poof- the testing stopped at that location.

Myself and many others were very surprised the military had continued testing these craft there on a weekly basis for 3 years after Bob had revealed the existence of the program.

Once testing of these craft had vanished from Area 51 we wondered where this program had been moved to.

Around 2010 John Lear revealed that a friend of his had taken an ATV out at night to probe the perimeter of Dugway military base located in the NW corner of Utah and nearly got caught by security, but confirmed he had seen gravity propulsion craft being tested that night.

Well that certainly made sense to relocate there since it was a short drive from Area 51 to Dugway and the new digs had a much larger security perimeter than Area 51 had.

I became a subscriber to the UTAH UFO group on YT to see if they ever captured anything unusual.

Sure enough in 2011 they made a trip to the outskirts of Dugway and got some very interesting footage.

I passed it along to my team who used our special software on it that can detect gravity propulsion in use and bingo!

So I spotted this video the other day from John Greenwald of The Black Vault fame which tells me that they are still active in their new digs -

This is sorta old news, but new to me as I don't pay much attention to restaurant technology.

This story is so wild I couldn't believe what I was reading and this is from 2018. One can only dream to ever be as badass as CFAs DevOps team. Chick-fil-A, my favorite defense contractor. Thread title is bit of sarcasm and will make more sense further at bottom of rabbit hole. Quoting whole article as it blew my mind.

Quote:Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

by Brian Chambers, Caleb Hurd, Sean Drucker, Alex Crane, Morgan McEntire, Jamie Roberts, and Laura Jauch (the Chick-fil-A IOT/Edge team)

In a recent post, we shared about how we do bare metal clustering for Kubernetes on-the-fly at the Edge in our restaurants. One of the most common (and best) questions we got was “but why?”. In the post we will answer that question. If you are interested in more or prefer video to text, you can also check out Brian and Caleb’s presentation at QConNY 2018.



Why K8s in a restaurant?

Why does a restaurant company like Chick-fil-A want to deploy Kubernetes at the Edge? What are the goals? That, we can answer.

• Low-latency, internet-independent applications that can reliably run our business
  
• High availability for these applications
  
• Platform that enables rapid innovation and that allows delivery of business functionality to production as quickly as possible
  
• Horizontal scale — infrastructure and application development teams
  

Capacity Pressures

Chick-fil-A is a very successful company in large part because of our fantastic food and customer service — both the result of the great people that operate and work in our restaurants. They are unmatched in the industry. The result is very busy restaurants. If you have been to a Chick-fil-A restaurant, this is not news to you. If you have not been, it’s time to go!

While we are very grateful for our successes, they have created a lot of capacity challenges for us as a business. To put it in perspective, we do more sales in six days a week than our competitors do in seven (we are closed on Sunday). Many of our restaurants are doing greater than three times the volume that they were initially designed for. These are great problems to have, but they create some extremely difficult challenges related to scale.

At Chick-fil-A, we believe the solutions to many of these capacity problems are technology solutions.

A new generation of workloads

One of our approaches to solving these problems is to invest in a smarter restaurant.

Our goal: simplify the restaurant experience for Owner/Operators and their teams and optimize for great, hot, tasty, food served quickly and with a personal touch, all while increasing the capacity of our existing footprint.

Our hypothesis: By making smarter kitchen equipment we can collect more data. By applying data to our restaurant, we can build more intelligent systems. By building more intelligent systems, we can better scale our business.

As a simple example, imagine a forecasting model that attempts to predict how many Waffle Fries (or replace with your favorite Chick-fil-A product) should be cooked over every minute of the day. The forecast is created by an analytics process running in the cloud that uses transaction-level sales data from many restaurants. This forecast can most certainly be produced with a little work. Unfortunately, it is not accurate enough to actually drive food production. Sales in Chick-fil-A restaurants are prone to many traffic spikes and are significantly affected by local events (traffic, sports, weather, etc.).

However, if we were to collect data from our point-of-sale system’s keystrokes in real-time to understand current demand, add data from the fryers about work in progress inventory, and then micro-adjust the initial forecast in-restaurant, we would be able to get a much more accurate picture of what we should cook at any given moment. This data can then be used to give a much more intelligent display to a restaurant team member that is responsible for cooking fries (for example), or perhaps to drive cooking automation in the future.

Goals like this led us to develop an Internet of Things (IOT) platform for our restaurants. To successfully scale our business we need the ability to 1) collect data and 2) use it to drive automation in the restaurant.

Rather than select many different vendor solutions that were silo’d and disconnected and therefore difficult to integrate, we wanted an open ecosystem that we own. This approach enables us to allow internal developers and/or external partners to develop connected “things” or applications for the Edge and leverage our platform for common needs like security, identity, and connectivity.

Put another way, the IOT/Edge team owns a small subset of the overall application base that is deployed on the edge, and is effectively a runtime platform team for the in-restaurant compute platform.

Architecture Overview

Here is a look at the architecture we developed (and are using today) to meet these goals.



Cloud Control Plane

Today, we run our higher order control plane and core IoT services in the cloud. This includes services like:

• Authorization Server — device identity management
  
• Data ingest / routing — collect data and send it where it needs to go
  
• Operational time series data — logs, monitoring, alerting, tracing
  
• Deployment management — self-service deployment for our application teams using GitOps (kudos to our friends at Weaveworks for sharing the term). We plan to share our work and code soon.
  

These services also run in Kubernetes so that we have a common paradigm across all of our team’s deployments.

Edge

“Edge Computing” is the idea of putting compute resources close to the action to attain a higher level of availability and/or lower level of latency.

We think of our Edge Computing environment as a “micro private cloud”. By this, we mean that we provide developers with a series of helpful services and a place to deploy their applications on our infrastructure.
Does this make us the largest “cloud provider” in the world? You can be the judge of that.



In all seriousness, this approach gives us a unique kind of scale. Rather than a few large K8s clusters with tens-to-hundreds-of-thousands of containers, at full scale we will have more than 2000 clusters with tens of containers per cluster. And that number grows significantly as we open many new restaurants every year.

Our edge workloads include:

• platform services such as an authentication token service, pub/sub messaging (MQTT), log collection/exfiltration (FluentBit), monitoring (Prometheus), etc.
  
• applications that interact with “things” in the restaurant
  
• simple microservices that serve HTTP requests
  
• machine learning models that synthesize cloud-developed forecasts with real-time events from MQTT to make decisions at the edge and drive automation
  

Our physical edge environment obtains it’s connectivity from multiple in-restaurant switches (and two routers), so we operate on a very highly available LAN.

Today, nearly all of the data that is collected at the Edge is ephemeral and only needs to exist for a short time before being exfiltrated to the cloud. This could change in the future, but it has kept our early-stage deployments very simple and made them much easier to manage.

Since we have a highly available Kubernetes cluster with data replicated across all nodes, we can ensure that we can retain any data that is collected until a time when the internet is again available for data exfiltration. We can also aggregate, compress, or drop data dynamically at the Edge based on business need.

Given all of this, we still use the cloud first for our services whenever possible. Edge is the fallback deployment target when high-availability, low-latency, in-restaurant applications are a must.

Following in the footsteps of giants

We run our Edge infrastructure on commodity hardware that costs us, ballpark, $1000/restaurant. We wanted to keep our hardware investment low-cost and horizontally scalable. We have not found a way to make it dynamic/elastic yet, but maybe one day (order on Amazon w/ free 30-second shipping perhaps?).

With our architecture, we can add additional compute capacity as-needed by adding additional devices. We may upsize our hardware footprint in the future, but what we have makes sense for our workloads today. Google also got started scaling workloads on commodity hardware (written in 2003, where has the time gone?)… so we’re in good company!

We hope our approach to Edge infrastructure encourages creative thinking for anyone that is working with scarce resources (physical space, budget, or otherwise). I think that’s everyone.


Everything else

Finally, we have our connectivity layer and the IOT things. Many of our devices are fully-powered (no batteries) but still constrained on chipsets/processing power. Wi-Fi is the default method for connectivity. We have not committed to a low-power protocol yet, but are interested in LoRa and the WiFi Halo (802.11ah) project.

For things/physical devices, our team also provides developers with an SDK for executing on-boarding flows (all OAuth based) and for accessing services within the Edge environment such as MQTT. Brian talked about this more extensively at QConNY 2017 (note that we were using Docker Swarm vs. Kubernetes at the time).

Containers at the Edge

Why would you want to run containers at the Edge? For the same reason you would run them in the cloud (or anywhere else).

Dependency management becomes easier. Testing is easier. The developer experience is easier and better. Teams can move much faster and more autonomously, especially when reasonable points of abstraction (such as k8s namespaces) and resource limits (CPU/RAM) are applied.

Another key design goal was reliability for our critical applications, meaning no single points-of-failure in the architecture. There are many ways this type of goal can be achieved, but we decided having > 1 physical hosts at the Edge and a container-based orchestration layer was the best approach for the types of workloads we have and for the skillset of our teams.

We initially called our strategy “Redundant Restaurant Compute”, which really speaks to the goal behind our approach. Later, we transitioned to calling it “Edge Computing”.

The ability to orchestrate services effectively and to preserve a desired number of replicas quickly and consistently attracted us to Kubernetes.

Why Kubernetes?

At first, we planned to use Docker Swarm for container orchestration, but made the move to Kubernetes in early 2018 because we believe it’s core capabilities and surrounding ecosystem are (by far) the strongest. We are excited about taking advantage of some of the developments around Kubernetes like Istio and OpenFaaS.

Most importantly, we firmly believe…

Ideas, in and of themselves, have no value.

Code, in and of itself, has no value.

The only thing that has value is code that is running in production. Only then have you created value for users and had the opportunity to impact your business.



Therefore, at Chick-fil-A, we want to optimize for taking great ideas, turning them into code, and getting that code running in production as fast as possible.

Research says that using the latest and greatest technology (like Kubernetes) has no correlation to a team or organization’s success. None. The ability to turn ideas into code and get code into production rapidly does.

If you can accomplish this goal and meet your requirements with VMWare, a single machine, some other clustering tool or orchestration layer, or using just the cloud, we would not try and convince you to switch to Kubernetes and follow our lead. The simplest possible solution is usually the best solution.

At Chick-fil-A, we believe that the best way for us to achieve these goals is for us to embrace containerization, and to do so with Kubernetes. At the end of the day, its all there to help you “Eat More Chicken”.

Next

What are our next steps?

In the next 18-24 months, we expect to increase the number of smart/connected devices in our restaurants to > 100,000 and complete our chain-wide rollout of Kubernetes to the Edge. The number of use cases for “brain applications” that control the restaurant from the edge continue to grow, and we look forward to serving them and sharing more with the community about what we learn.

We will also take a close look at the Google GKE On-Prem service that was just announced since it might save us from building and managing clusters in the future. What we have done to-date is a sunk cost, and if we can re-focus resources on the differentiating rather than infrastructure, you can be certain we will.

If we failed to answer questions you have about what we’re doing, don’t hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn. If we can help you with any challenges with Kubernetes at the Edge, please let us know. At Chick-fil-A, it is always our please to share, and (kudos to Caleb for this) “our pleasure to server you”.

Edge Computing at Chick-fil-A

Quote:Enterprise Restaurant Compute

by the CFA Enterprise Restaurant Compute Team

The last time we talked publicly about our Edge Kubernetes deployment was summer of 2018.

Since then, we have completed a chain-wide deployment and run it in production for almost 4 years. Every Chick-fil-A restaurant has an Edge Compute cluster running Kubernetes. We also run a large-scale cloud-deployed infrastructure to support our restaurant footprint.

We have integrated with several of our restaurant systems to assist with Kitchen Production processes or onboarding mobile payment terminals used in our Drive Thru. In total, there are tens-of-thousands of devices deployed across our restaurants that are actively providing telemetry data from a wide variety of smart equipment devices (fryers, grills, etc).

Our purpose today is to catch readers up to our current state and share what has changed over the past 4 years. There are still many exciting opportunities for the platform on the horizon, but we’ll leave that for another day…

[Much more at the headline link]

Quote:How the U.S. Air Force Deployed Kubernetes and Istio on an F-16 in 45 days

As hybrid cloud strategies go, the U.S. military certainly is taking a unique approach.



Just like almost everything else, military organizations increasingly depend on software, and they are turning to an array of open source cloud tools like Kubernetes and Istio to get the job done, according to a presentation delivered by Nicholas Chaillan, chief software officer for the U.S. Air Force, at KubeCon 2019 in San Diego. Those tools have to be deployed in some very interesting places, from weapons systems to even fighter planes. Yes, F-16s are running Kubernetes on the legacy hardware built into those jets.

“One point for the team was to demonstrate that it could be done,” Chaillan said. He challenged the Air Force and its partners to get Kubernetes up and running on a jet in 45 days, and while that was as difficult as it sounds, the team met the goal and F-16s are now running three concurrent Kubernetes clusters, he said.

Quote:A conversation with Southcom commander General Laura J. Richardson on security across the Americas (January 19, 2023)

US Southern Command plays a critical role in bolstering Latin American and Caribbean security, building national and international ties to advance US leadership. With a rich history of partnership, the combatant command has also contributed extensively to regional humanitarian efforts and recently celebrated twenty-five years of its Human Rights Initiative. What new strategies can US Southern Command deploy to promote security and prosperity within the Latin American and Caribbean theater? This event will explore General Richardson’s priorities to strengthen partnerships and counter threats and challenges impacting regional security.

Quote:Lithium extraction fields in South America have been captured by an aerial photographer in stunning high definition.

But while the images may be breathtaking to look at, they represent the dark side of our swiftly electrifying world.

Lithium represents a route out of our reliance on fossil fuel production. As the lightest known metal on the planet, it is now widely used in electric devices from mobile phones and laptops, to cars and aircraft.

Lithium-ion batteries are most famous for powering electric vehicles, which are set to account for up to 60 per cent of new car sales by 2030. The battery of a Tesla Model S, for example, uses around 12 kg of lithium.

These batteries are the key to lightweight, rechargeable power. As it stands, demand for lithium is unprecedented and many say it is crucial in order to transition to renewables.

However, this doesn't come without a cost - mining the chemical element can be harmful to the environment.

German aerial photographer Tom Hegen specialises in documenting the traces we leave on the earth's surface. His work provides an overview of places where we extract, refine and consume resources with his latest series exposing the “Lithium Triangle.”

In pictures: South America's 'lithium fields' reveal the dark side of our electric future

What Mexico’s planned geoengineering restrictions mean for the future of the field


Hold on, not so fast, only the American military-intelligence-industrial complex will carry out such geoengineering. Afterall, they have decades of experience & planning.

Quote:In 2025, US aerospace forces can "own the weather" by capitalizing on emerging technologies and focusing development of those technologies to war-fighting applications. Such a capability offers the war fighter tools to shape the battlespace in ways never before possible. It provides opportunities to impact operations across the full spectrum of conflict and is pertinent to all possible futures. The purpose of this paper is to outline a strategy for the use of a future weathermodification system to achieve military objectives rather than to provide a detailed technical
road map.

Current technologies that will mature over the next 30 years will offer anyone who has the necessary resources the ability to modify weather patterns and their corresponding effects, at least on the local scale. Current demographic, economic, and environmental trends will create global stresses that provide the impetus necessary for many countries or groups to turn this weather-modification ability into a capability.

In the United States, weather-modification will likely become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications. Our government will pursue such a policy, depending on its interests, at various levels. These levels could include unilateral actions, participation in a security framework such as NATO, membership in an international organization such as the UN, or participation in a coalition. Assuming that in 2025 our national security strategy includes weather-modification, its use in our national military strategy will naturally follow. Besides the significant benefits an operational capability would provide, another motivation to pursue weather-modification is to deter and counter potential adversaries.

In this paper we show that appropriate application of weather-modification can provide battlespace dominance to a degree never before imagined. In the future, such operations will enhance air and space superiority and provide new options for battlespace shaping and battlespace awareness.[1] "The technology is there, waiting for us to pull it all together;"[2] in 2025 we can "Own the Weather."

In extreme cases, it might involve the creation of completely new weather patterns, attenuation or control of severe storms, or even alteration of global climate on a far-reaching and/or long-lasting scale.

Weather as a Force Multiplier (36 pg PDF)

Here's an update to that "Dreamland Resort" guy and his ordeal with the federal "mob" that happened last November...



https://twitter.com/g_knapp/status/1590893322322968577

Quote:The Enduring Mystery of an Aggressive FBI Raid Near Area 51

When federal agents kicked in his door one icy morning last November, Joerg Arnu was still asleep. Roused by deafening bangs and shouts, the 60-year-old retired software developer stumbled out of bed to find a crowd of unfamiliar men in military gear standing in his foyer.

At least one of the half dozen men, he remembers, was visibly armed and pointing a gun in his direction. Another was holding a riot shield. “This is the FBI,” one yelled. “Put your hands against the wall!” Less than a minute later, Arnu was being handcuffed and led forcefully outside, dressed only in sweatpants and a T-shirt. His house, located in the remote town of Rachel, Nevada, had been swarmed by police vans. Shivering from a lightly falling snow, he was placed in the back of one of the vehicles, while over a dozen agents from the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations—the Air Force’s secretive counterintelligence wing—poured into his home. Not long afterwards, agents started asking him questions. One of the first things they wanted to know was: “Are there any booby traps on the property?” To Arnu, it seemed like a pretty weird thing to ask. A retired software developer and self-admitted senior citizen? Did that really sound like somebody who would boobytrap his own house?
....

As of this week, it’s been more than two months since the government raided both of Arnu’s properties, but he still hasn’t been charged with a crime. He was served with a search warrant that was missing dozens of pages and gave no reason for the raid; the case records related to the warrant have been sealed, so there’s no way of telling what the point of the search was. He also hasn’t been able to get in touch with the FBI, aside from a letter from the agency’s legal department denying reimbursement for the damage caused during the raids, he said. And, it goes without saying, he never got his stuff back.

“I believe the search, executed with completely unnecessary force by overzealous government agents, was meant as a message to silence the Area 51 research community,” Arnu recently wrote on his website.

Michael German, a former FBI agent who has been critical of the bureau since leaving it, called Arnu’s case “troubling.” German, who now works as a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, told Gizmodo that it wasn’t unusual for the FBI to conduct an operation like this to “send a message,” and to cow a specific individual or community. That’s particularly disturbing given Arnu’s role as a person involved in media, he added.

“Certainly it [an operation like this] could intimidate other journalists who were writing about these secret government programs. That chilling effect seems to be part of why they would be so aggressive in a case where the level of dangerousness is not clear,” he said. On top of this, German notes that the targeting of Joerg’s computer equipment “raises concerns that the intent may have been to impede his ability to exercise his First Amendment rights.”
...
While Arnu waits for answers, he’s trying to get on with his life. In addition to a slew of interviews with the press, the blogger has launched a GoFundMe to help pay for the damages inflicted by the raids and to finance his legal expenses (he has now hired a lawyer). He’s also trying to make up for the thousands of dollars of computer equipment that have vanished into government evidence lockers.

“I was treated like a drug dealer or some hardened criminal,” Arnu said during one of our interviews. “I was manhandled. I’m a sixty-year-old guy. There was no reason to bang me against the wall and drag me out of my own home in handcuffs...I just don’t see any reason to treat an unarmed senior citizen that way.”

For those who hate autocomplete, read on.

Quote:It was early last summer. My wife was at an airport. The weather was hot and her shuttle bus was late. She was texting with a family member who had come down with a cough. The family member had taken a COVID test and reported to my wife that it was negative. My wife, returning to the topic of her stressful day, typed the words “I need a,” intending to write “I need a drink.” But the autocomplete feature on her phone, interceding at the speed of thought – of artificial, digital thought -- offered another suggestion: “I need a booster.”

The nightmare is all right there, if you unpack it: The unsought programming of human behavior by pervasive, everyday technologies controlled by deceptive, obscure external actors. They’re deceptive, in this case, because autocomplete is sold as a kind of extension of your will, frontrunning your most probable verbal choices in order to save you time and ease your writing. The feature is not sold, so far as I’m aware, as a life coach, a public health aide, or a physician. But it had behaved like one that day, and my wife, who notices everything, had caught it – she even took a screenshot. When she told me of the incident, it confirmed an emerging feeling that my own texts were often interrupted by digital guides less interested in finishing my thoughts than in foisting on me their own. Strangely, the unusual suggestions were of a sexual cast sometimes – “orgasm” seemed to have popped up several times; not a word I tend to use in texts – which is why I remembered the occasions. Still, I couldn’t cite one in detail. Going with the eerie flow of life in a mediated, moderated age, I’d chosen to ignore them. I’d let them pass.

It’s choice we face constantly these days, particularly in our dealings with technology and the information flooding through it: Should we indulge our suspicions about the machine and the whole murky power complex it represents, or should we dismiss them, in some cases or all?

The argument for repeatedly dismissing them – because they are aroused repeatedly – seems to me to grow weaker by the day, if it is even an argument at all. To return to my wife’s “I need a booster” experience, which may seem minor in isolation but is enormous if treated as one instance of something that very likely happens countless times a day and for an unfathomable range of motives, not many people I know would advocate for phones which plant hypnotic prompts in users’ heads during their innocent conversations with relatives, under the cover of helping the user type. The partisans of covert mind control are still quite few, I like to think, even when the cause in question is popular. The party of thoughtless quiescence in such matters is vast, however, and it rarely defends its inaction. It’s rarely asked to.

Maybe it should be held to higher standards. Just last week, two troubling stories circulated about the secret workings of social media. Facebook, we learned, has been compiling posts which it deems “anti-government” and forwarding them to the FBI. To judge by press reports, these allegedly subversive posts included ones which questioned the results of the 2020 election, but they weren’t limited to such. How the posts were identified remains a mystery – algorithmically, through key words, or in some other way? – but the facts the operation occurred and that ideological filtering of posts is deemed so reliable by Facebook’s managers that they treat it as a form of legal evidence, is startling enough. Meanwhile, over at Twitter, we were told by an in-house whistle blower testifying before the senate, at least one Chinese spy was on the payroll. Other security lapses were also alleged. “It’s not farfetched,” the whistle blower asserted, “to say that an employee inside the company could take over the accounts of all the senators inside this room.”

Old news, I hear readers thinking. But it is new news – new news which explicitly confirms long-held suspicions of a general kind. And, for other observers, of a definite kind. They thought ahead, saw patterns, warned us of them, and urged on us a host of actions, from denouncing these services to cancelling them to calling for them to be to public account. Which is starting, however feebly, to happen. Not because of the quite people but the loud ones.

These excitable thinkers would be the “paranoid,” or so they’re often designated by those whose habit is to watch another amusing video when it’s shown that Tik-Tok, for example, logs its users’ every keystroke, collecting passwords and heaven knows what else and passing them along to hostile powers. They would be those who, on reading of my wife’s text, would leap to speculate on the implications of an AI-driven program to mold the thoughts, and ultimately the actions, of the human race. The entire race, I say, no less than that, because it is the nature of “paranoia” that its reach exceeds its grasp. Not content to dwell on individual cases, it strives to explore, to extrapolate, to guess, usually in the negative. It entertains the possibility that the anonymous lords of auto-complete might someday trade spooky nudges for bold directives, overriding or even supplanting our weakened wills. By then, we may not possess wills, nor desire them. Too disruptive to the training process.

To voluntarily run such bleak scenarios inside one’s busy little brain is thought to be unhealthy by the experts. Therapists call it “catastrophizing.” They are given to writing prescriptions for the condition. In extreme cases, they view such thinking as evidence of schizophrenia, for which an oft-used medication is a pill with the trade name Abilify. Last week, on my Twitter feed, I saw an ad for it – for a special version of the pill which contains, get this, a tiny transmitter which relays physical data to smart phone apps. The transmitter not only tells the phone (or several phones, if the patient “authorizes” them) if the pill has been swallowed, it also discloses how long the patient has “rested” recently and how many steps they’ve taken. Fascinating. Fascinating that big pharma should seek to implant tiny monitors in people whose illness is often marked the delusion that they have tiny monitors inside them.

But I digressed. Or did I? The topic was paranoia, its pros and cons, and the question I was driving toward is whether it’s tantamount to a duty now, at least for those who pretend to think at all. To learn about a psychoactive drug that broadcasts Bluetooth signals to nearby phones, and then to remember we live in a society of medical mandates with penalties attached, and to further recall that the data on one’s phones is subject to scrutiny by spies and cops, should require of an even an amateur intellectual a measure of cautionary creative inference. What’s the alternative, really? Deep sedation? How much more unconsciousness can you take, and how much more of it should we take, who don’t wish to wake up shuffling along in surveilled, entranced submission to whoever’s doing our thinking for us?

Do your duty, I say. Be responsible. Be paranoid. The future intends to complete itself without you, and if you don’t like it, you may need a pill – which you may be unable to refuse. Go crazy now, on your own terms, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll have some say over how crazy you’ll be driven then.

My personal belief is all planets are but eggs for a species to develop, "the species hatches and moves out into the universe or ceases to be." Plenty of species have become extinct and anyone who thinks it can not happen to the human race then they have not looked at the history of Earth.