Wall Street’s Hot New Financial Product: Your Rent Check
May 20th, 2015Via: Mother Jones:
Over the last two years, private equity firms and hedge funds have amassed an unprecedented real estate empire, snapping up Spanish revivals in Phoenix, adobes in Los Angeles, Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, and brick-faced bungalows in Chicago. In total, Wall Street investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in some of the cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown. But they’re not simply flipping these houses. Instead, they’ve started bundling some of them into a new kind of financial product that could blow up the housing market all over again.
No company has bought more houses than the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. (Its many investments include Hilton Hotels, the Weather Channel, and SeaWorld. Among its institutional investors are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase.) Through its subsidiary, Invitation Homes, Blackstone has picked up houses through local brokers, at foreclosure auctions, and in bulk purchases. Last April, it bought 1,400 houses in Atlanta in a single day. In Phoenix, some neighborhoods have a Blackstone-owned home on just about every block. As of November, Blackstone had acquired 40,000 houses, most of them foreclosures, worth $7.5 billion. Today, it is the largest owner of single-family rental homes in the nation.
Research Credit: ottilie
Teachers Using Pens and Paper in the Classroom “Not Fair” to Students, Microsoft Official Says
May 20th, 2015In other news, Microsoft Study Shows that Technology Is Shortening Attention Spans.
Via: The Georgia Straight:
Pens and paper have no place in the modern classroom. And chalkboards? They should be banished from our schools too.
That’s what Lia De Cicco Remu, director of Partners in Learning at Microsoft Canada, told the Georgia Straight ahead of the Microsoft Summit 2015 in Vancouver, which is set to be attended by around 200 teachers.
“When was the last time you used a piece of chalk to express yourself?” De Cicco Remu, a former teacher, asked by phone from Toronto. “Kids don’t express themselves with chalk or in cursive. Kids text.”
Related: Some Parents Who Work for Elite Silicon Valley Firms Send Their Children to School with No Computers
Los Angeles: Minimum Wage Going to $15 Per Hour by 2020
May 20th, 2015This is definitely a dire situation: CEOs Make 373 Times Average Worker Pay.
Increasing the minimum wage, while politically expedient, is going to spell doom for many small businesses. A relative earnings limit, on the other hand, could bring sanity to the wage inequality situation without destroying businesses that operate on smaller profit margins, thus maintaining a competitive marketplace.
Take the stick to the big money psychopaths, not Joe Small Business Owner.
Also, Los Angeles is so terrible. Flee while you can.
Via: Reuters:
The Los Angeles City Council voted on Tuesday to increase the minimum wage in the nation’s second-largest city to $15 an hour by 2020 from the current $9, in a victory for labor and community groups that have pushed for similar pay hikes in several U.S. municipalities.
The council’s 14-1 vote on the measure, which must come back before the panel for final approval, would require businesses with more than 25 employees to meet the $15 pay level by 2020, while smaller businesses would have an extra year to comply.
Officials said the plan, which comes on the heels of similar minimum wage hikes in other major cities including Seattle and San Francisco, would increase pay of an estimated 800,000 workers in the city.
“We are embarking upon, I think, the most progressive minimum wage policy anywhere in the country,” City Councilman Curren Price Jr., one of the main backers of the proposal, said before the vote.
With the federal minimum wage stagnant at $7.25 an hour since 2009, labor and religious groups have increasingly pressed local governments in liberal-leaning areas to enact their own minimum wage hikes even as their hopes dim for an increase from the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress.
The proposal given preliminary approval in Los Angeles, where housing costs are among the highest in the nation, represents a far-reaching victory for supporters of higher pay for low-wage workers.
The 67-percent pay increase would be implemented gradually, starting at $10.50 an hour for larger employers in 2016, and gradually going up each year until it reaches $15 in 2020.
Companies with 25 or fewer workers would follow a slightly slower stepped-up increase in minimum wage pay.
Opponents of minimum wage hikes, such as Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce senior vice president of public policy Ruben Gonzalez, say they place an undue burden on businesses, and would force employers to lay off workers or move.
“There is simply not enough room, enough margin in these businesses to absorb a 50-plus percent increase in labor costs over a short period of time,” he told the city council.
Mayor Eric Garcetti, who last year proposed a pay increase that would have brought the minimum wage to $13.25 by 2017, said in a statement that he planned to sign the council’s measure.
Related: Seattle Hikes Minimum Wage to $15 Per Hour
German Retail Giant Removes Glyphosate from 350 Stores
May 20th, 2015Via: Natural Society:
I recently snapped a photo from an advertising circular that was delivered to my home, proudly promoting Monsanto’s ‘probably carcinogenic’ Round Up, on sale no less, at a local hardware store. While US garden and DIY stores are still selling cancer-causing poison in a jug, a German retail giant will no longer carry glyphosate-containing products as of September 30, 2015.
More than 350 ‘toom Baumarkt DIY’ stores belonging to the REWE Group are removing any product that contains this endocrine disrupting chemical concoction, and as of today, no such products can be re-ordered from their stores.
Amputees Control Bionic Legs with Their Thoughts
May 20th, 2015Via: Reuters:
Amputees can control their bionic prosthetic limbs with their minds, thanks to tiny implanted myoelectric sensors (IMES) developed by Icelandic orthopedics company Ossur and surgically placed in a patient’s residual muscle tissue.
Ossur implanted tiny sensors in the residual muscle tissue of two amputees that they say trigger movement in the prosthesis via a receiver. Ossur President & CEO Jon Sigurdsson was due to announce in Copenhagen on Wednesday (May 20) that the two amputees are the first world-wide to be able to control their lower-limb prostheses subconsciously.
Policing, Mass Imprisonment, and the Failure of American Lawyers
May 20th, 2015Via: Harvard Law Review:
It did not surprise me that almost every child in the D.C. public high school class raised a hand when I asked if any of them had been stopped and searched by the police. When I told them that being stopped without reasonable suspicion that they were committing a crime is a violation of the United States Constitution, one of the students corrected me: “No, you don’t understand, these are the Jumpouts, not the police. They’re allowed to do that.” I’m used to people laughing in disbelief when I do constitutional rights trainings in heavily policed communities. But when I heard those words, my heart sank. In front of me was a child in whose world being stopped and frisked was so regular, such a fact of everyday life, that he had reasonably concluded that it must be lawful. This child was growing up believing that his suspicious body could be probed at will by government employees. One by one, the students described to me the routine that they had developed to turn and face the nearest wall while officers searched through their backpacks and pockets on the way home from school. Like many of the problems in the criminal legal system, there is no genuine dispute that these and more serious illegalities are happening on a massive scale. In the seven years that I have spent working in American courts and jails, one thing sticks out above all else: the divergence between the law as it is written and the law as it is lived.
The contemporary system of American policing and incarceration puts human beings in cages at rates unprecedented in American history and unparalleled in the modern world. It is a considerable bureaucratic achievement to accomplish the transfer of thirteen million bodies each year from their homes and families and schools and communities into government boxes of concrete and metal. It is also a failure of the legal profession.
The Death of Sgt James Brown Inside El Paso County Jail
May 19th, 2015Via: KFOX14:
CEOs Make 373 Times Average Worker Pay
May 19th, 2015Via: CNBC:
The average S&P 500 company CEO made 373 times the salary of the average production and non-supervisory worker in 2014, up from 331 times in 2013, according to the AFL-CIO.
Fermenting Morphine with Genetically Modified Yeasts
May 19th, 2015Laudanum Pale Ale?
Via: Radio New Zealand:
Scientists have figured out how to brew morphine using the same kit used to make beer at home.
They have genetically modified yeast to perform the complicated chemistry needed to convert sugar to morphine.
The findings, published in Nature Chemical Biology, raise promise for medicine but also concerns about “home-brewed” illegal drugs.
Experts have called for tight control of organisms genetically modified to produce narcotics.
If you brew beer at home, then you are relying on microscopic yeast that turns sugars into alcohol.
But by borrowing DNA from plants, scientists have been genetically engineering yeasts that can perform each of the steps needed to convert sugar into morphine.
One stage of the process – the production of an intermediary chemical called reticuline – had been a stumbling block.
That has been solved by a team at the University of California, Berkeley, and the scientists say it should now be possible to put all the steps together and “brew” morphine.
Dr John Dueber, a bioengineer at the university, said: “What you really want to do from a fermentation perspective is to be able to feed the yeast glucose, which is a cheap sugar source, and have the yeast do all the chemical steps required downstream to make your target therapeutic drug.
“With our study, all the steps have been described, and it’s now a matter of linking them together and scaling up the process.
“It’s not a trivial challenge, but it’s doable.”
Ripasso Testing 34% Efficient Concentrated Solar System in Kalahari Desert
May 18th, 2015Disclosures: I sell solar power systems in New Zealand and I’m long Enphase Energy.
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Via: Guardian:
A new solar electricity generation system that developers claim is the most efficient in the world, is being tested in South Africa’s Kalahari desert.
The Swedish company behind the project – which combines military technology with an idea developed by a 19th-century Scottish engineer and clergyman – says it is on the verge of building its first commercial installation.
In the remote Northern Cape province, huge mirrors reflect the sun across the brown Kalahari sand. This is the test site for Swedish company Ripasso, which is using the intense South African sun and local manufacturing know-how to develop their cutting-edge kit.
“Our whole team in South Africa has been hired locally, and our new systems have all been built with local South African labour. It works great,” says CEO Gunnar Larsson.
This is one of the few operational small-scale concentrated solar energy systems of its kind in the world. 34% of the sun’s energy hitting the mirrors is converted directly to grid-available electric power, compared to roughly half that for standard solar panels.
…
Independent tests by IT Power in the UK confirm that a single Ripasso dish can generate 75 to 85 megawatt hours of electricity a year – enough to power 24 typical UK homes. To make the same amount of electricity by burning coal would mean releasing roughly 81 metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Paul Gauche, director of the Solar Thermal Energy Research Group at the University of Stellenbosch has visited the test site many times. “The technology looks good to me. I’ve seen it working and I believe it meets the efficiency goals. The technology is proven with years of performance in the navy.”
He points out that it will be crucial to keep costs low enough to compete with photovoltaics, a significant challenge as their price falls every year. The system is also limited in that it is only useful in areas with consistent bright sunshine.
The technology works by using the mirrors as giant lenses that focus the sun’s energy to a tiny hot point, which in turn drives a zero-emission Stirling engine.
