Homes as ATMs: It’s Starting Again
October 5th, 2015Via: CNBC:
As home values rise, homeowners are gaining more equity on paper — and they’re taking it out in paper. Cash-out refinances jumped 68 percent in the second quarter from a year ago, according to Black Knight Financial Services. This is the highest volume of this type of refinance in five years.
Trans-Pacific Partnership
October 5th, 2015Via: Reuters:
Pacific trade ministers have reached a deal on the most sweeping trade liberalization pact in a generation that will cut trade barriers and set common standards for 12 countries, an official familiar with the talks said on Monday.
Leaders from a dozen Pacific Rim nations are poised to announce the pact later on Monday. The deal could reshape industries and influence everything from the price of cheese to the cost of cancer treatments.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership would affect 40 percent of the world economy and would stand as a legacy-defining achievement for U.S. President Barack Obama, if it is ratified by Congress.
Lawmakers in other TPP countries must also approve the deal.
The final round of negotiations in Atlanta, which began on Wednesday, had snared on the question of how long a monopoly period should be allowed on next-generation biotech drugs, until the United States and Australia negotiated a compromise.
Over Half of E.U. Countries Are Opting Out of GMOs
October 4th, 2015Via: Time:
Sixteen countries have alerted the European Union that they want to opt out of E.U.-approved GM crops.
Members of the economic bloc have until Oct. 3 to let the E.U. know if they were requesting to opt out of growing GMO produce from major companies like Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta and Pioneer, and according to the Food Navigator, a food trade publication, countries including Germany, Italy, Denmark, Bulgaria and Cyprus recently filed their requests and applications, increasing the number to 16. Exactly how many countries will ultimately opt out could be confirmed as soon as Monday.
In August, Scotland publicly said it would prohibit GMO crops out of concern that they could damage the country’s “clean and green” brand.
“Scotland is known around the world for our beautiful natural environment – and banning growing genetically modified crops will protect and further enhance our clean, green status,” Rural affairs secretary Richard Lochhead said in a statement at the time.
“A growing number of governments are rejecting the commission’s drive for GM crop approvals,” Greenpeace’s E.U. food policy director Franziska Achterberg told the Guardian. “They don’t trust the E.U. safety assessments and are rightly taking action to protect their agriculture and food. The only way to restore trust in the E.U. system now is for the commission to hit the pause button on GM crop approvals and to urgently reform safety testing and the approval system.”
The Guardian reports that environmentalists have praised the news, while industry and biotech supporters have responded to opt-outs with “weary resignation.”
Afghanistan: U.S. Bombs Hospital, At Least 19 Dead
October 3rd, 2015Via: Washington Post:
An airstrike apparently carried out by U.S. forces heavily damaged a charitable hospital in northern Afghanistan on Saturday, killing at least 19 people — three of them reportedly children — in an incident that a senior U.N. official equated to a war crime.
The airstrike occurred before dawn when a Doctors Without Borders trauma center in war-torn Kunduz was struck while doctors were treating dozens of patients. Hospital officials said they were assaulted from the air for 30 to 45 minutes, resulting in a large fire that burned some patients to death in their beds. Among those killed were 12 of the charity group’s staff members, the group said.
“This attack is abhorrent and a grave violation of international humanitarian law,” said Meinie Nicolai, the group’s president.
The Fed’s Grotesque “Explanation” Why 94.6 Million Are Out Of The Labor Force
October 3rd, 2015Via: ZeroHedge:
And this is where the wheels fall off the Atlanta Fed narative. Because the regional Fed’s very next sentence shows why the world is doomed when you task economists to centrally-plan it:
The decrease in labor force participation among prime-age individuals has been driven mostly by the share who say they currently don’t want a job. As of December 2014, prime-age labor force participation was 2.4 percentage points below its prerecession average. Of that, 0.5 percentage point is accounted for by a higher share who indicate they currently want a job; 2 percentage points can be attributed to a higher share who say they currently don’t want a job.
And there you have it: there are nearly 100 million working-age Americans who could be in the labor force, but are not “mostly” because they don’t want a job.
Nothing about the lack of job demand as mega corporations continue to lay workers off in droves instead of hiring, instead using every last dollar of free cash flow to buyback their own stock to boost executive compensation instead of growing their company and hire more workers.
Nothing about the collapse in small business formation – that driver of 80% of US employment – as firm exit rates are now greater than firm entry rates
Nothing about the inability to get a job in a world in which the rest of
the global is lapping the US in educational and labor skills.
Nothing about the US economy never having left the post-2008 depression where $4.5 trillion in Fed credit was created just to boost the S&P to all time highs and never making it to the actual economy (until the helicopters finally start paradropping of course)
Nothing about millions of aging, 55 and over, Americans refusing to retire or quit their job simply because they have no return on their savings to fall back on thank to the Fed’s ZIRP, thus keeping the labor pipeline clogged and preventing younger Americans from getting promoted and achieving better paying jobs.
Nothing about a Millennial generation encumbered with $1 trillion in debt, that is so terrified of its job prospects and having to pay down its debt, it choose instead to keep rolling and piling on to this debt by remaining in college indefinitely
Nothing about the perverted incentive structure of a welfare state that makes it more attractive to collect generous government handouts which end up punishing hard work.
None of that.
You see, it is because Americans “mostly don’t want a job.”
Is Anything Happening in New Zealand Besides Sportsball, Fashion, Celebrities and Recipes?
October 3rd, 2015nzherald.co.nz, just now:
Endless lobotomizing schlock.
Daimler Tests Self-Driving Truck on German Highway
October 2nd, 2015Via: AFP:
German automaker Daimler said it trialled a self-driving truck under real traffic conditions for the first time Friday, on a motorway in southern Germany.
The truck has smart systems including radars, cameras and active speed regulators and works without a human driver — although one has to be in the driver’s seat and take the wheel if necessary.
The standard Mercedes-Benz Actros, fitted with the intelligent “Highway Pilot” system, travelled 14 kilometres (about nine miles) on the A8 motorway, with a driver in the cabin but his hands off the wheel.
“Today’s premiere is a further important step towards the market maturity of autonomously driving trucks -– and towards the safe, sustainable road freight transport of the future,” said Wolfgang Bernhard, board member responsible for Daimler Trucks and Buses.
“Safe testing in real traffic is absolutely decisive for the development of this technology to market maturity. We are now able to proceed with this,” said Bernhard, who sat in the driver’s seat for the test.
Daimler unveiled the technology in May in the US state of Nevada, on the iconic Hoover Dam, an hour’s drive from Las Vegas.
The truck in Friday’s trial, the world’s first series-production autonomous truck, drove between Stuttgart and the town of Denkendorf in the southwestern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, where Daimler is headquartered.
A totally self-driving truck, without the need for human monitoring, is still a long way off.
Urban Barns
October 2nd, 2015I wonder what that power bill is each month?
Via: The National:
Related: Meanwhile in Japan
IBM Overcomes One of the Three Barriers to Viable Carbon Nanotube Transistors
October 2nd, 2015Via: MIT Technology Review:
For decades the semiconductor industry has been packing more and more silicon transistors onto each computer chip to keep steadily improving performance, but that process will soon reach its physical limits. Now researchers at IBM say a “major engineering breakthrough” gives reason to be optimistic that a promising alternative to silicon transistors—carbon nanotube transistors—will be ready in time to take silicon’s place.
Carbon nanotubes, tiny cylinders made of rolled-up, atom-thick sheets of carbon, have very attractive electrical and thermal properties and theoretically could form the basis of circuits that are much faster and more energy-efficient than today’s silicon ones. But several major manufacturing challenges stand in the way of commercial devices based on nanotube transistors. The IBM researchers say they’ve figured out how to overcome one of them: how to combine nanotubes with the metal contacts that deliver electric current.
“The U.S. Led ISIS Coalition”
October 2nd, 2015Your what hurts?
Via: CNN:



