Month: April 2017

Enlarge / That sketchy speedy delivery gig you were offered by that company that you applied to work for? It's probably a scam.

If you're using a Web-based third-party recruiter site to look for and apply for jobs, you may want to keep a close eye on the e-mails you get in response. As Steve Ragan of CSO reports, scammers are harvesting information from recruiter sites to offer "flexible" jobs that are in fact criminal undertakings—often posing as executives from the companies where applicants have applied for jobs.

One woman who applied for a job at the paint manufacturer Sherwin-Williams through the site of ZipRecruiter received an e-mail shortly afterward from someone posing as the CEO of the company. The person claimed that the position she had applied for was filled but offered another job as a "personal assistant" for the CEO himself for $500 a week.

"If you accept my offer, I will need you to take charge of my mails pick up and drop off as well as errand running during your spare time outside of work," the e-mail read. "The job is flexible so you can do it wherever you are as long as there is a post office in the area. I will pay for the first week in advance to run errands, and will also have my mails/packages forwarded to a nearby post office where you can pick them from at your convenience."

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Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a lot of money and nothing to prove. Post-Microsoft, his biggest achievement so far has been paying $2 billion to buy the LA Clippers, but on Monday The New York Times dropped an extensive report about his next venture: a project called "USAFacts," which aggregates publicly available government data to tell you how your city, state, and federal tax dollars are spent.

Ballmer has already spent $10 million on the project and is "happy to fund the damn thing" (his personal net worth is estimated at over $22 billion, so he's good for it). He describes it as "a [Form] 10-K for government," a big searchable database that shows where tax revenue goes in and where it comes out. If you want to find out how many police officers or public school teachers the government employs in your area, you can do that; if you want to know what percentage of their salaries come from taxes paid by businesses instead of individuals, you can do that, too.

Ballmer's enthusiasm for the project is infectious, according to the Times:

(credit: https://www.ge.com/)

This week, General Electric (GE) and Southern California Edison (SCE) announced that they had retrofitted a natural gas peaker plant with a 10 MW, 4.3 MWh battery installation to create the world’s first hybrid electric gas turbine. Peaker plants only run when demand for electricity is high, and they can be used to fill in the gaps between baseload energy and intermittent renewables.

The trouble with natural gas peaker plants, however, is that they can waste a lot of fuel in standby mode and when getting ramped up to the point where they can be put on the grid. But GE’s battery solution cuts out the fuel used during those times.

“The energy storage capacity of the battery has been specifically designed to provide enough time coverage to allow the gas turbine to start and reach its designated power output,” GE writes. This eliminates the need to burn fuel while the gas turbine is kept spinning in standby mode.