Hasta La Gadget!

Some of you guys might know Tony Fadell as one of the fathers of the iPod, while others might know him as the co-creator of Nest, the company that brought us smart and connected home products like the smart thermostat, smoke detector, and so on. However Fadell has plans to be known beyond that.

This is why he has recently launched a new company called Actev Motors, in which the company’s first product would be the Arrow Smart-Kart, a go-kart that is designed for kids to introduce them to what an electric car would feel like, which presumably in turn would ingrain the benefits of using an electric car at a young age to help spur on the purchase of greener vehicles when they’re older.

So what so smart about this go-kart? For starters it can be connected to the internet via WiFi, which in turn allows parents to geofence where their kids will be able to drive. This means that parents could geofence their backyard, thus ensuring that the kart would no longer be powered if the kids were to try and take it to the main road.

The accompanying app also comes with a built-in emergency stop button. There will be various kits designed for the car, like a Formula 1-style kit, or a drift kit, and there is also the option to add a higher-capacity battery for prolonged usage. Unfortunately it does not come cheap as it will cost $1,000 upon its release, but for now interested parents can pre-order the starter kit for $600.

Tony Fadell Wants To Build A ‘Smart’ Go-Kart For Kids , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

I flew down to Florida for my high school reunion.

I couldn’t miss it. Not because I was particularly eager to see people who I haven’t broken bread with in ten years, and who probably don’t remember my first name. Or because I was eager to exchange surface level conversation about what each of us have been up to since age 18, or how I’ve worked 5 different jobs in 5 years and could barely pay all of my bills last year.

I mainly wanted to go because I wanted to prove something to my 18-year-old self. I wasn’t sure what that was. I just knew I had to go, for her.

On my way home to Boca Raton, I took an Uber Pool (a shared ride) to JFK airport at 4 a.m., with a guy and a girl who were just leaving a bar. She had tequila breath, him cigarette. They asked me why I was up, yet pie-eyed and I told them I was jetting home for that 10-year reunion thing.

She laughed and gulped down air.

He leaned forward, eyed me up and down. “Good luck. But don’t go. It’ll make you feel pretty awful.”

I shoved the split ends off my forehead, leaned forward, eyed him up and down. “Thanks, but I have to go. I promised my 18-year-old self that I would.”

“I went to mine two years ago,” Tequila breath said while snapchatting a picture of her cuticles. “But what’s the point? You know what everyone is up to on Facebook.”

“I’m just looking for something,” I said, unwrapping a piece of gum to offer her and the cigarette smeller. “I don’t know what.”

I still didn’t know what when I found myself hiding behind three other people on the way inside the high school reunion. I wasn’t ready to go inside. I was nervous, soaking my light pink dress with puddles of stress sweat, wondering if going to this thing was actually the worst idea I had in 10 years.

At 18, we think we’ll be something certain by the time we all meet again at age 28. I didn’t think I would married with kids or anything serious like that. But I thought I’d wear a suit, own a suit, have a closet filled with them. Instead, my closet hangs some of the very same Forever21 dresses I wore obsessively back then. I thought I’d have a career that made me some sort of millionaire; instead I have a career that makes the amount of cash in my bank account a little bit bipolar.

I thought I’d be more put together, but instead, I found myself showing up in a dress with perfume stains on the front, lipstick smeared across my front incisors and my hair frizzing, like it always does when I need it to just act cool.

I guess being 28 seemed like it felt so old, at age 18, but really nothing has changed, except now I know what a 401k and paying for my own health insurance is like.

I stayed at the reunion for an hour, maybe two, before deciding that what I was looking for wouldn’t be here. It wouldn’t be in the hugs from people who look almost the same, talk almost the same and remember almost the same things about you that you’ve tried so hard to forget in the last century.

What I was looking for I found when I got home, pulled myself into a cocoon of bed sheets on the bed I used to sleep in at my parent’s house, and cracked open the mold-smelling yearbook from my senior year.

Inside, a comment from someone I can’t remember ever really knowing, who didn’t show up at the reunion.

“Jenny,” It began. “When you’re old and wondering what you’re supposed to do with your life, remember that when you were 18 you said you wanted to be a Rockstar. Being a Rockstar is weird. I don’t think you really want to be a Rockstar Rockstar, like in a band. I think you just want to live a life that’s a bit of a glamorous mess. So do that. And do that well.”

I ripped that page out of the book and folded it up.

“Glamorous mess,” I said, out loud to my row of childhood stuffed animals and Beanie Babies. “Maybe that’s what I’m missing. Maybe that’s what I was supposed to find 10 years later.”

Maybe the point of high school reunions aren’t so that we can compare and contrast our lives with classmates who got a higher grade than us back in AP Economics. Maybe it’s not so that we can chug too many whiskey sours and confess our love to a guy we used to have googly eyes for in biology class, as we drool on his wife’s shoulders and look more like wimp than his two year old baby.

Maybe the point is to go and find yourself on a barstool all alone, or in the backseat of an Uber ride home, that you can barely afford, and wonder what the 18-year-old version of yourself would have wanted now and would have been most proud of. I guess I thought I’d be touring he world in a rock band, perhaps a millionaire with houses all over the world, and definitely married to Clay Aiken.

But then, as I sit underneath my covers, and log on to my old Myspace account and read Microsoft word files of saved conversations from AIM chats with ex-best friends, I realize that Jen at 18 was quite simple. She only wanted to continue to find ways to disrupt the world; to find dreams that she could outgrow and conquer faster than a cheap polyester tube top from Forever21.

And maybe if that’s the only thing I take away from the high school reunion, aside from a lump of business cards from people I’ll probably never see again for another 10 years, and hugs from people I wish I could see again in 10 minutes, it’s that it shouldn’t take 10 years to remember the only cool thing about living life is living it completely wild and outrageous.

Maybe nothing about us really changes in 10 years except our urgency to pursue those wild dreams we hardly ever talk about. Maybe a lot of things seem like they’ve changed, we found a soul mate, we have a family, we live some place that costs more money than we ever had, making $7 an hour at Panera, we spend our days at a desk — different than the one that our textbooks once rested on.

Maybe deep down in our core, we’re all still just a little confused, a little reckless, and a whole lot desperate to do something beautiful with our one change at life.

Or maybe high school reunions are meant to remind us that we still want to pee in our pants a little when the mean girls look our way. Or that our once boy-band looking crushes are now married and with a mini-van.

I’m not sure. I guess I have another 10 years to try and figure it all out.

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A couple of months ago, it appeared that the Republican presidential field was a fragmented fratricidal mess, with party disarray and deadlock on display all the way to the Cleveland Convention. The Democrats, meanwhile, were on track to an early nomination and party unity.

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Hillary Clinton could still lock up the nomination by the last primaries on June 14, but not without relying on super-delegates. Here are the numbers:

Clinton has 1,769 pledged delegates won in caucuses and primaries, out of 2,310 delegates required for nomination. There are 913 yet to be awarded in the last round of primaries. To go over the top before the convention, not counting super-delegates, Clinton needs to win 541 more delegates, or well over half. But with Sanders surging nearly everywhere, that seems extremely unlikely.

So the state of play after the six states vote June 7 (DC votes June 14, but has only 20 delegates) is likely to show Clinton with 50 to 100 votes short, Sanders with momentum, and the Sanders campaign mounting a last ditch effort to persuade most of the 712 super-delegates (541 of whom have already declared for Clinton) to reconsider, on the premise that Sanders has the better shot at beating Trump.

Changing that many minds seems vanishingly unlikely. However, the Sanders campaign is increasingly in a go-for-broke mood.

Many Sanders supporters are far more militant than Sanders himself, and some are openly expressing the hope that Clinton will be indicted for some aspect of the email dust up.

That also seems highly improbable.

However, Clinton has been unable to catch a break. The theme of her campaign has been experience and competence, but her improper use of a private email server suggested neither. It gives Trump a huge opening to challenge her honesty and probably signals a further decline in voter trust in Clinton.

For the past couple of weeks, many progressives who sympathize with Sanders on the issues have urged him to recognize that he will not be nominated and to think about how else to exercise his substantial influence to to push both Clinton and the Democratic Party to the left in the coming political era. There is also the small matter of not inviting a Trump presidency.

Robert Reich, a fervent Sanders supporter, urged the Clinton camp to stop requesting Sanders to exit the race — but called on Sanders and his backers to support Clinton for the greater good once she wins the nomination.

Some of you say even if Hillary is better than Trump, you’re tired of choosing the “lesser of two evils,” and you’re going to vote your conscience by either writing Bernie’s name in, or voting for the Green Party candidate, or not voting at all.

I can’t criticize anyone for voting their conscience, of course. But your conscience should know that a decision not to vote for Hillary, should she become the Democratic nominee, is a de facto decision to help Donald Trump.

Harold Meyerson, vice-chair of Democratic Socialists of America, executive editor of The American Prospect, and one of the most astute analysts of the Sanders phenomenon, called on Sanders and his supporters to look beyond the election to build a movement, and warned against the self-indulgence of the self-righteous:

What is arguably the most successful left campaign in the nation’s history stands in danger of being undone by an infantile fraction of its own supporters. The threats of violence, the shouting down of such lifelong liberals as Barbara Boxer, and the growing desire of some in the campaign, both on its periphery and at its core, to walk away from the real prospect of building left power by refusing to work with allies and potential allies in the Democratic Party — all these now threaten the campaign’s potential to bring lasting change to American politics.

I write this as a strong Sanders supporter (albeit one who never thought he could win the nomination), as a lifelong democratic socialist (indeed, for some years, Bernie and I were probably the two most out-of-the-closet socialists in D.C.) who’s been astounded and thrilled by Sanders’s success so far in pushing the national and Democratic discourse to the left. I write this with the hope that the Sanders legions can come out of this election year with the networks and organizations that can reshape the American economic and political order — bolstering workers’ power, altering corporate governance, diminishing the scope of finance. But to do that effectively, they’ll have to make common cause with progressives who’ve backed Hillary Clinton.

Peter Dreier, another savvy Sanders supporter, spelled out a five-point plan for Sanders and his followers to build a durable left in America, something that has eluded progressives since FDR.

Many progressive politicians have promised to transform their electoral campaigns into ongoing movement operations, but few have had the patience or resources to do so. Many of Jessie Jackson’s supporters hoped that his presidential efforts in 1984 and 1988 would evolve into a permanent Rainbow Coalition of progressive activists, but it didn’t happen. After Obama won his brilliantly-executed 2008 campaign — built by an army of seasoned political and community organizers who trained hundreds of thousands of volunteers in the art of activism — he created the nonprofit now known as Organizing for Action (OFA). OFA has not lived up to its early promise, in large part because Obama made it an arm of the DNC in a bid to build support for his legislative agenda.

I find these arguments very persuasive. But first, Democrats need to avoid the ritual of the circular firing squad during the period between the last primaries and the July convention.

The challenge is that Sanders has built one of American history’s most potent mass movements for progressive change, reflecting deep frustrations on the part of young and working class people, and they are not about to quietly step aside and let Clinton have the prize. Nor are they in any mood to listen to elders still repenting their youthful votes for Eldridge Cleaver rather than Hubert Humphrey in the fraught 1968 election, opening the way for Richard Nixon. Each generation gets to define its own politics and make its own judgments and mistakes.

If Clinton had some momentum, if she were not the victim of her own missteps, if she had found a plausible voice to puncture Trump’s pretentions, then she would have a much stronger case that Sanders and his people should get on board. But it’s Sanders with the momentum, Clinton who keeps stumbling, and even her own strongest supporters are dismayed that her campaign seems mechanical and joyless.

Last Tuesday, Senator Elizabeth Warren delivered the keynote speech to the gala of the Center for Popular Democracy. It was one of the most effective demolitions of Donald Trump ever. She said, referring to the fact that Trump bragged about betting on a housing collapse in 2006:

What kind of a man roots for people to get thrown out of their houses? What kind of a man roots for people to get thrown out of their jobs? To root for people to lose their pensions? I’ll tell you exactly what kind of a man does that. It is a man who cares about no one but himself. A small, insecure, money-grubber who doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as he makes a profit off it.

Clinton makes similar arguments, but it is Warren who does it with verve, wit and devastating effect, and Clinton who manages to sound mechanical.

The period between the last primaries and the convention is shaping up as a time of maximum risk for Democrats. Political logic dictates that Democrats should unite behind Clinton because of the greater threat of Trump. But she is such a flawed candidate that political passions in many quarters dictate otherwise.

Sanders evidently believes that not only that he should be the Democrats’ nominee but that if events break right, he still can. Assuming Hillary Clinton is nominated, it will take rare statesmanship and leadership for Sanders to urge his followers to support Clinton while he keeps on building a movement.

—

Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School. His latest book is Debtors’ Prison: The Politics of Austerity Versus Possibility.

Like Robert Kuttner on Facebook.

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Popes are no stranger to YouTube (Benedict XVI got a YouTube channel years ago), but Pope Francis is stepping things up a notch. He just met with 11 YouTube creators from around the world in a “first-of-its-kind” chat to share perspectives on issues…

Porn parodies seem to be a natural occurrence for all things popular, like Lord of the Rings, Pokemon, X-Men, World of Warcraft, Game of Thrones, and so on. This is why it didn’t exactly come as a surprise to learn that Blizzard’s latest game, Overwatch, also spawn porn parodies of its own.

However as it turns out, Blizzard isn’t too thrilled about these parodies and we guess we can see why. The creators of Overwatch porn have been using the game’s assets and making them a lot of NSFW things, which by itself we reckon Blizzard is pretty uncomfortable with, but there is also the legal issue of using the Overwatch assets without their permission, which is why Blizzard has been going about trying to shut them down.

Apparently some of the creators of Overwatch porn have been receiving notices of copyright infringement, indicating that they should probably take down their creations of risk being hit with a lawsuit. That being said, not everyone is thrilled about it and one creator has taken to Reddit to protest and try to get the community to pressure Blizzard into stopping these takedown requests.

Whether or not they will be successful remains to be seen, but regardless, Overwatch is said to be one of Blizzard’s more progressive games in terms of representing female characters. For example Zarya is a female character from Overwatch that does not fit your stereotypical female character image, in which Blizzard explained, “There is also talk about diversity in different body types in that not everybody wants to have the exact same body type always represented. And we just want you to know that we’re listening and we’re trying hard and we hope Zarya is a step in the right direction.”

There was also a controversial pose with Tracer that Blizzard has since apologized for. With all these steps taken, like we said, it’s probably not surprising that Blizzard isn’t thrilled about their assets being used for adult purposes.

Blizzard Is Working Quickly To Shut Down ‘Overwatch’ Porn , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.