Six years ago (August 1, 2007), the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis — an eight-lane, steel truss arch bridge that handled 140,000 cars daily – collapsed during the evening rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring 145.
The NTSB cited a design flaw as the likely cause of the the catastrophic failure.
Last night, a section of a bridge along Interstate-5 in Washington State collapsed.
Here’s the good news and the bad news …
Did you know that the “frontline” IRS employees involved in the IRS scandal are unionized?
Yep.
Members of NTEU – the National Treasury Employees Union.
So what?
First, like most government employee unions, the NTEU is all for bigger government and fatter retirement benefits.
So, it’s no big surprise that the union endorsed Obama for President.
Nothing shady there … strictly legal … and consistent with the employees’ interests.
But, here’s where things get interesting …
In the old days, folks fretted (or dreamed) about the effect of computerized automation in factories and ATMs replacing bank tellers.
According to a recent McKinsey report:
Physical labor and transactional tasks have been widely automated …
Now, advances in data analytics, low-cost computer power, machine learning, and interfaces that “understand” humans are moving the automation frontier rapidly towards “knowledge work”..
Developments in how machines process language and understand context are allowing computers to search for information and find patterns of meaning at superhuman speed.
Here are a couple of examples …
The Homa Files 