China’s Ghost Cities
April 11th, 2011Madness on afterburner, comrade.
Via: Dateline:
Vast new cities of apartments and shops are being built across China at a rate of ten a year, but they remain almost completely uninhabited ghost towns.
It’s all part of the government’s efforts to keep the economy booming, and there are many people who would love to move in, but it’s simply too expensive for most.
Video journalist Adrian Brown wanders through malls of vacant shops, and roads lined with empty apartment buildings… 64 million apartments are said to be empty across the country and one of the few shop owners says he once didn’t sell anything for four or five days.
So are the efforts to boost the economy going to end up having the opposite effect and creating a financial crisis for China?
The Sock Puppet Industrial Complex: U.S. Trains ‘Activists’ to Evade Security Forces
April 11th, 2011If any component of this is noteworthy, it’s the scale. The core of this is as old as the hills.
Many of the TwitFace kids today haven’t even heard of the The Mighty Wurlitzer, but every crop of kids that fascists harvest are generally ignorant of who they’re actually serving, and there’s a fresh crop next year, and so it goes.
Via: AFP:
The United States is training thousands of cell phone and Internet pro-democracy campaigners worldwide to evade security forces in what it calls a “cat-and-mouse game” with authoritarian governments.
The US government is sponsoring efforts to help activists in Arab and other countries gain access to technology that circumvents government firewalls, secures telephone text and voice messages, and prevents attacks on websites.
“This is sort of a cat-and-mouse game and governments are constantly developing new techniques to go after critics, to go after dissenters,” said Michael Posner, the assistant US secretary of state for human rights and labor.
“We are trying to stay ahead of the curve and trying to basically provide both technology, training, and diplomatic support to allow people to freely express their views.”
Posner told a small group of reporters that the theme of Internet freedom will be “peppered” throughout the State Department’s annual report on human rights for 194 countries that is scheduled for release on Friday.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is campaigning hard for freedoms of expression, assembly and association online — what she calls the world’s town square or coffee house of the 21st century.
Related:
Air Force Wants Troll Persona Management Software
Arnie Gundersen: How Fukushima’s Fuel Rods Melted and Shattered
April 11th, 2011Nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen demonstrates how Fukushima’s fuel rods melted and shattered from Fairewinds Associates on Vimeo.
Emails About Oil
April 11th, 2011WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Once again, please refer to my previous posts that warned about what’s happening now:
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Oil Could Be On Brink Of Terrifying Move Higher
EPA: New Radiation Highs in Little Rock Milk, Philadelphia Drinking Water
April 10th, 2011Via: Forbes:
Milk from Little Rock and drinking water from Philadelphia contained the highest levels of Iodine-131 from Japan yet detected by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to data released by EPA Saturday.
The Philadelphia sample is below the EPA’s maximum contaminant level (MCL) for iodine-131, but the Little Rock sample is almost three times higher.
U.S. Dollar
April 10th, 2011WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
My U.S. Dollar Index analysis from 22 March remains in play. Here’s an update.
I expect a sucker bounce to occur sometime between the current level and 74.170, but that should be pretty short lived; days, not weeks. Tactical longside plays would be for actively managing pros only. For longer term bears, any bounce should just be a speed bump. The ascending line of the (broken down) bearish triangle is now a hard overhead resistance.
U.S. Dollar Index, Monthly Interval
Ok, so what happens if 74.170 breaks down?
A move below 74.170 sets up a re-test of 70.792 and a period of global financial panic. The analogy would be a driver taking a corner on an icy road too fast. Below 74.170, there would be an “Oh shit” moment as traction is lost and the car careens toward the cliff (70.792). The central banks will work together in an attempt to regain control.
My guess is that the breakdown of the monster bearish triangle (see chart) is a strong enough pattern to take out that hard pivot at 74.170, but I’m less sure about what will happen with 70.792.
You should know by now that I’m not one of these Chicken Little fast crash snake handlers that are predicting The End every five minutes, but I’d like everyone reading to know that 70.792 is a big deal. If the slide continues and 70.792 breaks down, that would represent an extremely serious emergency and probably the end of the current global financial system.
70.792 is a door to the unknown, so trying to guess what’s beyond it is pretty silly. But since a handful of you pay me to guess about things like this, I’ll try.
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. At a minimum, states will try unilateral capital controls in an attempt to prevent their currencies from disorderly appreciation vs. the toxic dollar. I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes to pass that secret contingency planning has been under way for this.
Let it suffice to say that below 70.792, the system will be very different and not in a good way. But let’s get down below 74.170 before spending too much time on trying to figure out what’s behind door # 70.792.
The Budget Pie Illustrated
April 10th, 2011I didn’t post a single story about the absurd Kabuki theater, brain rot, nonsense that came to a head last week, but this cartoon sums up the whole thing very succinctly.
Via: IBD:
Sony, Canon Plants Knocked Out by Aftershock
April 8th, 2011Via: Bloomberg:
Sony Corp. and Canon Inc. were among manufacturers that shut plants in Japan following a 7.1- magnitude earthquake yesterday, delaying their recovery from last month’s record temblor.
Sony, Japan’s largest exporter of consumer electronics, said it suspended operations at two plants in Miyagi prefecture because of power outages caused by last night’s aftershock of the 9-magnitude temblor that struck March 11. Canon, Nikon Corp., Fujitsu Ltd., Tokyo Electron Ltd., NTT DoCoMo Inc. and KDDI Corp. also reported disruptions today.
Naked Man Shoots SWAT Robot with AK-47
April 8th, 2011Via: WFTV:
A Brevard County man was naked when he opened fire on a SWAT team robot and it was all caught on video, according to deputies.
The Brevard County Sheriff’s Office said the robot was sent into the West Melbourne home last week because the homeowner had called his family and said he was going to take his own life and the life of anyone who tried to stop him.
Deputies decided that the safest way to enter was with a robot mounted with cameras. The $65,000 robot had four cameras that recorded the whole encounter. When the robot entered the house, the man came out, naked, and first tried to break the robot, then shot it at least four times with an AK-47, according to deputies.
Off Topic: Telecom More Than Triples Far North XT Rural Download Speed
April 8th, 2011On 8 April, early AM hours NZ time, I noticed that my Telecom XT connection was running much faster than usual:
Rural Far North New Zealand Telecom XT Speeds
Woh. That’s interesting!
I’ve been using Telecom XT “out here” since November 2009 and the link was always throttled back to a maximum of 1.3 Mbits/sec up and down. Since this morning, I’m getting around 4.4Mbits/sec down with the same 1.3Mbits/sec up. That’s almost as fast as the cable modem connection I had back around 2003 in the U.S.! (That cable modem link is one of about three things I miss about the U.S.; Mexican food restaurants and Amazon free shipping are the other two.)
I’ve seen this type of speed (and much faster) over XT in urban areas, but never out here. Even with five bars and line of site to the tower, 1.3Mbits up/down was the max due to Telecom throttling the link.
I wonder if Telecom is experimenting with future configurations for the Rural Broadband Initiative…
The goal of the RBI is to allow 80% of rural households to have access to a 5Mbits/sec connection to the Internet. So, it’s an interesting coincidence that this thing is now running within 600kbits of the mark. I’m not sure what they have specified for the upstream minimum on for rural users, but I think it’s 1Mbit/sec.
I have some extremely cynical ideas about what’s happening here, and my guess is that the speed on this thing is going to be throttled back down again, but I’m just going to try to smell the roses for now.
Are you a rural XT user? Has your connection speed increased dramatically? I’d be curious to know.
