5 Countries Spew More Plastic Into the Oceans Than the Rest of the World Together
January 18th, 2016Via: GlobalPost:
In a recent report, Ocean Conservancy claims that China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are spewing out as much as 60 percent of the plastic waste that enters the world’s seas.
“At this rate, we would expect nearly one ton of plastic for every three tons of fish in our oceans by 2025 — an unthinkable number with drastic economic and environmental consequences,” says Nicholas Mallos, director of Ocean Conservancy’s marine debris program.
62 People Now Own the Same Wealth as Half the World’s Population
January 17th, 2016Via: Independent:
Wealth inequality has grown to the stage where 62 of the world’s richest people own as much as the poorest half of humanity combined, according to a new report.
The research, conducted by the charity Oxfam, found that the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population – 3.6 million people – has fallen by 41 per cent, or a trillion US dollars, since 2010.
While this group has become poorer, the wealth of the richest 62 people on the planet has increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76 trillion.
Obama Declares Emergency in Michigan Over Lead-Contaminated Water
January 17th, 2016Via: CBC:
U.S. President Barack Obama signed an emergency declaration Saturday that clears the way for federal aid for Flint, Michigan, which is undergoing a drinking water crisis due to lead-contaminated water.
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The tap water in Flint, population 99,000, became contaminated after the city switched from the Detroit water system to the Flint River while a pipeline to Lake Huron is under construction. The decision to use the river was made while a Snyder-appointed emergency manager was running the city government due to its financial problems. The corrosive water from the Flint River lacked adequate treatment and caused lead to leach from old pipes in homes and schools.
Flint returned to the Detroit system in October after elevated lead levels were discovered in children, and could tap into the new pipeline by summer. But officials remain concerned that old pipes could continue to leach lead, to which exposure can cause behaviour problems and learning disabilities in children as well as kidney ailments in adults.
Obama Proposes $4 Billion Autonomous Vehicle Pilot Projects
January 17th, 2016In other news, self driving trucks will wipe out millions of jobs:
We are facing the decimation of entire small town economies, a disruption the likes of which we haven’t seen since the construction of the interstate highway system itself bypassed entire towns.
Via: Forbes:
Self-driving cars have a new supporter: President Obama.
After talking in his last State of the Union address this week about investing in the country’s transportation system, Obama and his Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced a 10-year, $4 billion plan to fund pilot projects that would accelerate the adoption of self-driving autonomous vehicles. Such programs, if funded in the fiscal year 2017 federal budget, will test connected vehicle systems in “designated corridors” around the country and work toward a multi-state regulatory framework that covers the industry.
“We are on the cusp of a new era in automotive technology with enormous potential to save lives, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and transform mobility for the American people,” Secretary Foxx said in a statement. “Today’s actions and those we will pursue in the coming months will provide the foundation and the path forward for manufacturers, state officials, and consumers to use new technologies and achieve their full safety potential.”
Foxx made the announcement from the Detroit Auto Show on Thursday alongside major automakers (including GM, Ford, Volvo, and Tesla) as well as Google. The news comes less than two weeks after GM invested $500 million in ride-sharing app Lyft to partner on automated vehicle technology. Ford has also reportedly been in talks on a partnership with Google, one of the leaders in self-driving car software.
Goldman Sachs to Pay $5 Billion in Mortgage Settlement
January 14th, 2016Via: CNBC:
Goldman Sachs said Thursday it will pay roughly $5 billion to settle federal and state probes of its role in the sale of shoddy mortgages in the years leading to the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis.
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Goldman shares fell 9 cents to $161.30 in aftermarket trading.
“Here Comes the Biggest Stock Market Crash in a Generation”
January 14th, 2016I’m not posting this because I think it’s going to happen, or not happen. I definitely don’t know.
It does, however, contain a remarkable level of doom for such a mainstream source.
What he’s saying is obvious and logical, which makes me wonder how applicable it is to this market.
Via: Fortune:
You don’t have to listen very hard to hear the bears growling on Wall Street, London, or Paris, these days. Indeed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down another 300 points on Wednesday to just under 16,200.
With the U.S. stock market sagging, oil off to its worst start ever, and the China’s economy continuing to deteriorate, bearish analysts have a wealth of evidence to point to.
And they don’t come much more bearish that Albert Edwards, strategist at Société Générale. He’s not had much nice to say about the global economy in years, and recent events have only hardened his convictions that the global economy is headed for disaster, and will take the prices of equities down with it. How much? Edwards predicts the stock market could plunge as much as 75%. That would be worse than during the financial crisis, in which stocks from their peak to trough dropped a brutal 62%.
In a research note published Wednesday, Edwards argued that ever since the last financial crisis, the global economy has been dependent on the Federal Reserve’s massive bond buying program to prop up equity prices and stimulate growth in emerging markets. “A commodity bubble and the resultant U.S. shale investment boom were all consequences of the Fed’s QE,” Edwards writes. Now that the Fed has stopped buying bonds and has actually moved to raise rates, the artificial growth in asset prices that we’ve seen since the last financial crisis will come undone, according to Edwards. “The illusion of of prosperity is shattered as boom now turns to bust,” he writes.
U.S. Intelligence Director’s Personal E-Mail, Phone Hacked
January 13th, 2016Via: Ars Technica:
The same individual or group claiming to be behind a recent breach of the personal e-mail account of CIA Director John Brennan now claims to be behind the hijacking of the accounts of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed to Motherboard that Clapper was targeted and that the case has been forwarded to law enforcement.
Someone going by the moniker “Cracka,” claiming to be with a group of “teenage hackers” called “Crackas With Attitude,” told Motherboard’s Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchiarai that he had gained access to Clapper’s Verizon FiOS account and changed the settings for his phone service to forward all calls to the Free Palestine Movement. Cracka also claimed to have gained access to Clapper’s personal e-mail account and his wife’s Yahoo account.
And Now… America’s Nuclear Smart Bomb
January 13th, 2016Via: New York Times:
The United States military is replacing the fixed tail section of the B61 bomb with steerable fins and adding other advanced technology. The result is a bomb that can make more accurate nuclear strikes and a warhead whose destructive power can be adjusted to minimize collateral damage and radioactive fallout.
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The B61 Model 12, the bomb flight-tested last year in Nevada, is the first of five new warhead types planned as part of an atomic revitalization estimated to cost up to $1 trillion over three decades. As a family, the weapons and their delivery systems move toward the small, the stealthy and the precise.
Cops Say They Can Access Encrypted Emails on So-Called PGP BlackBerrys
January 13th, 2016Via: Vice:
Dutch investigators have confirmed to Motherboard that they are able to read encrypted messages sent on PGP BlackBerry phones—custom, security-focused BlackBerry devices that come complete with an encrypted email feature, and which reportedly may be used by organized criminal groups.
“We are capable of obtaining encrypted data from BlackBerry PGP devices,” Tuscha Essed, a press officer from the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI), told Motherboard in an email. The NFI is a body that assists law enforcement in forensic evidence retrieval, and which, according to its website, deals with most of the forensic investigations in criminal cases in the Netherlands.
The news first emerged when Dutch blog “misdaadnieuws.com,” or Crime News, published apparent documents sourced from the NFI in December last year. According to that report, deleted messages can be recovered and encrypted emails read on these devices. The process is carried out with a piece of forensics software made by private company Cellebrite.
LG to Triple Solar Panel Production by 2020
January 13th, 2016Disclosure: I sell solar power systems in NZ.
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Via: LG PR:
LG Electronics (LG) today announced plans to significantly expand its solar energy solution business with a multimillion dollar investment to expand its solar panel manufacturing capabilities in South Korea.
LG entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Korean city of Gumi to invest USD 435 million (KRW 527.2 billion) to expand the company’s solar cell manufacturing facilities in the city. The addition of six production lines to the current eight will increase capacity from 1GW to 1.8GW by 2018 and 3GW — equivalent to the electrical power consumed by one million households — by 2020.
