BRICS Take Aim at Dollar
April 15th, 2011The U.S. Dollar Index has not yet crossed into the crisis territory that I wrote about recently, but here’s what I thought might happen if it does:
I’d say that capital controls, some kind of IMF SDR (Special Drawing Rights) ‘Global Reserve’ confetti bucks, and a global financial crisis management organization, like the IMF on steroids are possible.
Now, look at this, keeping in mind that the shit hasn’t even hit the fan yet.
Via: Reuters:
The BRICS group of emerging-market powers kept up the pressure on Thursday for a revamped global monetary system that relies less on the dollar and for a louder voice in international financial institutions.
The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa also called for stronger regulation of commodity derivatives to dampen excessive volatility in food and energy prices, which they said posed new risks for the recovery of the world economy.
Meeting on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, they said the recent financial crisis had exposed the inadequacies of the current monetary order, which has the dollar as its linchpin.
What was needed, they said in a statement, was “a broad-based international reserve currency system providing stability and certainty” — thinly veiled criticism of what the BRICS see as Washington’s neglect of its global monetary responsibilities.
The BRICS are worried that America’s large trade and budget deficits will eventually debase the dollar. They also begrudge the financial and political privileges that come with being the leading reserve currency.
“The world economy is undergoing profound and complex changes,” Chinese President Hu Jintao said. “The era demands that the BRICS countries strengthen dialogue and cooperation.”
In another dig at the dollar, the development banks of the five BRICS nations agreed to establish mutual credit lines denominated in their local currencies, not the U.S. currency.
…
The leaders reviewed the global role of the Special Drawing Right, the IMF’s accounting unit and reserve asset, which some experts believe could grow into a partial substitute for the dollar.
But they stepped around the issue of whether the yuan should join the SDR, saying only that they welcomed discussion of the composition of the SDR’s basket of currencies.
…
On the hot topic of capital flows, the BRICS called “for more attention” to the risks posed by massive cross-border flows of money but went no further.
Intense Light Passing Through Non Conductive Material, ‘Can Generate Magnetic Effects That Are 100 Million Times Stronger Than Previously Expected’
April 15th, 2011Intense light can cause glass to exhibit strong magnetic properties. Wow, this is a weird one. The buzz kill occurs when you read that the light needs to be focused to 10 million watts per square centimeter to realize the effect. The researchers are looking for materials that work at lower intensities.
Via: PhysOrg:
A dramatic and surprising magnetic effect of light discovered by University of Michigan researchers could lead to solar power without traditional semiconductor-based solar cells.
The researchers found a way to make an “optical battery,” said Stephen Rand, a professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Applied Physics.
In the process, they overturned a century-old tenet of physics.
“You could stare at the equations of motion all day and you will not see this possibility. We’ve all been taught that this doesn’t happen,” said Rand, an author of a paper on the work published in the Journal of Applied Physics. “It’s a very odd interaction. That’s why it’s been overlooked for more than 100 years.”
Light has electric and magnetic components. Until now, scientists thought the effects of the magnetic field were so weak that they could be ignored. What Rand and his colleagues found is that at the right intensity, when light is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, the light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than previously expected. Under these circumstances, the magnetic effects develop strength equivalent to a strong electric effect.
“This could lead to a new kind of solar cell without semiconductors and without absorption to produce charge separation,” Rand said. “In solar cells, the light goes into a material, gets absorbed and creates heat. Here, we expect to have a very low heat load. Instead of the light being absorbed, energy is stored in the magnetic moment. Intense magnetization can be induced by intense light and then it is ultimately capable of providing a capacitive power source.”
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The light must be shone through a material that does not conduct electricity, such as glass. And it must be focused to an intensity of 10 million watts per square centimeter. Sunlight isn’t this intense on its own, but new materials are being sought that would work at lower intensities, Fisher said.
Google Trades Down Over 5% in After Hours on Earnings Miss
April 14th, 2011WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
After hours GOOG: 546.70, -31.81 (-5.50%). That’s down through the 200 day moving average which is currently at 559.09. The chart has looked like shit on a stick since February. I’d say continuation lower is a strong possibility, with some sucker bounces along the way.
Via: CNBC:
Google shares slid in extended trading Thursday after the firm posted a profit that missed Wall Street expectations for the quarter, the first reporting period for the company since it named a new CEO.
Japan: Encasing Reactors Will Be More Difficult Than Chernobyl
April 14th, 2011Via: Reuters:
Encasing reactors at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant in concrete would present much more of a challenge than Chernobyl, according to an executive of the firm whose pumps are helping cooling efforts there.
“In Chernobyl, where a single reactor was encased, 11 trucks were in action for a number of months. In Fukushima we’re talking about four reactors,” Gerald Karch, chief executive of the technical business of unlisted machinery maker Putzmeister, said in an interview with Reuters.
China Foreign Reserves Soar Past $3 Trillion
April 14th, 2011Via: Reuters:
China’s foreign exchange reserves soared to a record of more than $3 trillion by end-March, while its money supply growth blew past forecasts, threatening to aggravate the nation’s inflation woes and trigger more policy tightening.
ABB FRIDA Concept Robot for Industrial Dual-Arm Assembly Applications
April 14th, 2011Foxconn assembly line workers make about $3480 per year, or $34,800 over a decade. How much will one of those ABB FRIDA robots (and associated systems) cost? My guess is that Foxconn could pay two human factory workers for a decade for less than the cost of one of those robots. Eventually, though, a single robot will do the work of some number of humans, and then the set-up costs will make more sense for a firm like Foxconn.
Bonuses: The robots won’t require dormitories or cafeterias, and they won’t commit suicide by jumping out the factory windows, like some of Foxconn’s human workers did. Hmm. Maybe being able to take down the suicide prevention nets from the factory buildings could be part of ABB’s marketing pitch!
I don’t know what will become of the landless peasants at that point… (Maybe it will become the army’s problem.)
While I do see the Rise of the Machines reality grinding slowly into existence, I think China’s non-trivial food issues will hit the fan long before the robot overlords appear on the scene.
Via: Engadget:
Don’t be fooled by the “concept” label that ABB has affixed to its new robot. There can be only one logical conclusion to this endeavor: FRIDA and its ilk will one day replace the millions of young Chinese workers assembling our gadgets. It’s no coincidence that this uniquely agile, dual-arm robot is compact enough to “fit into spaces ergonomically designed for human workers” and can be carried around “easily” to begin work with a minimum of installation requirements.
Police Increasingly Peeping at E-Mail, Instant Messages
April 14th, 2011This article ignores the existence of the NSA’s large scale, warrantless intercept program that’s running inside the U.S.
Via: MacWorld:
Law enforcement organizations are making tens of thousands of requests for private electronic information from companies such as Sprint, Facebook and AOL, but few detailed statistics are available, according to a privacy researcher.
Police and other agencies have “enthusiastically embraced” asking for e-mail, instant messages and mobile-phone location data, but there’s no U.S. federal law that requires the reporting of requests for stored communications data, wrote Christopher Soghoian, a doctoral candidate at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, in a newly published paper.
“Unfortunately, there are no reporting requirements for the modern surveillance methods that make up the majority of law enforcement requests to service providers and telephone companies,” Soghoian wrote. “As such, this surveillance largely occurs off the books, with no way for Congress or the general public to know the true scale of such activities.”
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If law enforcement wants to intercept e-mail or instant messages in real-time, they are required to report it. Since 1997, federal law enforcement has requested real-time intercepts only 67 times, with state law enforcement agents obtaining 54 intercept orders.
Soghoian wrote that those low figures may seem counterintuitive given the real-time nature of electronic communications. But all of the communications are stored, he noted.
“It is often cheaper and easier to do it after the fact rather than in real-time,” Soghoian wrote.
Cox Communications, a major U.S. service provider, charges $3,500 for a wiretap and $2,500 for a pen register. Account information, however, costs a mere $40.
How China and Others Are Altering Web Traffic
April 14th, 2011Here’s commentary from, U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators:
…When you’re connected to .mil’s PSYOP ISP, you may get a ‘special’ version of the Internet. For example, when you type in cnn.com or google.com, what you see may be quite different from what the rest of the world sees. The military could be running proxies that make sites appear any way PSYOP planners want them to appear. They could load content from the actual sites, but, on the fly, add PSYOP payloads to what is sent to the target population.
So, while regular visitors to cnn.com see the usual cnn.com page, those who connect to .mil’s PSYOP ISP might see extra stories that have been created specifically for the mission at hand. Or, other stories might not appear at all.
Maybe search results for various topics are packed with totally bogus results.
How about a special version of YouTube with videos and users completely fabricated by .mil and not at all visible by people on the regular Internet?
A proxy server is like one of those food processors you see on TV infomercials at 4am. It slices. It dices. It minces. A carrot goes in one side as a carrot, but it could come out the other side a dozen different ways.
Via: MIT Technology Review:
Google leveled new charges against China this week, claiming that the country has interfered with some citizens’ access to the Internet giant’s Gmail service, disguising the interference as technical glitches.
Security experts say that China is most likely using invisible intermediary servers, or “transparent proxies,” to intercept and relay network messages while rapidly modifying the contents of those communications. This makes it possible to block e-mail messages while making it appear as if Gmail is malfunctioning.
Companies regularly use transparent proxies to filter employees’ Web access. Some ISPs have also used the technique to replace regular Web advertisements with those of their own. But it’s becoming increasingly common for governments to use transparent proxies to censor and track dissidents and protestors. All traffic from a certain network is forced through the proxy, allowing communications to be monitored and modified on the fly. Intercepting and relaying traffic is known as a “man in the middle” attack.
New Zealand: Controversial Internet Piracy Bill Becomes Law
April 14th, 2011If at first you don’t succeed, try again under urgency.
Via: Stuff:
A bill that could see internet users have their access cut off if they repeatedly share copyright material has been passed by Parliament.
The Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill, which aims to stamp out internet piracy, passed by 111 votes to 11 this morning.
It was supported by all parties except the Greens and independent MPs Chris Carter and Hone Harawira.
Arnie Gundersen: “This is about a thousand times worse than ever anticipated by the nuclear planners.”
April 14th, 2011Fukushima Accident Severity Level Raised to ‘7’: Gundersen Discusses Lack of US Radiation Monitoring Data from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
