Quality Fade: The Production Cycle in China is the Opposite of the Theoretical Model of Continuous Improvement
May 17th, 2009Via: Economist:
Most of Mr Midler’s work is coping with what he calls “quality fade” as the Chinese factories transform what were, in fact, profitless contracts into lucrative relationships. The production cycle he sees is the opposite of the theoretical model of continuous improvement. After resolving teething problems and making products that match specifications, innovation inside the factory turns to cutting costs, often in ways that range from unsavoury to dangerous. Packaging is cheapened, chemical formulations altered, sanitary standards curtailed, and on and on, in a series of continual product debasements.
In a further effort to create a margin, clients from countries with strong intellectual-property protection and innovative products are given favourable pricing on manufacturing, but only because the factory can then directly sell knock-offs to buyers in other countries where patents and trademarks are ignored. It is, Mr Midler says, a kind of factory arbitrage.
Research Credit: Lagavulin
Saudi ‘Killer Chip’ Implant Would Track, Eliminate Undesirables
May 17th, 2009Via: Fox News:
It could be the ultimate in political control — but it won’t be patented in Germany.
German media outlets reported last week that a Saudi inventor’s application to patent a “killer chip,” as the Swiss tabloids put it, had been denied.
The basic model would consist of a tiny GPS transceiver placed in a capsule and inserted under a person’s skin, so that authorities could track him easily.
Model B would have an extra function — a dose of cyanide to remotely kill the wearer without muss or fuss if authorities deemed he’d become a public threat.
The inventor said the chip could be used to track terrorists, criminals, fugitives, illegal immigrants, political dissidents, domestic servants and foreigners overstaying their visas.
“The invention will probably be found to violate paragraph two of the German Patent Law — which does not allow inventions that transgress public order or good morals,” German Patent and Trademark Office spokeswoman Stephanie Krüger told the English-language German-news Web site The Local.
4 U.S. Citizens Murdered in Tijuana
May 15th, 2009Via: AP:
The bodies of four U.S. citizens were found strangled, beaten and stabbed in a van in this border city, two days after they reportedly left their Southern California homes for a night at the Mexican clubs, U.S. officials said Thursday.
The victims, ages 19 to 23 years old, were found tied up on Saturday, but their deaths were not reported earlier because they were under investigation, said Fermin Gomez, an assistant state prosecutor in Baja California.
U.S. consular officials in Tijuana said the victims — two men and two women from the San Diego and Chula Vista areas — were U.S. citizens. The state attorney general’s office in Baja California said one of the women was Mexican.
Their deaths are the latest in a string of violence in Tijuana that authorities blame on a bloody turf war between drug cartels.
“I just don’t think kids should be going to Tijuana right now,” Chula Vista police Lt. Scott Arsenault told the San Diego Union-Tribune. “They ran into the wrong people, obviously.”
Bernard Gonzales, a spokesman for the Chula Vista Police Department, said a friend told the women’s parents they were headed to nightclubs in Tijuana on Thursday night. They were reported missing the next day when they did not answer their cell phones.
Food Companies Are Placing the Onus for Safety on Consumers
May 15th, 2009You are free, of course, to consume as many ConAgra’s salmonella ridden, genetically engineered gut bombs are you wish. Just don’t forget the “kill step.”
Via: New York Times:
The frozen pot pies that sickened an estimated 15,000 people with salmonella in 2007 left federal inspectors mystified. At first they suspected the turkey. Then they considered the peas, carrots and potatoes.
The pie maker, ConAgra Foods, began spot-checking the vegetables for pathogens, but could not find the culprit. It also tried cooking the vegetables at high temperatures, a strategy the industry calls a “kill step,” to wipe out any lingering microbes. But the vegetables turned to mush in the process.
So ConAgra — which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label — decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The “food safety” instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: “Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots.”
Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show.
Yet the supply chain for ingredients in processed foods — from flavorings to flour to fruits and vegetables — is becoming more complex and global as the drive to keep food costs down intensifies. As a result, almost every element, not just red meat and poultry, is now a potential carrier of pathogens, government and industry officials concede.
Authorities Probe Insider Trading at SEC
May 15th, 2009Standard operating procedure… The insider trading part, that is.
Via: Reuters:
Two U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission employees are under investigation by federal criminal authorities for allegedly using insider information to trade stocks, a source familiar with the matter said on Thursday.
A report by the SEC’s internal watchdog alleges that the two SEC lawyers traded in stock of a large financial services company despite being told by another SEC employee of ongoing investigations of that company, CBS News reported.
The SEC inspector general report said one SEC attorney under investigation works in the Office of the SEC’s Chief Counsel and has access to a tremendous amount of nonpublic information, CBS News said.
An SEC spokesman said: “We take seriously even the suggestion that any SEC employee would engage in insider trading. We note that the inspector general report neither accuses any SEC employee of insider trading nor concludes that any such conduct took place.”
Calls to the SEC’s inspector general and Federal Bureau of Investigation were not immediately returned.
The SEC is in charge of policing markets and protecting investors. Ferreting out individuals who use nonpublic material information to profit on a company’s stock has been a priority for the SEC.
The SEC spokesman said the agency has been taking additional steps to enhance its protections against the potential for improper conduct.
U.S. Core Inflation Rose More Than Expected in April
May 15th, 2009Via: Reuters:
New York gold futures turned higher on Friday after data showed that U.S. core inflation rose more than expected in April, bolstering the status of gold as a hedge against inflation. However, when food and energy are included, U.S. consumer prices were unchanged in April from March.
And Now… DARPA’s Battlefield Telepathy Antics
May 15th, 2009Via: Wired:
Forget the battlefield radios, the combat PDAs or even infantry hand signals. When the soldiers of the future want to communicate, they’ll read each other’s minds.
At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.
Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of “pre-speech,” analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It’s a technique they’re also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.
The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person’s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable — if everyone has similar patterns. Last, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.”
The military has been funding a handful of mind-tapping technology recently, and already have monkeys capable of telepathic limb control. Telepathy may also have advantages beyond covert battlefield chatter. Last year, the National Research Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency released a report suggesting that neuroscience might also be useful to “make the enemy obey our commands.” The first step, though, may be getting a grunt to obey his officer’s remotely-transmitted thoughts.
Euro-Zone Economy Posts Sharpest-Ever Fall
May 15th, 2009WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
I’m sticking to my assessment that it’s going to take some kind of wildcard event to move the show on to the next act. Something big. I don’t know what, but it will probably involve a reduction in the number of national currencies or the use of some new global confetti currency. The crimes that the Fed undertook during the end of the Bush regime and the beginning of the Obama regime bought the system as we know it some time. We’re in the eye of the storm, in other words.
Trillions of dollars worth of funny money is now hiding somewhere out there, nobody knows where, but that confetti bomb is eventually going to burst into the wider system. When it does, we’ll be in for another round of chaos and probably hyperinflation.
Via: Wall Street Journal:
The euro-zone economy suffered its sharpest slump on record in the first quarter of 2009, underlining the severity of Europe’s recession.
Gross domestic product in the 16-nation euro-currency area fell 2.5% in the period from January to March, compared with the fourth quarter of 2008. That means Europe’s economic heartland was contracting at an annualized rate of nearly 10% in the first quarter.
However, the latest monthly indicators for business activity suggest the pace of Europe’s recession has slowed sharply. “This kind of pace of contraction will probably not be repeated,” said Greg Fuzesi, economist at J.P. Morgan in London: “You’re not going to get -10% again.”
A growing number of analysts believe the euro-zone economy could stabilize by this fall and return to growth around the end of the year, although unemployment is expected to continue rising until well into 2010. Business surveys have shown new orders stabilizing, while big drops in inventories in the last two quarters are expected to lead to higher production by firms in coming months.
The euro zone took an unprecedented beating in the first quarter, however, with the biggest contractions coming in countries that rely on the export of manufactured goods.
Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, contracted by 3.8% in the first quarter, equivalent to an annualized rate of -14.4%, in the country’s worst quarterly performance since official records started in 1970. Sharply falling exports and business investment were behind the slump, the government said, whereas consumer spending grew slightly, thanks in no small part to Germany’s cash-for-clunkers incentives, which led to higher new-car sales.
China’s Yuan ‘Set to Usurp U.S. Dollar’ as World’s Reserve Currency
May 15th, 2009Via: Telegraph:
The Chinese yuan is preparing to overtake the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, economist Nouriel Roubini has warned.
Professor Roubini, of New York University’s Stern business school, believes that while such a major change is some way off, the Chinese government is laying the ground for the yuan’s ascendance.
Known as “Dr Doom” for his negative stance, Prof Roubini argues that China is better placed than the US to provide a reserve currency for the 21st century because it has a large current account surplus, focused government and few of the economic worries the US faces.
In a column in the New York Times, Prof Roubini warns that with the proposal for a new international reserve currency via the International Monetary Fund, Beijing has already begun to take steps to usurp the greenback.
China will soon want to see the yuan included in the International Monetary Fund’s special drawing rights “basket”, he warns, as well as seeing it “used as a means of payment in bilateral trade.”
Geithner at Bilderberg
May 15th, 2009Via: Prison Planet:
Intrepid Bilderberg investigator and reporter Jim Tucker of the American Free Press confirms that U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will attend this year’s Bilderberg meeting in Athens, Greece.
Geithner’s presence will be in violation of the Logan Act, intended to prohibit American citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments. Congress established the Logan Act in 1799. The only Logan Act indictment occurred in 1803. It involved a Kentucky newspaper article that argued for the formation in the western United States of a separate nation allied to France. No prosecution followed.
Tucker told Alex Jones today that Geithner will attend the secretive meeting to talk about global government. Geithner recently announced while addressing the Council on Foreign Relations that he supported a proposal to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency with a composite of currencies that would be managed by the International Monetary Fund.
“Geithner, who has overseen Obama’s bailout agenda since taking over from Hank Paulson, is the perfect stooge to implement the global financial regulatory systems that elitists have called for in the aftermath of the financial downturn,” writes Paul Joseph Watson today. “Geithner’s presence at Bilderberg is noteworthy, not only because Bernanke attended immediately before the economic crisis last year, but also because Bilderberg’s agenda for 2009 is heavily weighted towards the financial crisis.”
