Bridgecorp Placed in Receivership
July 3rd, 2007Via: Stuff:
The collapse of one of the country’s major property financiers Bridgecorp – the fourth finance company to go to the wall in a year – could be one of the biggest to affect mum and dad investors since Equiticorp went bust in 1988.
Bridgecorp and its subsidiaries were placed in receivership at the request of its directors after defaulting on loan repayments five days ago, breaching terms of its trust deed.
The company raises money from the public and lends it to property developers who have generally failed to get funding from banks.
Bridgecorp claims it is the second-largest property development and commercial finance company in New Zealand by asset size, and the seventh-largest finance company overall.
China: Food Crops Grown in Soil Polluted with Heavy Metals
July 3rd, 2007Devastation.
Via: Wall Street Journal / Moneyweb:
For nearly two decades, Lai Mandai regularly ate and sold beans, cabbage and watermelons grown on a plot of land a short walk from a lead smelting plant in her village.
Like dozens of other villagers who ate locally grown food, Ms. Lai, 39 years old, developed health problems. “When I did work, planting vegetables or cleaning the floor, I felt so tired, and my fingers felt numb,” Ms. Lai says. “I talked with other villagers. They had the same problems.”
Ms. Lai, along with 57 other villagers, was eventually diagnosed with high levels of cadmium, a heavy metal that can cause kidney disease and softening of the bones. Runoff from the factory — which the government tore down in 2004 — had contaminated the farmland and entered the food supply. A Chinese government report found that rice grown in the village contained 20 times the permitted level of cadmium.
China’s tainted food supply has fallen under heightened scrutiny after a shipment of wheat flour contaminated with a chemical used in fire retardants found its way into pet food and was linked to the deaths of U.S. animals in late March. Concerns have since soared over the safety of the country’s exports. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently told consumers to stop buying toothpaste made in China because it might contain poisonous diethylene glycol. Last week, the FDA sounded an alarm on farm-raised seafood from China, citing excessive levels of antibiotics and additives.
Yet after decades of industrial pollution, some of the worst contaminants making their way into the country’s food come from the soil in which it is grown. So far it hasn’t been determined the extent to which tainted crops such as rice, fruits and vegetables have been exported to the U.S. What is clear is that in contaminated areas dotting the country, residents have been eating such food for years or decades.
Pingyang, where Ms. Lai lives, is among the so-called hot spots in China where farmland lying in the shadow of factory smokestacks or mining operations has been contaminated by heavy metals. These elements can cause a sweeping range of health problems, from brain damage to cancer.
Chinese academics have written about such sites in more than a dozen studies over the past two years in Chinese and international scientific journals. In a study published earlier this year, researchers at the Guangdong Institute of Ecology found excessive levels of cadmium and mercury in Chinese cabbage grown in Foshan, a major manufacturing center in southern China. Last year, researchers at Lanzhou University published research showing that vegetables at four sites near the mining and smelting city of Baiyin in the Northwestern Gansu province contained hazardous levels of cadmium, lead and copper. A study of crops grown in the central city of Chongqing found excessive lead and cadmium levels in vegetables at 20 sites.
Cop Dressed as ‘Uncle Sam’ Tickets Hundreds of Speeding Central Floridian Drivers
July 2nd, 2007Uncle $cam.
Via: local6.com:
Hundreds of Central Florida motorists were ticketed Monday by a costumed Uncle Sam officer in a weeklong operation targeting speeding holiday drivers.
About 20 sheriff’s deputies on motorcycles pulled over speeding motorists after they were detected by Uncle Sam’s laser speed-detection gun.
During the four-hour traffic operation, 275 citations were issued, according to sheriff’s deputies.
Top U.S. Politicians Call for British-Style Surveillance State
July 2nd, 2007Via: New York Daily News:
The attempted terror attacks in Britain prove the U.S. needs its domestic spying program and more surveillance cameras in American cities, two powerful lawmakers said yesterday.
Sen. Joseph Lieberman called for an end to the “petty, partisan fighting” over the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping and e-mail spying efforts.
“I hope this week, based on what happened in the United Kingdom, President Bush [and] the bipartisan leadership of Congress will sit down and say, ‘Hey, let’s cut out the nonsense,'” Lieberman (I-Conn.) said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“We’re fiddling while our enemies are getting ready to attack us,” he said. “Let’s figure out how to pass a law to modernize this electronic surveillance capacity, which is critical.”
Related: United States Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner: Secret Trials for Terrorists
EMP Shopping Cart Locker
July 2nd, 2007If you know even a little about the critical and undefended infrastructures that make modern society possible, you might find this article funny, and not funny, all at once.
Note on a Different Matter: These people mention Tor. Please read The Ugly Truth About Online Anonymity if you haven’t already re: Tor.
Via: Instructables:
Ever noticed a painted yellow line in the parking lot around many supermarkets and retail stores? The magic yellow line emits a signal that causes carts to stop dead in their tracks, preventing carts from leaving the parking lot.
Now you can build your own portable yellow line– with up to a 20 foot range. Need I say more? Hint: it works inside the store.
Disclaimer: This is not an easy project. It will require knowledge of circuits, soldering, social engineering, and a tiny bit of PIC microcontroller stuff. High power is involved, and if you mess up, you might get burned, caught on fire, or arrested– most likely all three. Always use an appropriate amperage fuse to prevent a short from becoming a much bigger problem. This project is also fairly expensive. The parts will cost about 65 bucks. Batteries with some kick will run 20-30 bucks, and a single PCB is about 60 bucks. They get a lot cheaper if you buy multiples for your friends.
We would be thrilled to sell kits, and it would certainly make the components cheaper and easier to get, but frankly, we’re a little worried about the possibility of civil action. We likewise recommend that no one else sells kits commercially.
Geostrategy via Economics: China Providing the U.S. with Enough Rope to Hang Itself
July 2nd, 2007For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
As good as this article is, it doesn’t mention a certain, former superpower that was also bogged down in a futile war in Eurasia when it collapsed. That’s right, I’m referring to the Soviet Union’s last strategic blunder: The invasion of Afghanistan. Remember the role the U.S. played in that conflict: funding bin Laden and the Afghan Mujahideen, providing weapons, training and intelligence throughout the 1980s…
Flash forward to today. Far from being a superpower, the U.S. couldn’t even afford the rope necessary to hang itself.
China has lots of rope.
Of course, the Chinese are screwed too, and they know it (they’re now scrambling for everything from wheat to copper to oil). But if you know that you’re going to have to fight a guy, it’s a good thing if he gets his ass kicked by someone else when he’s on his way to fight you.
Via: Austin Chronicle:
The Washington Post (May 8, p.D1): “Joseph E. Stiglitz [Nobel winner in economics] … co-authored a study that predicts the Iraq conflict alone will eventually cost taxpayers more than $1 trillion, counting military rebuilding and health care for wounded veterans.” Incredibly, we haven’t paid for any of this yet. The Post article noted, “The war bill is going directly on the nation’s credit card.” Foreign investors, especially China, have been paying for this war.
Now why would they do that? The answer: It’s in their strategic interest to finance a war that drains America’s financial, military, and leadership clout. They’re paying for us to screw ourselves. It saves them the trouble. However, given the irresponsibility of America’s military adventures and the equal irresponsibility of the American electorate in elevating someone like George W. Bush to power, why would China and the other investing nations finance the rebuilding of America’s military might? How could that possibly be in their interest – especially now that the euro has overtaken the dollar as a viable medium for world exchange? Hence China and others are making obvious moves to invest differently. We’re about to be left behind.
We’re still important, a big economy, a player. We’re still dangerous, with all our bombs and missiles. But we won’t be fighting another ground war anytime soon, and everybody knows it. Financially and militarily, we’re no superpower anymore – though no presidential candidate can say that. Whether we recede from center stage gracefully or destructively, we’ll recede. We already have. It doesn’t look that way on TV, but we already have.
Several U.S. Corporations Support Colombian Death Squads
July 2nd, 2007One for your same-shit-different-century file.
Via: Los Angeles Times:
A former paramilitary soldier told a congressional panel Thursday that several U.S. companies provided financial support to illegal militias accused of killing Colombian civilians.
Edwin Guzman, a former Colombian army sergeant who later became a paramilitary member, testified that his military units were responsible for guarding the property of the Birmingham, Ala.-based Drummond coal company, which has extensive operations in Colombia.
Guzman said that the Colombian military also worked closely with right-wing paramilitary units housed on Drummond premises in a joint effort to protect the company and its coal shipments from leftist guerrillas.
Drummond provided company vehicles, gasoline and other supplies to the paramilitary group United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, Guzman said.
It has been illegal for U.S. companies to provide financial assistance to the AUC since September 2001, when the U.S. government designated it as a terrorist organization. But Guzman told members of three House Foreign Affairs Committee panels that protection agreements between the outlawed groups and corporations were commonplace.
Related: Chiquita Supports Terrorism
Cryptogon Story on the Front Page of Reddit
July 1st, 2007Guys, the Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation story below is on the front page of Reddit at the moment and the traffic is so heavy that it’s exceeding the CPU time that my account is allowed on the server. If you see a high CPU usage error page, try back in about three minutes.
Traffic will return to normal soon.
UPDATE: Reddit Traffic Dropping Off
Getting back to manageable traffic levels now. Man, that was nuts.
iRobot Corp.: Arming Robots with Tasers
July 1st, 2007Via: AP / MSNBC:
RoboCops and robot soldiers got a little closer to reality Thursday as a maker of floor-cleaning automatons teamed up with a stun-gun manufacturer to arm track-wheeled ‘bots for the police and the Pentagon.
By adding Tasers to robots it already makes for the military, iRobot Corp. says it hopes to give soldiers and law enforcement a defensive, non-lethal tool.
But some observers fear such developments could ultimately lead to robots capable of deciding on their own when to shoot and kill.
“It’s one more step in that direction,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va.-based military research organization.
“It is not the first step in that direction, but I think at some point toward the end of the next decade, you’re going to start seeing RoboCops, or a Terminator,” Pike said, referring to a pair of 1980s robot-themed sci-fi films. “We may see autonomous robots capable of inflicting lethal force.”
Investment Landfill: Is Your Pension Fund a Dump for Toxic Waste?
June 30th, 2007Paul Tustain, the director of BullionVault, has written a special report on the Bear Stearns crisis.
You should know that Paul is in the business of making gold ownership simple and efficient for individual investors. You should also know that I am a BullionVault client.
Via: BullionVault (PDF):
It starts with the humble mortgage. Lots of people in the United States who have no money have borrowed 100% of the value of a house right at the top of a housing market which has since fallen sharply. These are the subprime borrowers.
The lenders, however, did not have to worry very much about the risk of default, because they rolled these mortgages into packages called Mortgage-Backed Securities, which they then sold. They got to be off-risk within a few weeks, because by then these bonds — backed by the homebuyers’ promise to repay their home loans each month, plus interest — belonged to other financial organizations.
But it is not always easy to sell a package of these Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS). Selling such a product demands that the credit quality is assessed — and because the underlying lender is marketing to subprime borrowers, the package of debt in the MBS is heavily composed of mortgages quite likely to go into default. So a credit ratings agency will give it a low credit score.
This is where it pays to get a bunch of smart investment bankers involved…
