The US should finally wake up one day and see why outsourcing is a bad idea.

Once another country reach certain level of technology competency, they can pretty much copy anything from US.

The premier of BitPesa is officially underway. The service stepped out of its beta phase on Firday in a quest to subvert the time-honored and well-estalbished money moving providers throughout the diaspora.

By changing the way in how citizens of the predominately unbanked country interact financially, BitPesa has officially began its new remittance service that uses bitcoin as its backbone.
A Strong Alternative

The company – founded by Duncan Goldie-Scot and headed up by CEO, Elizabeth Rossiello – following a drawn out series of negotiations with various banking entities and network providers throughout Kenya, has etched a deal that looks to make BitPesa the most efficient way to move money throughout the region.

Thanks to the technology behind bitcoin, in a region where M-Pesa, the service is ran by Safaricom currently reigns, BitPesa provides a strong, yet cost-efficient solution to the often high fees associated with the current and major providers.



Though the fees per transaction vary, depending on the amount of money in transit, M-Pesa has worked to lower fees for the country’s citizens; however, money transfers still predominately rely on the major providers like Western Union, MoneyGram and WorldRemit. These traditional money transmitters, according to the World Bank, charge anywhere between 6% and 13%, applicable to all Kenyans wishing to send money home.

BitPesa, on the other hand, will charge a flat rate of 3% regardless of transaction size; the service, while it relies on bitcoin, doesn’t view itself as a strictly bitcoin company. Rossiello tells the Wall Street Journal that “we are taking bitcoin, translating it into the local currency, and dispersing it the way people know.” The startup focuses on the fact that the majority of Kenyans now own mobile smartphones, making it a likely place to start in assisting the world’s predominantly unbanked.

Gaining Traction

BitPesa’s head of trading and risk, Amy Ludlum, in a conversation with HumanIPO, explains how the company has leveraged M-Pesa’s current market to their benefit:

“Mobile money has allowed us to launch as quickly as we have, it is a brilliant technology, we love it, we use it to do everything. We hardly ever touch cash anymore.”
She adds that with little advertising, the company has been able to spread awareness by the effective, yet old fashioned method of word-of-mouth marketing:

“So far so good, we didn’t advertise our launch very much, we just got a handful of BitPesa testers to see if the platform worked. But we have got lot of people coming onto the site and starting using it even without telling anyone.”
Building Trust

The company is looking to target the African regions of Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda as part of its growth and development strategy and has already gained a strong foothold in these areas, much of which too has come as a result of word of mouth.


“We consider ourselves a Kenyan company, but we are also an East African company, we know there is some interest in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda,” Ludlum told HumanIPO.


BitPesa embraces the fact that the majority of Kenyans now own and operate smartphones, providing a favorable environment to begin in assisting the world’s predominantly unbanked. The company, while offering a degree of incentive through its low transaction fees, doesn’t put customer funds on hold like much of its competitors, as a result, BitPesa is quickly gaining the trust of the local community.

A consortium of interested groups launched a giant airship to fly over the NSA's new snooping repository in Bluffdale, Utah. A 135 foot long thermal airship flew over the snoop headquarters last Friday with the message: "NSA Illegal Spying Below" with an arrow pointing downwards at the panopticon.

The airship also carried a message to visit the website http//standagainstspying.org.  The consortium of groups includes "20 grassroots advocacy groups and Internet companies" and was organized by Greenpeace, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Tenth Amendment Center (TAC).

In much of the world, the Predator drone symbolises US power. It is ubiquitous, stealthy and can strike at any moment. They patrol the skies of central Asia, north Africa, the Arabian peninsula – and now Iraq. Other countries have nuclear weapons and aircraft carriers. But nobody else can match the lethal ingenuity of America’s Hellfire missile. Little surprise that two US presidents – George W Bush, and now Barack Obama – have resorted to them so frequently. But their heyday is waning. America’s unipolar drone moment is ending.

Mr Obama’s chief problem is their speedy adoption around the world. Unlike nuclear weapons, there is no treaty governing the use of military drones. For roughly a decade, the Central Intelligence Agency has been able to strike targets pretty much with impunity – and blanket deniability. Of America’s partners, only the UK has been deemed fit for export. But others, including Iran, whose drones also patrol the same Iraqi skies as their US counterparts, have reverse engineered the unmanned aerial vehicle with relative ease. China is even exporting drones. Last month Saudi Arabia became its first big customer. Within five years, many countries, some of them highly unsavoury, will possess military drones, says the Rand Corporation.

All of which poses a quandary for Mr Obama and whoever succeeds him. Put simply, the US must emulate the hypocritical parent: do as I say, not as I do. Nobody wants other countries to act like the US. Many voices, including Mr Obama himself, have urged the US to put drone warfare on a transparent footing. At the moment, Mr Obama can order drone assassinations without having to admit it, or explain himself to anyone. Hundreds of militants have been killed in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. But hundreds more civilians, perhaps thousands, have also been accidentally killed.

The sea ice surrounding Antarctica, which, as I reported in my book, has been steadily increasing throughout the period of satellite measurement that began in 1979, has hit a new all-time record high for areal coverage.

The new record anomaly for Southern Hemisphere sea ice, the ice encircling the southernmost continent, is 2.074 million square kilometers and was posted for the first time by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s The Cryosphere Today early Sunday morning.

The “Steven Goddard Real Science” blog compares the raw U.S. temperature records from the Energy Department’s United States Historical Climatology Network to the “final” processed figures, to demonstrate how the historical data have been “corrected,” using computer modeling.

The modifications made to the past temperature record had the effect of cooling the 20th century, which makes temperatures over the last 14 years appear much warmer by comparison. Such changes don’t square with history, which shows the decade of the 1930s the hottest on record. The Dust Bowl storms were so severe they sent clouds of debris from Texas and Oklahoma to the East Coast, even darkening the skies over the U.S. Capitol one day in 1934.

In an inconvenient article from 1999, written before the data had been “corrected,” James Hansen, then a NASA scientist, acknowledged that the climate had held steady after the Dust Bowl storms. “In the U.S.,” wrote Mr. Hansen, “there has been little temperature change in the past 50 years, the time of rapidly increasing greenhouse gases — in fact, there was a slight cooling throughout much of the country.” Mr. Hansen, recognized as a godfather of the global warming doomcriers, then predicted that the first decade of the 21st century would be even hotter than the 1930s.

To produce this hotter result, the scientists “adjusted” the temperature records to make it appear so. NASA redrew the temperature chart Mr. Hansen used in 1999, and the new chart shows a dramatically cooled 1930s. The 1990s that Mr. Hansen once said were not so hot became warmer than the 1930s.

The greatest problem we have is misinformation. People simply do not comprehend why and how the economic policies of the post-war era are imploding. This whole agenda of socialism has sold a Utopian idea that the State is there for the people yet it is run by lawyers following their own self-interest. The pensions created for those in government drive the cost of government up exponentially with time. The political forces blame the rich and this merely creates a class warfare with no resolution for the future. Even confiscating all the wealth of the so-called rich will not sustain the system. Consequently, we just have to crash and burn and start all over again.

The Guardian reported that some 50,000 people marched in London to protest against austerity. They cried: “Who is really responsible for the mess this country is in? Is it the Polish fruit pickers or the Nigerian nurses? Or is it the bankers who plunged it into economic disaster – or the tax avoiders? It is selective anger.”

The exploitation by the bankers has been really a disaster. They have been their own worst enemy and in the end, they have become the symbol that inspires class warfare if not revolution. They are not the representatives of those who produce jobs. They are merely those who wanted to trade with other people’s money for free. When they win, it is their’s, but any losses are passed to the taxpayers. Bankers should be bankers – not hedge fund managers who keep 100% of the profits using other people’s savings.

If you do approach him, make sure u have a video camera recording of anything thing he says.

(CNN) -- North Korea fired two projectiles Sunday that "appear to be short-range missiles" into the sea off the eastern coast of the Korean peninsula, a South Korean defense ministry official told CNN.
The launch took place shortly before 5 a.m. (4 p.m. ET Saturday), according to the official. The projectile's estimated range is 500 km (310 miles).
This is the second reported launch by North Korea in recent days.
On Thursday, U.S. and South Korean government officials reported North Korea had launched three projectiles from its southeastern coast.