Cannes (France) (AFP) – Channing Powell, the creator of the hit horror television series “The Walking Dead”, is not someone who is easily spooked.

But Powell is scared, “terrified actually” of what big tech might be up to.

And critics were too after watching her spine-chilling new series, “The Feed”, premiere in Cannes this week.

The Amazon show is set in the near future when we can share emotions, thoughts and what we see with our eyes on a social network embedded in our brains.

If that sounds as far fetched as the post-apocalyptic zombies of “The Walking Dead”, Powell has news for you.

“Elon Musk and Facebook are already trying to develop the technology portrayed in the show,” she told AFP at the Canneseries festival in the French Riviera resort.

The Tesla boss and sometime Twitter warrior “is developing a neuro lace (computer) that covers the entire brain that you would control with thought,” Powell said.

“Facebook has been working on something similar in some place called ‘Building 8’ where it has all its secret projects.”

Both are very quiet about what precisely they are doing, said Powell.

– Chips controlled by thought –

However, “people at MIT have already created something you can attach to your ear that is controlled by thought.

“It can tell you the time and how much groceries are when you walk through the aisles of a supermarket,” she added.

“The Feed” — which will screen later this year — is based on Nick Clark Windo’s 2018 novel of the same name.

Told from inside the fabulously wealthy family who invented “The Feed” and now effectively control the world, the story doesn’t end well.

Given what we have learned about the harvesting and misuse of personal data from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and how Google can seem to predict our needs before we search for it on our smartphone, that should not be too surprising.

“We have seen dystopian shows before but never like this,” Powell insisted, who cast British actor David Thewlis as the tech guru patriarch of the seemingly well-meaning clan.

“It was a very realistic portrayal of what happens when we let technology control us — and we are heading in that direction.

“We cannot let go of our iPhones, we need to check Instagram every hour or minute. The notion that you would put something inside your head is really frightening to me,” the 39-year-old said.

– ‘Terrifying’ –

But it is where tech companies are going, she insisted, the next logical step from Google’s smart glasses.

Powell said workers in some companies in Belgium and Sweden already have chips implanted in their bodies.

“What is happening around us right now is so scary. When somebody like Elon Musk (a radical libertarian) — who is inside this — is telling the government, ‘You need to regulate us, and stop us from doing what we are doing’, that is terrifying. Because he knows way more than we know,” she said.

Paranoia about new technology is nothing new, Powell admitted, dating back beyond the Industrial Revolution.

But what we are living through now, and with little or no regulation to hold tech companies back, is of a different order, she argued.

“Technology has brought us so much…. but there are also these negative undertones to it. Facebook is watching you and selling your information. They own Instagram and WhatsApp, and (Amazon’s) Alexa is in every room of your house. Siri can pop up on your phone when you didn’t even call her. You cannot ignore that side of it.”

Set in England, “The Feed” has British actor Guy Burnet play Thewlis’ psychologist son and Nina Toussaint-White his daughter-in-law.

Burnet told AFP that the series’ vision of the near future “was far from crazy… and it is amazing it hasn’t been done before” when you see Beijing’s plans for its social credit system.

From next year all Chinese citizens will be ranked and either punished or rewarded according to their “social credit” score.

“I think we’re not on the precipice, we may have already passed it,” the actor warned.

In “The Feed”, a handful of people control the code on which the world relies, and it is they, said Powell, who get to decide what the public need to know.

“Which is effectively where we are now” in the real world too, the writer warned.

Original Article

The NYC Council announced that they just passed bills prohibiting marijuana testing being required as part of the hiring process in New York City, and banning the City from requiring marijuana testing for people on probation.

‘This bill will close one trap door that trips people up,” said the council’s Public Safety Committee chair Donovan Richards. “Too many people come out, they are trying to do better, and they get busted for marijuana and go back into jail or prison. This sets them back.”

The city conducts hundreds of such tests each year.

There are fears for the Dalai Lama after the 83-year-old Buddhist leader was rushed 300 miles to the Indian capital with a chest infection.

‘Today morning his holiness felt some discomfort and he was flown to Delhi for check-up,’ Tenzin Taklha, his personal secretary said.

‘Doctors have diagnosed him with chest infection and he is being treated for that. His condition is stable now. He will be treated for two three days here.’

The spiritual leader, who fled to India in early 1959 after a failed uprising against Chinese rule, lives in exile in the northern Indian hill town of Dharamshala.

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The Dalai Lama gestures during a group hearing at the Palais des Congres, in Paris in September 2016

Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama delivers teachings during the first day of New Year or ‘Losar’ in the northern hill town of Dharamsala in 2012

Many of the up to 100,000 Tibetans living in India are worried that their fight for a genuinely autonomous homeland would end with the Dalai Lama.

He said last month that it was possible that once he dies his incarnation could be found in India, and warned that any other successor named by China would not be respected.

China, which took control of Tibet in 1950, brands the Nobel peace laureate a dangerous separatist and has said its leaders have the right to approve the Dalai Lama’s successor, as a legacy inherited from China’s emperors.

But many Tibetans – whose tradition holds that the soul of a senior Buddhist monk is reincarnated in the body of a child on his death – suspect any Chinese role as a ploy to exert influence on the community.

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The official announcement for the 2019 Cannes Film Festival is 10 days away, but Paramount’s Elton John hybrid biopic-musical — starring Taron Egerton as the iconic British singer-songwriter — is poised to descend on the south of France, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. Paramount declined comment.

The film’s addition to the lineup had been widely speculated given its official release on the very Cannes-friendly date of May 24 (the fest is set to run May 14-25). Its screening — and any potential parties — will likely be among the hottest tickets at Cannes, which is also set to feature Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The news comes just days after a six-minute montage of Rocketman — directed by Dexter Fletcher, who stepped in to finish Bohemian Rhapsody after Bryan Singer’s departure — drew loud applause at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. The footage spanned John’s days as a child at the Royal Academy of Music to his early career, including his first U.S. concert at the Troubadour in Los Angeles and how after he grappled with fame and addiction before transforming into a global superstar.

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Small homeowners swept up in the city’s aggressive enforcement of short-term rentals, like Airbnb, are getting hit with steep fines.

Owners of one- and two-family homes in Brooklyn have been issued more than $2.1 million in fines under the de Blasio administration, The City reported. That’s 27 percent of the total $7.8 million in fines issued in the borough during that period.

Homeowners in Queens paid a larger share: $1.7 million in penalties made up 39 percent of the borough’s total $4.3 million. In Manhattan, where one- and two-family homes are harder to come by, they made up less than 1 percent of the $16.2 million in fines issued for illegal rentals since 2014.

Dian Killian is among the homeowners who’ve been penalized. She told The City she had researched the legality of renting out her unit in Bedford-Stuyvesant. State laws prohibiting rentals of less than 30 days do not apply to one- and two-family homes.

Still, she was approached by inspectors and hit with four buildings violations by the Mayor’s Office of Special Enforcement. Killian eventually paid more than $5,000 in fines — which she said amounted to about three months of rentals.

Newly elected Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said the proportion of fines hitting small homeowners contradicts what the administration has said about enforcement targeting the more egregious offenders. In July 2018, Council Speaker Corey Johnson said city inspectors “are really trying to go after the really bad actors that have entire buildings or multiple apartments in a building.”

Mayor Bill de Blasio previously told NY1 that “my problem is when a building is turned into a de facto hotel. My problem is when an apartment is rented out effectively year round.”

Both officials have sought tighter regulation.

“We were clear our intent is not to go after one- and two-family homeowners,” Williams told The City. “We thought we had a partnership with the city. But the administration looks like they’ve opened up a can of wild, wild west whoop-ass on them.”

City officials say their enforcement is complaint-driven, and that there are cases where one- and two-family homes had been turned into de facto boarding houses or where Airbnb had struggled to self-police violations of the rules. [The City] — Meenal Vamburkar

Original Article

New York City is careening closer to all-out financial bankruptcy for the first time since Mayor Abraham Beame ran the city more than 40 years ago, experts say.

As tax-fleeced businesses and individuals flee en masse, and city public spending surges into the stratosphere, financial analysts say Gotham is perilously near total fiscal disaster.

Long-term debt is now more than $81,100 per household, and Mayor de Blasio is ramping up to spend as much as $3 billion more in the new budget than the current $89.2 billion.

“The city is running a deficit and could be in a real difficult spot if we had a recession, or a further flight of individuals because of tax reform,” said Milton Ezrati, chief economist of Vested.

“New York is already in a difficult financial spot, but it would be in an impossible situation if we had any kind of setback.”

De Blasio has detailed $750 million in savings for the preliminary fiscal 2020 budget, but that won’t be enough to stave off a bloodbath if New York’s economy is hit by financial shocks — including a recession, which some see on the horizon — analysts warn. Gov. Cuomo’s preliminary budget has $600 million in city cuts in the coming year.

But city spending, up some 32 percent since de Blasio took office — triple the rate of inflation — may need to be cut deeper, these analysts add. The city’s long-term pension obligations have escalated, as well, as its workforce has soared by more than 33,000 in the last five years.

Other startling indicators:

• New York state — and city — are ranked No. 1 nationwide in state and local tax burden.
• Property taxes, almost half of the city’s revenue, is rising faster than any other revenue source — squeezing businesses and forcing homeowners, already hit by federal property tax deduction changes, to relocate to lower-tax states.
• The top 1 percent of New York City earners pay some 50 percent of Big Apple income tax revenue.

“New York City could go bankrupt, absolutely,” said Peter C. Earle, an economist at the American Institute for Economic Research.

“In that case, the city would get temporary protection from its creditors, but it would be very difficult for the city to take on new debt.”

Original Article

Lightstone Group’s David Lichtenstein said Friday that Amazon’s about-face on its New York megacomplex was the “worst day for NYC since 9-11.”

“Except this time, the terrorists were elected,” the developer added in an email to The Real Deal, in a dig to the politicians who fiercely criticized the tech giant’s deal with the city for the nearly $3 billion in tax breaks and government incentives it came with. On Thursday, Amazon cited pressure from the local politicians as its reason to abandon the deal for the Long Island City campus, which was to bring 25,000 new jobs to New York and would create, by some expectations, $27 billion in tax revenue over a decade.

Since November, Amazon had faced fierce backlash from elected officials, activists and union leaders, who criticized the secretive nature of the negotiations between the company and the city and state, and who argued that the world’s most valuable company did not need to be cajoled with tax breaks to come to New York.

Among the deal’s most vocal critics: State Sen. Michael Gianaris of Queens, who was named to a board that had veto power over the plan; Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose congressional district borders the one where the complex would rise; and leaders from the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store union.

“A number of state and local politicians have made it clear that they oppose our presence and will not work with us to build the type of relationships that are required to go forward,” Amazon said in a statement Thursday explaining its decision to drop the plans.

Lightstone is a major developer with a $3 billion portfolio across New York, Miami and Los Angeles. In Long Island City, Lightstone owns a 428-unit rental building less than two miles from where Amazon’s campus was set to rise. 

Lichtenstein is among several industry figures who’ve addressed losing out on the Amazon campus, which the real-estate industry felt would be a major boost to both the residential and commercial markets. “The future of the neighborhood is still going to happen,” said Robert Whalen, Halstead’s director of leasing in Long Island City, “but Amazon could’ve accelerated the process.” Dave Maundrell, of Citi Habitats, said that without Amazon, “we’re back to where we were six months ago. The market’s gonna go back down.”

Kathryn Wylde, who leads the pro-business group Partnership for New York City, said that “we competed successfully, made a deal and spent the last three months trashing our new partner.” Seth Pinsky of RXR Realty echoed her sentiments, telling the Wall Street Journal that “for some of the people opposing the project it was kind of a game.”

“They enjoyed being the center of attention and having their statements tweeted and retweeted,” Pinsky added. “But this isn’t a game.”

Original Article